The Johnstown Flood (20 page)

And aside from the many large groups of people gathered inside Alma Hall, Dr. Swan’s house, or the other buildings that were still standing, there were any number of smaller groups of four to six, or even one to two, people who spent the night inside their own tiny attics or atop the roofs of little houses that bobbed about with the current. Some were closed in under roof beams, with no windows to look out or escape through; they were still alive, but trapped, and with no way of knowing what might happen next.

At least one family had jumped into a large bed when the water rushed up their stairs. The bed was borne clear to the ceiling by the water, and the family stayed there, floating inside their own house through the remainder of the night.

Another family named Williams had their house split in half at the bridge, then went floating up the Stony Creek in what was left of the attic. In the darkness that night Mrs. Williams gave birth to a baby boy; and the family stayed there until morning, soaked, freezing cold, the baby wrapped in a shawl.

Scores of others floated on rooftops or freight cars or half-submerged debris, without any protection from the pouring rain. A Mrs. Jacob Malzi hung on to the eaves of a house all night, up to her waist in water. A Miss Minnie Chambers had climbed inside a freight car which had been carried through the cut near the bridge and smashed to pieces against the roof of the Cambria works, where she, miraculously still alive, spent the night holding on to a small pipe that stuck up through the roof. James Shumaker lay half-unconscious across a heap of drifting wreckage all night, his face and arms badly torn and nearly blinded in both eyes by sand and lime.

Several people spent the night in trees, hanging on with the water lapping about below, never daring to close their eyes, even for a few moments, for fear they might fall asleep, lose their grip, and drop into the black current. Jacob Horner and his family of eight spent all night in a tree; so did Reuben Bensen and Mrs. Ann Buck, who was eighty years old, and Mrs. John Burket, who had had every bit of her clothing ripped from her back by the flood.

Of the great many people who were lucky enough to get to dry land, there were a number who were in such a state of shock and fear that they just started walking, stopping for nothing, stumbling on blindly through the dripping woods until the first light of morning.

But by far the worst of the night’s horrors was the fire at the bridge. Minnie Chambers, the girl who clung to the roof of the Cambria works, said later that she could hear screaming from the bridge all through the night. William Tice, who owned a drugstore on Portage Street, described what he saw soon after he had been fished out of the water near the bridge.

“I went up on the embankment and looked across the bridge, which was filled full of debris, and on it were thousands of men, women, and children, who were screaming and yelling for help, as at this time the debris was on fire, and after each crash there was a moment of solemn silence, and those voices would again be heard crying in vain for the help that came not. At each crash hundreds were forced under and slain.

“I saw hundreds of them as the flames approached throw up their hands and fall backward into the fire, and those who had escaped drowning were reserved for the more horrible fate of being burned to death. At last I could endure it no longer, and had to leave, as I could see no more.”

Frank McDonald, a railroad conductor who apparently kept on watching, said, “They reminded me of a lot of flies on flypaper, struggling to get away with no hope and no chance to save them.”

Actually, for anyone to see much of what was going on was extremely difficult, with the rain pouring down, the dark, the smoke, and the wild flames. One after another, houses had been swept against the pileup and quickly took fire. Out of them, crawling on hands and knees, climbing, jumping from place to place, helping one another, small, dark figures had appeared, now silhouetted sharply against the high, wind-whipped flames, now invisible against the black shadow of mangled debris, now emerging again from the smoke and groping their way toward the ends of the bridge. That there looked to be thousands of them and that they seemed insectlike is understandable enough; but evidence is that, at most, perhaps 500 to 600 people were driven into the burning heap, and though exact figures were never settled on, it is likely that all but about 80 of them managed to escape.

A good many escapes were made thanks to the courage of bystanders who rushed in to help. They lifted old people and children from the windows of half-shattered houses. They helped carry the badly injured across the wreckage to the hillsides.

