McGuigan then went back to the last car to the other crewmen. When the whistle began blowing, he ran to the passenger coach, shouting that the flood was coming, while conductors Bell and Easton took off for their trains, shouting the same thing.
“The women were sitting down, and the men were standing up, and they all had their grips and valises in their hands, and the men ran to the upper end of the car, and the ladies to the west end where I was.
“I assisted them out, and got up and looked through the train, and I couldn’t see anybody on the train, and then I ran with two of the ladies, caught hold of their hands, and ran until we came to the ditch…and Miss Eberly, she refused to go into the ditch, and I threw her into it, and jumped down and assisted her up on the other side, and ran up the hill.”
No one was lost, not even the baggagemaster, J. W. Grove, who decided to jump onto one of the yard engines standing about instead of trying for the hill. Every other loose engine in East Conemaugh was dumped over, driven into the hillside, or swept off with the flood, except the one he picked.
Brakeman McGuigan went about for some time after carrying a picture of Miss Eberly, who was the pretty, young star of the company and actually Mrs. Eberly. She in turn was quoted widely when she returned to New York and described the bravery of the trainmen.
Later the Pennsylvania Railroad, in an effort to establish exactly what had happened at East Conemaugh, conducted its own investigation, which would provide the one full account of the whereabouts of several dozen employees, the official decisions made before the water struck, and the personal decisions made when it was seen rounding the bend behind the Hess train. The study revealed several cases such as that of brakeman McGuigan, but it included many more where the reaction had been a good deal less coolheaded and quite a lot more human.
Samuel S. Miller, for example, was also a brakeman, on the first section of the Day Express, the one on which most of the fatalities occurred. Part of his testimony went as follows:
Q. Where were you when the big wave came?
A. I was partly up on the hill.
Q. What were you doing up there?
A. Well, I was told that it was coming, and I got up on the hill for my own safety. I had gone to the Agent at Conemaugh, he was in the office at Conemaugh station—
Q. Who is he?
A. E. R. Stewart—and I borrowed the key from him for the water closet at the station, and I went in the water closet, and I think I was reading a Commercial-Gazette at the time when I heard the big whistle, and not knowing of any freight moving, I first thought probably it might be a freight engine that was to assist first Day Express up the mountain; I thought maybe they were alarming the passengers to get on the train and wondered why it wasn’t a passenger engine whistle. The next thought that came to me was that South Fork dam had broken. I made a hasty exit, and when I got outside, a young fellow came along and said that was what was wrong. He seemed to be in a great hurry, and I asked him if South Fork dam had broken, and he replied, “Yes, so people say,” and it seems to me, I told him to run, and I ran too.
Q. You broke for the hill?
A. Yes, sir, I broke for the hill.
Q. You didn’t go to your train?
A. No, sir; I got up on the hill probably 110 yards from the station, and looked back, and could see that the water had come. I could see that the water was between the houses at that time. I concluded I wasn’t high enough, and I went up onto still higher ground.
Q. You didn’t climb a tree?
A. No, sir.
Q. Why didn’t you go to your train and help get your passengers out?
A. Well, for my own safety. From the descriptions I had heard, I concluded I had better be on the hill.
Q. You might have gone to your train if you had tried?
A. I could have, but the question was whether I could then have gone to the hill or not.
Q. You believed your life was in danger, did you?
A. Yes, sir.
Now several hundred freight cars, a dozen or more locomotives, passenger cars, nearly a hundred more houses, and quite a few human corpses were part of the tidal wave that surged on down the valley.
Before it had plowed through East Conemaugh, the water had cut along the valley below Mineral Point, crashing back and forth against the mountainsides as the river channel swung this way and that. A mile or so above East Conemaugh, at the place the railroad men called “the big cut,” the Pennsylvania tracks again left the riverbank to take a short cut across another oxbow. Here again the flood had divided briefly, with part of it rushing headlong through the cut, while the rest went with the river on its two-mile loop off to the north. It was a course which sapped much of the wave’s potential speed and energy. But from East Conemaugh on to Johnstown the valley opened up considerably and the river headed directly for its meeting with the Stony Creek. Past East Conemaugh the flood was on a straightaway, and there it began to gather speed.
Woodvale got it next. Woodvale was somewhat bigger than East Conemaugh, prosperous, new, and the pride of the Cambria Iron Company. It was a sort of model town, built by the company, and with its clean white houses it looked, as one man said, more like a New England town. It was connected to Johnstown by a streetcar line that ran along its main thoroughfare, Maple Avenue, which was far and away the prettiest street in the valley. Maple Avenue was nearly a mile long and looked like a green tunnel that May. The trees reached over the tracks where the little yellow streetcars rattled by, their horses heading for the stable. When the flood had passed, there would be no trace of Maple Avenue.
About 1,000 people lived in Woodvale. There was a woolen mill, built by Cambria Iron, which employed several hundred women. There was the Rosensteel tannery, two schoolhouses, some churches, and no saloons (they evidently were contrary to the Iron Company’s idea of a model town).
