The viaduct was one of the landmarks of the country. It stood seventy-five feet high and bridged the river gap with one single eighty-foot arch. Even the biggest locomotives looked tiny by contrast as they chugged across it on their way up the mountain. Faced with a tawny-colored local sandstone, it was, as one engineer said, “a substantial and imposing piece of masonry,” which had been built by “an honest Scotch stonemason” named John Durno from a design worked out by the same Sylvester Welsh who had picked the site for the reservoir.
The bridge had been built to save running the railroad clear around the oxbow. A cut had been made across the oxbow, a distance of less than a hundred feet, and the tracks had been run through it to the bridge. At the eastern end of the cut, where the river bends off to the south, the tracks were about twenty feet above the normal water level. But at the western end, where the tracks started over the bridge, they were seventy feet above the river. Thus the river’s big two-mile loop to the south accomplished a drop of some fifty feet in elevation, which could have been achieved in less than a hundred feet, if the water were to take the path of the railroad cut.
When the flood hit this dividing point, part of the giant wave rushed through the cut at a depth of about twenty feet and plunged down over the top of the viaduct and into the deep river gully below, sweeping with it tons of debris which piled on top of the bridge or wedged between its huge arch.
Meanwhile, the rest of the water, and by far the greater proportion of it, crashed along the longer and more tortuous course of the river bed, heaped up to a height of perhaps seventy feet by the narrow channel and gathering before it the shredded refuse of two miles’ worth of heavy timber, rock, and mud. Perhaps six or seven minutes passed before it swung around the last big bend before the bridge. When it struck, it was almost as high as the bridge itself.
The bridge held momentarily. There was an awful booming crunch as debris piled against stone and virtually sealed off the already clogged arch, and the water surged back and forth, seething with yellow foam, mounting up and up until it was nearly eighty feet high. And then it started spurting over the top of the bridge, gushing between the boulders and mangled railroad cars, the broken planks, ties, and tree stumps that had been dumped there.
Now, for a brief instant (no one knows exactly how long it lasted), Lake Conemaugh formed again some five and a half miles downstream from its original resting place. It gathered itself together, held now by another dam, which however temporary was nonetheless as high as the first one; and when this second dam let go, it did so even more suddenly and with greater violence than the first one. The bridge collapsed all at once, and the water exploded into the valley with its maximum power now concentrated again by the momentary delay.
A mile or so beyond the bridge was the white frame village of Mineral Point, consisting of some thirty houses set in a row along a single street, Front Street, which ran parallel with the river on the north side of the river. It was a pretty little place, quiet, clean, tucked at the foot of the mountainside.
The river there was quite shallow and filled with rocks. The water was quick and bright, and its steady rushing among the rocks was the first sound people heard when they woke up in the morning and the last they heard as they dropped off to sleep at night. Except for the railroad, which ran along the opposite side of the river well above the roof line of the houses, Mineral Point looked as though it might have been a thousand miles from civilization. The air smelled of the river and of sweet, fresh-cut timber at the sawmill and furniture factory, the town’s sole supporting industry, which stood at the far end of Front Street.
The people who lived in Mineral Point had names like Reighard, Page, Sensebaugh, Gromley, Byers, and Burkhart, and there were perhaps 200 of them, if you counted some of the outlying families that picked up their mail there. The houses all faced the river and had deep lots, running back to where the woods started at the base of the hill. Fruit trees and truck gardens grew wonderfully in the moist soil put down by the river over long geologic ages.
Nothing much out of the ordinary had ever happened in Mineral Point. There had been a murder there once. A woman who was new to town and lived off to herself was killed by another stranger, a miner from over in the hard-coal country named Mickey Moore. The accepted story was that he was one of the Molly Maguires and that was the reason behind the killing. He had to carry out some dark oath. But that had been several years back. Mickey Moore had disappeared and life had gone on about as it always had, except that no child liked to stay out in the woods very long after dark. “Mickey Moore will get you,” they said to each other, “sure as anything.”
Beyond the last house, past the sawmill and around another bend or two in the river, and up on the opposite bank beside the railroad, was Mineral Point tower.
