David McCullough Library E-book Box Set

by David McCullough

  It would be as though the whole sky were laying siege to the burly landscape. The rain would drum down like an unyielding river. Lightning would flash blue-white, again and again across the sky, and thunderclaps would boom back and forth down the valley like a cannonade, rattling every window along the lakeshore.

  Then, almost as suddenly as it had started, the siege would lift, and silent, milky steam would rise from the surface of the water and the rank smell of the sodden forest floor would hang on in the air for hours.

  Tonight, however, it appeared there was to be no storm. Parke turned and walked back inside. About nine-thirty he went upstairs, climbed into bed, and went to sleep.

  About an hour and a half later, very near eleven, the rain began. It came slamming through the blackness in huge wind-driven sheets, beating against the clubhouse, the tossing trees, the lake, and the dark, untamed country that stretched off in every direction for miles and miles.

  The storm had started out of Kansas and Nebraska, two days before, on May 28. The following day there had been hard rains in Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Trains had been delayed, roads washed out. In Kansas, along the Cottonwood River, a dozen farms had been flattened by tornado-force winds and several people had been killed. In northern Michigan and parts of Indiana there had been sudden snow squalls. Warnings had been telegraphed east. On the night of the 29th the U.S. Signal Service issued notices that the Middle Atlantic states were in for severe local storms. On the morning of May 30 all stations in the area reported “threatening weather.”

  When the storm struck western Pennsylvania it was the worst downpour that had ever been recorded for that section of the country. The Signal Service called it the most extensive rainfall of the century for so large an area and estimated that from six to eight inches of rain fell in twenty-four hours over nearly the entire central section. On the mountains there were places where the fall was ten inches.

  But, at the same time, there were astonishing disparities between the amount of rainfall at places within less than a hundred-mile radius. At the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, for example, a pail left outside overnight would have five inches of water in it the next morning when the rain was still coming down. The total rainfall at the clubhouse would be somewhere near seven inches. In Pittsburgh, just sixty-five miles to the west as the crow flies, the total rainfall would be only one and a half inches.

  But as the storm beat down on the mountain that night, John G. Parke, Jr., who would turn twenty-three in less than a month, slept on, never hearing a thing.

  –2–

  Most of the holiday crowds were back from the cemetery by the time the rain began Thursday afternoon. It had been the customary sort of Memorial Day in Johnstown, despite the weather.

  People had been gathering along Main Street since noon. With the stores closed until six, with school out, and the men off from the mills, it looked as though the whole town was turning out. Visitors were everywhere, in by special trains from Somerset, Altoona, and other neighboring towns. The Ancient Order of Hibernians, “a stalwart, vigorous looking body of men,” as the Johnstown Tribune described them, was stopping over for its annual state convention. Hotels were full and the forty-odd saloons in Johnstown proper were doing a brisk business.

  The Reverend H. L. Chapman, who lived two doors off Main, in the new Methodist parsonage facing the park, later wrote, “The morning was delightful, the city was in its gayest mood, with flags, banners and flowers everywhere…we could see almost everything of interest from our porch. The streets were more crowded than we had ever seen before.”

  The parade, late starting as always, got under way about two-thirty, marched up Main, past the Morrell place, on by the Presbyterian Church and the park, clear to Bedford Street. There it turned south and headed out along the river to Sandy Vale, where the war dead were buried. The fire department marched, the Morrellville Odd Fellows, the Austrian Music Society, the Horners-town Drum Corps, the Grand Army Veterans, and the Sons of Veterans, and half a dozen or more other groups of various shapes and sizes, every one of them getting a big cheer, and especially the Grand Army men, several of whom were beginning to look as though the three-mile tramp was a little more than they were up to.

  How much things had changed since they had marched off to save the Union! It had been nearly thirty years since Lincoln had first called for volunteers. Grant and Lee were both dead, and there were strapping steelworkers with thick, black mustaches standing among the crowds along Main Street who had been born since Appomattox.

