Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever (4 page)

But not right away. The first news about Omaha's tornado didn't go out by telephone or telegraph, because the lines were all down. Instead, a message was sent to the Associated Press from Omaha to Lincoln, Nebraska, by train.

This was bad, because during a crisis, telephone and telegraph operators were always crucial, life-saving links to the rest of the world, especially after a tornado, earthquake, hurricane, or flood. Omaha needed food, water, and help—although the mayor, full of pride and stoicism, would be slow to ask for those things—and the communities near Omaha also would have benefited from immediately knowing what was coming their way. With communication lines down, there was no way to properly warn their neighbors of what was coming. They were on their own.

What nobody else could know or predict was that this was just the beginning and the start of something else entirely. Weather forecasts were far from useless in 1913; but in this instance, they might as well have been. In Washington, D.C., the United States Weather Bureau issued an alert that “a severe storm is predicted to pass over the East
Tuesday and Wednesday.” Storm warnings were issued from Hatteras, North Carolina, to Eastport, Maine, and cold wave warnings for the west lake region, the middle and upper Mississippi Valley were issued. “No decided fall in temperature is predicted for the East until after the passage of the western storm,” concluded the bureau. “Showers are predicted to fill in the time until the storm arrives.”

No mention anywhere of tornadoes and not a word about flooding.

The tornadoes were the opening act of a natural disaster that would unfold for the next few weeks, and if one considers the cleanup and aftereffects, months and years. But the disaster would be known not for its wind, but its water. It didn't help matters that the country was in the midst of El Niño season, a period when the surface ocean waters in the eastern tropical Pacific become abnormally warm, a phenomenon that tends to give the United States some pretty funky weather, and the night of March 23 was as funky and furious as it gets. The Omaha tornado of 1913 was the opening salvo of the Great Flood of 1913.

*
 One might potentially theorize that he was reaching in his pocket for a key, but this was an age when few people locked their doors, and he was going to a house that had people in it, which means he wouldn't have been worried about not being able to get inside.

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 If there's anything worse than seeing your lives destroyed by a tornado, it's probably seeing your lives destroyed by a tornado and then being rained on.

MONDAY,

MARCH 24, 1913

Chapter Two

The First Flood Deaths

March 23, Sunday evening, Washington, D.C.

Once he learned about the Omaha tornado, Ernest P. Bicknell, the Red Cross's national director, did not waste time. He sent telegrams to Eugene T. Lies, a 36-year-old field worker in Chicago, and a St. Louis fellow who went by the name of C. H. Hubbard, to hurry to Omaha and set up a facility to help the tornado victims. He also telegraphed Governor John H. Moorehead of Nebraska, pledging the Red Cross's support and promising that relief trains, carrying nurses and doctors, would soon be in Omaha; and he wired additional towns that had been in the tornado's path to see what the Red Cross could do.

That done, a restless Bicknell waited for further reports of the destruction. He was in the American Red Cross office, located in the State-War-Navy Building next to the White House, where Woodrow Wilson was settling in, having just been sworn in earlier in the month. As the reports trickled in, Bicknell decided he could do more if he personally oversaw the operations in Omaha.

The 51-year-old's resume was like reading a Who's Who of Natural Disasters for the 20th Century. He worked on helping victims in the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake (estimated casualties,
over 3,000), the 1909 Cherry Mine disaster (casualties, 259), and during the Mississippi River floods of 1912 (estimated casualties, 200).

Traveling to Omaha wasn't a decision made lightly, given that it would take roughly twenty-four hours almost nonstop by train to get there from Washington, D.C., but the destruction demanded the Red Cross's attention. Bicknell was always buried in work, however, even when a crisis wasn't ongoing. Much of his job was spent promoting the development of the American Red Cross, which had been in existence since 1881 when Clara Barton, impressed by the International Red Cross, brought the concept to the United States. Between disasters, Bicknell's main function seemed to be preparing for conferences, which invariably called upon him to write and deliver a speech and raise money and call attention to the organization. But when a disaster called, he pushed all of that aside and devoted himself to the relief effort, enjoying the experience of rolling up his sleeves and having a change of pace from the day-to-day bureaucracy.

