TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE:

Any corrections made are catalogued in a note at the end of this text.

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MAP OF THE DELUGED CONEMAUGH DISTRICT.

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.

ILLUSTRATED.

EDGEWOOD PUBLISHING CO.,
1889.
Copyright, 1889, by
WILLIS FLETCHER JOHNSON.

[PREFACE.]

The summer of 1889 will ever be memorable for its appalling disasters by flood and flame. In that period fell the heaviest blow of the nineteenth century—a blow scarcely paralleled in the histories of civilized lands. Central Pennsylvania, a centre of industry, thrift and comfort, was desolated by floods unprecedented in the records of the great waters. On both sides of the Alleghenies these ravages were felt in terrific power, but on the western slope their terrors were infinitely multiplied by the bursting of the South Fork Reservoir, letting out millions of tons of water, which, rushing madly down the rapid descent of the Conemaugh Valley, washed out all its busy villages and hurled itself in a deadly torrent on the happy borough of Johnstown. The frightful aggravations which followed the coming of this torrent have waked the deepest sympathies of this nation and of the world, and the history is demanded in permanent form, for those of the present day, and for the generation to come.

[CONTENTS.]

[LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.]

[CHAPTER I.]

Springtime in the mountains. Graceful slopes and frowning precipices robed in darkest green of hemlock and spruce. Open fields here and there verdant with young grass and springing grain, or moist and brown beneath the plow for the planting time. Hedgerow and underwood fragrant with honeysuckle and wild blackberry bloom; violets and geraniums purpling the forest floor. Conemaugh creek and Stony creek dash and plunge and foam along their rocky channels to where they unite their waters and form the Conemaugh river, hastening down to the Ohio, to the Mississippi, to the Mexican Gulf. Trout and pickerel and bass flash their bronze and silver armor in the sparkling shallows of the streams and in the sombre and placid depths of the lake up yonder behind the old mud dam. Along the valley of the Conemaugh are ranged villages, towns, cities: Conemaugh, Johnstown, Cambria, Sang Hollow, Nineveh, and others, happy and prosperous. Conemaugh nestles at the very foot of the Alleghenies; all railroad trains eastward bound stop there to catch their breath before beginning the long climb up to Altoona. Sang Hollow nestles by the river amid almost tropical luxuriance of vegetation; yon little wooded islet in mid-stream a favorite haunt of fishermen. Nineveh is rich in bog iron and coal, and the whirr of the mill-wheel is heard. Johnstown, between the two creeks at their junction, is the queen city of the valley. On either side the creek, and beyond, the steep mountain sides; behind, the narrow valley reaching twenty miles back to the lake; before, the Conemaugh river just beginning its romantic course. Broken hillsides streaked with torrents encompass it. Just a century ago was Johnstown founded by one Joseph Johns, a German settler. Before then its beauteous site was occupied by an Indian village, Kickenapawling. Below this was the head of navigation on the Conemaugh. Hither came the wagoners of the Alleghenies, with huge wains piled high with merchandise from seaboard cities, and placed it on flat-bottomed boats and started it down the river-way to the western markets. The merchandise came up from Philadelphia and Baltimore by river, too; up the Susquehanna and Juniata, to the eastern foot-hills, and there was a great portage from the Juniata to the Conemaugh; the Kittanning Trail, then the Frankstown Turnpike. Later came the great trunk railroad whose express trains now go roaring down the valley.

Johnstown is—nay, Johnstown was!—a busy and industrious place. The people of the town were the employees of the Cambria Iron and Steel Company, their families, and small storekeepers. There was not one rich man in the town. Three-quarters of the 28,000 people lived in small frame tenement houses on the flats by the river around the works of the Cambria Company. The Cambria Company owns almost all the land, and the business and professional men and the superintendents of the company live on the hills away up from the creeks. The creeks become the Conemaugh river right at the end of the town, near where the big stone Pennsylvania Railroad bridge crosses the river.

The borough of Johnstown was on the south bank of Conemaugh creek, and the east bank of Stony creek, right in the fork. It had only about a third of the population of the place. It had never been incorporated with the surrounding villages, as the Cambria Company, which owned most of the villages and only part of Johnstown, did not wish to have them consolidated into one city.

Conemaugh was the largest village on the creek between the lake and Johnstown. It is often spoken of as part of Johnstown, though its railroad station is two or three miles up the creek from the Johnstown station. The streets of the two towns run into each other, and the space between the two stations is well built up along the creek. Part of the Cambria Iron and Steel Company’s works are at Conemaugh, and five or six thousand of the workingmen and their families lived there. The business was done in Johnstown borough, where almost all the stores of Johnstown city were.

The works of the Cambria Company were strung along from here down into Johnstown proper. They were slightly isolated to prevent a fire in one spreading to the others, and because there was not much flat land to build on. The Pennsylvania road runs along the river, and the works were built beside it.

JOHNSTOWN AS LEFT BY THE FLOOD.

Between Conemaugh and Johnstown borough was a string of tenements along the river which was called Woodvale. Possibly 3000 workmen lived in them. They were slightly built of wood, many of them without cellars or stone foundations. There were some substantially built houses in the borough at the fork. Here the flats widen out somewhat, and they had been still further increased in extent by the Cambria Company, which filled up part of the creek beds with refuse and the ashes from their works. This narrowed the beds of the creeks. The made land was not far above the water at ordinary times. Even during the ordinary spring floods the waters rose so high that it flowed into the cellars of the tenements, and at times into the works. The natural land was occupied by the business part of the town, where the stores were and the storekeepers had their residences. The borough had a population of about 9000. On the north bank of the river were a third as many more people living in tenements built and owned by the Cambria Company. Further down, below the junction of the two creeks, along both banks of the Conemaugh river, were about 4000 employees of the Cambria Company and their families. The place where they lived was called Cambria or Cambria City. All these villages and boroughs made up what is known as the city of Johnstown.

The Cambria Company employed about 4000 men in its works and mines. Besides these were some railroad shops, planing mills, flour mills, several banks and newspapers. Only the men employed by the Cambria Company and their families lived on the flats and made ground. The Cambria Company owned all this land, and made it a rule not to sell it, but to lease it. The company put rows of two-story frame tenements close together, on their land close to the works, the cheaper class of tenements in solid blocks, to cheapen their construction. The better tenements were separate buildings, with two families to the house. The tenements rented for from $5 to $15 a month, and cost possibly, on the average, $500 to build. They were all of wood, many of them without cellars, and were built as cheaply as possible. The timbers were mostly pine, light and inflammable. It was not an uncommon thing for a fire to break out and to burn one or two rows of tenements. But the different rows were not closely bunched, but were sprinkled around in patches near the separate works, and it was cheaper for the company to rebuild occasionally than to put up brick houses.

Besides owning the flats, the Cambria Company owned the surrounding hills. In one of the hills is limestone, in another coal, and there is iron ore not far away. The company has narrow-gauge roads running from its mines down to the works. The city was at the foot of these three hills, which meet in a double V shape. Conemaugh creek flowing down one and Stony creek flowing down the other. The hills are not so far distant that a man with a rifle on any one could not shoot to either of the others. They are several hundred feet high and so steep that roads run up them by a series of zigzag grades. Few people live on these hills except on a small rise of ground across the river from Johnstown. In some places the company has leased the land for dwelling houses, but it retains the ownership of the land and of the coal, iron and limestone in it. The flats having all been occupied, the company in recent years had put up some tenements of a better class on the north bank of the river, higher up than the flood reached. The business part of the town also was higher up than the works and the tenements of the company.

In normal times the river is but a few hundred feet wide. The bottom is stony. The current is so fast that there is little deposit along the bank. It is navigable at no time, though in the spring a good canoeist might go down it if he could steer clear of the rocks. In the summer the volume of water diminishes so much that a boy with a pair of rubber boots on can wade across without getting his feet wet, and there have been times when a good jumper could cross the river on the dry stones. Below Johnstown, after Stony creek has joined the Conemaugh creek, the volume of water increases, but the Conemaugh throughout its whole length is nothing but a mountain stream, dry in the summer and roaring in the spring. It runs down into the Kiskiminitas river and into the Allegheny river, and then on to Pittsburgh. It is over 100 miles from Johnstown to Pittsburgh following the windings of the river, twice as far as the straight line.

Johnstown was one of the busiest towns of its size in the State. Its tonnage over the Pennsylvania and Baltimore and Ohio roads was larger than the tonnage of many cities three times its size. The Iron and Steel Company is one of the largest iron and steel corporations in the world. It had its main rolling mills, Bessemer steel works, and wire works at Johnstown, though it also has works in other places, and owns ore and coal mines and leases in the South, in Michigan, and in Spain, besides its Pennsylvania works. It had in Johnstown and the surrounding villages 4000 or 5000 men usually at work. In flush times it has employed more than 6000. So important was the town from a railroad point of view that the Baltimore and Ohio ran a branch from Rockwood, on its main line to Pittsburgh, up to Johnstown, forty-five miles. It was one of the main freight stations on the Pennsylvania road, though the passenger business was so small in proportion that some express trains do not stop there. The Pennsylvania road recently put up a large brick station, which was one of the few brick buildings on the flats. Some of the Cambria Company’s offices were also of brick, and there was a brick lodging house for young men in the employ of the company. The Pennsylvania road had repair shops there, which employed a few hundred men, and the Baltimore and Ohio branch had some smaller shops. Johnstown had several Catholic and Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, and Lutheran churches. It had several daily and weekly papers. The chief were the Tribune, the Democrat, and the Freie Presse.

The Cambria Iron Works, the great industry of Johnstown, originated in a few widely separated charcoal furnaces built by pioneer iron workers in the early years of the century. As early as 1803 General Arthur St. Clair engaged in the iron business, and erected the Hermitage furnace about sixteen miles from the present site of Johnstown. In 1809 the working of ores was begun near Johnstown. These were primitive furnaces, where charcoal was the only fuel employed, and the raw material and product were transported entirely on wagons, but they marked the beginning of the manufacture of iron in this country.

The Cambria Iron Company was chartered under the general law in 1852, for the operation of four old-fashioned charcoal furnaces in and near Johnstown, which was then a village of 1300 inhabitants, to which the Pennsylvania railroad had just been extended. In 1853 the construction of four coke furnaces was begun, but it was two years before the first was finished. England was then shipping rails into this country under a low duty, and the iron industry here was struggling for existence. The company at Johnstown was aided by a number of Philadelphia merchants, but was unable to continue in business, and suspended in 1854. At a meeting of the creditors in Philadelphia soon afterward a committee was appointed, with Daniel J. Morrell as Chairman, to visit the works at Johnstown and recommend the best means, if any, to save themselves from loss. In his report, Mr. Morrell strongly urged the Philadelphia creditors to invest more money and continue the business. They did so, and Matthew Newkirk was made President of the company. The company again failed in 1855, and Mr. Morrell then associated a number of gentlemen with him, and formed the firm of Wood, Morrell & Co., leasing the works for seven years. The year 1856 was one of great financial depression, and 1857 was worse, and, as a further discouragement, the large furnace was destroyed by fire in June, 1857. In one week, however, the works were in operation again, and a brick building was soon constructed. When the war came, and with it the Morrill tariff of 1861, a broader field was opened up, and in 1862 the present company was formed.

The years following the close of the war brought about an unprecedented revival in railroad building. In 1864 there were but 33,908 miles of railroad in the United States, while in 1874 there were 72,741 miles, or more than double. There was a great demand for English steel rails, which advanced to $170 per ton. Congress imposed a duty of $28 a ton on foreign rails, and encouraged American manufacturers to go into the business. The Cambria Company began the erection of Bessemer steel works in 1869, and sold the first steel rails in 1871, at $104 a ton.

The company had 700 dwelling-houses, rented to employees. The works and rolling mills of the company were situated upon what was originally a river flat, where the valley of the Conemaugh expanded somewhat, just below Johnstown, and now part of Millville. The Johnstown furnaces, Nos. 1, 2, 3 and 4, formed one complete plant, with stacks 75 feet high and 16 feet in diameter at the base. Steam was generated in forty boilers fired by furnace gas, for eight vertical, direct-acting blowing engines. Nos. 5 and 6 blast furnaces formed together a second plant, with stacks 75 feet high and 19 feet in diameter. The Bessemer plant was the sixth started in the United States (July, 1871). The main building was 102 feet in width by 165 feet in length. The cupolas were six in number. Blast was supplied from eight Baker rotary pressure blowers, driven by engines 16 x 24 inches at 110 revolutions per minute. The Bessemer works were supplied with steam by a battery of twenty-one tubular boilers. The best average, although not the very highest work done in the Bessemer department, was 103 heats of 8½ tons each for each twenty-four hours. The best weekly record reached 4847 tons of ingots, and the best monthly record 20,304 tons. The best daily output was 900 tons of ingots. All grades of steel were made in the converters, from the softest wire and bridge stock to spring stock. The open-hearth building, 120 x 155 feet, containing three Pernot revolving hearth furnaces of fifteen tons capacity each, supplied with natural gas. The rolling mill was 100 feet in width by 1900 feet in length, and contained a 24-inch train of two stands of three-high rolls, and a ten-ton traveling crane for changing rolls. The product of the mill was 80,000 pounds per turn. The bolt and nut works produced 1000 kegs of finished track bolts per month, besides machine bolts. The capacity of the axle shop was 100 finished steel axles per day. The “Gautier steel department” consisted of a brick building 200 x 50 feet, where the wire was annealed, drawn and finished; a brick warehouse 373 x 43 feet, many shops, offices, etc.; the barb-wire mill, 50 x 250 feet, where the celebrated Cambria link barb wire was made, and the main merchant mill, 725 x 250 feet. These mills produced wire, shafting, springs, plough-shares, rake and harrow teeth, and other kinds of agricultural implement steel. In 1887 they produced 50,000 tons of this material, which was marketed mainly in the Western States. Grouped with the principal mills thus described were the foundries, pattern and other shops, draughting offices and time offices, etc., all structures of a firm and substantial character.

