The city itself was still the most overpowering spectacle. (“It is a scene that blanches the faces of strong men, and in its multiplying horror is almost beyond description,” wrote a reporter for the New York Daily Graphic.) The weather had turned dull and cold again, which was unpleasant but welcome news as far as the doctors and sanitation workers were concerned. This way the dead would not decay quite so fast.
Bonfires by the hundreds were blazing across the valley where the ungainly and by now putrid carcasses of drowned horses were being cremated. The stench everywhere was terrible, of burned plaster and sodden bedding, of oil-soaked muck, of water thick with every kind of filth, and, worst of all, of still unfound bodies. The correspondents wrote of negotiating the rope bridge over the Conemaugh (“A slide, a series of frightful tosses from side to side, a run, and you have crossed…”) and of the curious things to be found once in town (“In the midst of the wreck a clothing store dummy, with a hand in the position of beckoning to a person, stands erect and uninjured.”). They interviewed bystanders (“‘I have visited Johnstown a dozen times a year for a long time,’ said a businessman to-day, ‘and I know it thoroughly, but I haven’t the least idea now of what part of it this is. I can’t even tell the direction the streets used to run.’”); and they quoted General Hastings as saying that there were 8,000 people dead. (“Nobody thinks this too small,” the Sun reporter added. “Nobody who has been about here an hour would think anything too awful to be possible.”)
Sunday night four enormous relief trains had rolled in below the bridge. Monday Billy Flinn brought in 280 teams of horses and 1,300 men. (“Very few Americans among them,” wrote one reporter.) Mrs. Lew Wallace, wife of the war hero and novelist, was reported missing from the Day Express. (She had actually taken another train and was safe in Altoona.) John Fulton and Colonel John Linton were both mistakenly reported dead (Fulton was reported “positively drowned”), and James McMillan, vice-president of Cambria Iron, was asked when work would start on rebuilding the mills, to which he answered, “Immediately.” There was talk of dynamiting the wreckage at the stone bridge, and there was a strong plea from the doctors and the sanitation officials from Pittsburgh to let it burn. The smell of burning flesh among the wreckage was something awful (“People in New York who remember the smell of the ruins of the Belt Line stables, after their destruction by fire…know what the odor is.”), but fire would cut the odds against a typhus outbreak, and throughout the valley and on downriver, clear to Pittsburgh, typhus had become an overriding concern.
In Pittsburgh the papers urged everyone to boil his water. From Nineveh, where nearly a hundred bodies had been recovered, Dr. Benjamin Lee, head of the Pennsylvania Board of Health, sent a message to the sheriffs of the four counties between Johnstown and Pittsburgh:
The State Board of Health hereby directs and empowers you to immediately summon a posse to patrol the Conemaugh river, tear down the drift heaps and remove the dead bodies, both human beings and domestic animals. This is absolutely necessary to protect your county from pestilence.
The wreckage at the bridge was described in detail, with some saying it covered thirty acres, others claiming it was more like sixty. (It was about halfway in between.) “I stood on the stone bridge at 6 o’clock,” wrote a Sun reporter Monday, “and looked into the seething mass of ruin below me. At one place the blackened body of a babe was seen; in another 14 skulls could be counted…At this time the smoke was still rising to the height of 50 feet…” On Wednesday, June 5, a little boy named Eddie Schoefler would be found still alive amid the wreckage. It would be one of the momentous events of the week.
Then, from Sunday on, there had been increased tension over the Hungarians, which was something quite colorful indeed to write about. Thanks to Chal Dick and, by now, many others, tales of “foul deeds” perpetrated by the “fiendish Huns” were rampant, and only a few reporters bothered to try to check them out. Story after story went on the wire describing how “ghouls, more like wild beasts” were slicing off fingers for gold wedding bands, and how angry Johnstown vigilantes were hunting them down. One account described how a woman’s body had been decapitated in order to steal her necklace. The Post told how gangs of Hungarians tried to raid unguarded freight cars for food and clothes. Another report said that a Hungarian had been caught in the act of blowing up a safe in the First National Bank. The Daily Graphic described how a crowd cornered a Hungarian at his “fiendish work” and strung him up on a lamppost.
