The Johnstown Flood (28 page)

Within a very short time several large tents were serving as the cleanest, best-organized hospitals in town; six Red Cross hotels, two stories tall, with hot and cold running water, kitchens, and laundries, had been built with some of the fresh lumber on hand; and Clara herself was situated in her own command tent with the Red Cross banner flying overhead. When the survey was completed it was found that a large number of people with serious injuries had been too weak or broken in spirit to do anything to help themselves. Moreover, a surprising number of cases of prolonged shock were discovered, a phenomenon that would also be noted by a correspondent for the
Medical News
of Philadelphia. “A profound melancholia,” he called it, “associated with an almost absolute disregard of the future” and evidenced by “a peculiar intonation of words, the persons speaking mechanically.”

Clara and her people did their best to tend everyone they could. Clara herself worked almost round the clock, directing hundreds of volunteers, distributing nearly half a million dollars’ worth of blankets, clothing, food, and cash. She also spoke her mind once or twice to the head of the Philadelphia chapter of the Red Cross, with the result that within a few days neither group would have anything to do with the other.

There seems little doubt that except for Hastings she was the best-known, among the people of Johnstown, of all the outsiders on hand and certainly the one who would be remembered the longest. She stoutly proclaimed that the Red Cross was there to stay as long as there was work to do. “We are always the last to leave the field,” she said. She seemed to be everywhere at once, bouncing through the streets in a buckboard, scrutinizing the way things were being handled, whether she had anything to do with them or not. On one such ride she was accompanied by an Episcopal priest who was afraid she would be jolted to pieces and told her so. “Oh, this is nothing,” she shouted back, “so long as we have no bullets flying around us.”

Clara stayed for five months, never once leaving the scene even for a day. In October, when she did finally pack up and go, it was with all sorts of official blessings and thanks. She was presented with a diamond locket from the people of Johnstown; glowing editorials were written (“…too…too much cannot be said in praise of this lady…To her timely and heroic work, more than to that of any other human being, are the people of the Conemaugh Valley indebted…”); and back home in Washington a dinner was given in her honor at the Willard with the President and Mrs. Harrison in attendance. The Red Cross had clearly arrived.

There were others who would be remembered. A few smalltime crooks slipped in with the crowds. They queued up with the flood victims to collect whatever the Red Cross happened to be handing out at the moment or grabbed what they could from the debris. One or two suspicious-looking characters were nabbed before they had a chance to do much of anything and were swiftly hustled out of town. There were some, too, who simply hung around long enough to educate themselves on the place, then lit off to play on the sympathy of neighboring towns, describing the horrors of the devastation and their own heart-rending experiences in the flood at one back doorstep after another. One of them who went straight to Pittsburgh even managed to take the Relief Committee there for a good deal of cash before he was found out.

A handful of crackpots appeared on the scene, most of whom were of the religious-fanatic sort, and the most memorable of them was a gaunt prophet from Pittsburgh known as “Lewis, the Light,” who wore nothing but long, red underwear and passed out handbills that said, among other things:

Then there were the “harpies,” as some of the newspaper correspondents called them, who apparently came in from Pittsburgh. It was reported that a number of them had been seen at points along the line from Johnstown to Pittsburgh trying to recruit girls for “their nefarious calling” among the prettiest flood victims. Several who had tried to board the trains had been put off, but enough of them managed one way or other to reach Johnstown, so that within not too long a time Prospect Hill was making its own lively contribution to the mining-camp spirit of the place. Prospect “is overridden with bawdy houses and places for the illicit sale of liquor,” one police official said.

This in turn added fuel to the cause of the W.C.T.U. ladies who had arrived almost immediately after the disaster and stayed on as the valley filled up with more and more men and as the demand for strong drink grew apace. Through most of June, Hastings kept the lid on liquor sales; the only thing being served was lemonade, which was sold at little makeshift stands through town. When, in July, the liquor ban was lifted, the lemonade concessions went immediately out of business. Twenty-two celebrants were arrested the first day, and George Swank wrote in the
Tribune
that the lemonade had “made more sickness than all the beer and whiskey that could be drunk.”

