The Johnstown Flood (27 page)

On the Saturday following the calamity more than $100,000 had been raised in Pittsburgh. By the time they had finished, the people of Pittsburgh would give $560,000. New York City gave $516,000; Philadelphia, $600,000; Boston, $150,000. Nickels and dimes came in from school children and convicts. Churches sent $25, $50, $100. In Salt Lake City thousands of people turned out for a concert given in the huge Mormon Tabernacle, the proceeds of which were sent to Johnstown.

In New York’s Madison Square Garden, Jake Kilrain, who was to take on John L. Sullivan in another few weeks for the world championship, put on an exhibition fight with Charley Mitchell to raise money for Johnstown. (Sullivan was invited to attend the show but did not, and was soundly hissed when his telegram of apology was read by the manager.) At the Metropolitan Opera House, Edwin Booth played the third act of
Othello
and raised $2,500. In Washington, John Philip Sousa gave a band concert. In Paris, Buffalo Bill staged a special production of his Wild West Show, which was attended by the Prince of Wales. And in Altoona, on the night of Monday, June 3, there had been a benefit performance presented by the
Night Off
troupe.

Tiffany & Company sent $500. R. H. Macy & Company sent $1,000. Joseph Pulitzer sent $2,000; Jay Gould, $1,000; John Jacob Astor, $2,500. The New York Stock Exchange gave $20,000. An old Confederate soldier sent four $100 Confederate bills, and the citizens of Cupola, Colorado, sent a solid-silver brick.

There were donations from Nantucket ($1,136.93), Yazoo City, Mississippi ($350), and Tombstone, Arizona ($101). The first check to arrive was supposedly one for $100 from Senator Matthew S. Quay, leader of the Republican forces in Pennsylvania; and Simon Cameron, the state’s crusty, old Republican boss, who would be remembered as the man who defined an honest politician as one “who when he is bought stays bought,” sat down and wrote out what was said to be one of the last checks he ever signed, for $1,000.

The Hebrew Benevolent Society of Los Angeles contributed $1,000. The United States Brewers Association sent $10,000. The Pittsburgh Society of Spiritualists collected $100. Money poured in from every state and from fourteen countries overseas. The London Stock Exchange gave $5,000. The total donations from Germany came to $30,000. There was money from the Lord Mayor of Dublin, the Mayor of Belfast, and the Sultan of Turkey. Queen Victoria sent her condolences to President Harrison, and from Washington came more than $30,000, including a check from Harrison for $300. (The President had presided over a mass meeting at the Willard Hotel Tuesday afternoon, looking very small and gray as he sat in a big armchair in the center of the stage. He had made a brief appeal for help, during which, according to one account, his voice trembled, and nearly $10,000 had been raised.)

In all, the contributions from within the United States would come to $3,601,517.80. The sum from abroad was $141,300.98, making a total of $3,742,818.78. And this does not include the goods of every kind that rolled in by the trainload.

From Saturday on the relief trains kept coming without letup. Lumber came in by the carload, and furniture, and barrels of quicklime, embalming fluid, pitch, pine tar, and resin. There was a carload of potatoes from Walla Walla. Minneapolis sent sixteen carloads of flour. Cincinnati sent 20,000 pounds of ham. Prisoners at the Western Penitentiary baked 1,000 loaves of bread. From Arbuckle’s in Pittsburgh came 30,000 pounds of coffee, and a New York butcher sent 150 pounds of bologna. Wheeling, West Virginia, sent a whole carload of nails.

By Friday, June 7, two hundred carloads of provisions had cleared Pittsburgh. At the Pennsylvania depot in Johnstown, and at the B & O depot, the platforms and yards were piled with cans of biscuits, boxes of candles, cheese, lamp chimneys and matches, huge cases of soap and canned goods, bacon by the barrelful, and hundreds of sacks of corn meal. People had donated cots, mattresses, hair combs, pipes, pillows, teakettles, tents, cookstoves, and more than 7,000 of shoes.