  At the start of the war Johnstown had been no more than a third the size it was now; and ten years before that, it had been nothing but a sleepy little canal town with elderbushes growing high along Main, and so quiet you could hear the boat horns before the barges cleared the bend below town.

  But ever since the war, with the west opening up, the Cambria Iron Company had had its giant three-ton converters going night and day making steel for rails and barbed wire, plowshares, track bolts, and spring teeth for harrows. The valley was full of smoke, and the city clanked and whistled and rumbled loud enough to be heard from miles off. At night the sky gleamed so red it looked as though the whole valley were on fire. James Quinn, one of Johns-town’s most distinguished-looking Grand Army veterans and its leading dry-goods merchant, enjoyed few sights more. “The sure sign of prosperity,” he called it.

  Years after, Charlie Schwab, the most flamboyant of Carnegie’s men, described the view of Johnstown from his boyhood home in the mountain town of Loretto, nearly twenty miles to the northeast.

  “Along toward dusk tongues of flame would shoot up in the pall around Johnstown. When some furnace door was opened the evening turned red. A boy watching from the rim of hills had a vast arena before him, a place of vague forms, great labors, and dancing fires. And the murk always present, the smell of the foundry. It gets into your hair, your clothes, even your blood.”

  Most of the men watching the parade that Memorial Day would have taken a somewhat less romantic view. In the rolling mills they worked under intense heat on slippery iron floors where molten metal went tearing by and one false step or slow reaction could mean horrible accidents. Most of them worked a ten-or even twelve-hour day, six days a week, and many weeks they worked the hated “long turn,” which meant all day Sunday and on into Monday. If they got ten dollars for a week’s work they were doing well.

  A visiting journalist in 1885 described Johnstown as “new, rough, and busy, with the rush of huge mills and factories and the throb of perpetually passing trains.” The mills were set just below town in the gap in the mountains where the Conemaugh River flows westward. On the hillside close to the mills the trees had turned an evil-looking black and grew no leaves.

  Johnstown of 1889 was not a pretty place. But the land around it was magnificent. From Main Street, a man standing among the holiday crowds could see green hills, small mountains, really, hunching in close on every side, dwarfing the tops of the houses and smokestacks.

  The city was built on a nearly level flood plain at the confluence of two rivers, down at the bottom of an enormous hole in the Alleghenies. A visitor from the Middle West once commented, “Your sun rises at ten and sets at two,” and it was not too great an exaggeration.

  The rivers, except in spring, appeared to be of little consequence. The Little Conemaugh and Stony Creek, or the Stony Creek, as everyone in Johnstown has always said (since it is the Stony Creek River), are both more like rocky, oversized mountain streams than rivers. They are about sixty to eighty yards wide. Normally their current is very fast; in spring they run wild. But on toward August, as one writer of the 1880’s said, there are places on either river where a good jumper could cross on dry stones.

  The Little Conemaugh, which is much the swifter of the two, rushes in from the east, from the Allegheny Mountain. It begins near the very top of the mountain, about eighteen miles from Johnstown, at a coal town called Lilly. Its so
urces are Bear Rock Run and Bear Creek, Trout Run, Bens Creek, Laurel Run, South Fork Creek, Clapboard Run and Saltlick Creek. From an elevation of 2,300 feet at Lilly, the Little Conemaugh drops 1,147 feet to Johnstown.

  The Stony Creek flows in from the south. It is a broader, deeper river than the other and is fed by streams with names like Beaver Dam Run, Fallen Timber Run, Shade Creek, and Paint Creek. Its total drainage is considerably more than that of the Little Conemaugh, and until 1889 it had always been thought to be the more dangerous of the two.

  When they meet at Johnstown, the rivers form the Conemaugh, which, farther west, joins the Loyalhanna to form the Kiskiminetas, which in turn flows into the Allegheny about eighteen miles above Pittsburgh.

  At Johnstown it was as though the bottom had dropped out of the old earth and left it angry and smoldering, while all around, the long, densely forested ridges, “hogbacks” they were called, rolled off in every direction like a turbulent green sea. The climb up out of the city took the breath right out of you. But on top it was as though you had entered another world, clean, open, and sweet-smelling.

