But when dinnertime had passed and there still seemed no end to the rain and any chance of moving on seemed even less likely, whatever spirit of adventure there had been faded rapidly. The passengers had nearly all returned to the trains. They passed the time as best they could in the dim afternoon light, with the sound of the pelting rain all around them.
Elizabeth Bryan of Philadelphia sat looking out the window, while beside her, her friend Jennie Paulson of Pittsburgh read a novel titled Miss Lou. The girls had been to a wedding in Pittsburgh the day before and were on their way to New York, each wearing a small corsage of roses. Another passenger, the Reverend T. H. Robinson, a professor at the Western Theological Seminary in Allegheny, was busy writing a diary of the day’s events for his wife.
Others were doing what they could to amuse their children. Some slept. One elderly gentleman, feeling slightly ill, had had his berth made up and retired for the day. Still others gathered in small clusters along the aisles to talk about the storm and the rising river, service on the Pennsylvania, the dismal prospect of the night ahead, or the possibility of getting a decent meal somewhere.
There was talk too about the dam farther up the mountain that everyone had been hearing about. But there was not much concern about it.
“The possibility of the dam giving way had been often discussed by passengers in my presence,” one man, a bank teller from New Jersey, was later quoted, “and everybody supposed that the utmost danger it would do when it broke, as everybody believed it sometime would, would be to swell a little higher the current that tore down through Conemaugh Valley. Such a possibility as the carrying away of a train of cars on the great Pennsylvania Railroad was never seriously entertained by anybody.”
Another passenger said that though many people may have been uneasy and were keeping “a pretty good lookout for information,” the porters comforted them “with the assurance that the Pennsylvania Railroad Company always took care of its patrons.”
So far whoever was directing things in the yard had chosen to move them twice. Twice they had watched the river working in on the tracks where the two trains stood, twice they had been moved forward and toward the hill, to be farther away from the river, and both times they had seen the tracks fall off into the water very soon after.
Now they were on the last sidings next to town, as far from the river as it was possible to be. The second section was on the track beside the depot and closest to town. Then came the first section, on the next track toward the river; and on the other side of it, four tracks over, was the local mail train. The Day Express engines were standing about even with the depot, with Section Two a few cars farther forward. The last cars were nearly on line with the telegraph tower, which stood on the river side of the tracks.
In the caboose of the mail train, which was nearest of the three to the tower, a fire was going in the stove and the conductors and others of the train crews were sitting about keeping warm between turns at checking in at the tower.
Messages had been coming in and going out of the tower steadily since early morning, and included those from South Fork. One operator, D. M. Montgomery, was later quoted as saying that the South Fork warning was generally well known. “But of course,” he added, “nobody paid any more attention to it than if there hadn’t been one at all. I know I didn’t for one. It seemed like a rumor and they didn’t take any belief in it.”
Charles Haak, another operator in the tower, and the one who had passed along the first message from South Fork to the yardmaster’s office downstairs, said he did not pay much attention to the warnings either.
“I was a stranger there,” Haak said. “I had only been there but eight months, and of course, I listened to other people around there, residents there, and there was talk about the dam breaking, and they said there had been rumors but it never came, and so I thought that was how it would be this time.”
As for the decisions on which trains to put where, they were being made by J. C. Walkinshaw, the yardmaster, who had been on duty since six that morning.
Walkinshaw was forty-nine years old, a widower with five children. He had worked for the Pennsylvania since he was seventeen and had been in charge of the East Conemaugh yards for twenty-three years. In a book of short biographical sketches of long-time company employees published later by the railroad, Walkinshaw peers out of a small photograph with wide eyes framed by white hair and whiskers, looking rather astonished and not especially bright. Robert Pitcairn later said that though Walkinshaw suffered from consumption, and so was “not very efficient” as yardmaster and “not very able to stand the physical strain,” he, Pitcairn, nonetheless considered him amply qualified to look after the company’s interest.
With circumstances as they were, Walkinshaw was left with little choice on what to do with the trains. He could not send them to the east, up the valley, because of the washouts at Buttermilk Falls and farther on. Nor could he send them back down the line toward Johnstown, as there were now reports of washouts in that direction as well.
About all he could do was to keep moving them back from the river, which is what he did. But once he had them on the northernmost siding, he concluded that he had taken “every reasonable precaution” under the circumstances.
One other very possible choice, of course, was to move the passengers out of the trains to higher ground. But to ask that many people to go out into the cold wind and rain, into the muddy little town where there might well be problems finding enough shelter for everyone, seemed more than Walkinshaw was willing to do, even though he had full knowledge of the trouble at Lake Conemaugh and was heard by at least one witness to say that if the dam ever broke it would “sweep the valley.”
Walkinshaw had been out several times, checking equipment, giving orders, looking at the river. From two o’clock to three there seemed to be no change in the water level. Apparently the worst was over. But then about 3:15 the bridge below the telegraph tower went, causing a great stir among the crowd. Hour by hour the current had eaten away at its foundations, until they let go and the whole thing just dropped down into the water. Sometime shortly after, Walkinshaw went into his office where his son handed him another message about the dam. Then, about a quarter to four, Walkinshaw decided to take a brief rest.
