One of the remarkable features was the cheerful spirit with which flood victims viewed their plight. This was Dayton's first big flood in many years. Much of the submerged area had been considered safe, but as the majority of residents of these sections looked out on all sides upon a great sweep of muddy, swiftly moving water, they seemed undisturbed.
In some of the poorer sections the attitude of the marooned was not so cheerful. As a motor boat passed beneath the second floor at one partly submerged house, a man leaned out and threatened to shoot the boat's occupants unless they rescued his wife and a baby that had been born the day before. The woman, almost dying, was let from the window by a rope and taken to a place of refuge.
Further on, members of a motor boat party were startled by shots in the second floor of a house, about which five feet of water swirled. The boat was stopped and a man peered from a window.
"Why are you shooting?" he was asked.
"Oh, just amusing myself, shooting at rats that come upstairs. When are you going to take me out of here?" he replied.
Three babies were born in one church during the afternoon. One was born in a boat while its mother was being conveyed to safety. Such scenes were common.
WOMEN BECAME HYSTERICAL
At the rescue stations the scenes enacted were heartrending and the most pitiful were witnessed at the temporary morgues. At the West Dayton morgue frantic crowds all day and night watched every body brought in, hoping against hope it was not that of some loved one.
Women became hysterical at times when searching for missing members of their families whom they had failed to find at the relief stations.
With the coming of nightfall Thursday the efforts to rescue more persons were slackened, and all of Dayton not in the central flood districts waited in dread for the nightly fires which had added horrors to the already terrible situation.