  In 1889 there were still black bear and wildcats on Laurel Hill to the west of town. Though the loggers had long since stripped the near hills, there were still places within an hour’s walk from Main Street where the forest was not much different than it had been a hundred years before.

  Now and then an eagle could still be spotted high overhead. There were pheasants, ruffed grouse, geese, loons, and wild turkeys that weighed as much as twenty pounds. Plenty of men marching in the parade could remember the time before the war when there had been panthers in the mountains big enough to carry off a whole sheep. And it had been only a few years earlier when passenger pigeons came across the valley in numbers beyond belief. One January the Tribune wrote: “On Saturday there were immense flocks of wild pigeons flying over town, but yesterday it seemed as if all the birds of this kind at present in existence throughout the entire country were engaged in gyrating around overhead. One flock was declared to be at least three miles in length by half a mile wide.”

  Still, many days there were in the valley itself when the wind swept away the smoke and the acrid smell of the mills and the air was as good as a man could ask for. Many nights, and especially in winter, were the way mountain nights were meant to be, with millions of big stars hanging overhead in a sky the color of coal.

  Looking back, most of the people who would remember Johnstown as it was on that Memorial Day claimed it was not as unpleasant a place as one might imagine. “People were poor, very poor by later standards,” one man said, “but they didn’t know it.” And there was an energy, a vitality to life that they would miss in later years.

  Many of the millworkers lived in cheap, pine-board company houses along the riverbanks, where, as the Tribune put it, “Loud and pestiferous stinks prevail.” But there were no hideous slums, such as had spread across the Lower East Side of New York or in Chicago and Pittsburgh. The kind of appalling conditions that would be described the next year by Jacob Riis in his How the Other Half Lives did not exist then in Johnstown. No one went hungry, or begging, though there were always tramps about, drifters, who came with the railroad, heading west nearly always, knocking at back doors for something to eat.

  They were part of the landscape and people took them for granted, except when they started coming through in big numbers and there were alarming stories in the papers about crowds of them hanging around the depot.

  One diary, kept by a man who lived outside of town, includes a day-by-day tramp count. “Wednesday, May 1, 1889, Two Tramps…Thursday, May 2, Two Tramps,” and so on, with nearly a tramp or two every day, week after week.

  New people came to town, found a job or, if not, moved on again, toward Pittsburgh. But for most everyone who decided to stay there was work. Although lately, Johnstown men, too, had been picking up and going west to try their luck at the mills in St. Louis or the mines in Colorado. And lately the jobs they left behind were being filled by “hunkies” brought in to “work cheap.”

  The idea did not please people much. Nor did it matter whether the contract workers were Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Russians, or Swedes; they were all called Hungarians, “bohunks” or “hunkies.” But so far, and again unlike the big cities, Johnstown had only a few such men, and most of them lived in Cambria City, just down the river, beyond the new stone bridge that carried the main line of the Pennsylvania across the Conemaugh.

  The vast majority of the people who lined Main Street watching the parade were either Irish, Scotch-Irish, or Cornish (Cousin Jacks, they were called), German or Welsh, with the Germans and the Welsh greatly outnumbering all the rest. There were some Negroes, but not many, and a few of the leading merchants were Jews.

  The Germans and the Welsh had been the first settlers. More of them, plus the Scotch-Irish, had come along soon after to work in the mines and first forges. Quite a few of the big Irishmen in the crowd had come in originally to build the railroad, then stayed on. Johnstown had been an active stop along the Underground Railroad, and a few of the Negroes had come in that way. Others of them came later to work in the tannery.

  There were German and Welsh churches in town, a German newspaper, and several Irish fortunetellers. Welsh and German were spoken everywhere, along with enough other brogues, burrs, and twangs to make a “plain American” feel he was in a country of “feriners,” or so it often seemed.

