[CHAPTER XXVII.]
Upon a pretty little plateau two hundred feet above the waters of Stony Creek, and directly in front of a slender foot-bridge which leads into Kernsville, stands a group of tents which represents the first effort of any national organization to give material sanitary aid to the unhappy survivors of Johnstown.
It is the camp of the American National Association of the Red Cross, and is under the direction of that noble woman, Miss Clara Barton of Washington, the President of the organization in this country. The camp is not more than a quarter of a mile from the scene of operations in this place, and, should pestilence attend upon the horrors of the flood, this assembly of trained nurses and veteran physicians will be known all over the land. That an epidemic of some sort will come, there seems to be no question. The only thing which can avert it is a succession of cool days, a possibility which is very remote.
Miss Barton, as soon as she heard of the catastrophe, started preparations for opening headquarters in this place. By Saturday morning she had secured a staff, tents, supplies, and all the necessary appurtenances of her work, and at once started on the Baltimore and Ohio Road. She arrived here on Tuesday morning, and pitched her tents near Stony Creek. This was, however, a temporary choice, for soon she removed her camp to the plateau upon which it will remain until all need for Miss Barton will have passed. With her came Dr. John B. Hubbell, field agent; Miss M. L. White, stenographer; Gustave Angerstein, messenger, and a corps of fifteen physicians and four trained female nurses, under the direction of Dr. O’Neill, of Philadelphia.
Upon their arrival they at once established quartermaster and kitchen departments, and in less than three hours these divisions were fully equipped for work. Then when the camp was formally opened on the plateau there were one large hospital tent, capable of accommodating forty persons, four smaller tents to give aid to twenty persons each, and four still smaller ones which will hold ten patients each. Then Miss Barton organized a house-to-house canvass by her corps of doctors, and began to show results almost immediately.
The first part of the district visited was Kernsville. There great want and much suffering were discovered and promptly relieved. Miss Barton says that in most of the houses which were visited were several persons suffering from nervous prostration in the most aggravated form, many cases of temporary insanity being discovered, which, if neglected, would assume chronic conditions. There were a large number of persons, too, who were bruised by their battling on the borders of the flood, and were either ignorant or too broken-spirited to endeavor to aid themselves in any particular. The majority of these were not sufficiently seriously hurt to require removal from their homes to the camp, and so were given medicines and practical, intelligent advice how to use them.
There were fifteen persons, however, who were removed from Kernsville and from a district known as the Brewery, on the extreme east of Johnstown. Three of the number were women and were sadly bruised. One man, Caspar Walthaman, a German operative at the Cambria Iron Works, was the most interesting of all. He lived in a little frame house within fifty yards of the brewery. When the flood came his house was lifted from its foundations and was tossed about like a feather in a gale, until it reached a spot about on a line with Washington Street. There the man’s life was saved by a great drift, which completely surrounded the house, and which forced the structure against the Prospect Hill shore, where the shock wrecked it. Walthaman was sent flying through the air, and landed on his right side on the water-soaked turf. Fortunately the turf was soft and springy with the moisture, and Walthaman had enough consciousness left to crawl up the hillside, and then sank into unconsciousness.
At ten o’clock Saturday morning some friends found him. He was taken to their home in Kernsville. He was scarcely conscious when found, and before he had been in a place of safety an hour he had lost his mind, the reaction was so great. His hair had turned quite white, and the places where before the disaster his hair had been most abundant, on the sides of his head, were completely denuded of it. His scalp was as smooth as an apple-cheek. The physicians who removed him to the Red Cross Hospital declared the case as the most extraordinary one resulting from fright that had ever come under their observation. Miss Barton declares her belief that not one of the persons who are now under treatment is seriously injured, and is confident they will recover in a few days.