A SECTION OF JOHNSTOWN NOW.
“When the water rose,” she said, “we were all at home. It drove us from floor to floor, and we had just reached the roof when the house started. It went whirling toward the bridge, struck it, and went down. Mother, my little sister and I all caught on another roof that was just above the water, but father and my little brother went down with the house. Father’s face was towards us as he sank. He shouted goodby, and that was the last. Just then my little sister lost her hold and she followed father and brother. Then mother called out that she was going to drown. I got to her and raised her head out of the water. My head rested on a sawlog and a board protected me from the other timbers. Some rescuers came running down the bridge and saw us. I made them take mother out first and meantime I struggled to get out of the timbers, but they closed in on me.
“The more I struggled the tighter they held me. The fire was just behind me, and I could feel its heat. By the time the men had carried mother to the bank the fire was so fierce they could hardly get back. When they did reach me they could not get me out, for my foot was fast between a saw log and a piece of timber. Then they ran for tools. The fire kept sweeping on before the breeze from up stream. I had almost resigned myself to an awful death when some other men braved the fire and reached me. They began chopping and sawing. One blow of an axe cut off a drowned man’s hand. The men tied a rope around me. How they got me out finally I scarcely know. My kneecap was almost cut off. When the current sucked my father down he caught me by the foot; that is what dragged me so far into the timbers.”
Miss Clarke and her mother are both badly injured. Some of the men who rescued the young lady were Slavs.
Miss Mamie Brown was caught in the timbers in almost the same way as Miss Clarke, near the bank. The fire was coming on towards her, and the would-be rescuers had been driven back. Finally John Schmidt braved the dangers and rescued her. Father Trautwein, of St. Columbia’s church, who witnessed Schmidt’s brave conduct, said if any man is a hero Schmidt is that man.
As has been written dynamite had added its horror to the sixty-acre mass of wrecked buildings, railroads, streets and human beings that lie above the railroad bridge. A half dozen times on the afternoon of June 6, the heavy thunder of the huge cartridges was heard for miles around, and fragments of the debris flew high in the air, while at a distance the crowd looked on in dreadful sorrow at the thought of the additional mangling that the remains of the hundreds of bodies still buried in the mass were bound to undergo. There was little complaint, however, even on the part of those who have relatives or friends buried there, for the work of the past few days has shown how futile was the idea that anything but an explosive could effectually break up and remove the compact mass.
All that hundreds of men have been able to do has amounted to nothing more than a little picking around the edges. Even the dynamite is doing the work slowly. The surface of the mass about where it was used is upheaved and washed about a bit, but the actual progress is, so far as can be seen, very small. It will be a week before the gorge can be opened even now. Meanwhile a proposition is being discussed not to open it at all, but to bury it deep, and by filling in to raise the level of the whole city.
There has been an unpleasant feeling between rival committees of citizens, and at a meeting held in Johnstown on Tuesday the whole matter was settled by the resignation of Chairman Moxham, of the old relief committee, and the appointment in his place of J. B. Scott, of Pittsburgh, who is also chairman of the local relief committee in that city. It is believed that this will be an additional guarantee to the country of fairness and impartiality in the disbursement of the funds.