And while he was gone, the Red Cross would remain in capable hands with Mabel Boardman, who was technically a volunteer, but in actuality a wealthy philanthropist who ran the entire organization. Boardman took herself out of the running to be at the helm of the American Red Cross, believing the public would more naturally follow a male leader, although Bicknell himself was far from a ceremonial figurehead. In her current back seat, Mabel may have not been doing much for women's rights, but she did a tremendous amount for the Red Cross, devoting her life to it, working for the organization from 1903 to 1944, just two years before her death.

Bicknell was a man with brown eyes that almost matched his sandy brown hair that he parted in the middle. In 1913, when walrus mustaches were still the norm and muttonchop sideburns could occasionally be spotted on older gentlemen, Bicknell was clean-shaven, apparently an early adopter of Gillette razors, which had debuted on the scene in 1900. If Bicknell managed to secure a time machine and travel to modern times, other than his shirt's starch-infested white collar and early twentieth-century tweed suit, he wouldn't seem so out of place.

Bicknell boarded the train in Washington, D.C. that evening, fully believing that he could conduct affairs more efficiently from Omaha. Either way, he would be of more help than half a nation away in
Washington. If all went as planned, throughout the night his train would pass through several states, mostly Ohio and Indiana, and he could be in Chicago by noon the next day, where he would then board another train for Omaha. But, of course, it didn't all go as planned.

Through the night of March 23 and into the 24th, all across the Midwest

Omaha had the worst of it, but it was one community hit by one tornado. The night of March 23 was packed with tornadoes. Depending on the source you believe, it may have been as few as six or as many as twelve. Omaha, with the tornado cutting through a densely populated downtown, was the most affected, but at least six tornadoes tormented Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Michigan, and Indiana within the span of about two hours, killing more than two hundred people and destroying thousands of homes. What hit Omaha also attacked Neola, Iowa, where two people lost their lives, and Bartlett, Iowa, where three more people died.

In the Nebraska town of Berlin, which would change its name to Otoe five years later when America fought the Germans during World War I, seven people died. Another twister destroyed half the buildings in the Nebraska town of Yutan, killing sixteen. There were still more tornado-related deaths in Walton and Sterling, Illinois, another in Traverse City, Michigan, and yet another in Perth, Indiana, where most of the buildings were leveled.

Six people were snuffed out by a cyclone in northwest Chicago: two railroad men were killed in the northern suburb of Des Plaines, Illinois, when the chimney from a manufacturing plant was hurled into a caboose of their freight train; another man was crushed in the rubble of his house; yet another was electrocuted by fallen wires; a telegraph lineman was in the wrong place at the wrong time and literally blown off his post into oblivion; a second telegraph lineman was also on a telegraph pole and was electrocuted when the wind came through.

In Terre Haute, Indiana, at 9:45
P
.
M
., a tornado took the lives of twenty-one people; it was theorized later that even more residents, trapped in their homes, would have died from electrical fires, and fires started by lightning, if the rain hadn't started falling. The community was a collage of tragedy, but in the midst of it all, there were a couple of miracles. A baby was lifted out of a bed, carried for a block, and set down, uninjured. Another resident was inside a house that flew a
quarter-mile, according to some reports. The woman inside emerged from the wreckage, injury-free. Some people chuckled later, remembering defeathered chickens and how one person's clothing, lain out on a bed, was pulled up into the fireplace and went up the chimney.

Three more people died in the tiny village of Flag Springs, Missouri, which was described at the time as being basically wiped off the map.

All in all, it's believed that 221 people died in tornadoes that night and 761 people were injured.