“I sat down and wasn’t in the chair more than a minute until I heard a whistle blow,” he recalled later.
“I jumped off my chair, and ran out and hollowed for every person to go away off the road and get on high ground, and I started up the track.
“Just as I left the office, I saw the rear end of this work train backing around the curve. I started up toward the train, and the minute I saw the train stop, I saw the engineer jump off and run for the hill. Just that minute, I saw a large wave come around the hill.”
Inside the trains there was considerable commotion when the whistle started blasting. People stood up and began asking what the trouble was. Two Negro porters came through, both looking very excited and when asked if this meant that the dam had broken, the first one said he did not know, and the second said he thought it had. Outside, a conductor ran along between the trains shouting, “Get to the hill! Get to the hill!”
The Reverend Robinson said that no one knew what was going on, but that he remembered telling a woman next to him that he thought there was no danger. Then he looked out of the window and saw the wave coming. It appeared to be about 300 yards away, but there was no water to be seen. As one man said, it looked more like a hill of rubbish than anything else. Some people said it looked to be fifty feet high and it was taking everything in front of it. Everyone started for the door.
On Section One, the train standing between the mail train and Section Two, nearly every passenger got through the doors as fast as possible, but several of them, seeing the mud and rain, turned back. Jennie Paulson and her friend Elizabeth Bryan decided to go back for their overshoes. An old minister from Kalamazoo, Michigan, and his wife saw the flood bearing down and returned to the
ir seats inside. But most people jumped and ran.
“It was every man for himself and God for us all,” a New Haven, Connecticut, man named Wilmot said later.
Once they had clambered out into the rain, the passengers from Section One were faced with an immediate problem. On the next track, directly between them and high ground, stood Section Two.
“I saw three ways before me,” the Reverend Robinson wrote afterward, “climb over section No. 2 or crawl under it, or run down the track with the flood four car lengths and around the train. I instantly chose the latter. No one else followed me so far as I saw, but all attempted the other courses.”
Robinson made it safely around the train, but between him and the town and the streets which climbed to high ground was a ditch running parallel with the last track. It was about ten feet wide and perhaps five feet deep and rushing with water the color of heavily creamed coffee. Fortunately for him, Robinson arrived at the ditch at a place where a big plank had been laid across it. He was over in seconds and on his way up a steep, mud-slick embankment toward the town.
But others hesitated at the ditch, or leaped, or fell in and floundered about desperately, panicked. A number of men stopped, then moved back several steps, got a start, and jumped across. George Graham, a doctor from Port Royal, Pennsylvania, made it over this way; then, feeling that he still had time to spare, turned back to see if he could help some of the others.
“Just to my left, into the ditch, armpit deep, I saw nine women and girls tumble. I instantly grabbed the hand of the first and quickly pulled her out; the meanwhile all the others reached for me at once. I succeeded in saving them all except one old lady.” Wilmot, the New Haven man, also cleared the ditch, carrying his child in his arms. When he looked back to find out what had become of his wife, he saw her hesitating on the other side, while a man beside her shouted, “Jump, jump!” She jumped and made it, and they ran on.
Cyrus Schick, a prominent Reading businessman who, with his wife and her sister, had been on his way home from a long health tour in the west, fell headlong into the ditch, as did his sister-in-law, Eliza Stinson. Schick’s wife saw him bob up out of the water but then lost sight of him in all the confusion. His body and that of Miss Stinson were not found for ten days.
On the other side of the ditch the streets were full of running, shouting people. One local girl, a pretty young schoolteacher named Kate Giffen, who lived with her family on Front Street, would later describe racing to her house to pick up a child and seeing the woman who lived next door standing out on her porch screaming. She was the wife of John Hess, and she was screaming that the locomotive whistle still blasting away in the yards below was her husband’s.
The Reverend Robinson found himself all alone, pressing up a back alley.
“I ran to the second street, and, hoping I might be safe, I turned and looked. The houses were floating away behind me, and the flood was getting round above me. I ran on to the third street and turned again; the water was close behind me, houses were toppling over, and the torrent again pushing round as if to head me off.”
He kept on running, and when he turned again, he was high enough to see most of the town and the river valley. He watched a railroad car break loose and bound off in the plunging water, with two men on top trying desperately to keep their balance, moving first to one side then to another, as they headed toward Johnstown. How many passengers there might have been inside he could not tell. Everywhere people were rushing this way and that, some ducking inside doorways, some going for higher ground, stumbling and falling in the muddy streets. As the wave hit Front Street, buildings began falling, one on top of another; some seemed to bounce and roll before they were swept downstream. Locomotives from the roundhouse went swirling about like logs in a millrace.