And, of course, there were the sight-seers. They had been coming almost from the first morning after the disaster. They came into South Fork by special trains from Altoona. They arrived in Johnstown on excursion trains that chugged in along the B & O weekend mornings. On Sunday, June 23, several hundred arrived, turned out in holiday attire and carrying picnic baskets. It seemed incredible; but there they were. The wreckage at the stone bridge seemed to fascinate them the most. But they strolled about everywhere, got in the way, set up their lunch parties inside abandoned houses, laughed, took pictures, asked a lot of silly questions, and infuriated nearly everyone except a few enterprising local men who set up booths and began selling official Johnstown Flood relics: broken china, piano keys, beer bottles, horseshoes, buttons, even bits of brick or wood shingles.

Hastings and the other officials kept asking the railroads to stop selling tickets to anyone who had no rightful business in Johnstown; before the month was out the railroads had agreed to comply as best they could and the number of visitors dropped off sharply.

Actually there would have been many more sight-seers than there were had there not been such widespread fear of disease; and though the cooperation of the railroads helped considerably to diminish the problem, the real turn came when it became known that typhoid fever had actually broken out in the valley.

The first clear-cut case was identified on Monday, June 10. More cases were found in the next several days, but the news was kept quiet. Within a week, however, the disease had spread swiftly and so had the rumors. By July 25 there would be 215 cases of typhoid within the flooded area and 246 beyond.

The doctors and sanitation crews, already dog-tired, flew into a frenzy of activity, working night and day to stop the thing and to keep the valley from panicking. Considering what might have happened under the circumstances, they did a spectacular job. But before the summer ended, forty people would die of typhoid; and like those who died of injuries or exposure in the first days after the disaster, they would not be included in the official figure given for the flood’s victims.

Interestingly enough, along with the typhoid, there ran a long spell of unusually good health in Johnstown. There were fewer colds, fewer cases of measles, and fewer people complaining of “spring disorders” than there would have been under normal conditions. Those who managed to stay healthy through the first frightful days immediately following the disaster, stayed very healthy from then on. The regulations and precautions enforced by the sanitation people undoubtedly had a great deal to do with this, but so, most everyone would later agree, did the fact that there was by the end of the first week something almost like a spirit of exhilaration in the air. There was so much happening all around. Every day there was some kind of excitement. Those who had survived, despite how much they may have suffered, began to discover new energy in themselves. They were alive, and bad as things were that was still a lot better than being dead. And there was now so very much to be done.

There were exceptions, to be sure. Dr. Swan, for example, was so broken in spirit by what he had been through that he would never be able to practice medicine again. And the only fatality among the polyglot army of people brought in to help was a suicide among General Hasting’s troops. Sunday afternoon a moody farm boy with a wife and two children back home became so depressed by what he had seen that he went into his tent and shot himself through the head.

But for nearly everyone else the almost absurd idea that they were going to pick up and start over again, to rebuild everything, began working like a tonic. They started pulling together what was left of their old lives and got to work on the new.

Most of them had precious little left of the old. Dr. Matthews, who had opened a new practice in Johnstown just a few months before the flood, found not a shred of all that he had owned except for one shaving mug. Of George and Mathilde Heiser’s earthly possessions, the only thing recovered was a big wardrobe which young Victor retrieved from the wreckage on Main Street. When he pried open the door, he found his father’s old Civil War uniform inside, and in one pocket a single penny. It represented his entire inheritance.

Men like Horace Rose and John Fulton had lost their homes and virtually everything else they owned. James Quinn and his brother-in-law were able to recover scarcely a single board from their dry-goods store. The only possessions recovered from the Quinn home were some books, a photograph album, and some silverware, which were found scattered a mile or more from where the house had stood.