The company operated about thirty-five miles of railroad tracks, employing in this service twenty-four locomotives, and owned 1500 cars. To the large bodies of mountain land connected with the old charcoal furnaces additions have been made of ores and coking coals, and the company now owns in fee simple 54,423 acres of mineral lands. It has 600 beehive coke ovens in the Connellsville district, and the coal producing capacity of the mines in Pennsylvania owned by the company is 815,000 tons per year.

In continuation of the policy of Daniel J. Morrell, the Cambria Iron Company has done a great deal for its employees. The Cambria Library was erected by the Iron Company and presented to the town. The building was 43 x 68½ feet, and contained a library of 6914 volumes. It contained a large and valuable collection of reports of the United States and the State, and it is feared that they have been greatly damaged. The Cambria Mutual Benefit Association is composed of employees of the company, and is supported by it. The employees receive benefits when sick or injured, and in case of death their families are provided for. The Board of Directors of this association also controls the Cambria Hospital, which was erected by the Iron Company in 1866, on Prospect Hill, in the northern part of the town. The company also maintained a club house, and a store which was patronized by others, as well as by its employees.

[CHAPTER II.]

Twenty miles up Conemaugh creek, beyond the workingmen’s villages of South Fork and Mineral Point, was Conemaugh lake. It was a part of the old and long disused Pennsylvania Canal system. At the head of Conemaugh creek, back among the hills, three hundred feet or more above the level of Johnstown streets, was a small, natural lake. When the canal was building, the engineers took this lake to supply the western division of the canal which ran from there to Pittsburgh. The Eastern division ended at Hollidaysburgh east of the summit of the Alleghanies, where there was a similar reservoir. Between the two was the old Portage road, one of the first railroads constructed in the State. The canal was abandoned some years ago, as the Pennsylvania road destroyed its traffic. The Pennsylvania Company got a grant of the canal from the State. Some years after the canal was abandoned the Hollidaysburgh reservoir was torn down, the water gradually escaping into the Frankstown branch of the Juniata river. The people of the neighborhood objected to the existence of the reservoir after the canal was abandoned, as little attention was paid to the structure, and the farmers in the valley below feared that the dam would break and drown them. The water was all let out of that reservoir about three years ago.

The dam above Johnstown greatly increased the small natural lake there. It was a pleasant drive from Johnstown to the reservoir. Boating and fishing parties often went out there. Near the reservoir is Cresson, a summer resort owned by the Pennsylvania road. Excursion parties are made up in the summer time by the Pennsylvania Company, and special trains are run for them from various points to Cresson. A club called the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club was organized some years ago, and got the use of the lake from the Pennsylvania Company. Most of the members of the club live in Pittsburgh, and are prominent iron and coal men. Besides them there are some of the officials of the Pennsylvania road among the members. They increased the size of the dam until it was not far from a hundred feet in height, and its entire length, from side to side at the top, was not far from nine hundred feet. This increased the size of the lake to three miles in length and a mile and a quarter in width. It was an irregular oval in shape. The volume of water in it depended on the time of the year.

Some of the people of Johnstown had thought for years that the dam might break, but they did not think that its breaking would do more than flood the flats and damage the works of the Cambria Company.

When the Hunting and Fishing Club bought the site of the old reservoir a section of 150 feet had been washed out of the middle. This was rebuilt at an expense of $17,000 and the work was thought to be very strong. At the base it was 380 feet thick and gradually tapered until at the top it was about 35 feet thick. It was considered amply secure, and such faith had the members of the club in its stability that the top of the dam was utilized as a driveway. It took two years to complete the work, men being engaged from ’79 to ’81. While it was under process of construction the residents of Johnstown expressed some fears as to the solidity of the work, and requested that it be examined by experts. An engineer of the Cambria Iron Works, secured through Mr. Morrell, of that institution, one provided by Mr. Pitcairn, of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and Nathan McDowell, chosen by the club itself, made a thorough examination. They pronounced the structure perfectly safe, but suggested some precautionary measures as to the stopping of leaks, that were faithfully carried out. The members of the club themselves discovered that the sewer that carried away the surplus or overflow from the lake was not large enough in times of storm. So five feet of solid rock were cut away in order to increase the mouth of the lake. Usually the surface of the water was 15 feet below the top of the dam, and never in recent years did it rise to more than eight feet. In 1881, when work was going on, a sudden rise occurred, and then the water threatened to do what it did on this occasion. The workmen hastened to the scene and piled débris of all sorts on the top and thus prevented a washout.

For more than a year there had been fears of a disaster. The foundations of the dam at South Fork were considered shaky early in 1888, and many increasing leakages were reported from time to time.

“We were afraid of that lake,” said a gentleman who had lived in Johnstown for years; “We were afraid of that lake seven years ago. No one could see the immense height to which that artificial dam had been built without fearing the tremendous power of the water behind it. The dam must have had a sheer height of 100 feet, thus forcing the water that high above its natural bed, and making a lake at least three miles long and a mile wide, out of what could scarcely be called a pond. I doubt if there is a man or woman in Johnstown who at some time or other had not feared and spoken of the terrible disaster that has now come.

“People wondered, and asked why the dam was not strengthened, as it certainly had become weak; but nothing was done, and by and by they talked less and less about it, as nothing happened, though now and then some would shake their heads as if conscious the fearful day would come some time when their worst fears would be transcended by the horror of the actual occurrence.”

There is not a shadow of doubt but that the citizens of Cambria County frequently complained, and that at the time the dam was constructed a vigorous effort was made to put a stop to the work. It is true that the leader in this movement was not a citizen of Johnstown, but he was and is a large mine owner in Cambria County. His mine adjoins the reservoir property. He was frequently on the spot, and his own engineer inspected the work. He says the embankment was principally of shale and clay, and that straw was used to stop the leaking of water while the work was going on. He called on the sheriff of Cambria County and told him it was his duty to apply to the court for an injunction. The sheriff promised to give the matter his attention, but, instead of going before court, went to the Cambria Company for consultation. An employee was sent up to make an inspection, and as his report was favorable to the reservoir work the sheriff went no further. But the gentleman referred to said that he had not failed to make public his protest at the time and to renew it frequently. This recommendation for an injunction and protest were spoken of by citizens of Altoona as a hackneyed subject.

Confirmation has certainly been had at South Fork, Conemaugh, Millvale and Johnstown. The rumor of an expected break was prevalent at these places, but citizens remarked that the rumor was a familiar incident of the annual freshets. It was the old classic story of “Wolf, wolf.” They gave up the first floors to the water and retired upstairs to wait until the river should recede, as they had done often before, scouting the oft-told story of the breaking of the reservoir.

RUINS OF JOHNSTOWN, VIEWED FROM PROSPECT HILL.

An interesting story, involving the construction and history of the Conemaugh lake dam, was related by J. B. Montgomery, who formerly lived in Western Pennsylvania, and is now well known in the West as a railroad contractor. “The dam,” said he, “was built about thirty-five years ago by the State of Pennsylvania, as a feeder for the western division of the Pennsylvania Canal. The plans and specifications for the dam were furnished by the Chief Engineer of the State. I am not sure, but it is my impression, that Colonel William Milnor Roberts held the office at the time. Colonel Roberts was one of the most famous engineers in the country. He died several years ago in Chili. The contractors for the construction of the dam were General J. K. Moorhead and Judge H. B. Packer, of Williamsport, a brother of Governor Packer. General Moorhead had built many dams before this on the rivers of Pennsylvania, and his work was always known to be of the very best. In this case, however, all that he had to do was to build the dam according to the specifications furnished by the State. The dam was built of stone and wood throughout, and was of particularly solid construction. There is no significance in the discovery of straw and dirt among the ruins of the dam. Both are freely used when dams are being built, to stop the numerous leaks.

“The dam had three waste-gates at the bottom, so arranged that they could be raised when there was too much water in the lake, and permit the escape of the surplus. These gates were in big stone arches, through which the water passed to the canal when the lake was used as a feeder.

“In 1859 the Pennsylvania Railroad Company purchased the canal from the State, and the dam and lake went into the possession of that company. Shortly afterward the Pennsylvania Company abandoned the western division of the canal, and the dam became useless as a feeder. For twenty-five years the lake was used only as a fish-pond, and the dam and the gates were forgotten. Five years ago the lake was leased to a number of Pittsburgh men, who stocked it with bass, trout, and other game fish. I have heard it said that the waste-gates had not been opened for a great many years. If this is so, no wonder the dam broke. Naturally the fishermen did not want to open the gates after the lake was stocked, for the fish would have run out. A sluiceway should have been built on the side of the dam, so that when the water reached a certain height the surplus could escape. The dam was not built with the intention that the water should flow over the top of it under any circumstances, and if allowed to escape in that way the water was bound to undermine it in a short time. With a dam the height of this the pressure of a quantity of water great enough to overflow it must be something tremendous.

“If it is true that the waste-gates were never opened after the Pittsburgh men had leased the lake, the explanation of the bursting of the dam is to be found right there. It may be that the dam had not been looked after and strengthened of late years, and it was undoubtedly weakened in the period of twenty-five years during which the lake was not used. After the construction of the dam the lake was called the Western Reservoir. The south fork of the Conemaugh, which fed the lake, is a little stream not over ten feet wide, but even when there were no unusual storms it carried enough water to fill the lake full within a year, showing how important it was that the gates should be opened occasionally to run off the surplus.”

Mr. Montgomery was one of a party of engineers who inspected the dam when it was leased by the Pennsylvania Company, five years ago. It then needed repairs, but was in a perfectly safe condition if the water was not allowed to flow over it.

[CHAPTER III.]

Friday, May 31st, 1889. The day before had been a solemn holiday. In every village veterans of the War for the Union had gathered; in every cemetery flowers had been strewn upon the grave-mounds of the heroic dead. Now the people were resuming the every-day toil. The weather was rainy. It had been wet for some days. Stony Creek and Conemaugh were turbid and noisy. The little South Fork, which ran into the upper end of the lake, was swollen into a raging torrent. The lake was higher than usual; higher than ever. But the valley below lay in fancied security, and all the varied activities of life pursued their wonted round.

Friday, May 31st, 1889. Record that awful date in characters of funereal hue. It was a dark and stormy day, and amid the darkness and the storm the angel of death spread his wings over the fated valley, unseen, unknown. Midday comes. Disquieting rumors rush down the valley. There is a roar of an approaching storm—approaching doom! The water swiftly rises. A horseman thunders down the valley: “To the hills, for God’s sake! To the hills, for your lives!” They stare at him as at a madman, and their hesitating feet linger in the valley of the shadow of death, and the shadow swiftly darkens, and the everlasting hills veil their faces with rain and mist before the scene that greets them.

This is what happened:—

The heavy rainfall raised the lake until its water began to pour over the top of the dam. The dam itself—wretchedly built of mud and boulders—saturated through and through, began to leak copiously here and there. Each watery sapper and miner burrowed on, followers swiftly enlarging the murderous tunnels. The whole mass became honeycombed. And still the rain poured down, and still the South Fork and a hundred minor streams sent in their swelling floods, until, with a roar like that of the opening gates of the Inferno belching forth the legions of the damned, the wall gave way, and with the rush of a famished tiger into a sheepfold, the whirlwind of water swept down the valley on its errand of destruction—

“And like a horse unbroken,

When first he feels the rein,

The furious river struggled hard,

And tossed his tawny mane,

And burst the curb, and bounded,

Rejoicing to be free,

And, whirling down in mad career,

Battlement and plank and pier,

Rushed headlong to the sea!”

According to the statements of people who lived in Johnstown and other towns on the line of the river, ample time was given to the inhabitants of Johnstown by the railroad officials and by other gentlemen of standing and reputation. In hundreds of cases this warning was utterly disregarded, and those who heeded it early in the day were looked upon as cowards, and many jeers were uttered by lips that now are cold. The people of Johnstown also had a special warning in the fact that the dam in Stony Creek, just above the town, broke about noon, and thousands of feet of lumber passed down the river. Yet they hesitated, and even when the wall of water, almost forty feet high, was at their doors, one man is said by a survivor to have told his family that the stream would not rise very high.

