Another of Barton’s assets was a keen spirit of objectivity. William Barton noted that she rarely stood on precedent and that she tried to keep an open mind about people, methods of business, and herself. This openness is perceptible in her acceptance of startling changes. Railway travel, typewriters, automobiles, and airplanes were all taken in stride, and when telephones and electric lights became available she had them installed in her home immediately. She welcomed dress reform, prison reform, and other social change. Clara Barton was a determined, sensitive, competent, difficult, and unpredictable woman, and she brought all of these qualities to, and etched them on, the American Red Cross in 1882.
During the years that she was president of the American Red Cross, it was a small but well-known group. Her name lent power and respectability to the Red Cross cause. The list of relief efforts undertaken in those early years is impressive—assistance at the sites of numerous natural disasters, foreign aid to both Russia and Turkey, battlefield relief in the Spanish-American War. She participated in nearly all of the field work, which was her métier, for it combined her humanitarian sentiments with her need to lose herself in her work and the remuneration of praise.
The first work undertaken by the Red Cross in America was actually done prior to the ratification of the Treaty of Geneva. In the fall of 1881, disastrous forest fires swept across Michigan. Local Red Cross chapters at Dansville and Rochester, New York, sent money and materials amounting to $80,000, and Barton directed Julian Hubbell to oversee the work. Thus did Hubbell, still a medical student at the University of Michigan, begin his career as chief field agent for the American Red Cross.
In early September 1881, Michigan farmers in “the Thumb” of the State were burning stubble left after the harvest. Aggravated by drought conditions, the fires spread to the dry forests. One estimate at the time stated that an area 100 by 30 kilometers (60 by 20 miles) was burned.
From 1881 on, nearly every year saw the Red Cross actively engaged in the relief of some calamity. In 1882, and again in 1884, the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers flooded, sweeping away valuable property, leaving hundreds destitute and homeless. Relief centers were established in Cincinnati and Evansville, Indiana, and the Red Cross steamers, the Josh V. Throop and Mattie Belle, cooperated with government relief boats to supply sufferers cut off by water. All along the rivers, families were furnished with fuel, clothing and food, or cash. The Red Cross also undertook to relieve starving and sick animals by contributing oats, hay, corn, and medicine. Lumber, tools, and seeds were left to help the stricken rebuild their lives. Barton herself supervised the work on the Mattie Belle as it plowed its way between the cities of St. Louis and New Orleans.
The American Red Cross did not attempt to supply every need in every instance, nor did it try to aid the victims of every calamity. A notable case in which the Red Cross declined to give aid occurred in 1887. A severe drought had plagued the people of northwestern Texas for several years; State and Federal aid had been denied and in desperation a representative of the stricken area applied to Barton for relief. She went directly to the scene, but she determined that what was needed was not Red Cross aid but an organized drive for public contributions. Through the Dallas News she advertised for help and was delighted to find a quick response.
Besides flood and fire relief, the young American Red Cross helped tornado victims in Louisiana and Alabama in 1883 and contributed in the relief of an earthquake at Charleston, South Carolina, in 1886. When a tornado struck Mount Vernon, Illinois, in February 1888, Barton and her co-workers organized the inhabitants so effectively that they needed to stay at the scene only two weeks.
An outbreak of yellow fever in Jacksonville, Florida, also in 1888, precipitated the first use of trained Red Cross nurses, many of whom worked heroically. In one instance, ten of them jumped from a moving train to enter the small town of Macclenny, Florida, whose rail service had been stopped because of the fever’s epidemic proportions. But unfortunately the Jacksonville episode was not an entirely happy one. Barton had a lifelong inability to pick qualified subordinates; in this case the man she chose to supervise the nurses—a Colonel Southmayd of the New Orleans Red Cross—had extremely poor judgment. Southmayd found the Jacksonville workers to be “earnest and warm-hearted,” but all evidence is to the contrary. Some nurses refused to work for three dollars a day when they could get four dollars in private hospitals. One got drunk on the whiskey used as medicine, another was arrested for theft, and several were accused of immoral conduct. Southmayd staunchly refused to remove the offending nurses, and for a time the incident put an unfortunate stigma on Red Cross workers. It also served to strengthen Clara Barton’s determination to oversee personally as much Red Cross field work as possible.
The most celebrated peacetime relief work undertaken by the young American Red Cross was at Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in 1889. Johnstown, at the point where Stony Creek joins the Conemaugh River, often endured spring floods, but in May 1889 the rains were unusually heavy. After several days low-lying parts of Johnstown lay under 1 to 4 meters (3 to 13 feet) of water. Then a dam broke in the mountains 16 kilometers (10 miles) from the city. A wall of water, 9 meters (30 feet) high, rushed down to kill 2,200 people and destroy millions of dollars in property.