History of the Johnstown Flood / Including all the Fearful Record; the Breaking of the South Fork Dam; the Sweeping Out of the Conemaugh Valley; the Over-Throw of Johnstown; the Massing of the Wreck at the Railroad Bridge; Escapes, Rescues, Searches for Survivors and the Dead; Relief Organizations, Stupendous Charities, etc., etc., With Full Accounts also of the Destruction on the Susquehanna and Juniata Rivers, and the Bald Eagle Creek.

by Willis Fletcher Johnson

No travelers in an upheaved and disorganized land push through with more pluck and courage than the newspaper correspondents. Accounts have already been given of some of their experiences. A writer in the New York Times thus told of his, a week after the events described:

“A man who starts on a journey on ten minutes’ notice likes the journey to be short, with a promise of success and of food and clothes at its end. Starting suddenly a week ago, the Times’s correspondent has since had but a small measure of success, a smaller measure of food, and for nights no rest at all; a long tramp across the Blue Hills and Allegheny Mountains, behind jaded horses; helping to push up-hill the wagon they tried to pull or to lift the vehicle up and down bridges whose approaches were torn away, or in and out of fords the pathways to which had disappeared; and in the blackness of the night, scrambling through gullies in the pike road made by the storm, paved with sharp and treacherous rocks and traversed by swift-running streams, whose roar was the only guide to their course. All this prepared a weary reporter to welcome the bed of straw he found in a Johnstown stable loft last Monday, and on which he has reposed nightly ever since.

“And let me advise reporters and other persons who are liable to sudden missions to out-of-the-way places not to wear patent leather shoes. They are no good for mountain roads. This is the result of sad experience. Wetness and stone bruises are the benisons they confer on feet that tread rough paths.

“The quarter past twelve train was the one boarded by the Times’s correspondent and three other reporters on their way hither a week ago Friday night. It was in the minds of all that they would get as far as Altoona, on the Pennsylvania Road, and thence by wagon to this place. But all were mistaken. At Philadelphia we were told that there were wash-outs in many places and bridges were down everywhere, so that we would be lucky if we got even to Harrisburg. This was harrowing news. It caused such a searching of time-tables and of the map of Pennsylvania as those things were rarely ever subjected to before. It was at last decided that if the Pennsylvania Railroad stopped at Harrisburg an attempt would be made to reach the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad at Martinsburg, West Virginia, by way of the Cumberland Railroad, a train on which was scheduled to leave Harrisburg ten minutes after the arrival of the Pennsylvania train.

“It was only too evident to us, long before we reached Harrisburg, that we would not get to the West out of that city. The Susquehanna had risen far over its banks, and for miles our train ran slowly with the water close to the fire-box of the locomotive and over the lower steps of the car platform. At last we reached the station. Several energetic Philadelphia reporters had come on with us from that lively city, expecting to go straight to Johnstown. As they left the train one cried: ‘Hurrah, boys, there’s White. He’ll know all about it.’ White stood placidly on the steps, and knew nothing more than that he and several other Philadelphia reporters, who had started Friday night, had got no further than the Harrisburg station, and were in a state of wonderment, leaving them to think our party caught.

“As the Cumberland Valley train was pulling out of the station, its conductor, a big, genial fellow, who seemed to know everybody in the valley, was loth to express an opinion as to whether we would get to Martinsburg. He would take us as far as he could, and then leave us to work out our own salvation. He could give us no information about the Baltimore and Ohio Road. Hope and fear chased one another in our midst; hope that trains were running on that road, and fear that it, too, had been stopped by wash-outs. In the latter case it seemed to us that we should be compelled to return to Harrisburg and sit down to think with our Philadelphia brethren.

“The Cumberland Valley train took us to Hagerstown, and there the big and genial conductor told us it would stay, as it could not cross the Potomac to reach Martinsburg. We were twelve miles from the Potomac and twenty from Martinsburg. Fortunately, a construction train was going to the river to repair some small wash-outs, and Major Ives, the engineer of the Cumberland Valley Road, took us upon it, but he smiled pitifully when we told him we were going across the bridge.

“‘Why, man,’ he said to the Times’s correspondent, ‘the Potomac is higher than it was in 1877, and there’s no telling when the bridge will go.’

“At the bridge was a throng of country people waiting to see it go down, and wondering how many more blows it would stand from foundering canal-boats, washed out of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, whose lines had already disappeared under the flood. A quick survey of the bridge showed that its second section was weakening, and had already bent several inches, making a slight concavity on the upper side.