A girl named Rose Clark was trapped near one end of the bridge, half submerged under water, with a broken arm and a broken leg which was pinned down by timbers. A group of men had worked for several hours to free her leg but without success and the fire kept spreading closer. For a short while there was talk among them of cutting her leg off, rather than letting her burn to death, and for a few tense minutes, when the flame was almost on top of them, it looked as though they would have to. But the leg came free at last, and they carried her to safety.

The fire burned on through the night, and would be still blazing when morning came. In little towns miles away downriver and on the other side of the mountains, people could see a strange, shimmering, blood-red glow in the sky.

But even for those who had somehow succeeded in getting to the high ground in time, even for those who were uninjured or were lucky enough to have a roof to sleep under, there was the indescribable agony of remembering what they had seen, and not knowing what had become of others. No one really knew for sure the extent of what had happened, but they knew it had been terrible beyond belief, and if the whereabouts of someone was not known, then only the worst could be imagined. All that could be done now was to wait for morning, and hope.

Mr. Robert Pitcairn’s private car had been attached to eastbound passenger train Number 18 shortly before noon that morning and rolled out of Pittsburgh’s Union Station about an hour later. Mr. Pitcairn was on his way to Lilly to see how serious the storm damage was there, and to look things over at Johnstown and South Fork on the way.

Messages about trouble along the line had been coming in to his office since early morning, including one about the dam. Pitcairn had read it and thought little more of it. First of all, he could not quite understand how Colonel Unger could be sending such warnings, since he knew perfectly well that Colonel Unger had no telegraph wire at the club and that the telephone line was not open yet. And secondly, as he would say later, he simply “paid little attention to any reports about the South Fork dam, as they had been made perhaps nearly every year.”

When later messages came in from South Fork, from agent Dougherty and Pitcairn’s old friend J. P. Wilson, Pitcairn was already on his way east.

Pitcairn’s knowledge of the dam went back more than thirty years, to the time when the Pennsylvania had first bought it. His old boyhood friend Andy Carnegie had gotten him a job on the railroad, as a ticket agent at Cresson, not long before that. He and Carnegie had been telegraph operators together in Pittsburgh; then they went with the Pennsylvania. Later on, when Andy quit his job as head of the Pittsburgh Division to go into business for himself, Pitcairn had been named to replace him.

But his first real interest in the dam began when it broke in 1862 and wrecked a lot of railroad property in South Fork. Then nearly twenty years later, when the South Fork club finished its restoration and there was talk in the valley about leaks at the base of the dam, Pitcairn had gone up to see for himself, taking along several of his own people from South Fork. They had given the dam what he felt was a thorough enough going-over. Benjamin Ruff had walked with them, saying that what everyone called leaks were actually springs that came from near the ends of the dam. Ruff also promised that he would strengthen things some, and then they all shook hands and went home.

“The only point we were afraid of,” Pitcairn said later, “was the leaks at the bottom of the dam increasing.” And he was evidently afraid (or cautious) enough to ask Wilson and others in the area to keep an eye out for him. Whether his subsequent membership in the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club was, even in part, his way of keeping his own eye out, is not known. Though it seems highly doubtful, since, unlike Daniel J. Morrell, he had every sort of social and business reason for wishing to be there.

Now his train headed out of Pittsburgh along the muddy Monongahela, past the towering black Edgar Thomson works at Braddock, where the British general by the same name had suffered his famous defeat; then on through one little town after another, East McKeesport, Irwin, Jeannette, Greensburg, and out into open hill country. He had been over the route maybe a thousand times during his years with the railroad. He knew every bend, bridge, siding, every water tower, coal tipple, every depot, every barn and farmhouse along the horizon. He could not claim to know all the men, that would be impossible, but he knew the good part of them, and certainly every last one of them knew him. He was their supreme commander. His word was law from Altoona to Pittsburgh, and the portly frame, the bullet head, the pince-nez glasses and walrus mustache were far better-known among them than the rather inconspicuous features of the man who was then President of the United States. And if it were a question as to which one wielded the most authority, there would have been some debate.

