By morning nearly two carloads of supplies had been deposited at the western end of the bridge and work had begun on a rope bridge to get them over the Conemaugh. But more remarkable still was the fact that early Sunday, perhaps as early as eight in the morning, the Pittsburgh train itself came steaming up the valley clear to the stone bridge. So swiftly had the railroad swung back into action during the night that by dawn enough new track had been put down from Sang Hollow to start the train cautiously on its way. And as it crept through the ruins of Morrellville and Cambria City, men standing in the open doors of the boxcars passed out bundles of bread, cheese, and crackers to the ragged crowds that lined the tracks.
The supplies had left Pittsburgh about four Saturday afternoon. Pittsburgh had been in a frenzy since early that morning. The Allegheny River had risen sharply during the night, and the riverbanks and bridges were lined with people watching the wreckage sweep past. Already there were rumors that dead bodies had been fished out. “A sense of intense uneasiness pervaded the air,” one man wrote.
There were still precious few facts to go on, but the papers were getting out a new edition every hour, and the news kept growing more and more alarming. Outside the newspaper offices, traffic was snarled by the crowds that pressed in to read the latest bulletins and kept calling for names.
At one o’clock a mass meeting was held at Pittsburgh’s Old City Hall, at which Robert Pitcairn stood up and spoke briefly about what he had seen. “Gentlemen,” he said in closing, “it is not tomorrow you want to act, but today; thousands of lives were lost in a moment, and the living need immediate help.” Then there was a call for contributions. At the front of the hall two men using both hands took in $48,116.70 in fifty minutes. “There was no speech making,” a reporter wrote, “no oratory but the eloquence of cash.”
Wagons were sent through the city to collect food and clothing. Union Station looked like wartime, swarming with people and with train after train being loaded in the yards. The first train went out with twenty cars full. On board were some eighty volunteers of the “Pittsburgh Relief Committee,” a dozen reporters, perhaps thirty police, and, according to one account, Mr. Durbin Home, a member of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, who was on his way to find out what had happened to several friends and relatives who had not been heard from since they left for the lake on Memorial Day.
When the rope bridge was finally finished Sunday morning at Johnstown, the men started over with their heavy loads, swaying precariously above the raging river. They came across one at a time and very slowly. And for the next several days, until the stone bridge was open again, they would keep on coming almost without stop.
Later on Sunday several good-sized boats would be hauled up the valley by train and put into service crossing the river, taking men and supplies over and bringing refugees back. On Sunday the boats ferried some 3,000 passengers, coming and going. Monday, they carried 7,000, along with supplies and dead bodies.
Wagons loaded down with salt pork, bedding, goods of every kind, rolled down flood-gullied roads from Ebensburg and Loretto, splashing up showers of gummy mud the color of a new baseball glove. Doctors and work crews started off from Altoona, where it was reported 5,000 people were milling about the railroad station. In dozens of little towns along the Pennsylvania toward Pittsburgh, and back along the B & O toward Somerset, church bells were ringing and hundreds of people were coming in from the country with their donations; and all day, one after another, relief trains kept streaming through, many of them with “For the Johnstown Sufferers” scrawled in big letters on the boxcars. One train in by the Somerset line carried a whole shipment of tents sent by the governor of Ohio. Another Pittsburgh train, eleven cars long, carried nothing but coffins.
Some of the offerings that were mounting up in Johnstown created more than a little amusement. In their eagerness to help, some people had not bothered to think much about what would be needed. One nicely tied bundle opened Sunday afternoon contained a ball of carpet rags, a paper of tacks, two bags of salt, one baby’s shoe, and two darned stockings of different colors. A box of homemade liniment, with” warm before using” written on the side, was tossed out of one car. There was a package of worn-out schoolbooks, a Bible with several pages marked, some fancy needlework, even bits of bric-a-brac.
But almost everything else that came in, however shabby or trivial seeming, was immediately grabbed up and put to good use. A blue dress coat with bright brass buttons that looked every bit of seventy years old was presented to an equally ancient-looking Grubbtown man who wore it away with much pride. Children went shuffling off in shoes several sizes too big for them. Women gladly put on men’s coats and hats.