By Thursday, the 6th, the day the Cincinnati hams arrived, any fears there had been of serious food shortages were over. The problem now was distribution. Commissaries had been set up and were run with reasonable efficiency. Several women complained that the prettiest girls were getting more than their share, and often people came climbing back up the hillsides with empty baskets after waiting hours in line. But considering how many more there were to feed, things were exceptionally well organized. The Army had arrived the day before, which helped a lot. Hastings had held off calling in more troops but had decided late Tuesday to bring in the 14th Regiment from Pittsburgh (580 men), and now with their white tents pitched in rows where the park had been and on Prospect, the place began to look like a cross between a military encampment and a wide-open mining town. For along with the Army had come another Booth and Flinn gang of 1,100, and with the railroads bringing in their own crews, with more and more drifters arriving, by the end of the week there would be nearly 7,000 men at work in the valley. They too pitched tents or built rough shanties on the hillsides, upon which they hung names like “Lively Boys,” “Willing Workers,” and “The Ladies’ Pets.” They were making $2.00 a day, which was good money; and a man with a team could make $5.00, which was good enough to have attracted men all the way from Ohio and New York. And with the pay went “room and board.”

Enormous tents served as so-called dining halls, where several hundred men could be fed at a sitting. Coffee was ladled out of a bucket, bread was passed out in big dishpans, followed by more dishpans, each with a ten-pound slab of butter in it. When meals were ready, “the rush for the table cast the Oklahoma boom all in the shade,” wrote the
Times.

The men worked hard and made notable progress. By sundown Thursday more had been accomplished than in all the days since the disaster. The air rang with shouts and the screech of nails yanked out by crowbars. Hundreds of bonfires crackled and sent up columns of black smoke where now barrels of resin were being dumped on to burn up dead animals and the worst of the debris. Teams were hitched to mud-bound machinery and dangerous-looking walls that came down with a crash. There were tools enough now for every man, and by midweek a shipment of dynamite along with an expert to handle it had arrived to break the jam at the stone bridge.

So far every attempt to pull loose the debris there had failed. Locomotives and a steam winch had been tried, and a gang of lumberjacks from Michigan had done their best but had made hardly a dent. The ugly mass had been driven against the bridge with such savage force, and was so tightly ensnared by miles of barbed wire, that nothing, it seemed, could break it loose. Then for several days the valley echoed with the roar of dynamite as slowly, one by one, great gaps were blasted through the entanglement, which, most people believed, still held many human corpses.

The expert in charge was a man named Kirk, who was known among the press as “The Prince of Dynamiters.” He was short, squat, about fifty years old, with a grizzly beard and a habit, when walking, of waving his hands about as if warning people back from his next explosion.

“He personally superintends the preparations of all blasts,” wrote the
Times
man on the scene, “and when ready emits a peculiar cry more like a wail than a warning. Then he surveys the atmosphere with the air of a Major General and yells, ‘Fire!’ The yell often terrifies the spectators more than the explosion itself.” But on Saturday Kirk managed to scare the daylights out of everybody, and with a good deal more than his yell.

Despite the inroads he was making, he was not at all satisfied with the time the job was taking, so he cut loose with a 450-pound charge, hoping to break the jam with one blow. Nine fifty-pound boxes of dynamite were planted at the base of the mass, each set about thirty feet apart. The whole valley and every building that was still standing trembled with the blast. Horses shied violently. Work stopped all over town. And within no time Kirk had been told in quite explicit language by what seemed like half the surviving population that he was to pull no such stunt again. But a gaping hole had been gouged out of the wreckage and at last daylight could be seen under the arches.

Some men became so exhausted from the work that they had to give up and go home. Everyone by this time had grown more or less accustomed to the grisly look of the place, the smell, and the constant presence of death; but the work itself was grueling, and no matter how much was accomplished, there seemed always an insurmountable lot still left to be done.

The wreckage spewed across the city was far greater in quantity than all that had stood there before the flood. The water had swept the valley above the city of virtually everything that man had built there over some eighty years and dumped it on Johnstown. Now every last bit of it had to be cleaned up, searched through, burned, or carted away. On top of that, sanitation problems were enormous. One gang of workers did nothing but sprinkle disinfectants over the entire district, and as George Swank later wrote, there was “a fortune for the man who concocts a disinfectant that won’t stink the nose off a person.” Four thousand barrels of quicklime would be used before the cleanup was finished.