Unlike East Conemaugh, Woodvale got no warning. It was all over in about five minutes. The only building left standing was the woolen mill, and there was only part of that. At the western end of the town, the end almost touching Johnstown, stood the Gautier works, part of it in Woodvale, part in Conemaugh borough. The huge works sent up a terrific geyser of steam when the water hit its boilers, and then the whole of it seemed simply to lift up and slide off with the water. The tannery went and so did the streetcar shed, along with eighty-nine horses and about thirty tons of hay. When the water had passed, the town was nothing but a mud flat strewn with bits of wreckage. There was only a tiny fringe of houses left along the edges, on the foothills. There was not a tree, not a telegraph pole, not a sign of where the railroad had been. Two hundred and fifty-five houses had been taken off, and there was no way of telling where they had been.
The official figure for Woodvale’s dead would later be set at 314, which means that about one out of every three people in town had been killed.
A number of people had tried to crawl under a freight train that was blocking their way to the hill and had been crushed when the water hit the train and it started moving. Dozens of others had never made it out of their houses. At the woolen mill three men had kept retreating to different rooms and higher floors as the big brick building caved in piece by piece, all around them, until there was only that small part which miraculously withstood everything that was thrown against it.
When the wireworks broke up it contributed miles and miles of barbed wire to the mountain of wreckage and water that, once past the wireworks, had only a few hundred yards to go until it struck Johnstown.
It was now not quite an hour since the dam had given way. The rain was still coming down, but not so hard as before, and the sky overhead was noticeably brighter.
In Johnstown the water in the streets seemed actually to be going down some. It had been a long, tiresome day in Johnstown, and the prospects for a night without gas or electricity were not especially cheerful, but by the looks of the water and the sky, the worst of it had passed.
Johnstown was still sparsely settle
d when this map made about the time of the Civil War. Woodvale (top) and Kernville (lower right) were mostly vacant lots. By 1889 population in the area had tripled.
One of the few surviving photographs of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club shows two lake-side boathouses, boardwalks, a rowboat planted with flowers (at lower left) and several cottage fronts.
The Moorhead house, once among the finest “cottages” on Lake Conemaugh, stands today at the edge of St. Michael, a coal town that, years after the flood, grew up around the abandoned summer colony.
The heroic “resident engineer” at the club, John G . Parke, Jr.
At left below, a small railing marks the crest of South Fork dam, the immense ends of which still stand above South Fork Creek. From railing to distant rooftops (the town of St. Michael) was once the northern end of Lake Conemaugh. Large roof is the old clubhouse, only half of which still stands. It is now a miners’ bar and hotel.
FOUR MEMBERS OF THE SOUTH FORK FISHING AND HUNTING CLUB
(Clockwise from top left) Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, Robert Pitcairn, Philander C. Knox
FOUR OF JOHNSTOWN’S LEADING CITIZENS
(Clockwise from top left) Daniel J . Morrell, John Fulton, Captain Bill Jones, Tom L . Johnson
A wide-angle view of Johnstown taken on the day before the flood gives the valley a broader look than it actually has, makes the hills appear too low-lying, but shows such principal features as the Stony Creek (foreground), the Cambria works (where the smoke rises at far left), Prospect Hill (the rows of white houses to the right of the mills), and the gap (center) through which the wall of water rushed. Kernville is at right. Johnstown proper lies between the gap and the church steeples, and to the left of the river.
This view was taken from the same point several months after the flood and shows the extent of damage to the lower part of Johnstown (at left) and Kernville. Not shown are Woodvale (which sits in the middle of the gap), where the whole town was wiped out, or Cambria City. Also, though there are still hundreds of houses to be seen in the main part of town, only a relative few were still in one piece, or standing where they belonged. Green Hill , a refuge for thousands of flood survivors, rises on the right of the gap.
With dozens of displaced buildings and tons of debris piled up behind it, the big stone Methodist church (at upper left in the view above) stands unmoved, looking over the desolation of lower Johnstown (in the far distance) and the dim side of Prospect Hill (at upper right).
A favorite subject for the swarms of photographers who rushed to cover the disaster was the house belonging to John Schultz. It had been neatly skewered by a huge tree and then dumped down near the Point. Six people were in it when the wave hit. Miraculously they all came out alive.
The photograph at right is almost certainly a fake. Though hundreds of corpses were strewn among the wreckage, few were found looking quite so neat and clean as this barefoot “victim,” and by the time the photographers arrived any body so well exposed would have been long since removed.
A view taken less than 24 hours after the flood shows the Cambria Iron offices (the big buildings on the left) and the swamped ruins of the city beyond. A t far right is part of the depot. Two Cambria Iron locomotives stand at lower right, inside the high board fence that enclosed company grounds.
Weeks after the flood, workmen tackle the last remains of the debris piled against the Pennsylvania Railroad's massive stone bridge.
