The Johnstown Flood (14 page)

Hess and Plummer still could see nothing, but according to Plummer, Hess said, “The lake’s broke,” and with that he put on steam, tied down the whistle, and with their gravel cars clattering along in front, they went shrieking toward East Conemaugh and the railroad yards where the two sections of the
Day Express
stood waiting.

The Hess ride into Conemaugh would be talked about and described in books and magazine articles for years to come, with Hess in his engine (Number 1124), blazing down the valley, the water practically on top of him, in an incredibly heroic dash to sound the alarm.

Hess himself said afterward, “I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t see what else I could do.”

He also said that he never did see any water, never waited around that long. Moreover, Plummer estimated that their top speed as they rounded the bend into the yards was no more than twelve miles an hour, which, he said, was the best they could do considering the load they were pushing, the condition of the tracks, and the fact that they had no idea which way the waiting trains on the other side of the blind turn might have been rearranged in their absence.

It was Hess’s intention to keep right on going through the yards, clear to Johnstown, if the track was clear. But it was not. Plummer’s guess was that no more than two minutes passed after they had pulled to a stop until the flood came.

“My brother was up on the bank and saw it coming,” Plummer said. “I didn’t see it coming at all; he saw it coming though and saw where it was, and he ran down and grabbed hold of me and gouged Hess with his umbrella, and told us to run.”

With their whistle still screaming the two men jumped from the cab and started for the hillside.

A locomotive whistle was a matter of some personal importance to a railroad engineer. It was tuned and worked (even “played”) according to his own particular choosing. The whistle was part of the make-up of the man; he was known for it as much as he was known for the engine he drove. And aside from its utilitarian functions, it could also be an instrument of no little amusement. Many an engineer could get a simple tune out of his whistle, and for those less musical it could be used to aggravate a cranky preacher in the middle of his Sunday sermon or to signal hello through the night to a wife or lady friend. But there was no horseplay about tying down the cord. A locomotive whistle going without letup meant one thing on the railroad, and to everyone who lived near the railroad. It meant there was something very wrong.

The whistle of John Hess’s engine had been going now for maybe five minutes at most. It was not on long, but it was the only warning anyone was to hear, and nearly everyone in East Conemaugh heard it and understood almost instantly what it meant.

3

For the passengers on board the eastbound sections of the
Day Express,
the delay in East Conemaugh had been a dreary, monotonous affair. It was going on five hours now since the two trains had pulled to a stop between the river and the little town.

The first few hours had not been entirely uninteresting. A number of passengers had gone out to look things over. They went walking about in the rain, up and down the tracks, over to the depot or the telegraph tower to see if there was any word on how long they would be held there. Or they picked their way across the tracks to the riverbank where the crowds were gathered and several local men were making great sport of spearing things of interest out of the racing current. And on the other side of the tower, the township bridge looked as though it would go almost any time.

But when dinnertime had passed and there still seemed no end to the rain and any chance of moving on seemed even less likely, whatever spirit of adventure there had been faded rapidly. The passengers had nearly all returned to the trains. They passed the time as best they could in the dim afternoon light, with the sound of the pelting rain all around them.

Elizabeth Bryan of Philadelphia sat looking out the window, while beside her, her friend Jennie Paulson of Pittsburgh read a novel titled
Miss Lou.
The girls had been to a wedding in Pittsburgh the day before and were on their way to New York, each wearing a small corsage of roses. Another passenger, the Reverend T. H. Robinson, a professor at the Western Theological Seminary in Allegheny, was busy writing a diary of the day’s events for his wife.

Others were doing what they could to amuse their children. Some slept. One elderly gentleman, feeling slightly ill, had had his berth made up and retired for the day. Still others gathered in small clusters along the aisles to talk about the storm and the rising river, service on the Pennsylvania, the dismal prospect of the night ahead, or the possibility of getting a decent meal somewhere.

There was talk too about the dam farther up the mountain that everyone had been hearing about. But there was not much concern about it.

“The possibility of the dam giving way had been often discussed by passengers in my presence,” one man, a bank teller from New Jersey, was later quoted, “and everybody supposed that the utmost danger 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 Conemaugh Valley. Such a possibility as the carrying away of a train of cars on the great Pennsylvania Railroad was never seriously entertained by anybody.”

Another passenger said that though many people may have been uneasy and were keeping “a pretty good lookout for information,” the porters comforted them “with the assurance that the Pennsylvania Railroad Company always took care of its patrons.”

So far whoever was directing things in the yard had chosen to move them twice. Twice they had watched the river working in on the tracks where the two trains stood, twice they had been moved forward and toward the hill, to be farther away from the river, and both times they had seen the tracks fall off into the water very soon after.

Now they were on the last sidings next to town, as far from the river as it was possible to be. The second section was on the track beside the depot and closest to town. Then came the first section, on the next track toward the river; and on the other side of it, four tracks over, was the local mail train. The
Day Express
engines were standing about even with the depot, with Section Two a few cars farther forward. The last cars were nearly on line with the telegraph tower, which stood on the river side of the tracks.

In the caboose of the mail train, which was nearest of the three to the tower, a fire was going in the stove and the conductors and others of the train crews were sitting about keeping warm between turns at checking in at the tower.

Messages had been coming in and going out of the tower steadily since early morning, and included those from South Fork. One operator, D. M. Montgomery, was later quoted as saying that the South Fork warning was generally well known. “But of course,” he added, “nobody paid any more attention to it than if there hadn’t been one at all. I know I didn’t for one. It seemed like a rumor and they didn’t take any belief in it.”

Charles Haak, another operator in the tower, and the one who had passed along the first message from South Fork to the yardmaster’s office downstairs, said he did not pay much attention to the warnings either.

