Are any of you alive?
James.
Are you all safe? Is it our John Burn that is dead? Is Eliza safe? Answer.
It is worth repeating again that the majority of these telegrams will never be answered.
The Post-office letter carriers have only just begun to make their rounds in that part of the town which is comparatively uninjured. Bags of first-class mail matter are alone brought into town. It will be weeks before people see the papers in the mails. The supposition is that nobody has time to read papers, and this is about right. The letter carriers are making an effort, as far as they can, to distribute mail to the families of the deceased people. Many of the letters which arrive now contain money orders, and while great care has to be taken in the distribution, the postal authorities recognize the necessity of getting these letters to the parties addressed, or else returning them to the Dead Letter Office as proof of the death of the individuals in question. It is no doubt that in this way the first knowledge of the death of many will be transmitted to friends.
It is fair to say that the best part of the energies of the State of Pennsylvania at present are all turned upon Johnstown. Here are the leading physicians, the best nurses, some of the heaviest contractors, the brightest newspaper men, all the military geniuses, and, if not the actual presence, at least the attention, of the capitalists. The newspapers, medical reviews, and publications of all sorts teem with suggestions. Johnstown is a compendium of business, and misery, and despair. One class of men should be given credit for thorough work in connection with the calamity. These are the undertakers. They came to Johnstown, from all over Pennsylvania, at the first alarm. They are the men whose presence was imperatively needed, and who have actually been forced to work day and night in preserving bodies and preparing them for burial. One of the most active undertakers here is John McCarthy, of Syracuse, N. Y., one of the leading undertakers there, and a very public-spirited man. He brought a letter of introduction from Mayor Kirk, of Syracuse, to the Citizens Committee here. He said to a reporter:—
“It is worthy of mention, perhaps, that never before in such a disaster as this have bodies received such careful treatment and has such a wholesale embalming been practiced. Everybody recovered, whether identified or not, whether of rich man or poor man, or of the humblest child, has been carefully cleaned and embalmed, placed in a neat coffin, and not buried when unidentified until the last possible moment. When you reflect that over one thousand bodies have been treated in this way it means something. It is to be regretted that some pains were not taken to keep a record of the bodies recovered, but the undertakers cannot be blamed for that. They should have been furnished with clerks, and that whole matter made the subject of the work of a bureau by itself. We have had just all we could do cleaning and embalming the bodies.”
The unsightliest place in Johnstown is the morgue in the Presbyterian Church. The edifice is a large brick structure in the centre of the city, and was about the first church building in the city. About one hundred and seventy-five people took refuge there during the flood. After the first crash, when the people were expecting another every instant, and of course that they would perish, the pastor of the church, the Rev. Mr. Beale, began to pray fervently that the lives of those in the church might be spared. He fairly wrestled in prayer, and those who heard him say that it seemed to be a very death-struggle with the demon of the flood itself. No second crash came, the waters receded, and the lives of those in the church were spared. The people said that it was all due to the Rev. Mr. Beale’s prayer. The pews in the church were all demolished, and the Sunday-school room under it was flooded with the angry waters, and filled up to the ceiling with débris. The Rev. Mr. Beale is now general morgue director in Johnstown, and has the authority of a dictator of the bodies of the dead. In the Presbyterian Church morgue the bodies are, almost without exception, those which have been recovered from the ruins of the smashed buildings. The bodies are torn and bruised in the most horrible manner, so that identification is very difficult. They are nearly all bodies of the prominent or well-known residents of Johnstown. The cleaning and embalming of the bodies takes place in the corners of the church, on either side of the pulpit. As soon as they have a presentable appearance, the bodies are placed in coffins, put across the ends of the pews near the aisles, so that people can pass around through the aisles and look at them. Few identifications have yet been made here. In one coffin is the body of a young man who had on a nice bicycle suit when found. In his pockets were forty dollars in money. The bicycle has not been found. It is supposed that the body is that of some young fellow who was on a bicycle tour up the Conemaugh River, and who was engulfed by the flood.
The waters played some queer freaks. A number of mirrors taken out of the ruins with the frames smashed and with the glass parts entirely uninjured have been a matter for constant comment on the part of those who have inspected the ruins and worked in them. When the waters went down, the Sunday-school rooms of the Presbyterian Church just referred to were found littered with playing cards. In a baby’s cradle was found a dissertation upon infant baptism and two volumes of a history of the Crusades. A commercial man from Pittsburgh, who came down to look at the ruins, found among them his own picture. He never was in Johnstown but two or three times before, and he did not have any friends there. How the picture got among the ruins of Johnstown is a mystery to him.