“‘I have visited Johnstown a dozen times a year for a long time,’ said a business man to-day, ‘and I know it thoroughly, but I haven’t the least idea now of what part of it this is. I can’t even tell the direction the streets used to run.’
“His bewilderment is hardly greater than that of the citizens themselves. They wander about in the mud for hours trying to find the spot where the house of some friend or relative used to stand. It takes a whole family to locate the site of their friend’s house with any reasonable certainty.
“Wandering over this muddy plain one can realize something of what must have been the gigantic force of that vast whirlpool. It pressed upon the town like some huge millstone, weighing tens of thousands of tons and revolving with awful velocity, pounding to powder everything beneath. But the conception of the power of that horrible eddy of the flood must remain feeble until that sixty acres of burning débris is inspected. It seems from a little distance like any other mass of wreckage, though vastly longer than any ever before seen in this country. It must have been many times more tremendous when it was heaped up twenty feet higher over its whole area and before the fire leveled it off. But neither then nor now can the full terror of the flood that piled it there be adequately realized until a trip across parts where the fire has been extinguished shows the manner in which the stuff composing it is packed together. It is not a heap of broken timbers lying loosely thrown together in all directions. It is a solid mass. The boards and timbers which made up the frame buildings are laid together as closely as sticks of wood in a pile—more closely, for they are welded into one another until each stick is as solidly fixed in place as though all were one. A curious thing is that wherever there are a few boards together they are edge up, and never standing on end or flat. The terrible force of the whirlpool that ground four square miles of buildings into this sixty acres of wreckage left no opportunity for gaps or holes between pieces in the river. Everything was packed together as solidly as though by sledge-hammer blows.
“But the boards and timber of four square miles of buildings are not all that is in that sixty-acre mass. An immense amount of débris from further up the valley lies there. Twenty-seven locomotives, several Pullman cars and probably a hundred other cars, or all that is left of them, are in that mass. Fragments of iron bridges can be seen sticking out occasionally above the wreckage. They are about the only things the fire has not leveled, except the curious hillock spoken of, which is an eighth of a mile back from the bridge, where the flames apparently raged less fiercely. Scattered over the area, also, are many blackened logs that were too big to be entirely burned, and that stick up now like spar buoys in a sea of ruin. Little jets of flame, almost unseen by daylight, but appearing as evening falls, are scattered thickly over the surface of the wreckage.
“Of the rest of Johnstown, and the collection of towns within sight of the bridge, not much is to be said. They are, to a greater or less extent, gone, as Johnstown is gone. Far up the gap through which came the flood a large brick building remains standing, but ruined. It is all that is left of one of the biggest wire mills and steel works in the country. Turning around below the bridge are the works of the Cambria Iron Company. The buildings are still standing, but they are pretty well ruined, and the machinery with which they were filled is either totally destroyed or damaged almost beyond repair. High up on the hill at the left and scattered up on other hills in sight are many dwellings, neat, well kept, and attractive places apparently, and looking as bright and fresh now as before the awful torrent wiped out of existence everything in the valley below.
“This is Johnstown and its immediate vicinity as nearly as words can paint it. It is a single feature, one section out of fifteen miles of horror that stretches through this once lovely valley of the Allegheny. What is true of Johnstown is true of every town for miles up and down. The desolation of one town may differ from the desolation in others as one death may differ from another; but it is desolation and death everywhere—desolation so complete, so relentless, so dreadful that it is absolutely beyond the power of language fairly to tell the tale.”
[CHAPTER VI.]
Mr. William Henry Smith, General Manager of the Associated Press, was a passenger on a railroad train which reached the Conemaugh Valley on the very day of the disaster. He writes as follows of what he saw: