When these people came back to Johnstown on the day after the wreck of the town they had to put up in sheds, barns, and in houses which had been but partially ruined. They had to sleep without any covering in their wet clothes, and it took the liveliest kind of skirmishing to get anything to eat. Pretty soon a citizens’ committee was established, and nearly all the male survivors of the flood were immediately sworn in as deputy sheriffs. They adorned themselves with tin stars, which they cut out of pieces of sheet metal in the ruins, and sheets of tin with stars cut out of them are turning up continually, to the surprise of the Pittsburg workmen who are endeavoring to get the town in shape. The women and children were housed, as far as possible, in the few houses still standing, and some idea of the extent of the wreck of the town may be gathered from the fact that of 300 prominent buildings only sixteen were uninjured.
For the first day or so people were dazed by what had happened, and for that matter they are dazed still. They went about helpless, making vague inquiries for their friends and hardly feeling the desire to eat anything. Finally the need of creature comforts overpowered them, and they woke up to the fact that they were faint and sick. This was to some extent changed by the arrival of tents and by the systematic military care for the suffering.
THE BRIDGE WHERE HUNDREDS LOST THEIR LIVES.
The “fatal bridge,” as it is now called, and which wreaked such awful destruction, is described by a writer in this way:
“The bridge whose ‘resistance of the torrent’ was the matter of so much talk, was a noble four-track structure, just completed, fifty feet wide on top, 32 feet high above the water line, consisting of seven skew spans of fifty-eight feet each. It still remains wholly uninjured, except that it is badly spalled on the upper side by blows from the wreckage, but that it so remains is due solely to the accident of its position, and not to its strength, although it was and is still the embodiment of solidity.
“Had the torrent struck it, it would have swept it away as if it had been built of card-board, leaving no track behind; but fortunately (or unfortunately) its axis was exactly parallel with the path of the flood, which hence struck the face of the mountain full, and compressed the whole of its spoils gathered in a fourteen-mile course into one inextricable mass, with the force of tens of thousands of tons moving at nearly sixty miles per hour.
“Its spoils consisted of (1) every tree the flood had touched in its whole course, with trifling exceptions, including hundreds of large trees, all of which were stripped of their bark and small limbs almost at once; (2) all the houses in a thickly settled town three miles long and one-fourth to one-half mile wide; (3) half the human beings and all the horses, cows, cats, dogs, and rats that were in the houses; (4) many hundreds of miles of telegraph wire that was on strong poles in use, and many times more than this that was in stock in the mills; (5) perhaps 50 miles of track and track material, rails and all; (6) locomotives, pig-iron, brick, stone, boilers, steam engines, heavy machinery, and other spoil of a large manufacturing town.
“All this was accumulated in one inextricable mass, which almost immediately caught fire from some stove which the waters had not touched. Hundreds if not thousands of human beings, dead and alive, were caught in it, many by the lower part of the body only. Eye-witnesses describe the groans and cries which came from that vast holocaust for nearly the whole night as something almost unbearable to listen to, yet which could not be escaped. Hundreds, undoubtedly, suffered a slow death by fire; yet we cannot doubt that the vast majority of the men, women, and children in that fearful jam, which covered fully thirty acres, and perhaps more, were already dead when the fire began.
“Johnstown proper is in a large basin formed by the junction of the Conemaugh and the almost equally large Stony creek, flowing into the Conemaugh from the south, just above the bridge. The bridge being hermetically sealed, it and the adjacent embankment formed a second dam about thirty feet high, Johnstown serving as a bed of a reservoir which we should judge to be nearly large enough to hold the entire contents of the reservoir above, except that it was already filled knee-deep or more by an unusually heavy but annual spring flood.
“One offshoot of the main torrent was deflected southward by the Gautier Works, and went tearing through the heart of the more southerly portion of the town, and still another similar branch was split off from the main torrent further down; but in the main, the direct force of the torrent did not strike this southerly portion of the town.