“I was sitting in the tower, and all at once, I heard a roar,” W. H. Pickerell testified later. “I looked up the track, and I seen the trees and water coming. I jumped up and throwed the window up, and climbed out on a tin roof around our office and walked around on it, and I saw the driftwood coming around the curve, and the channel filling up and running over the bank, and I heard voices; I could hear somebody hollowing, but I couldn’t see them, and I walked around until the drift came down, and looked out, and perhaps one third of the distance in the river, I saw a man standing on a house roof. He looked over and seen me and recognized me.
“He says, ‘Mineral Point is all swept away, and the people swept away, and my whole family is gone.’ I says, ‘Is that so?’ and I says, ‘Do you know anything of my family?’, and he says, ‘No, I don’t; I think they were all drowned.’
“Christ Montgomery was his name, and I says, ‘Cheer up, Christ, don’t give up; as long as you’re on top, there’s hope!’
“I didn’t more than have the words out of my mouth until the drift he was riding made a straight shoot for the shore, and struck one hundred or one hundred and fifty yards west of my office where the river made a short turn, and went all to pieces; shingles flew right up in the air.
“He got out all right. He grabbed into the bushes just about the time it struck and I didn’t see anything of him for a breath, and then he crawled up out of the bushes. After I cheered him up, and told him not to give up, that there was hope for him as long as he was on top; I turned around to walk into my office on this tin roof. I didn’t have more than fifteen feet to walk, but I almost fainted when he told me my whole family was drowned. I turned right around to come in the office, and as I climbed toward the window, I looked and saw the house roof striking shore and seen him light, and saw him crawl up on his hands and knees, and saw he was saved, and when I looked above, there was a regular mountain of water coming. He was probably ahead of the main body of water a little.
“I started without coat or hat, and as it was pouring down raining at the time, I turned around to get my coat and hat, and ran with them in my hand onto the opposite side of the track onto a high bank, and when I looked up the track, the wave wasn’t more than a hundred yards off, and I beckoned for this man to get off the track. He wasn’t looking for it to come down the track, and he got out on the track ahead of it, and came pretty near getting caught the second time.”
Pickerell did not get caught at all nor, as things turned out, did any of his family, which was true of almost everyone else in Mineral Point.
The water had been coming up so fast that morning and during the early afternoon that most families had long since pulled out to higher ground by the time the flood fell on Front Street. First floors had been part way under water from about noon on, and there was no seeing the street or the riverbank. Picket fences, chicken coops, and backhouses had been drowned or had floated away as early as dinnertime.
But when the flood came, the wall of water swept through in such a way that it left almost nothing to suggest that there had ever been such a place as Mineral Point. The town was simply shaved off, right down to the bare rock.
The number of deaths ca
me to sixteen, and quite a few people, like Christ Montgomery, went racing off on wild downstream rides astride their own rooftops. Christopher Gromley and his son traveled four miles before they were able to leap safely to shore; and three hours later, when they finally made it back to where Mineral Point had been, they found that all the other members of their family, Mrs. Gromley and six more children, were dead.
The water moved straight on down the valley, picking up a little speed wherever there were fewer turns to eat up its momentum and slowing down wherever the course began twisting again.
Estimates are that, in some places, it may have been moving as much as forty miles an hour. Theoretically, if its weight and the average decline in elevation (thirty-three feet per mile) are taken into account, it had a speed of nearly ninety miles per hour. But the friction created by the rough terrain and the rubbish it pushed before it cut that speed drastically. What is more, its over-all rate of advance was extremely fitful. The wall of debris and water came on not steadily but in an irregular series of thunderous cheks and rushes.
At times, eyewitnesses said later, the debris would even clog the path enough to bring the whole thing to a mementary standstill. All the crushed and tangled sweepings from the dam down would lock clear across the valley, seeming almost more than the millions of tons of pressure from behind could budge.
But then the whole seething mass would burst apart, with trees and telegraph poles flying into the air, as though blasted by dynamite, and the water would rush forward again, even faster. And as it moved on, the water kept on tossing logs and roots above its surface, as though the whole mass were full of life.