Another gang was detailed to gather and burn bedding, clothes, and carpets which had been ruined by the water. The houses that had not been swept away were left, as Dr. Matthews said, in the most unsanitary condition imaginable. “The flood water,” he wrote, “was heavily charged with every kind of filth, and whatever this water touched it contaminated. As a result, every house in the flooded district was filled, in most cases to the second floor, with most offensive matter. There was not a place which the flood touched where a man could lay his head with safety.”

One of the biggest and most unpleasant jobs was digging out hundreds of cellars. Where houses had been swept from their foundations, it was often close to impossible to tell where they had been, the cellars having been so completely filled in by the flood. But every one of them had to be shoveled clean and their foul contents hauled out of the city.

The work camps themselves were another part of the problem, with their “open plumbing, openly arrived at,” as one doctor described it. Within the first week there were something like ninety-eight doctors at work, who, along with the Army, helped enforce basic sanitary practices. But what helped most of all was the weather. For ten days following the flood, temperatures stayed low, skies clouded, and there were frequent drenching rains. It was, wrote Dr. Lee, head of the sanitation board, a “great advantage in delaying decomposition.” It was also miserable weather to work in or to be camping in amid the reeking muck.

On Friday morning Captain Bill Jones was back home in Pittsburgh, close to a state of collapse after working four straight days with almost no sleep or rest. Jones had paid out of his own pocket for the supplies he had brought to Johnstown and the wages of the men he had taken with him. In an interview with the Pittsburgh
Press
he gave great credit to the leadership Moxham had shown and added that he had had a hundred or so Hungarians working for him and that they had “worked like heroes.”

General Hastings held up handsomely against the strain. He rode about town on a big horse, waving his floppy hat, and, in the main, did a good job. Director James Scott stayed on day after day, working with boundless energy. He wound up growing a full beard during his time in Johnstown and lost thirty pounds.

But perhaps the most resilient worker of them all, and certainly the one who stirred up the most talk, was a stiff-spined little spinster in a plain black dress and muddy boots who had brought the newly organized American Red Cross in from Washington. Miss Clara Barton and her delegation of fifty doctors and nurses had arrived on the B & O early Wednesday morning.

Clara was sixty-seven. She had been through the Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, and several nervous breakdowns. For a while she had tried running a women’s prison in Massachusetts. But since 1881, when, after a long campaign, she had succeeded in establishing an American branch of the International Red Cross, little else had been of real interest to her. And though her position as president was only a part-time job, she had already been down the Ohio by river barge to help during the floods of 1884 and to Texas with food and supplies during the famine of 1887. She had taken her workers to Illinois after a tornado in ‘88, and later that same year to Florida during a yellow-fever epidemic.

But these had been minor challenges compared to Johnstown, which she realized the moment she saw the valley from her train window. When the news of the disaster had first reached Washington Friday night, she had postponed doing anything for twenty-four hours; the story seemed too frightful and improbable to be true. But once there she knew that her Red Cross had arrived at its first major disaster. The organization, she had long argued, was meant for just such emergencies, and now she intended to prove it.

She set up headquarters inside an abandoned railroad car and, using a packing box for a desk, began issuing orders. Hospital tents were to be opened immediately, construction was to start on temporary “hotels” for the homeless, and a house-to-house survey was to be conducted to see just how many people needed attention. Hastings, it appears, did not know quite what to make of all this, or of Clara. “I could not have puzzled General Hastings more if I had addressed him in Chinese,” she wrote later, adding that “the gallant soldier could not have been more courteous and kind.”

In her stocking feet Clara stood five feet tall. She had a prominent nose, bright, black eyes, and a resolute set to her mouth. She took what little sleep she needed on a hard, narrow cot and had no use for demon rum, bumbling male officials, or for that matter anyone who attempted to tell her how to run her business. “A keen, steadfast, powerful New England woman,” she was described as by one writer.