Quinn, like hundreds of others, had sent his children off to Pittsburgh to live with relatives, while he stayed on to do what he could to help. But there were a few days before they left which the children would remember always. For nearly every child who survived, the week after the flood was a time of high adventure. The dynamite blasting at the bridge, the commissaries with their wondrous stacks of goods, the mobs of strangers tramping through the streets, the Iron Company’s little wood-burning switching engines with their bell-shaped stacks shunting back and forth moving supplies, the nuns, the soldiers, the Pittsburgh firemen in their long rubber coats, were all something to see.

Gangs of small boys made great sport of sneaking past the sentries posted about town, or crawling among the rows of tents. Little prefabricated houses, called “Oklahomas,” were being put up everywhere, and often, if he acted sensible enough, a boy could get a chance to help out. And every child, it seemed, took up relic hunting. “Every yard would yield something if one had the energy to dig,” Gertrude Quinn wrote later. Gold and jewelry were supposedly being found all over town. One story had it that a crockery jar full of $6,500 worth of gold had been found in the mud where old William Macpherson had had his grocery store. Gertrude Quinn’s sister Marie found a two-and-a-half-dollar goldpiece. And it was no trick at all to find half dimes or three-cent pieces or even a shirt stud with what looked like a diamond in it.

On Sunday, the 9th, the sun broke through for the first time since the flood. The spring green of the hills gleamed in bright morning sunlight, and overhead there were only a few small, soft clouds, and all the rest of the sky was a clean blue. Work went on the same as any other day. The air, already warmer than it had been for weeks, rang with the sound of picks and axes, hundreds of hammers, and, strangely it seemed at first, church bells.

On the embankment near the depot, just back from where Hastings had his headquarters, the chaplain of the 14th Regiment, H. L. Chapman, and David Beale began conducting the first services since the flood.

There were no more than thirty people gathered at first, but as time passed the crowd grew. Soldiers hanging about nearby drifted over. People came from the depot and over from the center of town. Beale stood on a packing box and told a story about over-hearing a newcomer in the valley ask a small boy how bad things were in Johnstown, to which the boy was said to have replied, “If I was the biggest liar on the face of the earth I could not tell you half.”

The rest of the service went as might be expected until John Fulton got up and started saying things that soon had the crowd stirring.

He said the Cambria shops would be rebuilt. “Amen!” answered several voices. “Johnstown is going to be rebuilt,” he said. “Thank God!” someone answered again.

He said he could not speak for the Gautier works, but he was sure, nonetheless, that they, too, would be rebuilt, and bigger than ever. The Cambria men would be taken care of, he told them, and if you still have your family left, he said, then “God bless your soul, man, you’re rich.” His sermon was simple: “Get to work, clean up your department, set your lathes going again. The furnaces are all right, the steel works are all right. Get to work, I say. That’s the way to look at this sort of thing…Think how much worse it could have been. Give thanks for that great stone bridge that saved hundreds of lives. Give thanks that it did not come in the night. Trust in God. Johnstown had its day of woe and ruin. It will have its day of renewed prosperity. Labor, energy, and capital, by God’s grace, shall make the city more thriving than ever in the past.”

“Amen!” again from the crowd.

That Johnstown should be rebuilt was by now taken as a matter of course. That it should be rebuilt right where it was before was also something everybody took for granted. No matter how dreadfully the valley had been ravaged, it was still their home. In fact, there is no record of anyone ever seriously considering the idea of not rebuilding in that particular place. The only question now was how long was it going to take to get things rolling once more.

The scene on the hillside would be remembered for years. Fulton, tall and spare, with his iron-gray beard and dark brow, certainly looked and sounded like a man of God; but he was also, as everyone knew, the voice of the Cambria Iron Company speaking, and as sincere as he may have been in asking them to trust in the Lord, his audience had had somewhat more experience putting its trust in the Cambria Iron Company. And either way, any man who could speak for both God and the Iron Company was someone to listen to closely.