How sudden the calamity is illustrated by an incident which Mr. Bender, the night chief operator of the Western Union in Pittsburgh, relates: “At 3 o’clock that Friday afternoon,” said he, “the girl operator at Johnstown was cheerfully ticking away that she had to abandon the office on the first floor, because the water was three feet deep there. She said she was telegraphing from the second story and the water was gaining steadily. She was frightened, and said many houses were flooded. This was evidently before the dam broke, for our man here said something encouraging to her, and she was talking back as only a cheerful girl operator can, when the receiver’s skilled ear caught a sound on the wire made by no human hand, which told him that the wires had grounded, or that the house had been swept away in the flood from the lake, no one knows which now. At 3 o’clock the girl was there, and at 3.07 we might as well have asked the grave to answer us.”

The water passed over the dam about a foot above its top, beginning at about half-past 2. Whatever happened in the way of a cloud-burst took place in the night. There had been little rain up to dark. When the workmen woke in the morning the lake was full, and rising at the rate of a foot an hour. It kept on rising until 2 P. M., when it began breaking over the dam and undermining it. Men were sent three or four times during the day to warn people below of their danger. When the final break came at 3 o’clock, there was a sound like tremendous and continued peals of thunder. Trees, rocks and earth shot up into mid-air in great columns and then started down the ravine. A farmer who escaped said that the water did not come down like a wave, but jumped on his house and beat it to fragments in an instant. He was safe on the hillside, but his wife and two children were killed.

Herbert Webber, who was employed by the Sportsmen’s Club at the lake, tells that for three days previous to the final outburst, the water of the lake forced itself out through the interstices of the masonry, so that the front of the dam resembled a large watering pot. The force of the water was so great that one of these jets squirted full thirty feet horizontally from the stone wall. All this time, too, the feeders of the lake, particularly three of them, more nearly resembled torrents than mountain streams, and were supplying the dammed up body of water with quite 3,000,000 gallons of water hourly.

At 11 o’clock that Friday morning, Webber says he was attending to a camp about a mile back from the dam, when he noticed that the surface of the lake seemed to be lowering. He doubted his eyes, and made a mark on the shore, and then found that his suspicions were undoubtedly well founded. He ran across the country to the dam, and there saw, he declares, the water of the lake welling out from beneath the foundation stones of the dam. Absolutely helpless, he was compelled to stand there and watch the gradual development of what was to be the most disastrous flood of this continent.

According to his reckoning it was 2.45 when the stones in the centre of the dam began to sink because of the undermining, and within eight minutes a gap of twenty feet was made in the lower half of the wall face, through which the water poured as though forced by machinery of stupendous power. By 3 o’clock the toppling masonry, which before had partaken somewhat of the form of an arch, fell in, and then the remainder of the wall opened outward like twin gates, and the great storage lake was foaming and thundering down the valley of the Conemaugh.

Webber became so awestruck at the catastrophe that he declares he was unable to leave the spot until the lake had fallen so low that it showed bottom fifty feet below him. How long a time elapsed he says he does not know before he recovered sufficient power of observation to notice this, but he does not think that more than five minutes passed. Webber says that had the dam been repaired after the spring freshet of 1888 the disaster would not have occurred. Had it been given ordinary attention in the spring of 1887 the probabilities are that thousands of lives would have been saved.

Imagine, if you can, a solid piece of ground, thirty-five feet wide and over one hundred feet high, and then, again, that a space of two hundred feet is cut out of it, through which is rushing over seven hundred acres of water, and you can have only a faint conception of the terrible force of the blow that came upon the people of this vicinity like a clap of thunder out of a clear sky. It was irresistible in its power and carried everything before it. After seeing the lake and the opening through the dam it can be readily understood how that out-break came to be so destructive in its character.

The lake had been leaking, and a couple of Italians were at work just over the point where the break occurred, and in an instant, without warning, it gave way and they went down in the whirling mass of water, and were swept into eternity.

Mr. Crouse, proprietor of the South Fork Fishing Club Hotel, says: “When the dam of Conemaugh lake broke the water seemed to leap, scarcely touching the ground. It bounded down the valley, crashing and roaring, carrying everything before it. For a mile its front seemed like a solid wall twenty feet high.” The only warning given to Johnstown was sent from South Fork village by Freight Agent Dechert. When the great wall that held the body of water began to crumble at the top he sent a message begging the people of Johnstown for God’s sake to take to the hills. He reports no serious accidents at South Fork.

Richard Davis ran to Prospect Hill when the water raised. As to Mr. Dechert’s message, he says just such have been sent down at each flood since the lake was made. The warning so often proved useless that little attention was paid to it this time. “I cannot describe the mad rush,” he said. “At first it looked like dust. That must have been the spray. I could see houses going down before it like a child’s play blocks set on edge in a row. As it came nearer I could see houses totter for a moment, then rise and the next moment be crushed like egg shells, against each other.”

Mr. John G. Parke, of Philadelphia, a civil engineer, was at the dam superintending some improvements in the drainage system at the lake. He did all he could with the help of a gang of laborers to avert the catastrophe and to warn those in danger. His story of the calamity is this:—

“For several days prior to the breaking of the dam, storm after storm swept over the mountains and flooded every creek and rivulet. The waters from these varied sources flowed into the lake, which finally was not able to stand the pressure forced upon it. Friday morning I realized the danger that was threatened, and although from that time until three o’clock every human effort was made to prevent a flood, they were of no avail. When I at last found that the dam was bound to go, I started out to tell the people, and by twelve o’clock everybody in the Conemaugh region did or should have known of their danger. Three hours later my gravest fears were more than realized. It is an erroneous idea, however, that the dam burst. It simply moved away. The water gradually ate into the embankment until there was nothing left but a frail bulwark of wood. This finally split asunder and sent the waters howling down the mountains.”

[CHAPTER IV.]

The course of the torrent from the broken dam at the foot of the lake to Johnstown is almost eighteen miles, and with the exception of one point, the water passed through a narrow V-shaped valley. Four miles below the dam lay the town of South Fork, where the South Fork itself empties into the Conemaugh river. The town contained about 2000 inhabitants. About four-fifths of it has been swept away. Four miles further down on the Conemaugh river, which runs parallel with the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad, was the town of Mineral Point. It had 800 inhabitants, 90 per cent. of the houses being on a flat and close to the river. Terrible as it may seem, very few of them have escaped. Six miles further down was the town of Conemaugh, and here alone there was a topographical possibility—the spreading of the flood and the breaking of its force. It contained 2500 inhabitants, and has been almost wholly devastated. Woodvale, with 2000 people, lay a mile below Conemaugh in the flat, and one mile further down were Johnstown and its suburbs—Cambria City and Conemaugh borough, with a population of 30,000. On made ground, and stretched along right at the river’s verge, were the immense iron works of the Cambria Iron and Steel Company, who have $5,000,000 invested in their plant. Besides this there are many other large industrial establishments on the bank of the river.

The stream of human beings that was swept before the angry floods was something most pitiful to behold. Men, women and children were carried along frantically shrieking for help, but their cries availed them nothing. Rescue was impossible. Husbands were swept past their wives, and children were borne along, at a terrible speed, to certain death, before the eyes of their terrorized and frantic parents. Houses, out-buildings, trees and barns were carried on the angry flood of waters as so much chaff. Cattle standing in the fields were overwhelmed, and their carcasses strewed the tide. The railroad tracks converging on the town were washed out, and wires in all directions were prostrated.

Down through the Packsaddle came the rushing waters. Clinging to improvised rafts, constructed in the death battle from floating boards and timbers, were agonized men, women and children, their heart-rending shrieks for help striking horror to the breasts of the onlookers. Their cries were of no avail. Carried along at a railway speed on the breast of this rushing torrent, no human ingenuity could devise a means of rescue.

It is impossible to describe briefly the suddenness with which the disaster came. A warning sound was heard at Conemaugh a few minutes before the rush of water came, but it was attributed to some meteorological disturbance, and no trouble was borrowed because of the thing unseen. As the low, rumbling noise increased in volume, however, and came nearer, a suspicion of danger began to force itself even upon the bravest, which was increased to a certainty a few minutes later, when, with a rush, the mighty stream spread out in width, and when there was no time to do anything to save themselves. Many of the unfortunates were whirled into the middle of the stream before they could turn around; men, women and children were struggling in the streets, and it is thought that many of them never reached Johnstown, only a mile or two below.

At Johnstown a similar scene was enacted, only on a much larger scale. The population is greater and the sweeping whirlpool rushed into a denser mass of humanity. The imagination of the reader can better depict the spectacle than the pen of the writer can give it. It was a twilight of terror, and the gathering shades of evening closed in on a panorama of horrors that has few parallels in the history of casualties.

When the great wave from Conemaugh lake, behind the dam, came down the Conemaugh Valley, the first obstacle it struck was the great viaduct over the South Fork. This viaduct was a State work, built to carry the old Portage road across the Fork. The Pennsylvania Railroad parallels the Portage road for a long distance, and runs over the Fork. Besides sweeping the viaduct down, the bore, or smaller bores on its wings, washed out the Portage road for miles. One of the small bores went down the bed of a brook which comes into the Conemaugh at the village of South Fork, which is some distance above the viaduct. The big bore backed the river above the village. The small bore was thus checked in its course and flowed into the village.

GENERAL VIEW OF THE RUINS, LOOKING UP STONY CREEK.

The obstruction below being removed, the backed-up water swept the village of South Fork away. The flood came down. It moved steadily, but with a velocity never yet attained by an engine moved by power controllable by man. It accommodated itself to the character of the breaks in the hill. It filled every one, whether narrow or broad. Its thrust was sideways and downward as well as forward. By side thrusts it scoured every cave and bend in the line of the mountains, lessening its direct force to exert power laterally, but at the same time moving its centre straight on Johnstown. It is well to state that the Conemaugh river is tortuous, like most streams of its kind. Wherever the mountains retreat, flats make out from them to the channel of the stream. It was on such flats that South Fork and Mineral Point villages and the boroughs of Conemaugh, Franklin, Woodvale, East Conemaugh and Johnstown were built.

After emerging from the South Fork, with the ruins of the great viaduct in its maw, it swept down a narrow valley until just above the village of Mineral Point. There it widened, and, thrusting its right wing into the hollow where the village nestled, it swept away every house on the flat. These were soon welded into a compact mass, with trees and logs and general drift stuff. This mass followed the bore. What the bore could not budge, its follower took up and carried.

The first great feat at carrying and lifting was done at East Conemaugh. It tore up every building in the yard of the Pennsylvania Railroad. It took locomotives and carried them down and dug holes for their burials. It has been said that the flood had a downward thrust. There was proof of this on the banks of the river, where there was a sort of breakwater of concreted cinders, slag, and other things, making a combination harder than stone. Unable to get a grip directly on these banks, the flood jumped over them, threw the whole weight of the mass of logs and broken buildings down on the sand behind them, scooped this sand out, and then, by backward blows, knocked the concrete to pieces. In this it displayed almost the uttermost skill of human malice.

After crossing the flat of East Conemaugh and scooping out of their situations sixty-five houses in two streets, as well as tearing passenger trains to pieces, drowning an unknown number of persons, and picking up others to dash against whatever obstacles it encountered, it sent a force to the left, which cut across the flat of Franklin borough, ripped thirty-two houses to pieces, and cut a second channel for the Conemaugh river, leaving an island to mark the place of division of the forces of the flood. The strength of the eastern wing can be estimated from the fact that the iron bars piled in heaps in the stock yard of the Cambria Iron Company were swept away, and that some of them may be found all along the river as far as Johnstown.

After this came the utter wiping out of the borough of Woodvale, on the flat to the northeast of Johnstown and diagonally opposite it. Woodvale had a population of nearly 3000 people. It requires a large number of houses to shelter so many. Estimating 10 to a family, which is a big estimate, there were 300 houses in Woodvale. There were also a woolen mill, a flour mill, the Gautier Barb Wire Mills of the Cambria Iron Company, and the tannery of W. H. Rosenthal & Co. Only the flour mill and the middle section of the bridge remain. The flat is bare otherwise. The stables of the Woodvale Horse Railroad Company went out with the water; every horse and car in them went also.

The change was wrought in five minutes. Robert Miller, who lost two of his children and his mother-in-law, thus describes the scene: “I was standing near the Woodvale Bridge, between Maple avenue and Portage street, in Johnstown. The river was high, and David Lucas and I were speculating about the bridges, whether they would go down or not. Lucas said, ‘I guess this bridge will stand; it does not seem to be weakened.’ Just then we saw a dark object up the river. Over it was a white mist. It was high and somehow dreadful, though we could not make it out. Dark smoke seemed to form a background for the mist. We did not wait for more. By instinct we knew the big dam had burst and its water was coming upon us. Lucas jumped on a car horse, rode across the bridge, and went yelling into Johnstown. The flood overtook him, and he had to abandon his horse and climb a high hill.

“I went straight to my house in Woodvale, warning everybody as I ran. My wife and mother-in-law were ready to move, with my five children, so we went for the hillside, but we were not speedy enough. The water had come over the flat at its base and cut us off. I and my wife climbed into a coal car with one of the children, to get out of the water. I put two more children into the car and looked around for my other children and my mother-in-law. My mother-in-law was a stout woman, weighing about two hundred and twelve pounds. She could not climb into a car. The train was too long for her to go around it, so she tried to crawl under, leading the children.