And as much as there was coming in, it was nowhere near enough. There were perhaps 27,000 people in the valley who had to be taken care of, who had to be supplied with every kind of basic necessity; and added to them were all those others streaming in to help.
By nightfall Sunday well over 1,000 people were in from out of town. Something like fifty undertakers had arrived from Pittsburgh. The railroad was bringing work crews in by the trainful. A Pittsburgh fire department had arrived and, remarkably enough, by midnight had just about extinguished the fire at the stone bridge. There was also present a rather stout Republican politician by the name of Daniel Hartman Hastings, the Adjutant General of the state, who, after looking the situation over since morning, had decided it was time the military took over.
A lawyer by profession, the general’s only military experience had been at Altoona during the strike of ’77. Saturday morning he had hitched up his team and driven nonstop from his home in Bellefonte, seventy miles to the northeast, arriving at Prospect Hill after dark. He had slept that night in the company of several tramps on the floor of the signal tower at the Pennsylvania station and managed to cross over to Johnstown first thing the next morning. He talked to Moxham and his committeemen about calling out the National Guard but was advised strenuously against it. Moxham thought it was important that the people handle their problems themselves; it would do more than anything else, he said, to help them get over their anxieties.
Later in the day, when a company of troops arrived from Pittsburgh, sent by the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce, Hastings told them to go back to where they had come from. They had received no proper orders to turn out, he said, and had no business being there. He gave the officer in charge a vigorous dressing down, and back they went.
But by nightfall another meeting was held with the local officials and it was agreed to draw up a formal request to the governor for troops. For by now it was clear to just about everyone that the job of running things had gone beyond what the Moxham “dictatorship” could cope with. In another two days Moxham would resign his authority altogether, and James B. Scott, head of the Pittsburgh Relief Committee, would take over as the civilian head.
Rumors of looting and drunken fist fights were now even more exaggerated than they had been the previous night, but now they were not totally unfounded. The Reverend Beale and others later testified to witnessing attempted thefts. On Prospect Hill there seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of whiskey. One husky farm boy who had come down from Ebensburg with a load of provisions stayed long enough to get so drunk that he toppled off the hillside, rolled head over heels down the embankment, and fell into the Little Conemaugh, nearly drowning in minutes. “God only saved him,” his father said later, “and for something better we hope.”
Captain Hart’s police seemed unable to keep order, and if things were not troublesome enough as they were, one of his lieutenants, a much-respected local lawyer and sportsman named Chal Dick, went riding about on horseback brandishing a Winchester rifle and telling lurid stories about the Hungarians he had seen robbing the dead and how he had already shot a couple of them. The stories spread like wildfire, and with them went more fear and suspicion of any man who spoke with an accent or even looked slightly foreign. People talked of how Paris had been looted by the Germans d
uring the Franco-Prussian War, or harked back to tales of violence and evil doings in the old country at the time of the plagues.
And to make matters still worse, it was well known that even more people were on their way. Word was Sunday night that Booth and Flinn, the big Pittsburgh construction company, was sending 1,000 men the next day, and everyone had heard about the kind of riffraff Billy Flinn was known for hiring. He would pack them into freight cars like cattle and then turn them loose into Johnstown. Every last one of them would have to be fed and sheltered, and where was it all to come from? And who was there to police the place?
But what was not known, even as Hastings sent out his message to the governor, was just how many others were heading for the devastated city. For along with the Flinn crew there were thousands more coming—charity workers, doctors, preachers, men looking for work, smalltime crooks and pickpockets, drifters, farm hands, ladies of the W.C.T.U., former Johnstown people heading back to look for relatives, railroad officials, prostitutes, sight-seers.