  The first white settlers in the valley had been Solomon and Samuel Adams and their sister Rachael, who came over the Allegheny Mountains from Bedford about 1771 and cleared a patch of land near the Stony Creek. Until then the place had been known as Conemack Old Town, after a Delaware Indian village that stood about where the Memorial Day parade had gathered that noon at the foot of Main.

  Samuel Adams and an Indian killed each other in a knife fight, and the traditional story is that Rachael was also killed by Indians soon after. Solomon made a fast retreat back to the stockade at Bedford, and it was not for another twenty years or thereabouts that the first permanent settler arrived. In 1794, about the time President Washington was sending an army over the mountains to put down the so-called Whiskey Rebellion in Pittsburgh, Joseph Schantz, or Johns, an Amish farmer from Switzerland, came into the valley with his wife and four children. He cleared off thirty acres between the rivers, raised a cabin, planted an orchard, and laid out a village which he called Conemaugh Old Town—or just Conemaugh—and which he had every hope for becoming the county seat.

  When the county was established in 1804 and given the old Latin name for Wales—Cambria—Ebensburg, a mountain village fifteen miles to the north, was picked as county seat. Three years later Joseph Johns sold his village and moved on.

  The next proprietor was a long-haired “York County Dutchman” (a Pennsylvania German) named Peter Levergood, and from then until the canal came through, the town remained no more than a backwoods trading center. But with the arrival of the canal it became the busiest place in the county. By 1835 Johnstown, as it was by then known, had a drugstore, a newspaper, a Presbyterian church, and a distillery. By 1840 its population, if the nearby settlements were counted, had probably passed 3,000. Then, in the 1850’s, the Pennsylvania Railroad came through, the Cambria Iron Company was established, and everything changed.

  By the start of the 1880’s Johnstown and its neighboring boroughs had a total population of about 15,000. Within the next nine years the population doubled. On the afternoon of May 30, 1889, there were nearly 30,000 people living in the valley.

  Properly speaking Johnstown was only one of several boroughs—East Conemaugh, Woodvale, Conemaugh, Cambria City, Prospect, Millville, Morrellville, Grubbtown, Moxham, Johnstown—which were clustered between the hills, packed in so tight that there was scarcely room to build anything more.

  Petty political jealousies and differences over taxes had kept them from uniting. As it was there was no telling where one began or the other ended unless you knew, which, o
f course, everyone who lived there did. Millville, Prospect, and Cambria City, it was said, lived on the pay roll of the Cambria mills; Conemaugh lived on the Gautier wire works, Woodvale on the woolen mills there, and Johnstown, in turn, lived on all the rest of them. Johnstown was the center of the lot, geographically and in every other way. It was far and away the largest, with a population of its own of perhaps 10,000 by 1889, which was four times greater than even the biggest of the others. The banks were there, the hotels, the jail, and a full-time police force of nine.

  There were five-story office buildings on Main and up-to-date stores. The town had an opera house, a night school, a library, a remarkable number of churches, and several large, handsome houses, most of which were owned by men high up in the Iron Company.

  Much would be written later on how the wealthy men of Johnstown lived on the high ground, while the poor were crowded into the lowlands. The fact was that the most imposing houses in town were all on Main Street, and one of the largest clusters of company houses was up on Prospect Hill.

  The rest of the people lived in two-and three-story frame houses which, often as not, had a small porch in front and a yard with shade trees and a few outbuildings in back. Nearly everyone had a picket fence around his property, and in spite of its frenzied growth, the city still had more than a few signs of its recent village past.

  On the 22nd of May, for example, the town fathers had gathered at the City Council chambers to settle various matters of the moment, the most pressing of which was to amend Section 12 of Chapter XVI of the Codified Ordinance of the Borough of Johnstown. The word “cow” was to be inserted after “goat” in the third line, so that it would from then on read: “Section 12. Any person who shall willfully suffer his horse, mare, gelding, mule, hog, goat, cow, or geese to run at large within the Borough shall for each offense forfeit and pay for each of said animals so running at large the sum of one dollar…”