“The train was suddenly pushed forward by the flood, and she was knocked down and crushed, so were my children, by the same shock. My wife and children in the car were thrown down and covered with coal. I was taken off by the water, but I swam to the car and pulled them from under a lot of coal. A second blow to the train threw our car against the hillside and us out of it to firm earth. I never saw my two children and mother-in-law after the flood first struck the train of coal cars. I have often heard it said that the dam might break, but I never paid any attention to it before. It was common talk whenever there was a freshet or a big pack of ice.”

The principal street of Woodvale was Maple avenue. The Conemaugh river now rushes through it from one side of the flat to the other. Its pavement is beautifully clean. It is doubtful that it will ever be cleared by mortal agency again.

Breaking down the barbed steel wire mill and the tannery at the bridge, the flood went across the regular channel of the river and struck the Gautier Steel Works, made up of numerous stanch brick buildings and one immense structure of iron, filled with enormous boilers, fly wheels, and machinery generally. The buildings are strewn through Johnstown. Near their sites are some bricks, twisted iron beams, boilers, wheels, and engine bodies, bound together with logs, driftwood, tree branches, and various other things, woven in and out of one another marvelously. These aggregations are of enormous size and weight. They were not too strong for the immense power of the destroying agent, for a twenty-ton locomotive, taken from the Gautier Works, now lies in Main street, three-quarters of a mile away. It did not simply take a good grip upon them; it was spreading out its line for a force by its left wing, and hit simultaneously upon Johnstown flat, its people and houses, while its right wing did whatever it could in the way of helping the destructive work. The left wing scoured the flat to the base of the mountain. With a portion of the centre it then rushed across Stony creek. The remainder of the central force cleared several paths in diverging directions through the town.

While the left and centre were tearing houses to pieces and drowning untold lives, the right had been hurrying along the base of the northern hills, in the channel of the Conemaugh river, carrying down the houses, bridges, human beings and other drift that had been picked up on the way from South Fork.

Thus far the destruction at Johnstown had not been one-quarter what it is now. But the bed of the Conemaugh beyond Johnstown is between high hills that come close together. The cut is bridged by a viaduct. The right wing, with its plunder, was stopped by the bridge and the bend. The left and centre came tearing down Stony creek. There was a collision of forces. The men, women, children, horses, other domestic animals, houses, bridges, railroad cars, logs and tree branches were jammed together in a solid mass, which only dynamite can break up. The outlet of Stony creek was almost completely closed and the channel of the Conemaugh was also choked. The water in both surged back. In Stony creek it went along the curve of the base of the hill in front of which Kernville is built. Dividing its strength, one part of the flood went up Stony creek a short distance and moved around again into Johnstown. It swept before it many more houses than before and carried them around in a circle, until they met and crashed against other houses, torn from the point of Johnstown flat by a similar wave moving in a circle from the Conemaugh.

The two waves and their burdens went around and around in slowly-diminishing circles, until most of the houses had been ground to pieces. There are living men, women and children who circled in these frightful vortices for an hour. Lawyer Rose, his wife, his two brothers and his two sisters are among those. They were drawn out of their house by the suction of the retreating water, and thus were started on a frightful journey. Three times they went from the Kernville side of the creek to the centre of the Johnstown flat and past their own dwelling. They were dropped at last on the Kernville shore. Mr. Rose had his collar bone broken, but the others were hurt only by fright, wetting and some bruises.

Some of the back water went up the creek and did damage at Grubtown and Hornerstown. More of it, following the line of the mountain, rushed in at the back of Kernville. It cut a clear path for itself from the lower end of the village to the upper end, diagonally opposite, passing through the centre. It sent little streams to topple homes over in side places and went on a round trip into the higher part of Johnstown, between the creek and the hill. It carried houses from Kernville to the Johnstown bank of the creek, and left them there. Then it coursed down the bank, overturning trains of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad, and also houses, and keeping on until it had made the journey several times.

How so marvelous a force was exerted is illustrated in the following statement from Jacob Reese, of Pittsburg, the inventor of the basic process for manufacturing steel. Mr. Reese says:—

“When the South Fork dam gave way, 16,000,000 tons of water rushed down the mountain side, carrying thousands of tons of rocks, logs and trees with it. When the flood reached the Conemaugh Valley it struck the Pennsylvania Railroad at a point where they make up the trains for ascending the Allegheny Mountains. Several trains with their locomotives and loaded cars were swept down the valley before the flood wave, which is said to have been fifty feet high. Cars loaded with iron, cattle, and freight of all kinds, with those mighty locomotives, weighing from seventy to one hundred tons each, were pushed ahead of the flood, trucks and engines rolling over and over like mere toys.

“Sixteen million tons of water gathering fences, barns, houses, mills and shops into its maw. Down the valley for three miles or more rushed this mighty avalanche of death, sweeping everything before it, and leaving nothing but death and destruction behind it. When it struck the railroad bridge at Johnstown, and not being able to force its way through that stone structure, the débris was gorged and the water dammed up fifty feet in ten minutes.

“This avalanche was composed of more than 100,000 tons of rocks, locomotives, freight cars, car trucks, iron, logs, trees and other material pushed forward by 16,000,000 tons of water falling 500 feet, and it was this that, sliding over the ground, mowed down the houses, mills and factories as a mowing machine does a field of grain. It swept down with a roaring, crushing sound, at the rate of a mile a minute, and hurled 10,000 people into the jaws of death in less than half an hour. And so the people called it the avalanche of death.”

[CHAPTER V.]

“Johnstown is annihilated,” telegraphed Superintendent Pitcairn to Pittsburg on Friday night. “He came,” says one who visited the place on Sunday, “very close to the facts of the case. Nothing like it was ever seen in this country. Where long rows of dwelling-houses and business blocks stood forty-eight hours ago, ruin and desolation now reign supreme. Probably 1500 houses have been swept from the face of the earth as completely as if they had never been erected. Main street, from end to end, is piled fifteen and twenty feet high with débris, and in some instances it is as high as the roofs of the houses. This great mass of wreckage fills the street from curb to curb, and frequently has crushed the buildings in and filled the space with reminders of the terrible calamity. There is not a man in the place who can give any reliable estimate of the number of houses that have been swept away. City Solicitor Kuehn, who should be very good authority in this matter, places the number at 1500. From the woolen mill above the island to the bridge, a distance of probably two miles, a strip of territory nearly a half mile in width has been swept clean, not a stick of timber or one brick on top of another being left to tell the story. It is the most complete wreck that imagination could portray.

“All day long men, women, and children were plodding about the desolate waste looking in vain to locate the boundaries of their former homes. Nothing but a wide expanse of mud, ornamented here and there with heaps of driftwood, remained, however, for their contemplation. It is perfectly safe to say that every house in the city that was not located well up on the hillside was either swept completely away or wrecked so badly that rebuilding will be absolutely necessary. These losses, however, are nothing compared to the frightful sacrifice of precious human lives to be seen on every hand.

“During all this solemn Sunday Johnstown has been drenched with the tears of stricken mortals, and the air is filled with sobs and sighs that come from breaking hearts. There are scenes enacted here every hour and every minute that affect all beholders profoundly. When homes are thus torn asunder in an instant, and the loved ones hurled from the arms of loving and devoted mothers, there is an element of sadness in the tragedy that overwhelms every heart.

“A slide, a series of frightful tosses from side to side, a run, and you have crossed the narrow rope bridge which spanned the chasm dug by the waters between the stone bridge and Johnstown. Crossing the bridge is an exciting task, yet many women accomplished it rather than remain in Johnstown. The bridge pitched like a ship in a storm. Within two inches of your feet rushed the muddy waters of the Conemaugh. There were no ropes to easily guide, and creeping was more convenient than walking. One had to cross the Conemaugh at a second point in order to reach Johnstown proper. This was accomplished by a skiff ferry. The ferryman clung to a rope and pulled the boat over.

“After landing one walks across a desolate sea of mud, in which there are interred many human bodies. It was once the handsome portion of the town. The cellars are filled up with mud, so that a person who has never seen the city can hardly imagine that houses ever stood where they did. Four streets solidly built up with houses have been swept away. Nothing but a small, two-story frame house remains. It was near the edge of the wave and thus escaped, although one side was torn off. The walk up to wrecks of houses was interrupted in many places by small branch streams. Occasionally across the flats could be seen the remains of a victim. The stench arising from the mud is sickening. Along the route were strewn tin utensils, pieces of machinery, iron pipes, and wares of every conceivable kind. In the midst of the wreck a clothing store dummy, with a hand in the position of beckoning to a person, stands erect and uninjured.

“It is impossible to describe the appearance of Main street. Whole houses have been swept down this one street and become lodged. The wreck is piled as high as the second-story windows. The reporter could step from the wreck into the auditorium of the opera house. The ruins consist of parts of houses, trees, saw logs and reels from the wire factory. Many houses have their side walls and roofs torn up, and one can walk directly into what had been second-story bed-rooms, or go in by way of the top. Further up town a raft of logs lodged in the street, and did great damage. At the beginning of the wreckage, which is at the opening of the valley of the Conemaugh, one can look up the valley for miles and not see a house. Nothing stands but an old woolen mill.

“Charles Luther is the name of the boy who stood on an adjacent elevation and saw the whole flood. He said he heard a grinding noise far up the valley, and looking up he could see a dark line moving slowly toward him. He saw that it was houses. On they came, like the hand of a giant clearing off his table. High in the air would be tossed a log or beam, which fell back with a crash. Down the valley it moved and across the little mountain city. For ten minutes nothing but moving houses were seen, and then the waters came with a roar and a rush. This lasted for two hours, and then it began to flow more steadily.”

Seen from the high hill across the river from Johnstown, the Conemaugh Valley gives an easy explanation of the terrible destruction which it has suffered. This valley, stretching back almost in a straight line for miles, suddenly narrows near Johnstown. The wall of water which came tearing down toward the town, picking up all the houses and mills in the villages along its way, suddenly rose in height as it came to the narrow pass. It swept over the nearest part of the town and met the waters of Stony creek, swollen by rains, rushing along with the speed of a torrent. The two forces coming together, each turned aside and started away again in a half-circle, seeking an outlet in the lower Conemaugh Valley. The massive stone bridge of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, at the lower base of the triangle, was almost instantly choked up with the great mass of wreckage dashed against it, and became a dam that could not be swept away, and proved to be the ruin of the town and the villages above. The waters checked here, formed a vast whirlpool, which destroyed everything within its circle. It backed up on the other side of the triangle, and devastated the village of Kernville, across the river from Johnstown.

The force of the current was truly appalling. The best evidence of its force is exhibited in the mass of débris south of the Pennsylvania bridge. Persons on the hillsides declare that houses, solid from their foundation stones, were rushed on to destruction at the rate of thirty miles an hour. On one house forty persons were counted; their cries for help were heard far above the roaring waters. At the railroad bridge the house parted in the middle, and the cries of the unfortunate people were smothered in the engulfing waters.

At the Cambria Iron Works a huge hickory struck the south brick wall of the rolling mill at an angle, went through it and the west wall, where it remains. A still more extraordinary incident is seen at the foot-bridge of the Pennsylvania station, on the freight track built for the Cambria Iron Works. The sunken track and bridge are built in a curve. In clearing out the track the Cambria workmen discovered two huge bridge trusses intact, the larger one 30 feet long and 10 feet high. It lay close to the top of the bridge and had been driven into the cut at least fifty feet.

It was with an impulse to the right side of the mountain that the great mass of water came down the Conemaugh river. It was a mass of water with a front forty feet high, and an eighth of a mile wide. Its velocity was so great that its first sweep did little damage on either side. It had no time to spread. Where it burst from the gap it swept south until it struck the bridge, and, although it was ten feet or more deep over the top of the bridge, the obstruction of the mass of masonry was so great that the head of the rush of water was turned back along the Pennsylvania Railroad bluff on the left, and, sweeping up to where it met the first stream again, licked up the portion of the town on the left side of the triangular plain. A great eddy was thus formed. Through the Stony Creek Gap to the right there was a rush of surplus water. In two minutes after the current first burst through, forty feet deep, with a solid mass of water whirling around with a current of tremendous velocity, it was a whirlpool vastly greater than that of ten Niagaras. The only outlet was under and over the railroad bridge, and the continuing rush of the waters into the valley from the gap was greater for some time than the means of escape at the bridge.

RUINS SHOWING THE PATH OF THE FLOOD.

“Standing now at the bridge,” says a visitor on Monday, “where this vast whirlpool struggled for exit, the air is heavy with smoke and foul with nameless odors from a mass of wreckage. The area of the triangular space where the awful whirlpool revolved is said to be about four square miles. The area of the space covered by this smoking mass is sixty acres. The surface of this mass is now fifteen feet below the top of the bridge and about thirty below the point on the bluff where the surface of the whirlpool lashed the banks. One ragged mass some distance above the bridge rises several feet above the general level, but with that exception the surface of the débris is level. It has burned off until it reached the water, and is smouldering on as the water gradually lowers. On the right bank, at about where was the highest water level, a detachment of the Pittsburg Fire Department is throwing two fitful streams of water down into the smoke, with the idea of gradually extinguishing the fire. In the immensity of the disaster with which they combat their feeble efforts seem like those of boys with squirt guns dampening a bonfire. About the sixty acres of burning débris, and to the left of it from where it begins to narrow toward Stony Creek Gap, there is a large area of level mud, with muddy streams wandering about in it. This tract of mud comprises all of the triangle except a thin fringe of buildings along the bluff on the Pennsylvania Railroad. A considerable number of houses stand on the high ground on the lower face of the central mountain and off to the right into Stony Creek Gap. The fringe along the Pennsylvania Railroad is mostly of stores and other large brick buildings that are completely wrecked, though not swept away. The houses on the higher ground are unharmed; but down toward the edge they fade away by degrees of completeness in their wreckage into the yellow level of the huge tract over which the mighty whirlpool swept. Off out of sight, in Stony Creek Gap, are fringes of houses on either side of the muddy flat.