From Pittsburgh Captain Bill Jones was on his way with three carloads of supplies and a small army of 300 men from the Edgar Thomson works, a number of whom had been with him in the old days at the Cambria mills. In Philadelphia pretty society girls were packing medical supplies and making ready to start off with relief units organized by half a dozen churches. Mr. H. C. Tarr of the Utopia Embalming Fluid Company of Brooklyn had already struck out for Johnstown and would wind up traveling nearly 200 miles by horseback before he got there. In Washington, Miss Clara Barton and her newly organized American Red Cross had boarded a special B & O train.
For, already, the Johnstown Flood had become the biggest news story since the murder of Abraham Lincoln. On Saturday night, quite late, the reporters camped inside the brickworks had finally gotten a line clear to Pittsburgh, and the words had been pouring out ever since. (“The awful catastrophe at Johnstown is by all odds the most stupendous fatality ever known in the history of this country….”)
The news had an effect that is difficult to imagine; by Sunday it was spread across the front page of virtually every paper in the country. On Saturday the papers had hedged on how many had been killed. The New York World had reported 1,500 lives lost; the Times had been even more cautious, saying only that hundreds were dead. But on Sunday the World headlines ran halfway down the page, and though they still had no firsthand facts to go on, the editors had decided to pull out all stops:
10,000 DEAD
Johnstown Blotted Out by the Flood
HALF ITS PEOPLE KILLED
Two Thousand Burned to Death in the Wreck
ALL APPROACHES CUT OFF
In Pittsburgh the Post-Gazette was selling its editions so fast that it had to reduce its page size temporarily in order not to run out of paper. Everywhere people were talking of little else and wanted to know more, much more; they wanted facts, names, details, pictures. And so along with all the others heading for Johnstown there came more reporters (perhaps a hundred or more), telegraph operators, editors, authors, artists, photographers.
The great rush to Johnstown, which had begun in Pittsburgh Friday night, was now under way full force. They came, thousands of them, from every station in life and from as far away as California, heading for a place very few of them had ever heard of two days earlier, driven by the most disparate motives imaginable.
VIII
“No pen can describe…”
–1–
Henry S. Brown of the Philadelphia Press had been sitting at his desk at eleven o’clock Friday night when the news first came in. At 11:25 he was on board a westbound train pulling out of the Broad Street Station, having taken no time to pack or, for that matter, to give much thought to just where it was he was going or what chance he had of getting there. At Harrisburg the train was delayed by floods along the Susquehanna, but Brown stayed on board when the conductor assured him everything would be cleared up in a few hours and that they would be moving on again. At dawn he was told things had changed rather drastically; nothing would be open west for two weeks.
Brown got hold of some maps and decided that if he could get a train to Chambersburg, fifty miles to the southwest, and could hire a team there, he might just be able to drive the rest of the way, which, according to the map, looked to be another hundred miles. He took the Cumberland Valley Railroad out of Harrisburg, but it was not until Sunday afternoon that he reached Chambersburg, located a double team, and started over the Tuscarora Mountain to McConnellsburg, twenty-two miles due west. Halfway over the mountain his wagon broke down, but he managed to borrow another from a farmer. At McConnellsburg he picked up another team and pushed on, along the Pennsylvania Pike (the old Forbes Road), heading for Juniata Crossing. From then on he splattered his way down washed-out roads, forded streams where bridges had been swept away, walked when he had to, crossed Sideling Hill in the dark, changed teams five more times, and never stopped to eat or rest. He reached Bedford about seven Monday morning and, finding no train there as he had expected, went whirling off once again, this time bound for Stoystown behind a pair of snow-white mules. Between Bedford and Stoystown, still traveling the state road, he managed to cross the Allegheny Mountain at a place where the elevation approaches 3,000 feet.
At Stoystown he would be able to pick up the B & O line from Somerset, but he arrived just in time to miss a relief train there; so rather than wait for another, he hired still one more team and headed on again, following the tortuous route of the raging Stony Creek down to Johnstown.