Men who had been with the Pennsylvania for a dozen years or more still talked about Pitcairn during the “Great Strike” of ’77. A lot of them felt that he had been the chief cause for what happened in Pittsburgh. The strike had begun on the B & O in Baltimore and had been spreading fast. Times were hard, and wages had been cut. But Pitcairn had chosen that particular moment to institute new practices on the division which would have meant increased work loads and even more layoffs. “The men were always complaining about something,” he would say later. When it was all over, a pitched battle had been fought between militia and a mob of strikers and unemployed, a good part of downtown Pittsburgh had been burned to the ground, and fifty-seven people had been killed. The men had gone back to work, having gained nothing. And Robert Pitcairn’s hold on them was stronger than ever.

He liked to say that the railroads (by which he really meant his railroad) were “the heart, blood, veins, and arteries of Pittsburgh,” which, of course, put him in a most important position indeed.

Pitcairn was in his mid-fifties. He was an elder of the fashionable new Shady Side Presbyterian Church and a man of considerable financial means. For aside from his earnings on the railroad, he had also managed to put together a good-sized fortune on the side, largely by backing his inventive friend George Westinghouse. Slabtown and the squalid back streets where he and Carnegie and Phipps had grown up were far, far behind him now.

Sitting in the upholstered splendor of his private car, he looked appropriately substantial, and quite tired. He had been up late the night before at the telegraph instrument in his home making inquiries about the weather between Pittsburgh and Altoona. Then he had gone off to town earlier than usual that morning, and with the news of the storm growing worse every hour, it had been a difficult day ever since. But now, watching the landscape sweep past his window, he began to realize just how serious things were.

The rain was coming down in wild, silvery sheets. The whole countryside was awash. Hillsides were mortally veined with angry little creeks. Fields were covered with water that looked to be a foot deep or more. At Latrobe, at the foot of Chestnut Ridge, the Loyalhanna was twice its normal size and well over its banks. Ten miles farther, he saw the Conemaugh for the first time and knew he was up against something unlike anything he had ever experienced. His train was moving very slowly by this time, following the course of the river where it cut through the ridge. On the other side of the ridge, at the village of Bolivar, people were out along the riverbanks watching the torrent rush by. At New Florence the water had spilled through the lowlands, flooding miles of woods and meadows. Pitcairn thought he could actually see the water rising, it was coming up so fast.

After New Florence the train pulled through little Nineveh, where men and boys in gum coats, their collars turned up against the biting wind, their hats dripping with rain, stood beside the track watching the cars clack by.

Then the train started into the breath-takingly beautiful Conemaugh Gap, or Packsaddle, the one pass through Laurel Hill to Johnstown. The railroad ran well above the river here, even with the river in its present condition, but above the tracks the mountainside loomed up another 1,500 feet.

Several miles farther on in the gorge, at a place called Sang Hollow, about four miles from Johnstown, they stopped. The time by now was about five after four.

Pitcairn climbed down from his car and went up to the tower to find out what the trouble was. The operator told him the lines east had gone dead; they tried again several times to get Johnstown, but it was no use. The operator said he could not let them through without clearance, which, according to the rules, was exactly what he was meant to say, even to Pitcairn.

“I was about making up my mind to proceed cautiously, running carefully, to find the trouble,” Pitcairn said later, “when looking east, I saw some debris. The water before this had been muddy, but very little drift. The debris attracted my attention from its singular appearance, being broken up wood entirely, and in very small pieces. In a short time, the telegraph poles commenced to break down, and threatened to take the tower down with it.”

Then they saw a man coming down the river on some debris, moving very fast. Pitcairn thought the water must have been going by at about fifteen miles an hour. They saw more people coming, hanging on to telegraph poles or what appeared to be parts of buildings or just being swept along and trying desperately and futilely to swim. Pitcairn and the others rushed out to do what they could to save them, but the river carried them off and out of sight.

“I returned to the telegraph office to see what word I could get, when the people came down by the scores; the water rising very rapidly, and men, women, and children on the drift, and we perfectly helpless.”

By this time most of the male passengers on board the train were out on the riverbanks doing everything possible to help. They got hold of long poles and big limbs and held them out over the current as far as they could, hoping maybe the people going by could reach them. They threw ropes, and at one point, one of them actually stripped off his coat and jumped into the water to save a mother and her small child.