“This flat is a peculiar thing. It is level and uninteresting as a piece of waste ground. Too poor to grow grass, there is nothing to indicate that it had ever been anything else than what it is. It is as clean of débris and wreckage as though there had never been a building on it. In reality it was the central and busiest part of Johnstown. Buildings, both dwellings and stores, covered it thickly. Its streets were paved, and its sidewalks of substantial stone. It had street-car lines, gas and electric lights, and all the other improvements of a substantial city of 15,000 or 20,000 inhabitants. Iron bridges spanned the streams, and the buildings were of substantial character. Not a brick remains, not a stone nor a stick of timber in all this territory. There are not even hummocks and mounds to show where wreckage might be covered with a layer of mud. They are not there, they are gone—every building, every street, every sidewalk and pavement, the street railways, and everything else that covered the surface of the earth has vanished as utterly as though it had never been there. The ground was swept as clean as though some mighty scraper had been dragged over it again and again. Not even the lines of the streets can be remotely traced.

“‘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:

“The fast line trains that leave Chicago at quarter past three and Cincinnati at seven P.M. constitute the day-express eastward from Pittsburg, which runs in two sections. This train left Pittsburg on time Friday morning, but was stopped for an hour at Johnstown by reports of a wash-out ahead. It had been raining hard for over sixteen hours, and the sides of the mountains were covered with water descending into the valleys. The Conemaugh River, whose bank is followed by the Pennsylvania Railroad for many miles, looked an angry flood nearly bankfull. Passengers were interested in seeing hundreds of saw-logs and an enormous amount of driftwood shoot rapidly by, and the train pursued its way eastward. At Johnstown there was a long wait, as before stated. The lower stories of many houses were submerged by the slack-water, and the inhabitants were looking out of the second-story windows. Horses were standing up to their knees in water in the streets; a side-track of the railroad had been washed out; loaded cars were on the bridge to keep it steady, and the huge poles of the Western Union Telegraph Company, carrying fifteen wires, swayed badly, and several soon went down. The two sections ran to Conemaugh, about two miles eastward of Johnstown, and lay there about three hours, when they were moved on to the highest ground and placed side by side. The mail train was placed in the rear of the first section, and a freight train was run onto a side track on the bank of the Conemaugh. The report was that a bridge had been washed out, carrying away one track and that the other track was unsafe. There was a rumor also that the reservoir at South Fork might break. This made most of the passengers uneasy, and they kept a pretty good look-out for information. The porters of the Pullman cars remained at their posts, and comforted the passengers with the assurance that the Pennsylvania Railroad Company always took care of its patrons. A few gentlemen and some ladies and children quietly seated themselves, apparently contented. One gentleman, who was ill, had his berth made up and retired, although advised not to do so.

“Soon the cry came that the water in the reservoir had broken down the barrier and was sweeping down the valley. Instantly there was a panic and a rush for the mountain side. Children were carried and women assisted by a few who kept cool heads. It was a race for life. There was seen the black head of the flood, now the monster Destruction, whose crest was high raised in the air, and with this in view even the weak found wings for their feet. No words can adequately describe the terror that filled every breast, or the awful power manifested by the flood. The round-house had stalls for twenty-three locomotives. There were eighteen or twenty of these standing there at this time. There was an ominous crash, and the round-house and locomotives disappeared. Everything in the main track of the flood was first lifted in air and then swallowed up by the waters. A hundred houses were swept away in a few minutes. These included the hotel, stores, and saloons on the front street and residences adjacent. The locomotive of one of the trains was struck by a house and demolished. The side of another house stopped in front of another locomotive and served as a shield. The rear car of the mail train swung around in the rear of the second section of the express and turned over on its side. Three men were observed standing upon it as it floated. The coupling broke, and the car moved out upon the bosom of the waters. As it would roll the men would shift their position. The situation was desperate, and they were given up for lost. Two or three hardy men seized ropes and ran along the mountain side to give them aid. Later it was reported that the men escaped over some driftwood as their car was carried near a bank. It is believed there were several women and children inside the car. Of course they were drowned. As the fugitives on the mountain side witnessed the awful devastation they were moved as never before in their lives. They were powerless to help those seized upon by the waters; the despair of those who had lost everything in life and the wailing of those whose relatives or friends were missing filled their breasts with unutterable sorrow.

“The rain continued to fall steadily, but shelter was not thought of. Few passengers saved anything from the train, so sudden was the cry ‘Run for your lives, the reservoir has broken!’

“Many were without hats, and as their baggage was left on the trains, they were without the means of relieving their unhappy condition. The occupants of the houses still standing on the high ground threw them open to those who had lost all, and to the passengers of the train.

“During the height of the flood, the spectators were startled by the sound of two locomotive whistles from the very midst of the waters. Two engineers, with characteristic courage, had remained at their posts, and while there was destruction on every hand, and apparently no escape for them, they sounded their whistles. This they repeated at intervals, the last time with triumphant vigor, as the waters were receding from the sides of their locomotives. By half-past five the force of the reservoir water had been spent on the village of Conemaugh, and the Pullman cars and locomotive of the second section remained unmoved. This was because, being on the highest and hardest ground, the destructive current of the reservoir flood had passed between that and the mountain, while the current of the river did not eat it away. But the other trains had been destroyed. A solitary locomotive was seen embedded in the mud where the round-house had stood.

“As the greatest danger had passed, the people of Conemaugh gave their thoughts to their neighbors of the city of Johnstown. Here was centred the great steel and iron industries, the pride of Western Pennsylvania, the Cambria Iron Works being known everywhere. Here were churches, daily newspapers, banks, dry-goods houses, warehouses, and the comfortable and well-built homes of twelve thousand people. In the contemplation of the irresistible force of that awful flood, gathering additional momentum as it swept on toward the Gulf, it became clear that the city must be destroyed, and that unless the inhabitants had telegraphic notice of the breaking of the reservoir they must perish. A cry of horror went up from the hundreds on the mountain-side, and a few instinctively turned their steps toward Johnstown. The city was destroyed. All the mills, furnaces, manufactories, the many and varied industries, the banks, the residences, all, all were swallowed up before the shadows of night had settled down upon the earth. Those who came back by daybreak said that from five thousand to eight thousand had been drowned. Our hope is that this is an exaggeration, and when the roll is called most will respond. In the light of this calamity, the destruction at Conemaugh sinks into insignificance.”

Mr. George Johnston, a lumber merchant of Pittsburg, was another witness. “I had gone to Johnstown,” he says, “to place a couple of orders. I had scarcely reached the town, about three o’clock in the afternoon, when I saw a bulletin posted up in front of the telegraph office, around which quite a crowd of men had congregated. I pushed my way up, and read that the waters were so high in the Conemaugh that it was feared the three-mile dam, as it was called, would give way. I know enough about Johnstown to feel that my life was not worth a snap once that dam gave way. Although the Johnstown people did not seem to pay much attention to the warning, I was nervous and apprehensive. I had several parties to see, but concluded to let all but one go until some later day. So I hurried through with my most urgent transactions and started for the depot. The Conemaugh had then gotten so high that the residents of the low-lying districts had moved into upper stories. I noticed a number of wagons filled with furniture hurrying through the streets. A few families, either apprehensive of the impending calamity or driven from their houses by the rising waters, had started for the surrounding hills. Johnstown, you know, lies in a narrow valley, and lies principally on the V-shaped point between the converging river and Stony Creek.

“I was just walking up the steps to the depot when I heard a fearful roar up the valley. It sounded at first like a heavy train of cars, but soon became too loud and terrible for that. I boarded a train, and as I sat at the car window a sight broke before my view that I will remember to my dying day. Away up the Conemaugh came a yellow wall, whose crest was white and frothy. I rushed for the platform of the car, not knowing what I did, and just then the train began to move. Terrified as I was, I remember feeling that I was in the safest place and I sank back in a seat. When I looked out again what had been the busy mill yards of the Cambria Iron Company was a yellow, turbulent sea, on whose churned currents houses and barns were riding like ships in a brook. The water rushing in upon the molten metal in the mills had caused deafening explosions, which, coupled with the roar and grinding of the flood, made a terrifying din. Turning to the other side and looking on down the valley, I saw the muddy water rushing through the main streets of the town. I could see men and horses floundering about almost within call. House-tops were being filled with white-faced people who clung to each other and looked terror-stricken upon the rising flood.

“It had all come so quickly that none of them seemed to realize what had happened. The conductor of my train had been pulling frantically at the bell-rope, and the train went spinning across the bridge. I sat in my seat transfixed with horror. Houses were spinning through beneath the bridge, and I did not know at what moment the structure would melt away under the train. The conductor kept tugging at the bell-rope and the train shot ahead again. We seemed to fairly leap over the yellow torrents, and I wondered for an instant whether we had not left the rails and were flying through the air. My heart gave a bound of relief when we dashed into the forest on the hillside opposite the doomed town. As the train sped along at a rate of speed that made me think the engineer had gone mad, I took one look back upon the valley. What a sight it was! The populous valley for miles either way was a seething, roaring cauldron, through whose boiling surface roofs of houses and the stand-pipes of mills protruded. The water was fairly piling up in a well farther up, and I saw the worst had not yet come. Then I turned my eyes away from the awful sight and tried not to even think until Pittsburg was reached.

“I cannot see how it is possible for less than five thousand lives to have been sacrificed in Johnstown alone. At least two-thirds of the town was swept away. The water came so quickly that escape from the low districts was impossible. People retreated to the upper floors of their residences and stores until the water had gotten too deep to allow their escape. When the big flood came the houses were picked up like pasteboard boxes or collapsed like egg-shells. The advance of the flood was black with houses, logs, and other debris, so that it struck Johnstown with the solid force of a battering-ram. None but eye-witnesses of the flood can comprehend its size and awfulness as it came tumbling, roaring down upon the unprotected town.”

TYPICAL SCENE IN JOHNSTOWN.

The appearance of the flood at Sang Hollow, some miles below Johnstown, is thus pictured by C. W. Linthicum, of Baltimore:

“My train left Pittsburg on Friday morning for Johnstown. The train was due at Sang Hollow at two minutes after four, but was five minutes late. At Sang Hollow, just as we were about to pull out, we heard that the flood was coming. Looking ahead, up the valley, we saw an immense wall of water thirty feet high, raging, roaring, rushing toward us. The engineer reversed his engine and rushed back to the hills at full speed, and we barely escaped the waters. We ran back three hundred yards, and the flood swept by, tearing up track, telegraph poles, trees, and houses. Superintendent Pitcairn was on the train. We all got out and tried to save the floating people. Taking the bell cord we formed a line and threw the rope out, thus saving seven persons. We could have saved more, but many were afraid to let go of the debris. It was an awful sight. The immense volume of water was roaring along, whirling over huge rocks, dashing against the banks and leaping high into the air, and this seething flood was strewn with timber, trunks of trees, parts of houses, and hundreds of human beings, cattle, and almost every living animal. The fearful peril of the living was not more awful than the horrors of hundreds of distorted, bleeding corpses whirling along the avalanche of death. We counted one hundred and seven people floating by and dead without number. A section of roof came by on which were sitting a woman and girl. A man named C. W. Heppenstall, of Pittsburg, waded and swam to the roof. He brought the girl in first and then the woman. They told us they were not relatives. The woman had lost her husband and four children, and the girl her father and mother, and entire family. A little boy came by with his mother. Both were as calm as could be, and the boy was apparently trying to comfort the mother. They passed unheeding our proffered help, and striking the bridge below, went down into the vortex like lead.

“One beautiful girl came by with her hands raised in prayer, and, although we shouted to her and ran along the bank, she paid no attention. We could have saved her if she had caught the rope. An old man and his wife whom we saved said that eleven persons started from Cambria City on the roof with him, but that the others had dropped off.

“At about eight P. M. we started for New Florence. All along the river we saw corpses without number caught in the branches of trees and wedged in corners in the banks. A large sycamore tree in the river between Sang Hollow and New Florence seemed to draw into it nearly all who floated down, and they went under the surface at its roots like lead. When the waters subsided two hundred and nine bodies were found at the root of this tree. All night the living and the dead floated by New Florence. At Pittsburg seventy-eight bodies were found on Saturday, and as many more were seen floating by. Hundreds of people from ill-fated Johnstown are wandering homeless and starving on the mountain-side. Very few saved anything, and I saw numbers going down the stream naked. The suffering within the next few days will be fearful unless prompt relief is extended.”