While the tornadoes were attacking other towns in the Midwest over the next two hours, Omaha swiftly turned its attention to rescuing its citizens. The telephone and telegraph lines were demolished, enough that there was no way to send a message to warn anyone else in time of what was to come. Everyone would be on their own, including those in Omaha, given that there was no quick way to tell the rest of the nation what had happened. T. R. Porter did his best to share the news, however. He made tracks to Fort Omaha, once a United States Army supply depot and now a training center where soldiers learned how to fly in hot-air balloons, which could come in handy during battle, it was believed, and, indeed, during World War I, they were used for observing the enemy below. The fort also taught soldiers radio communication and telegraphy, and as luck would have it, it had a wireless station. The Associated Press may have received word of the tornado first via train, but Porter was apparently the first to get out a lengthy account of what had happened, relaying the news of the tornado one state to the south, to Fort Riley, Kansas, and from there, the soldiers telegraphed the story of the tornado and its destruction to the rest of the country.

Throughout the night with the aid of lantern light, men dug into hills of debris, searching for the living. Doctors tended to the hundreds of wounded. The street railway company had men working, hoping to clear some of the wreckage on the tracks by morning. Families wandered around in a daze. One Omaha resident named John Sullivan sent his daughter to fetch a doctor for his dying mother. After his mother died and his little girl didn't return, Sullivan spent anxious hours wandering the city, shivering and without shoes, looking for her until she eventually turned up. And nobody was particularly excited to see, shortly after midnight, snowflakes falling. It was the beginning of a blizzard.

March 24, dawn, Mulberry, Indiana

Roy Rothenberger, twenty-six, and his seventeen-year-old brother, Roscoe, were at Wildcat Creek in a boat that they built themselves. With them was a 21-year-old friend, Elva Myers. They were hunting wild ducks and ironically sitting ducks themselves.

The boat was a hastily made flat-bottomed vessel with low sides. It was kind of like a johnboat, which is the same thing only with a bench or two. The three young Hoosiers guided themselves by using poles to push themselves down the river. The plan was to travel to what was called the Wyandotte Bridge, leave the boat there, and walk back. Some of their friends took a look at the boat and probably the weather and warned them that it might have trouble, but the Rothenberger brothers and Myers felt that they'd be just fine. Hindsight is 20/20, and considering it was raining—it had been raining just about everywhere the day before and on this Monday—it's hard not to wonder just what these three were thinking.

7
A
.
M
., Fort Wayne, Indiana

About 120 miles northeast of Mulberry, Indiana, a downpour pummeled Miss Theresa Hammond, an attractive schoolteacher who was also considered one of the town's old maids at the age of twenty-seven.

Her morning started as it pretty much did every day. As Miss Hammond had every morning for the last five years, she awakened at 1209 Barr Street where her mother Margaret and her older sister Mary also lived. Theresa had another sister, Elizabeth, who married around the time Theresa went into teaching and moved back with her husband to where the family had spent most of their years, in Miners Mills, Pennsylvania, which was as small a village as it sounds. Eventually it became part of the city of Wilkes-Barre.

As for Fort Wayne, Theresa had lived here since around the turn of the century. It was a city with a population of 63,933, a growing metropolis with ample examples of progress. There was the large and new Y.W.C.A. building, and seven moving picture shows, eight if one included the one currently under construction. The city had its forestry department, an art school, four hospitals, twenty-four hotels, eight paid fire companies, and twelve public parks sprawling over 145 acres of land. Forty-three miles of road were paved, twenty-six
with the modern stuff, asphalt, and seventeen miles of brick. It was a manufacturing hub for cigar factories (there were thirty-two), breweries (eighteen), broom factories (three), and washing machines (three). The historical society archived the past, and the five daily newspapers and six weeklies covered the present and pointed the way toward what looked to be a bright future.

Theresa Hammond, whose teacher's salary averaged about $30 a month, going up and down every month depending on how often she was needed, paid her ten-cent fare on the trolley. During her approximately four-mile commute, the conversation among passengers must have been about the rain, which had been going strong since the previous morning.

On Saturday night, March 22, Fort Wayne's weatherman, W. S. Palmer, assured residents that the next day would be “fair and warmer.” But Palmer had egg on his face that day, since it had rained all of Easter Sunday, and it was still raining on Monday when residents woke up to the news that Omaha, Nebraska had been devastated by a tornado, and Terre Haute, on the other end of Indiana, had been ravaged as well.