The friction set up by the terrain and the debris also caused the bottom of the mass of water to move much slower than the top. As a result the top was continually sliding over the bottom and down the front of the advancing wall, like a cake of ice across a slick board. The water, in other words, was rolling over itself all the time it was passing forward, and this caused a violent downward smashing, like a monstrous surf falling on a beach, that could crush almost anything in its path. A man caught under it had no chance at all. In fact, one of the major problems later on would be finding the bodies that had been pounded deep down into the mud.
Work train Number Two out of East Conemaugh was standing on the track nearest the hillside about a half mile upstream from the Conemaugh yards, at a place called Buttermilk Falls. The engineer sitting inside the rain-soaked cab was a friendly looking man with a round face and a dashing set of muttonchop whiskers. His name was John Hess.
Normally he never worked east of the yards. His division ran west from Conemaugh, as far as Sang Hollow, which was three miles below Johnstown. But today, with trouble almost everywhere along the line, help was being sent wherever it was needed.
Hess had gone to his regular engine as usual that morning and had been told to take a work crew down to Cambria City to clear a slide. His conductor was R. C. Liggett, his fireman, J. B. Plummer.
They had gotten through to Cambria City without any problems and worked there until nearly eleven, when an order came through to go clear up the valley to a landslide at Wilmore, on the far side of south Fork. At Johnstown and East Conemaugh there had been delays of twenty minutes and more, but sometime between noon and one they had started out of the yards, running east along the Little Conemaugh on the track farthest back from the water against the hillside. Less than a mile out they passed a place where a good hundred feet of track on the right had fallen off into the river. Beyond “AO” tower they came up on a flagman.
“I stopped to let him on,” Hess recalled later, “and he says, ‘You can’t go any further.’ And I asked him why, and he says, ‘The north track is in the river and I don’t believe the one you’re on is safe,’ and I says, ‘Whereabouts? and he says, ‘Right through the big cut.’ We went through the big cut to where the washout was, and seen it was badly washed, and I says to the conductor, ‘I guess we’ll have to take it afoot from here, and see where it is safe.’ The conductor is an old experienced man, and he looked at the track we were on, and he says, ‘It isn’t safe, I won’t run over that.’ It was washed up to the ends of the ties and underneath the track, and undermined it; the ballast was still sticking to the ties; the ties seemed to be holding it up. He says, ‘That isn’t safe at all,’ and we walked on up to Mineral Point, the next tower, and were going to report there but the operator told us he had no communication except with South Fork.”
The operator, W. H. Pickerell, also told them about the messages which had been coming through from South Fork concerning the dam.
The men tramped back down the tracks to “AO” tower, where they took time out to eat. When the finished, it was about two o’clock and there was another message from East Conemaugh about a slide at Buttermilk Falls.
“We came down there,” Hess said, “and found the track that we had went up on. The conductor thought at first it was unsafe, and we walked down over it and left the engine above it, and he suggested to cut couple cars off—we had seven empty flats and the cabin ahead of our engine, and he suggested to cut off a couple cars and run them over to see whether it was safe, and probably we could bring the rest over. So we sent a man with two cars down over this dangerous place, and the bank didn’t appear to slip much, and I brought the engine and rest of the train over. That left us on the Conemaugh side of this washout. I went down and the brakeman coupled up those cars that they had sent down ahead, and the conductor took the men with their shovels and went back to the slide about one hundred yards back of where we were laying.
“I don’t suppose we had laid there more than twenty minutes until we heard the flood coming. We didn’t see it but we heard the noise of it coming. It was like a hurricane through wooded country.”
Conductor Liggett heard the sound and thought he saw the tops of the trees bend on the flat upstream between the railroad and the river.
“And I says to the men, ‘We’ll get away from here,’ and I still looked, and then I was satisfied there was something coming. I couldn’t see any rubbish or drift, but I saw there was a commotion among the green timber.”
He shouted at the men to run. They dropped their tools and started down the tracks looking for a place where they could climb out of the way. But the rocks were too steep. They had to keep running, 200, 300, nearly 400 yards before they found a path.
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 screamin
g 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.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 251