H. M. Bennett and S. W. Keltz, engineer and conductor of engine No. 1,165, an extra freight, which happened to be lying at South Fork when the dam broke, tell a graphic story of their wonderful flight and escape on the locomotive before the advancing flood. At the time mentioned Bennett and Keltz were in the signal tower at that point awaiting orders. The fireman and flagman were on the engine, and two brakemen were asleep in the caboose. Suddenly the men in the tower heard a loud booming roar in the valley above them. They looked in the direction of the sound, and were almost transfixed with horror to see two miles above them a huge black wall of water, at least one hundred and fifty feet in height, rushing down the valley upon them.

One look the fear-stricken men gave the awful sight, and then they made a rush for the locomotive, at the same time giving the alarm to the sleeping brakemen in the caboose with loud cries, but with no avail. It was impossible to aid them further, however, so they cut the engine loose from the train, and the engineer, with one wild wrench, threw the lever wide open, and they were away on a mad race for life. For a moment it seemed that they would not receive momentum enough to keep ahead of the flood, and they cast one despairing glance back. Then they could see the awful deluge approaching in its might. On it came, rolling and roaring like some Titanic monster, tossing and tearing houses, sheds, and trees in its awful speed as if they were mere toys. As they looked they saw the two brakemen rush out of the cab, but they had not time to gather the slightest idea of the cause of their doom before they, the car, and signal tower were tossed high in the air, to disappear forever in engulfing water.

Then with a shudder, as if at last it comprehended its peril, the engine leaped forward like a thing of life, and speeded down the valley. But fast as it went, the flood gained upon them. Hope, however, was in the ascendant, for if they could but get across the bridge below the track would lean toward the hillside in such a manner that they would be comparatively safe. In a few breathless moments the shrieking locomotive whizzed around the curve and they were in sight of the bridge. Horror upon horrors! Ahead of them was a freight train, with the rear end almost on the bridge, and to get across was simply impossible! Engineer Bennett then reversed the lever and succeeded in checking the engine as they glided across the bridge, and then they jumped and ran for their lives up the hillside, as the bridge and tender of the locomotive they had been on were swept away like a bundle of matches in the torrent.

[CHAPTER VII.]

There have been many famous rides in history. Longfellow has celebrated that of Paul Revere. Read has sung of Sheridan’s. John Boyle O’Reilly has commemorated in graceful verse the splendid achievement of Collins Graves, who, when the Williamsburg dam in Massachusetts broke, dashed down the valley on horseback in the van of the flood, warning the people and saving countless lives:

“He draws no rein, but he shakes the street

With a shout and a ring of the galloping feet,

And this the cry that he flings to the wind:

‘To the hills for your lives! The flood is behind!’

“In front of the roaring flood is heard

The galloping horse and the warning word.

Thank God! The brave man’s life is spared!

From Williamsburg town he nobly dared

To race with the flood and take the road

In front of the terrible swath it mowed.

For miles it thundered and crashed behind,

But he looked ahead with a steadfast mind:

‘They must be warned,’ was all he said,

As away on his terrible ride he sped.”

There were two such heroes in the Conemaugh Valley. Let their deeds be told and their names held in everlasting honor. One was John G. Parke, a young civil engineer of Philadelphia, a nephew of the General John G. Parke who commanded a corps of the Union Army. He was the first to discover the impending break in the South Fork dam, and jumping into the saddle he started at breakneck speed down the valley shouting: “The dam; the dam is breaking; run for your lives!” Hundreds of people were saved by this timely warning. Reaching South Fork Station, young Parke telegraphed tidings of the coming inundation to Johnstown, ten miles below, fully an hour before the flood came in “a solid wall of water thirty feet high” to drown the mountain-bound town.

Some heeded the note of alarm at Johnstown; others had heard it before, doubted, and waited until death overtook them. Young Parke climbed up into the mountains when the water was almost at his horse’s heels, and saw the deluge pass.

Less fortunate was Daniel Peyton, a rich young man of Johnstown. He heard at Conemaugh the message sent down from South Fork by the gallant Parke. In a moment he sprang into the saddle. Mounted on a grand, big, bay horse, he came riding down the pike which passes through Conemaugh to Johnstown, like some angel of wrath of old, shouting his warning:

“Run for your lives to the hills! Run to the hills!”

The people crowded out of their houses along the thickly settled streets awe-struck and wondering. No one knew the man, and some thought he was a maniac and laughed. On and on, at a deadly pace, he rode, and shrilly rang out his awful cry. In a few moments, however, there came a cloud of ruin down the broad streets, down the narrow alleys, grinding, twisting, hurling, over-turning, crashing—annihilating the weak and the strong. It was the charge of the flood, wearing its coronet of ruin and devastation, which grew at every instant of its progress. Forty feet high, some say, thirty according to others, was this sea, and it travelled with a swiftness like that which lay in the heels of Mercury.

On and on raced the rider, on and on rushed the wave. Dozens of people took heed of the warning and ran up to the hills.

Poor, faithful rider! It was an unequal contest. Just as he turned to cross the railroad bridge the mighty wall fell upon him, and horse, rider, and bridge all went out into chaos together.

A few feet further on several cars of the Pennsylvania Railroad train from Pittsburg were caught up and hurried into the cauldron, and the heart of the town was reached.

The hero had turned neither to the right nor left for himself, but rode on to death for his townsmen. When found Peyton was lying face upward beneath the remnants of massive oaks, while hard by lay the gallant horse that had so nobly done all in his power for humanity before he started to seek a place of safety for himself.

Mrs. Ogle, the manager of the Western Union telegraph office, who died at her post, will go down in history as a heroine of the highest order. Notwithstanding the repeated notifications which she received to get out of reach of the approaching danger, she stood by the instruments with unflinching loyalty and undaunted courage, sending words of warning to those in danger in the valley below. When every station in the path of the coming torrent had been warned, she wired her companion at South Fork: “This is my last message,” and as such it shall always be remembered as her last words on earth, for at that very moment the torrent engulfed her and bore her from her post on earth to her post of honor in the great beyond.

Miss Nina Speck, daughter of the Rev. David Speck, pastor of the First United Brethren Church, of Chambersburg, was in Johnstown visiting her brother and narrowly escaped death in the flood. She arrived home clad in nondescript clothing, which had been furnished by an old colored washerwoman, and told the following story of the flood:

“Our house was in Kernsville, a part of Johnstown through which Stony Creek ran. Although we were a square from the creek, the back-water from the stream had flooded the streets in the morning and was up to our front porch. At four o’clock on Friday afternoon we were sitting on the front porch watching the flood, when we heard a roar as of a tornado or mighty conflagration.

“We rushed up-stairs and got out upon the bay-window. There an awful sight met our eyes. Down the Conemaugh Valley was advancing a mighty wall of water and mist with a terrible roar. Before it were rolling houses and buildings of all kinds, tossing over and over. We thought it was a cyclone, the roar sounding like a tempest among forest trees. We started down-stairs and out through the rear of the house to escape to the hillside near by. But before we could get there the water was up to our necks and we could make no progress. We turned back and were literally dashed by the current into the house, which began to move off as soon as [we] were in it again. From the second-story window I saw a young man drifting toward us. I broke the glass from the frames with my hands and helped him in, and in a few minutes more I pulled in an old man, a neighbor, who had been sick.

“Our house moved rapidly down the stream and fortunately lodged against a strong building. The water forced us out of the second-story up into the attic. Then we heard a lot of people on our roof begging us for God’s sake to let them in. I broke through the roof with a bed-slat and pulled them in. Soon we had thirteen in all crouched in the attic.

“Our house was rocking, and every now and then a building would crash against us. Every moment we thought we would go down. The roofs of all the houses drifting by us were covered with people, nearly all praying and some singing hymns, and now and then a house would break apart and all would go down. On Saturday at noon we were rescued, making our way from one building to the next by crawling on narrow planks. I counted hundreds of bodies lying in the debris, most of them covered over with earth and showing only the outlines of the form.”

Opposite the northern wall of the Methodist Church the flood struck the new Queen Anne house of John Fronheiser, a superintendent in the Cambria Works. He was at home, as most men were that day, trying to calm the fears of the women and children of the family during the earlier flood. Down went the front of the new Queen Anne house, and into the wreck of it fell the Superintendent, two elder children, a girl and a boy. As the flood passed he heard the boy cry: “Don’t let me drown, papa; break my arms first!” and the girl: “Cut off my legs, but don’t let me drown!”

And as he heard them, came a wilder cry from his wife drifting down with the current, to “Save the baby.” But neither wife nor baby could be saved, and boy and girl stayed in the wreck until the water went down and they were extricated.

Horror piled on horror is the story from Johnstown down to the viaduct. Horror shot through with intense lights of heroism, and here and there pervaded with gleams of humor. It is known that one girl sang as she was whirled through the flood, “Jesus, lover of my soul,” until the water stopped her singing forever. It is known that Elvie Duncan, daughter of the Superintendent of the Street Car Company, when her family was separated and she was swept away with her baby sister, kept the little thing alive by chewing bread and feeding it to her. It is known that John Dibart, banker, died as helplessly in his splendid house as did that solitary prisoner in his cell; that the pleasant park, with the chain fence about it, was so completely annihilated that not even one root of the many shade trees within its boundaries remains. It is known also that to a leaden-footed messenger boy, who was ambling along Main Street, fear lent wings to lift him into the Tribune office in the second story of the Post Office, and that the Rosensteels, general storekeepers of Woodvale, were swept into the windows of their friends, the Cohens, retail storekeepers of Main Street, Johnstown, two miles from where they started. It is known that the Episcopal Church, at Locust and Market Streets, went down like a house of cards, or as the German Lutheran had gone, in the path of the flood, and that Rector Diller, his wife and child, and adopted daughter went with it, while of their next-door neighbors, Frank Daly, of the Cambria Company, and his mother, the son was drowned and the mother, not so badly hurt in body as in spirit, died three nights after in the Mercy Hospital, Pittsburg.

But while the flood was driving people to silent death down the valley, there was a sound of lamentation on the hills. Hundreds who had climbed there to be out of reach during the morning’s freshet saw the city in the valley disappearing, and their cries rose high above the crash and the roar. Little time had eyes to watch or lips to cry. O’Brien, the disabled Millville storekeeper, was one of the crowd in the park. He saw a town before him, then a mountain of timber approaching; then a dizzy swirl of men at the viaduct, a breaking of the embankment to the east of it, the forming of a whirlpool there that ate up homes and those that dwelt in them, as a cauldron of molten iron eats up the metal scraps that are thrown in to cool it, and then a silence and a subsidence.

It was a quarter of four o’clock. At half-past three there had been a Johnstown. Now there was none.

[CHAPTER VIII.]

Volumes might be written of the sufferings endured and valor exhibited by the survivors of the flood, or of the heart-rending grief with which so many were stricken. At Johnstown an utterly wretched woman named Mrs. Fenn stood by a muddy pool of water trying to find some trace of a once happy home. She was half crazed with grief, and her eyes were red and swollen. As a correspondent stepped to her side she raised her pale, haggard face and remarked:

“They are all gone. O God! be merciful to them! My husband and my seven dear little children have been swept down with the flood, and I am left alone. We were driven by the awful flood into the garret, but the water followed us there. Inch by inch it kept rising, until our heads were crushing against the roof. It was death to remain. So I raised a window, and one by one, placed my darlings on some driftwood, trusting to the great Creator. As I liberated the last one, my sweet little boy, he looked at me and said: ‘Mamma, you always told me that the Lord would care for me; will He look after me now?’ I saw him drift away with his loving face turned toward me, and, with a prayer on my lips for his deliverance, he passed from sight forever. The next moment the roof crashed in, and I floated outside, to be rescued fifteen hours later from the roof of a house in Kernsville. If I could only find one of my darlings I could bow to the will of God, but they are all gone. I have lost everything on earth now but my life, and I will return to my old Virginia home and lay me down for my last great sleep.”

A handsome woman, with hair as black as a raven’s wing, walked through the depot where a dozen or more bodies were awaiting burial. Passing from one to another, she finally lifted the paper covering from the face of a woman, young, and with traces of beauty showing through the stains of muddy water, and with a cry of anguish she reeled backward to be caught by a rugged man who chanced to be passing. In a moment or so she had calmed herself sufficiently to take one more look at the features of her dead. She stood gazing at the corpse as if dumb. Finally, turning away with another wild burst of grief, she said: “And her beautiful hair all matted and her sweet face so bruised and stained with mud and water!” The dead woman was the sister of the mourner. The body was placed in a coffin a few minutes later and sent away to its narrow house.

A woman was seen to smile, one morning just after the catastrophe, as she came down the steps of Prospect Hill, at Johnstown. She ran down lightly, turning up toward the stone bridge. She passed the little railroad station where the undertakers were at work embalming the dead, and walked slowly until she got opposite the station. Then she stopped and danced a few steps. There was but a small crowd there. The woman raised her hands above her head and sang. She became quiet and then suddenly burst into a frenzied fit of weeping and beat her forehead with her hands. She tore her dress, which was already in rags.

“I shall go crazy,” she screamed, “if they do not find his body.”

The poor woman could not go crazy, as her mind had been already shattered.

“He was a good man,” she went on, while the onlookers listened pityingly. “I loved him and he loved me.”

“Where is he?” she screamed. “I must find him.”