The big, brick roundhouse had some nine engines in it when the flood struck. There were also another nineteen or twenty engines elsewhere in the yards, machine shops, a lot of rolling stock, a coal shed, and the three passenger trains. When the wave struck, it was probably about twenty-eight to thirty feet high, though, understandably, it looked a great deal higher to anyone caught in its path. The roundhouse was crushed, as one onlooker said, “like a toy in the hands of a giant.” The passenger trains were swamped in an instant. Section One was ripped apart and the baggage car and one coach were flung downstream and its Pullman coach caught fire. Yard engines went spinning off, one after another.
Section Two and the mail train both miraculously survived. Section Two had been standing on an embankment five to six feet high, which certainly had something to do with its good fortune. There were also some freight cars in front of it and a coal shed that toppled across the tracks and helped deflect some of the onrush. But it was the roundhouse which almost certainly did most of the deflecting, and the fact that the valley both curves sharply and broadens out at that particular point along the river undoubtedly contributed to the inconsistent behavior of the oncoming wave.
The destruction all around the trains was fearful. Forty houses along Front Street were taken away. The Eagle Hotel, the Central Hotel, the post office, the railroad station, several stores, at least half the town was destroyed. The only railroad track left was that under Section Two, the mail train, and a few other pieces of equipment that, for one quirk of fate or another, happened to survive.
Thirty locomotives, some weighing as much as eighty tons, were scattered anywhere from a hundred yards to a mile from where they had been standing. One locomotive boiler would be carried all the way to Johnstown. How many lives were lost was never determined exactly. But at least twenty-two passengers from the Day Express sections were killed, including Cyrus Shick and his sister-in-law, Jennie Paulson and Elizabeth Bryan, the minister’s wife from Kalamazoo, and F. Phillips, one of the Negro porters.
In East Conemaugh and Franklin, which was the name of the cluster of houses across the river from the yards, the known death toll came to twenty-eight.
But when the flood had passed, the engine and tender and six cars of the second section were almost at the exact same place they had been since before noon. They had been shoved along the track some, maybe twenty yards downstream. There was debris jammed in around them; but the sixteen people inside, who out of fear or indecision or dumb luck had stayed on board, were as safe and sound as though virtually nothing had happened. The water had come up over the seats in several cars and the passengers were soaked to the skin and badly shaken by the experience, but the only fatalities from their cars were among those who had tried to make a run for it.
One such passenger was John Ross of New Jersey, who, it was said later, was about thirty-three years old and a cripple. He had been traveling in one of the sleepers of Section Two, a car in which no one had chosen to hang back. Ross struggled out with the rest and was having a terribly difficult time until one of the train crew, a brakeman named J. G. Miller, came running along, picked him up, and managed to carry Ross some fifty yards or more before he dropped him.
“I had to drop him,” Miller said later, “to save myself. I saw it was either life or death with me, and I dropped him, and went for the hill.”
The mail train, which had been standing on an even lower track and within no more than a hundred yards from the river, was also still intact, though it too had been shoved downstream quite a way. Like Section Two, the mail train had been partly sheltered by the roundhouse, but what seems to have saved it was the telegraph tower which fell right onto the engine just as it was being pushed past underneath, and pinned it down there until the water had passed. But unlike any of the other trains, there were no fatalities among its passengers. Everyone got off and onto the hill in time, thanks to the good sense of the crew and, perhaps in part, to the particular nature of the passengers themselves.
Like all the others milling about the yards that morning, the eighteen or so passengers on board the mail train had heard mixed reports about the dam. They were told that if it ever broke it would drown the valley, and the
y were told that it would raise the level of the river maybe a foot or two. They were told it would take the water one hour to get from the lake to East Conemaugh, and they were told that it would take three hours. But mostly they were told that the dam was an old chestnut and not to think any more of it.
But their conductor, Charles Warthen, decided to tell them everything he knew, which was not a whole lot more, but he at least made it sound serious. He also told them to get ready to move out at the slightest notice, which was something neither of the conductors of the other trains had chosen to do.
The trainmen had been sitting in the last car of the mail train, talking about the situation, but for some reason or other, S. E. Bell, who was conductor on Section One, and Levi Easton, conductor on Section Two, made no effort to warn their passengers. The likeliest explanation seems to be that they, like so many others, had no real fear of anything happening.
All but one or two of Warthen’s passengers were from the Night Off company. When they were told what might be expected of them, they quietly went to work rounding up their belongings, and the women began pinning up their skirts.
About two o’clock C. J. McGuigan, brakeman on the mail train, had gone to the tower to ask if there was any further news, and the operator (which one it was he did not recall) said, “Nothing, only another message that the dam is in a very dangerous condition.” Not knowing anything about the dam, McGuigan asked him what the consequences might be if the dam broke.
“He kind of smiled,” McGuigan told the story later, “and said, ‘It would cover this whole valley from hill to hill with water.’ I got kind of frightened myself then, and I came right down, and told the passengers the second time to be on the lookout…. The ladies got frightened, and one of them wanted to know if they should not better go to the hills now, but the manager of the troupe said ‘No, there is no danger yet’…seemed to be ready for it…I think they were very sensible people.”
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 252