It was about seven thirty Monday night when he finally reached Johnstown, after having traveled the hundred miles from Chambersburg in about twenty-eight hours. No more than ten minutes later he was shaking hands with another correspondent by the name of F. Jennings Crute, also of the Press. Crute had left the Philadelphia office at the same time as Brown and had pulled into Johnstown only an hour before, having traveled about seven times as far as Brown. For instead of heading west on the Pennsylvania Friday night, Crute had made the whole trip by rail, first by heading east to New York, then going by way of Buffalo (on the Central) to Cleveland and Pittsburgh.
Brown and Crute went directly to work and, like the other reporters swarming over the place, were soon filing their stories from the brickworks above the stone bridge, which by now had become quite a center of operations. The Pittsburgh papers, the Times, the Press, the Dispatch, the Commercial-Gazette, and the Leader, were all represented. (In an old photograph taken at the end of the stone bridge on Sunday, a group of twenty-one Pittsburgh correspondents pose proudly beneath derby hats, several with cigar in hand, their dark vests crossed by heavy watch chains.) They had taken over two floors of one building, as well as a woodshed. The newcomers squeezed in where best they could, everyone working under tremendous difficulties. Those who had been there for more than twenty-four hours were unshaven, red-eyed, and near collapse from lack of sleep. They were using barrelheads, coffin lids, and shovel bottoms for writing desks, and the words they wrote were put on the wire as fast as was humanly possible.
The place became known as the “Lime Kiln Club” and rapidly gave rise to that special kind of fellowship-through-duress, which so often happens in war. “The culinary department,” one of the group wrote later, “was taken charge of by Tom Keenan of the Press. With an old coffee-pot taken from the debris at the bridge, some canned corned beef, a few boxes of crackers, a few quarts of condensed milk and a bag of unground coffee, he was soon enabled to get up a meal for his starving comrades which was the envy of those in the neighborhood who, while hungry, did not belong to the band of scribes, whom they looked upon as a lot of luxurious revellers.”
By late Monday the force of telegraph operators had increased enough to set up night and day shifts. Food became more plentiful, and the presence of the new men did much to boost spirits. The New York Sun reporters had come by the same roundabout route as F. Jennings Crute, while their rivals from the Herald, World, Times, and Tribune had gone more or less
the way of Henry Brown. The correspondent of the Chicago Inter-Ocean walked up from Sang Hollow, as did several others, and every one of them was brimful of tales of his experiences.
The early arrivals at last got some sleep that night, there at the brickworks, while the newcomers found what accommodations they could elsewhere around town. Eight of them, including the Philadelphia men, wound up on the narrow first floor of the signal tower across the river. About midnight they were awakened by a man at the door saying, “Isn’t this terrible. Look at them, human beings, drowned like rats in their hole.” At which point one of the corpses sat bolt upright and said, “Get the hell out of here and let us sleep!”
But for all the boon companionship and oft-told stories, the hardships endured by “the gentlemen of the press” were considerable. Vile-smelling smoke from the still smoldering bridge blew through the windows of the old building where they worked. The floor was shaky and full of holes, and to enter the place in the dark of night was, as one man said, “to place one’s life in jeopardy.” John Ritenour of the Pittsburgh Post fell twenty feet, wedging between timbers and so severely injuring himself that he had to be sent home. Sam Kerr of the Leader fell off the top of a house lodged in the drift and would have drowned if one of his colleagues had not been on hand to pull him out. Clarence Bixby of the Post fell from the railroad bridge while trying to get across at one in the morning and was badly banged up. And several weeks later, F. Jennings Crute, worn down by lack of sleep and exposure, caught a cold that turned to pneumonia. On December 3 he died.
The competition between papers was friendly but fierce, with every man scrambling for an advantage. One of them, a William Henry Smith of the Associated Press, had actually been on board a section of the ill-fated Day Express and wrote a long, florid description of the experience. (“It was a race for life. There was seen the black head of the flood, now the monster Destruction, whose crest was raised high in the air, and with this in view even the weak found wings for their feet.”) But for the rest it was a matter of finding out what was happening amid the chaos around them, and as of Monday night there was plenty happening.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 260