And she started at the top of her speed down the track toward the river. Some men caught her. She struggled desperately for a few moments, and then fainted.

Her name was Eliza Adams, and she was a bride of but two months. Her husband was a foreman at the Cambria Iron Works and was drowned.

JOHNSTOWN—VIEW COR. MAIN AND CLINTON STS.

The body of a beautiful young girl of twenty was found wedged in a mass of ruins just below the Cambria Iron Works. She was taken out and laid on the damp grass. She was tall, slender, of well-rounded form, clad in a long red wrapper, with lace at her throat and wrists. Her feet were encased in pretty embroidered slippers. Her face was a study for an artist. Features clear cut as though chiseled from Parian marble; and, strangely enough, they bore not the slightest disfigurement, and had not the swelled and puffed appearance that was present in nearly all the other drowned victims. A smile rested on her lips. Her hair, which had evidently been golden, was matted with mud and fell in heavy masses to her waist.

“Does any one know her?” was asked of the silent group that had gathered around.

No one did, and she was carried to the improvised morgue in the school-house, and now fills a grave as one of the “unidentified dead.”

Miss Rose Clark was fastened in the debris at the railroad bridge, at Johnstown. The force of the water had torn all of her garments off and pinned her left leg below the water between two beams. She was more calm than the men who were trying to rescue her. The flames were coming nearer, and the intense heat scorching her bare skin. She begged the men to cut off the imprisoned leg. Finally half of the men turned and fought the fire, while the rest endeavored to rescue Miss Clark. After six hours of hard work, and untold suffering by the brave little lady she was taken from the ruins in a dead faint. She was one mass of bruises, from her breast to her knees, and her left arm and leg were broken.

Just below Johnstown, on the Conemaugh, three women were working on the ruins of what had been their home. An old arm-chair was taken from the ruins by the men. When one of the women saw the chair, it brought back a wealth of memory, probably the first since the flood occurred, and throwing herself on her knees on the wreck she gave way to a flood of tears.

“Where in the name of God,” she sobbed, “did you get that chair? It was mine—no, I don’t want it. Keep it and find for me, if you can, my album. In it are the faces of my husband and little girl.”

Patrick Downs was a worker in one of the mills of the Cambria Iron Works. He had a wife and a fourteen-year-old daughter, Jessie Downs, who was a great favorite with the sturdy, hard-handed fellow-workmen of her father.

She was of rare beauty and sweetness. Her waving, golden-yellow hair, brushed away from a face of wondrous whiteness, was confined by a ribbon at the neck. Lustrous Irish blue eyes lighted up the lovely face and ripe, red lips parted in smiles for the workmen in the mills, every one of whom was her lover.

Jessie was in the mill when the flood struck the town, and had not been seen since till the work of cleaning up the Cambria plant was begun in earnest. Then, in the cellar of the building a workman spied a little shoe protruding from a closely packed bed of sandy mud. In a few moments the body of Jessie Downs was uncovered.

The workmen who had been in such scenes as this for six days stood about with uncovered heads and sobbed like babies. The body had not been bruised nor hurt in any way, the features being composed as if in sleep.

The men gathered up the body of their little sweetheart and were carrying it through the town on a stretcher when they met poor Patrick Downs. He gazed upon the form of his baby, but never a tear was in his eye, and he only thanked God that she had not suffered in contest with the angry waves.

He had but a moment before identified the body of his wife among the dead recovered, and the mother and child were laid away together in one grave on Grove Hill, and the father resumed work with the others.

Dr. Lowman is one of the most prominent physicians of Western Pennsylvania. His residence in Johnstown was protected partially from the avalanche of water by the Methodist Church, which is a large stone structure. Glancing up-stream, the Doctor saw advancing what seemed to be a huge mountain. Grasping the situation, he ran in and told the family to get to the top floors as quickly as possible. They had scarcely reached the second floor when the water was pouring into the windows. They went higher up, and the water followed them, but it soon reached its extreme height.

While the family were huddled in the third story the Doctor looked out and saw a young girl floating toward the window on a door. He smashed the glass, and, at the great risk of his own life, succeeded in hauling the door toward him and lifting the girl through the window. She had not been there long when one corner of the building gave way and she became frightened. She insisted on taking a shutter and floating down-stream. In vain did the Doctor try to persuade her to forego such a suicidal attempt. She said that she was a good swimmer, and that, once out in the water, she had no fears for her ultimate safety. Resisting all entreaties and taking a shutter from the window, she plunged out into the surging waters, and has not since been heard from.

When the girl deserted the house, Dr. Lowman and his family made their way to the roof. While up there another corner of the house gave way. After waiting for several hours, the intervening space between the bank building and the dwelling became filled with drift. The Doctor gathered his family around him, and after a perilous walk they all reached the objective point in safety. Dr. Lowman’s aged father was one of the party. When his family was safe Dr. Lowman started to rescue other unfortunates. All day Saturday he worked like a beaver in water to his neck, and he saved the lives of many.

No man returns from the valley of death with more horrible remembrance of the flood than Dr. Henry H. Phillips, of Pittsburg. He is the only one known to be saved out of a household of thirteen, among whom was his feeble old mother and other near and dear friends. His own life was saved by his happening to step out upon the portico of the house just as the deluge came. Dr. Phillips had gone to Johnstown to bring his mother, who was an invalid, to his home in the East End. They had intended starting for Pittsburg Friday morning, but Mrs. Phillips did not feel able to make the journey, and it was postponed until the next day. In the meantime the flood began to come, and during the afternoon of Friday the family retired to the upper floors of the house for safety. There were thirteen in the house, including little Susan McWilliams, the twelve-year-old daughter of Mr. W. H. McWilliams, of Pittsburg, who was visiting her aunt, Mrs. Phillips; Dr. L. T. Beam, son-in-law of Mrs. Phillips; another niece, and Mrs. Dowling, a neighbor. The latter had come there with her children because the Phillips house was a brick structure while her own was frame. Its destruction proved to be the more sudden and complete on account of the material.

The water was a foot deep on the first floor, and the family were congratulating themselves that they were so comfortably situated in the upper story, when Dr. Phillips heard a roaring up toward the Cambria Iron Works. Without a thought of the awful truth, he stepped out upon the portico of the house to see what it meant. A wall of water and wreckage loomed up before him like a roaring cloud. Before he could turn back or cry out he saw a house, that rode the flood like a chip, come between him and his vision of the window. Then all was dark, and the cold water seemed to wrap him up and toss him to a house-top three hundred yards from where that of his mother had stood. Gathering his shattered wits together the Doctor saw he was floating about in the midst of a black pool. Dark objects were moving all about him, and although there was some light, he could not recognize any of the surroundings. For seventeen hours he drifted about upon the wreckage where fate had tossed him. Then rescuers came, and he was taken to safe quarters. A long search has so far failed to elicit any tidings of the twelve persons in the Phillips’ house.

Mr. G. B. Hartley, of Philadelphia, was one of the five out of fifty-five guests of the Hurlburt House who survived.

“The experience I passed through at Johnstown on that dreadful Friday night,” said Mr. Hartley to a correspondent, “is like a horrible nightmare in a picture before me. When the great rush of water came I was sitting in the parlors of the Hurlburt House. Suddenly we were startled to hear several loud shouts on the streets. These cries were accompanied by a loud, crashing noise. At the first sound we all rushed from the room panic-stricken. There was a crash and I found myself pinned down by broken boards and debris of different kinds. The next moment I felt the water surging in. I knew it went higher than my head because I felt it. The water must have passed like a flash or I would not have come out alive. After the shock I could see that the entire roof of the hotel had been carried off. Catching hold of something I manged to pull myself up on to the roof. The roof had slid off and lay across the street. On the roof I had a chance to observe my surroundings. Down on the extreme edge of the roof I espied the proprietor of the hotel, Mr. Benford. He was nearly exhausted, and it required every effort for him to hold to the roof. Cautiously advancing, I managed to creep down to where he was holding. I tried to pull him up, but found I was utterly powerless. Mr. Benford was nearly as weak as myself, and could do very little toward helping himself. We did not give up, however, and in a few minutes, by dint of struggling and putting forth every bit of strength, Mr. Benford managed to crawl upon the roof. Crouching and shivering on another part of the roof were two girls, one a chamber-maid of the hotel, and the other a clerk in a store that was next to it. The latter was in a pitiable plight. Her arm had been torn from its socket. I took off my overcoat and gave it to her. Mr. Benford did the same thing for the other, for it was quite chilly. A young man was nursing his mother, who had had her scalp completely torn off. He asked me to hold her head until he could make a bandage. He tore a thick strip of cloth and placed it round her head. The blood saturated it before it was well on. Soon after this I was rescued more dead than alive.”

[CHAPTER IX.]

Many of the most thrilling sights and experiences were those of railroad employees and passengers. Mr. Henry, the engineer of the second section of express train No. 8, which runs between Pittsburg and Altoona, was at Conemaugh when the great flood came sweeping down the valley. He was able to escape to a place of safety. His was the only train that was not injured, even though it was in the midst of the great wave. The story as related by Mr. Henry is most graphic.

“It was an awful sight,” he said. “I have often seen pictures of flood scenes and I thought they were exaggerations, but what I witnessed last Friday changes my former belief. To see that immense volume of water, fully fifty feet high, rushing madly down the valley, sweeping everything before it, was a thrilling sight. It is engraved indelibly on my memory. Even now I can see that mad torrent carrying death and destruction before it.

“The second section of No. 8, on which I was, was due at Johnstown about quarter past ten in the morning. We arrived there safely and were told to follow the first section. When we arrived at Conemaugh the first section and the mail were there. Washouts further up the mountain prevented our going on, so we could do nothing but sit around and discuss the situation. The creek at Conemaugh was swollen high, almost overflowing. The heavens were pouring rain, but this did not prevent nearly all the inhabitants of the town from gathering along its banks. They watched the waters go dashing by and wondered whether the creek would get much higher. But a few inches more and it would overflow its banks. There seemed to be a feeling of uneasiness among the people. They seemed to fear that something awful was going to happen. Their suspicions were strengthened by the fact that warning had come down the valley for the people to be on the lookout. The rains had swollen everything to the bursting point. The day passed slowly, however. Noon came and went, and still nothing happened. We could not proceed, nor could we go back, as the tracks about a mile below Conemaugh had been washed away, so there was nothing for us to do but to wait and see what would come next.

“Some time after three o’clock Friday afternoon I went into the train dispatcher’s office to learn the latest news. I had not been there long when I heard a fierce whistling from an engine away up the mountain. Rushing out I found dozens of men standing around. Fear had blanched every cheek. The loud and continued whistling had made every one feel that something serious was going to happen. In a few moments I could hear a train rattling down the mountain. About five hundred yards above Conemaugh the tracks make a slight curve and we could not see beyond this. The suspense was something awful. We did not know what was coming, but no one could get rid of the thought that something was wrong at the dam.

“Our suspense was not very long, however. Nearer and nearer the train came, the thundering sound still accompanying it. There seemed to be something behind the train, as there was a dull, rumbling sound which I knew did not come from the train. Nearer and nearer it came; a moment more and it would reach the curve. The next instant there burst upon our eyes a sight that made every heart stand still. Rushing around the curve, snorting and tearing, came an engine and several gravel cars. The train appeared to be putting forth every effort to go faster. Nearer it came, belching forth smoke and whistling long and loud. But the most terrible sight was to follow. Twenty feet behind came surging along a mad rush of water fully fifty feet high. Like the train, it seemed to be putting forth every effort to push along faster. Such an awful race we never before witnessed. For an instant the people seemed paralyzed with horror. They knew not what to do, but in a moment they realized that a second’s delay meant death to them. With one accord they rushed to the high lands a few hundred feet away. Most of them succeeded in reaching that place and were safe.

“I thought of the passengers in my train. The second section of No. 8 had three sleepers. In these three cars were about thirty people, who rushed through the train crying to the others ‘Save yourselves!’ Then came a scene of the wildest confusion. Ladies and children shrieked and the men seemed terror-stricken. I succeeded in helping some ladies and children off the train and up to the high lands. Running back, I caught up two children and ran for my life to a higher place. Thank God, I was quicker than the flood! I deposited my load in safety on the high land just as it swept past us.

“For nearly an hour we stood watching the mad flood go rushing by. The water was full of debris. When the flood caught Conemaugh it dashed against the little town with a mighty crash. The water did not lift the houses up and carry them off, but crushed them up one against the other and broke them up like so many egg- shells. Before the flood came there was a pretty little town. When the waters passed on there was nothing but a few broken boards to mark the central portion of the city. It was swept as clean as a newly-brushed floor. When the flood passed onward down the valley I went over to my train. It had been moved back about twenty yards, but it was not damaged. About fifteen persons had remained in the train and they were safe. Of the three trains ours was the luckiest. The engines of both the others had been swept off the track, and one or two cars in each train had met the same fate. What saved our train was the fact that just at the curve which I mentioned the valley spread out. The valley is six or seven hundred yards broad where our train was standing. This, of course, let the floods pass out. It was only about twenty feet high when it struck our train, which was about in the middle of the valley. This fact, together with the elevation of the track, was all that saved us. We stayed that night in the houses in Conemaugh that had not been destroyed. The next morning I started down the valley and by four o’clock in the afternoon had reached Conemaugh furnace, eight miles west of Johnstown. Then I got a team and came home.