In a view from above the Stony Creek, looking toward the Point (the stone bridge and the mills can be seen faintly in the distance), a slim island of surviving houses stands amid acres of mud and ruin.
Gertrude Quinn, at the age of 5. This photograph was one of the few Quinn family possessions to survive the flood.
Victor Heiser as he looked at 19, three years after the flood, when he had left Johnstown to begin his college education.
For Richard Harding Davis, the flood was the first big assignment in a long, colorful career as roving reporter and author.
For Clara Barton, “Angel of the Battlefield,” the flood was the first great test of her newly organized American Red Cross.
With their houses swept away, their money and belongings all gone, many families “made do” in rough hillside shelters such as these, built and furnished with the best they could scavenge from the devastated valley.
At the center of town, where the militia had set up camp, a young sentry stands guard while a survivor signs up for relief rations.
The body of a child is carried into the Adams Street schoolhouse, a temporary morgue where 301 bodies were recorded in the log books.
An artist’s drawing of the broken dam, seen from inside the empty reservoir, shows the spillway (at far right) and the bridge that crossed it. The breach in the dam was about 420 feet across the top.
At the Pennsylvania depot survivors crowd one of the several commissaries set up by volunteers from Pittsburgh and other nearby towns.
Scenes such as the one above and at left below were repeated many times, as survivors searched among the dead, or suddenly found a lost loved one among the living. But the illustration at right below, supposedly depicting the demise of three “Huns” who had been caught robbing the dead, has no basis in fact. Popular as they were in the nation’s press, lurid stories of rampant pillage and bloodshed were soon entirely discredited.
At Grandview Cemetery, on a high hill above Johnstown, hundreds of plain marble headstones mark the graves of the flood’s unknown dead.
V
“Run for your lives!”
–1–
Most of the people in Johnstown never saw the water coming; they only heard it; and those who lived to tell about it would for years after try to describe the sound of the thing as it rushed on them.
It began as a deep, steady rumble, they would say; then it grew louder and louder until it had become an avalanche of sound, “a roar like thunder” was how they generally described it. But one man said he thought the sound was more like the rush of an oncoming train, while another said, “And the sound, I will never forget the sound of that. It sounded to me just like a lot of horses grinding oats.”
Everyone heard shouting and screaming, the earsplitting crash of buildings going down, glass shattering, and the sides of houses ripping apart. Some people would later swear they heard factory whistles screeching frantically and church bells ringing. Who may have been yanking the bell cords was never discovered, but it was later reported that a freight engineer named Hugh Clifford had raced his train from above the depot across the stone bridge, his whistle going the whole way; and a man named Charles Horner blew the whistle over at Harry Swank’s machine shop.
Those who actually saw the wall of water would talk and write of how it “snapped off trees like pipestems” or “crushed houses like eggshells” or picked up locomotives (and all sorts of other immense objects) “like so much chaff.” But what seemed to make the most lasting impression was the cloud of dark spray that hung over the front of the wave.
Tribune editor George Swank wrote, “The first appearance was like that of a great fire, the dust it raised.” Another survivor described it as “a blur, an advance guard, as it were a mist, like dust that precedes a cavalry charge.” One young man said he thought at first that there must have been a terrible explosion up the river, “for the water coming looked like a cloud of the blackest smoke I ever saw.”
For everyone who saw it, there seemed something especially evil about this “awful mass of spray” that hovered over “the black wreck.” It was talked of as “the death mist” and would be remembered always.
The fact was there had been something close to an explosion up the river, at the Gautier works, when the water rolled over the fires there, which undoubtedly accounted for a good part of what they saw. Horace Rose, who witnessed about as much as anyone, thought so.
At the first sound of trouble he had rushed to the third floor of his house on lower Main Street and from the front window coul
d see nearly a mile up the valley. Only a few minutes before he had been playfully teasing his neighbors’ child, Bessie Fronheiser, from another window downstairs, telling her to come on over for a visit. The distance between the two houses was only about five feet, so he had put some candy on the end of a broom and passed it over to her. That was so successful that he next passed across a tin cup of coffee to Bessie’s mother in the same way. She was just raising the cup to her lips when the first crash came.
From the third floor Rose could see the long line of the rolling debris, stretching from hill to hill, slicing through the Gautier works, chopping it down and sending up a huge cloud of soot and steam.
The sight took his breath away. Once clear of the wireworks, the wave kept on coming straight toward him, heading for the very heart of the city. Stores, houses, trees, everything was going down in front of it, and the closer it came, the bigger it seemed to grow. Rose figured that he and his family had, at the most, two or three minutes before they would be crushed to death.
There would be slight differences of opinion later as to precisely when the wave crossed the line into Johnstown, but the generally accepted time is 4:07.
The height of the wall was at least thirty-six feet at the center, though eyewitness descriptions suggest that the mass was perhaps ten feet higher there than off to the sides where the water was spreading out as the valley expanded to a width of nearly half a mile.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 253