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

Tears ran down his face as he said this. The messenger coming up just then said:—

“Your wife has been found. They got her down at Nineveh. Her brother has gone to fetch her up.”

The man went away with the messenger.

“He didn’t seem much rejoiced over the good news about his wife,” remarked one of the strangers, who had yet to learn that Johnstown people speak of death and the dead only indirectly whenever possible.

It was the wife’s body, not the wife, that had been found, and that the messenger was to fetch up. The bodies of this man’s eight children have not yet been found. He is the only survivor of a family of ten.

Queer salvage from the flood was a cat that was taken out alive last evening. Its hair was singed off and one eye gone, but it was able to lick the hand of the man who picked it up and carried it off to keep, he said, as a relic of the flood. A white Wyandotte rooster and two hens were also dug out alive, and with dry feathers, from the centre of a heap of wrecked buildings.

The work of clearing up the site of the town has progressed so far that the outlines of some of the old streets could be faintly traced, and citizens were going about hunting up their lots. In many cases it was a difficult task, but enough old landmarks are left to make the determination of boundary lines by a new survey a comparatively easy matter.

The scenes in the morgues are disgusting in the highest degree. The embalmers are at work cutting and slashing with an apathy born of four days and nights of the work, and such as they never experienced before. The boards on which the bodies lie are covered with mud and slime, in many instances.

Men with dynamite, blowing up the drift at the Pennsylvania Railroad bridge, people in the drift watching for bodies, people finding bodies in the ruins and carrying them away on stretchers or sheets, the bonfires of blazing débris all over the town, the soldiers with their bayonets guarding property or taking thieves into custody, the tin-starred policemen with their base ball clubs promenading the streets and around the ruins, the scenes of distress and frenzy at the relief stations, the crash of buildings as their broken remnants fall to the ground—this is the scene that goes on night and day in Johnstown, and will go on for an indefinite time. Still, people have worked so in the midst of such excitement, with the pressure of such an awful horror on their minds that they can get but little rest even when they wish to. Men in this town are too tired to sleep. They lie down with throbbing brains that cannot stop throbbing, so that even the sense of thinking is intense agony.