“In my tramp down the valley I saw some awful sights. On the tree branches hung shreds of clothing torn from the unfortunates as they were whirled along in the terrible rush of the torrent. Dead bodies were lying by scores along the banks of the creeks. One woman I helped drag from the mud had tightly clutched in her hand a paper. We tore it out of her hand and found it to be a badly water-soaked photograph. It was probably a picture of the drowned woman.”

Pemberton Smith is a civil engineer employed by the Pennsylvania Railroad. On Friday, when the disaster occurred, he was at Johnstown, stopping at the Merchants’ Hotel. What happened he described as follows:

“In the afternoon, with four associates, I spent the time playing checkers in the hotel, the streets being flooded during the day. At half-past four we were startled by shrill whistles. Thinking a fire was the cause, we looked out of the window. Great masses of people were rushing through the water in the street, which had been there all day, and still we thought the alarm was fire. All of a sudden the roar of the water burst upon our ears, and in an instant more the streets were filled with debris. Great houses and business blocks began to topple and crash into each other and go down as if they were toy-block houses. People in the streets were drowning on all sides. One of our company started down-stairs and was drowned. The other four, including myself, started up-stairs, for the water was fast rising. When we got on the roof we could see whole blocks swept away as if by magic. Hundreds of people were floating by, clinging to roofs of houses, rafts, timbers, or anything they could get a hold of. The hotel began to tremble, and we made our way to an adjoining roof. Soon afterward part of the hotel went down. The brick structures seemed to fare worse than frame buildings, as the latter would float, while the brick would crash and tumble into one great mass of ruins. We finally climbed into a room of the last building in reach and stayed there all night, in company with one hundred and sixteen other people, among the number being a crazy man. His wife and family had all been drowned only a few hours before, and he was a raving maniac. And what a night! Sleep! Yes, I did a little, but every now and then a building near by would crash against us, and we would all jump, fearing that at last our time had come.

“Finally morning dawned. In company with one of my associates we climbed across the tops of houses and floating debris, built a raft, and poled ourselves ashore to the hillside. I don’t know how the others escaped. This was seven o’clock on Saturday morning. We started on foot for South Fork, arriving there at three P. M. Here we found that all communication by telegraph and railroad was cut off by the flood, and we had naught to do but retrace our steps. Tired and footsore! Well, I should say so. My gum-boots had chafed my feet so I could hardly walk at all. The distance we covered on foot was over fifty miles. On Sunday we got a train to Altoona. Here we found the railroad connections all cut off, so we came back to Johnstown again on Monday. And what a desolate place! I had to obtain a pass to go over into the city. Here it is:

“Pass Pemberton Smith through all the streets.

“Alec. Hart, Chief of Police.

“A. J. Maxham, Acting Mayor.”

“The tragic pen-pictures of the scenes in the press dispatches have not been exaggerated. They cannot be. The worse sight of all was to see the great fire at the railroad-bridge. It makes my blood fairly curdle to think of it. I could see the lurid flames shoot heavenward all night Friday, and at the same time hundreds of people were floating right toward them on top of houses, etc., and to meet a worse death than drowning. To look at a sight like this and not be able to render a particle of assistance seemed awful to bear. I had a narrow escape, truly. In my mind I can hear the shrieks of men, women, and children, the maniac’s ravings, and the wild roar of a sea of water sweeping everything before it.”

VIEW ON CLINTON ST., JOHNSTOWN.

Among the lost was Miss Jennie Paulson, a passenger on a railroad train, whose fate is thus described by one of her comrades:

“We had been making but slow progress all the day. Our train lay at Johnstown nearly the whole day of Friday. We then proceeded as far as Conemaugh, and had stopped from some cause or other, probably on account of the flood. Miss Paulson and a Miss Bryan were seated in front of me. Miss Paulson had on a plaid dress, with shirred waist of red cloth goods. Her companion was dressed in black. Both had lovely corsage bouquets of roses. I had heard that they had been attending a wedding before they left Pittsburg. The Pittsburg lady was reading a novel entitled Miss Lou. Miss Bryan was looking out of the window. When the alarm came we all sprang toward the door, leaving everything behind us. I had just reached the door when poor Miss Paulson and her friend, who were behind me, decided to return for their rubbers, which they did. I sprang from the car into a ditch next the hillside, in which the water was already a foot and a-half deep, and, with the others, climbed up the mountain side for our very lives. We had to do so, as the water glided up after us like a huge serpent. Any one ten feet behind us would have been lost beyond a doubt. I glanced back at the train when I had reached a place of safety, but the water already covered it, and the Pullman car in which the ladies were was already rolling down the valley in the grasp of the angry waters.”

Mr. William Scheerer, the teller of the State Banking Company, of Newark, N. J., was among the passengers on the ill-fated day express on the Pennsylvania Railroad that left Pittsburg at eight o’clock A. M., on the now historic Friday, bound for New York.

There was some delays incidental to the floods in the Conemaugh Valley before the train reached Johnstown, and a further delay at that point, and the train was considerably behind time when it left Johnstown. Said Mr. Scheerer: “The parlor car was fully occupied when I went aboard the train, and a seat was accordingly given me in the sleeper at the rear end of the train. There were several passengers in this car, how many I cannot say exactly, among them some ladies. It was raining hard all the time and we were not a very excited nor a happy crowd, but were whiling away the time in reading and in looking at the swollen torrent of the river. Very few of the people were apprehensive of any danger in the situation, even after we had been held up at Conemaugh for nearly five hours.

“The railroad tracks where our train stopped were full fourteen feet above the level of the river, and there was a large number of freight and passenger cars and locomotives standing on the tracks near us and strung along up the road for a considerable distance. Between the road and the hill that lay at our left there was a ditch, through which the water that came down from the hill was running like a mill-race. It was a monotonous wait to all of us, and after a time many inquiries were made as to why we did not go ahead. Some of the passengers who made the inquiry were answered laconically—‘Wash-out,’ and with this they had to be satisfied. I had been over the road several times before, and knew of the existence of the dangerous and threatening dam up in the South Fork gorge, and could not help connecting it in my mind with the cause of our delay. But neither was I apprehensive of danger, for the possibility of the dam giving away had been often discussed by passengers in my presence, and everybody supposed that the utmost damage it would do when it broke, as everybody believed it sometime would, would be to swell a little higher the current that tore down through the Conemaugh Valley.

“Such a possibility as the carrying away of a train of cars on the great Pennsylvania road was never seriously entertained by anybody. We had stood stationary until about four o’clock, when two colored porters went through the car within a short time of each other, looking and acting rather excited. I asked the first one what the matter was, and he replied that he did not know. I inferred from his reply that if there was any thing serious up, the passengers would be informed, and so I went on reading. When the next man came along I asked him if the reservoir had given way, and he said he thought it had.

“I put down my book and stepped out quickly to the rear platform, and was horrified at the sight that met my gaze up the valley. It seemed as if a forest was coming down upon us. There was a great wall of water roaring and grinding swiftly along, so thickly studded with the trees from along the mountain sides that it looked like a gigantic avalanche of trees. Of course I lingered but an instant, for the mortal danger we all were in flashed upon me at the first sight of that terrible on-coming torrent. But in that instant I saw an engine lifted bodily off the track and thrown over backward into the whirlpool, where it disappeared, and houses crushed and broken up in the flash of an eye.

“The noise was like incessant thunder. I turned back into the car and shouted to the ladies, three of whom alone were in the car at the moment, to fly for their lives. I helped them out of the car on the side toward the hill, and urged them to jump across the ditch and run for their lives. Two of them did so, but the third, a rather heavy lady, a missionary, who was on her way to a foreign station, hesitated for an instant, doubtful if she could make the jump. That instant cost her her life. While I was holding out my hand to her and urging her to jump, the rush of waters came down and swept her, like a doll, down into the torrent. In the same instant an engine was thrown from the track into the ditch at my feet. The water was about my knees as I turned and scrambled up the hill, and when I looked back, ten seconds later, it was surging and grinding ten feet deep over the track I had just left.

“The rush of waters lasted three-quarters of an hour, while we stood rapt and spell-bound in the rain, looking at the ruin no human agency could avert. The scene was beyond the power of language to describe. You would see a building standing in apparent security above the swollen banks of the river, the people rushing about the doors, some seeming to think that safety lay indoors, while others rushed toward higher ground, stumbling and falling in the muddy streets, and then the flood rolled over them, crushing in the house with a crash like thunder, and burying house and people out of sight entirely. That, of course, was the scene of only an instant, for our range of vision was only over a small portion of the city.

“We sought shelter from the rain in the home of a farmer who lived high up on the side-hill, and the next morning walked down to Johnstown and viewed the ruins. It seemed as if the city was utterly destroyed. The water was deep over all the city and few people were visible. We returned to Conemaugh and were driven over the mountains to Ebensburg, where we took the train for Altoona, but finding we could get no further in that direction we turned back to Ebensburg, and from there went by wagon to Johnstown, where we found a train that took us to Pittsburg. I got home by the New York Central.”

[CHAPTER X.]

Edward H. Jackson, who worked in the Cambria Iron Works, told the following story:

“When we were going to work Friday morning at seven o’clock, May 31st, the water in the river was about six inches below the top of the banks, the rains during the night having swollen it. We were used to floods about this time of the year, the water always washing the streets and running into the cellars, so we did not pay much attention to this fact. It continued rising, and about nine o’clock we left work in order to go back to our homes and take our furniture and carpets to the upper floors, as we had formerly done on similar occasions. At noon the water was on our first floors, and kept rising until there was five feet of water in our homes. It was still raining hard. We were all in the upper stories about half-past four, when the first intimation we had of anything unusual was a frightful crash, and the same moment our house toppled over. Jumping to the windows, we saw the water rushing down the streets in immense volumes, carrying with it houses, barns, and, worst of all, screaming, terrified men, women, and children. In my house were Colonel A. N. Hart, who is my uncle, his wife, sister, and two children. They watched their chance, and when a slowly moving house passed by they jumped to the roof and by careful manœuvring managed to reach Dr. S. M. Swan’s house, a three-story brick building, where there were about two hundred other people. I jumped on to a tender of an engine as it floated down and reached the same house. All the women and children were hysterical, most of the men were paralyzed by terror, and to describe the scene is simply impossible. From the windows of this house we threw ropes to persons who floated by on the roofs of houses, and in this way we saved several.

“Our condition in the house was none of the pleasantest. There was nothing to eat; it was impossible to sleep, even had any one desired to do so; when thirsty we were compelled to catch the rain-water as it fell from the roof and drink it. Other people had gone for safety in the same manner as we had to two other brick houses, H. Y. Hawse’s residence and Alma Hall’s, and they went through precisely the same experience as we did. Many of our people were badly injured and cut, and they were tended bravely and well by Dr. W. E. Matthews, although he himself was badly injured. During the evening we saved by ropes W. Forrest Rose, his wife, daughter, and four boys. Mr. Rose’s collar-bone and one rib were broken. After a fearful night we found, when day broke, that the water had subsided, and I and some others of the men crawled out upon the rubbish and debris to search for food, for our people were starving. All we could find were water-soaked crackers and some bananas, and these were eagerly eaten by the famished sufferers.

“Then, during the morning, began the thieving. I saw men bursting open trunks, putting valuables in their pockets, and then looking for more. I did not know these people, but I am sure they must have lived in the town, for surely no others could have got there at this time. A meeting was held, Colonel Hart was made Chief of Police, and he at once gave orders that any one caught stealing should be shot without warning. Notwithstanding this we afterward found scores of bodies, the fingers of which were cut off, the fiends not wishing to waste time to take off the rings. Many corpses of women were seen from which the ears had been cut, in order to secure the diamond earrings.

“Then, to add to our horrors, the debris piled up against the bridge caught fire, and as the streets were full of oil, it was feared that the flames would extend backwards, but happily for us this was not the case. It was pitiful to hear the cries of those who had been caught in the rubbish, and, after having been half drowned, had to face death as inevitable as though bound to a stake. The bodies of those burned to death will never be recognized, and of those drowned many were so badly disfigured by being battered against the floating houses that they also will be unrecognizable. It is said that Charles Butler, the assistant treasurer of the Cambria Iron Works, who was in the Hurlburt House, convinced that he could not escape and wishing his body to be recognized, pinned his photograph and a letter to the lapel of his coat, where they were found when his body was recovered. I have lost everything I owned in the world,” said Mr. Jackson, in conclusion, “and hundreds of others are in the same condition. The money in the banks is all right, however, for it was stowed away in the vaults.”

Frank McDonald, a railroad conductor, says:

“I certainly think I saw one thousand bodies go over the bridge. The first house that came down struck the bridge and at once took fire, and as fast as the others came down they were consumed. I believe I am safe in saying I saw one thousand bodies burn. It reminded me of a lot of flies on fly-paper struggling to get away, with no hope and no chance to save them. I have no idea that had the bridge been blown up the loss of life would have been any less. They would have floated a little further with the same certain death. Then, again, it was impossible for any one to have reached the bridge in order to blow it up, for the waters came so fast that no one could have done it.”