He was a rugged, seventeen-year-old Pittsburgh boy named Bill Heppenstall, who was on his way back to school at Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, after being home ill. A small house had lodged momentarily in some overhanging trees. The men heard a baby crying, but the house was too far out to reach. Heppenstall decided he would go in and get the child. The others tried to talk him out of it, but he got the bell cord out of one of the cars, tied it around him, and swam out to the house. In no time he was back with the child. There were great cheers from the crowd. But he then told them the mother was still back there and started into the water again, this time taking a railroad tie along with him to help hold her up. Just as he got her to shore the house tore loose from the trees and went spinning off downstream.

By the time it began getting dark, the operator at Sang Hollow had counted 119 people going by, dead and alive. Despite everything they had tried, the men on the riverbank had been able to rescue only seven.

About six o’clock Pitcairn ordered the train back down to New Florence. The water was still high, but it did not seem to be getting any higher. He had decided to take the passengers back to Pittsburgh, giving them the option to stop off at New Florence if there were any accommodations to be had.

But before leaving, Pitcairn got off a message to Pittsburgh. It was directed to the editors of the morning papers, and its exact wording remains unclear. But sometime between five thirty and six the news was out and on the wire. A dam had failed at South Fork and caused a disastrous flood at Johnstown. By then Pitcairn had faced up to the awful realization of what had gone wrong.

His train rolled ever so slowly back through the gorge, reaching New Florence by perhaps six thirty. The first thing he did there was to write out a still longer and more detailed message, which he then put aside, in the hope that some further word might come in from Johnstown itself. So for the next several hours they sat and waited. The rain hammered down outside; men kept coming in and out talking of more bodies found or the few half-drowned souls they had been able to drag ashore.

The village sat well back from the river, on high, dry ground. Only a few houses near the river were under water, and few citizens were suffering any serious discomforts. As a result the streets were filled with people going to and from the river, standing in doorways, talking to passengers from Pitcairn’s train, or gathered in groups looking at the dull, red glow in the sky to the east.

About ten o’clock Pitcairn received word from Johnstown by way of Sang Hollow. One of his men in Johnstown, a W. N. Hays, had managed to get from Johnstown to Sang Hollow on foot. Apparently he had been on the hillside above the west end of the bridge and was able to make his way down the tracks above the rampaging river. Once he reached Sang Hollow, the message was put on the wire to New Florence.

Pitcairn was told how things were at Johnstown, and he then sent a second message to Pittsburgh, which would be quoted in the papers there at some length. He reported the number of bodies that had been counted going by at Sang Hollow. He said there was no way clear to Johnstown, but that his information was that the city was “literally wiped out.” He said that the debris at the stone bridge was reported to be forty feet high and that it was burning.

Then he said, “I fear there will be terrible suffering among those saved which should be relieved as soon as possible. In the interest of humanity I think a public meeting should be called early tomorrow to send food, clothing, etc. to those poor people which we will be glad to forward to Johnstown…as soon as we can get a clear track there.”

This message, like the one before it, went right on the wire. Before midnight the story was across the country:

But the fact was that the rush to Johnstown had already begun hours before. Two trains had been chartered by five Pittsburgh newspapers, and the first of them, the one with the Dispatch and
Times
men on board, started out from Union Station a few minutes after seven. The second, chartered by the Post, the
Commercial-Gazette,
and the
Chronicle-Telegraph,
followed almost immediately after. In New York, Philadelphia, Boston, in Chicago, Cleveland, and St. Louis, reporters picked up their hats and coats and went directly to the nearest depot, taking no time to pack or anything else. Some of them were still in evening clothes after a night at the theater.

The trains from Pittsburgh got no farther than Bolivar, where the men piled out into the rain and moved among the crowds gathered at the station and along the dark edge of the river. They picked up stories of the bodies and wreckage that had been washing past, about the few rescues that had been made, and the horrid things people had seen happen.