“I was a stranger there,” Haak said. “I had only been there but eight months, and of course, I listened to other people around there, residents there, and there was talk about the dam breaking, and they said there had been rumors but it never came, and so I thought that was how it would be this time.”

As for the decisions on which trains to put where, they were being made by J. C. Walkinshaw, the yardmaster, who had been on duty since six that morning.

Walkinshaw was forty-nine years old, a widower with five children. He had worked for the Pennsylvania since he was seventeen and had been in charge of the East Conemaugh yards for twenty-three years. In a book of short biographical sketches of long-time company employees published later by the railroad, Walkinshaw peers out of a small photograph with wide eyes framed by white hair and whiskers, looking rather astonished and not especially bright. Robert Pitcairn later said that though Walkinshaw suffered from consumption, and so was “not very efficient” as yardmaster and “not very able to stand the physical strain,” he, Pitcairn, nonetheless considered him amply qualified to look after the company’s interest.

With circumstances as they were, Walkinshaw was left with little choice on what to do with the trains. He could not send them to the east, up the valley, because of the washouts at Buttermilk Falls and farther on. Nor could he send them back down the line toward Johnstown, as there were now reports of washouts in that direction as well.

About all he could do was to keep moving them back from the river, which is what he did. But once he had them on the northernmost siding, he concluded that he had taken “every reasonable precaution” under the circumstances.

One other very possible choice, of course, was to move the passengers out of the trains to higher ground. But to ask that many people to go out into the cold wind and rain, into the muddy little town where there might well be problems finding enough shelter for everyone, seemed more than Walkinshaw was willing to do, even though he had full knowledge of the trouble at Lake Conemaugh and was heard by at least one witness to say that if the dam ever broke it would “sweep the valley.”

Walkinshaw had been out several times, checking equipment, giving orders, looking at the river. From two o’clock to three there seemed to be no change in the water level. Apparently the worst was over. But then about 3:15 the bridge below the telegraph tower went, causing a great stir among the crowd. Hour by hour the current had eaten away at its foundations, until they let go and the whole thing just dropped down into the water. Sometime shortly after, Walkinshaw went into his office where his son handed him another message about the dam. Then, about a quarter to four, Walkinshaw decided to take a brief rest.

“I sat down and wasn’t in the chair more than a minute until I heard a whistle blow,” he recalled later.

“I jumped off my chair, and ran out and hollowed for every person to go away off the road and get on high ground, and I started up the track.

“Just as I left the office, I saw the rear end of this work train backing around the curve. I started up toward the train, and the minute I saw the train stop, I saw the engineer jump off and run for the hill. Just that minute, I saw a large wave come around the hill.”

Inside the trains there was considerable commotion when the whistle started blasting. People stood up and began asking what the trouble was. Two Negro porters came through, both looking very excited and when asked if this meant that the dam had broken, the first one said he did not know, and the second said he thought it had. Outside, a conductor ran along between the trains shouting, “Get to the hill! Get to the hill!”

The Reverend Robinson said that no one knew what was going on, but that he remembered telling a woman next to him that he thought there was no danger. Then he looked out of the window and saw the wave coming. It appeared to be about 300 yards away, but there was no water to be seen. As one man said, it looked more like a hill of rubbish than anything else. Some people said it looked to be fifty feet high and it was taking everything in front of it. Everyone started for the door.

On Section One, the train standing between the mail train and Section Two, nearly every passenger got through the doors as fast as possible, but several of them, seeing the mud and rain, turned back. Jennie Paulson and her friend Elizabeth Bryan decided to go back for their overshoes. An old minister from Kalamazoo, Michigan, and his wife saw the flood bearing down and returned to their seats inside. But most people jumped and ran.

“It was every man for himself and God for us all,” a New Haven, Connecticut, man named Wilmot said later.

Once they had clambered out into the rain, the passengers from Section One were faced with an immediate problem. On the next track, directly between them and high ground, stood Section Two.

“I saw three ways before me,” the Reverend Robinson wrote afterward, “climb over section No. 2 or crawl under it, or run down the track with the flood four car lengths and around the train. I instantly chose the latter. No one else followed me so far as I saw, but all attempted the other courses.”

Robinson made it safely around the train, but between him and the town and the streets which climbed to high ground was a ditch running parallel with the last track. It was about ten feet wide and perhaps five feet deep and rushing with water the color of heavily creamed coffee. Fortunately for him, Robinson arrived at the ditch at a place where a big plank had been laid across it. He was over in seconds and on his way up a steep, mud-slick embankment toward the town.

But others hesitated at the ditch, or leaped, or fell in and floundered about desperately, panicked. A number of men stopped, then moved back several steps, got a start, and jumped across. George Graham, a doctor from Port Royal, Pennsylvania, made it over this way; then, feeling that he still had time to spare, turned back to see if he could help some of the others.

“Just to my left, into the ditch, armpit deep, I saw nine women and girls tumble. I instantly grabbed the hand of the first and quickly pulled her out; the meanwhile all the others reached for me at once. I succeeded in saving them all except one old lady.” Wilmot, the New Haven man, also cleared the ditch, carrying his child in his arms. When he looked back to find out what had become of his wife, he saw her hesitating on the other side, while a man beside her shouted, “Jump, jump!” She jumped and made it, and they ran on.

Cyrus Schick, a prominent Reading businessman who, with his wife and her sister, had been on his way home from a long health tour in the west, fell headlong into the ditch, as did his sister-in-law, Eliza Stinson. Schick’s wife saw him bob up out of the water but then lost sight of him in all the confusion. His body and that of Miss Stinson were not found for ten days.