East Palestine, the first Ohio station passed by the train, appeared to be a little village nestled in between two great hills. There were enough people scattered at the tracks, however, to warrant the presumption that it was a city of considerable importance.
From early dawn, when the first rays of the sun came shimmering through the Allegheny mists, the country through which the McKinley funeral train passed seemed alive with waiting people. As the train was later than its schedule the probabilities were that many thousands lined up along the track had been waiting for almost an hour for the fleeting glimpse of the cars accompanying the murdered President’s body to its last resting place.
Steel workers, with their dinner pails in their hands, ran the risk of being late at the mills in order to pay their last homage to the dead. It was at the steel towns, just east of Pittsburg, that the largest early crowds lined the tracks.
Between and east of the mill towns was the open mountain country interspersed with an occasional cluster of houses near coal mines or oil wells. Even in the open country as early as 6 a. m. there were people gathered at the cross-roads or leaning against farm fences.
Faces were seen peering through, up and down windows of houses situated near the tracks. In railroad yards hundreds were crowded on top of cars so as to obtain a view as the sections of the Presidential train picked their way through the maze of tracks. Women and girls as well as men and boys were eager to see the cars go by.
In the railroad cars in Pitcairn, a few miles east of Pittsburg, hundreds of factory girls were lined up. It was 8:35 a. m. when the train passed through Pitcairn, so most of the girls with lunch boxes under their arms must have been quite late to work, all for the sake of the few seconds’ look at the train which brought so close to them the victim of the anarchist’s bullet and his successor, President Roosevelt.
Young women who were not shop girls were there, too, evidently having come from the most exclusive residence districts of the little city, trudging through the rough tracks to obtain a brief look.
Away from the crowds at the towns solitary watchers were passed. Engineers and firemen of passing trains leaned far out of their cab windows when the train approached. Boys and girls, perched high on rocky crags, remained in their points of vantage to see the train fly past.
As the train neared Pittsburg it passed between a continuous line of men and women, boys and girls, miles long.
There was hardly a space of a dozen feet that was not filled. On the sides and tops of the near-by foothills colored specks told of the bright dresses of women and girls, who were watching the entrance of the long tunnel in Pittsburg, which was like a human archway, so many persons of all ages and sexes were crowded around and above the black opening.