This sample of the over-all tone and content of the reports was written late Sunday:
Last night a party of thirteen Hungarians were noticed stealthily picking their way along the banks of the Conemaugh toward Sang Hollow. Suspicious of their purpose, several farmers armed themselves and started in pursuit. Soon their most horrible fears were realized. The Hungarians were out for plunder. They came upon the dead and mangled body of a woman, lying upon the shore, upon whose person there were a number of trinkets of jewelry and two diamond rings. In their eagerness to secure the plunder, the Hungarians got into a squabble, during which one of the number severed the finger upon which were the rings, and started on a run with his fearful prize. The revolting nature of the deed so wrought upon the pursuing farmers, who by this time were close at hand, that they gave immediate chase. Some of the Hungarians showed fight, but, being outnumbered, were compelled to flee for their lives. Nine of the brutes escaped, but four were literally driven into the surging river and to their death. The thief who took the rings was among the number of the involuntary suicides.
The “thugs and thieves in unclean hordes,” as one writer described them, were nearly always Hungarians, though there was at least one report of two Negroes being shot at by Pittsburgh police when seen robbing a dead body, and there were a few references to “the worthless Poles.”
Such accounts were given a great deal of space by all but a few of the big eastern papers and were featured prominently in the headlines. (“FIENDS IN HUMAN FORM” ran the New York Herald headline on Monday. “DRUNKEN HUNGARIANS, DANCING, SINGING, CURSING AND FIGHTING AMID THE RUINS.”) Lurid illustrations were published, drawn by artists who had only the reporters’ stories to go by. One scene showed two bodies dangling from a telephone pole near the riverbank, while in the foreground a “wild-eyed” Hungarian, who looks much like a touring company Fagin, is held at bay, knee-deep in water, by a stalwart gentleman with a horse pistol who could very well be Robert E. Lee.
They were stories which had great appeal to anyone ready to believe in the darker side of humanity and particularly that segment of humanity which spoke with a thick accent, smelled of garlic, and worked cheap. The only trouble was that there was scarcely any truth to the stories, as several correspondents had already begun to suspect. At four Monday afternoon Alfred Reed of the World cabled his editors:
NO LYNCHINGS. I WARNED YOU LAST NIGHT NOT TO PRINT WILD RUMORS, AND AM GLAD TO HEAR YOU HAD ENOUGH CONFIDENCE IN ME TO HOLD OUT SUCH STORIES.
The next day an angry General Hastings issued a statement that reports of lynchings and rioting were “utterly devoid of truth,” sharply criticized the newspapers for publishing them, and suggested that the reporters stick to the facts.
Several characters had indeed been caught trying to pilfer the dead and had received some rather rough treatment, including, it appears, enough mock preparations for a lynching to put a terrific scare into one of them; and it is quite possible that a few fingers may have been mutilated by thieves trying to wrench off gold wedding bands. But there were certainly no diamond rings stolen (one survivor doubted that there were more than one or two diamond rings in all Johnstown at that time), no bank safes were blown, and, as David Beale wrote later, no fingers were cut off by human ghouls. Furthermore, the Hungarians themselves apparently had almost nothing to do with what foul doings there were. “There was little stealing done by the Hungarians,” Beale wrote, “and most accounts of outrages attributed to these people were apocryphal; and I am glad to say t
hat all statements of shooting and hanging them were without foundation.” And to emphasize the validity of this last statement, he said his source was Chal Dick himself.
Dick, it seems, had gone slightly out of his head immediately after the disaster and had been suffering from vivid and vicious delusions. His wife and children had been killed and he simply went berserk for about a day or so. By the time he snapped out of it, the damage had been done, and from then on the stories were spread, according to the best evidence, largely by outsiders who had come into the valley.
For though there may have been relatively little resentment in Johnstown against the Hungarians (or the other Southern European peoples called Hungarians), in Pittsburgh feelings were different. The steel bosses, like Henry Clay Frick, had been bringing them in by the thousands to work in Braddock and Homestead. They were single men mostly, willing to work for the lowest wages, and under the worst conditions, just to save enough to go back home and buy a small farm on the Danube. They got the toughest jobs, worked hard, and were generally hated by the Irish, the German, and American workers. Years later, John Fitch, the historian, interviewed an old Scotch-Irish furnace boss in Pittsburgh about the “hunkies.”
“They don’t seem like men to me hardly,” he said. “They can’t talk United States. You tell them something and they just look and say, ‘Me no fustay, me no fustay,’ that’s all you can get out of ’em.” When wages were going down, when men were let go at the mills, when the unions suffered setbacks, somehow the Hungarians seemed at the root of things.
The few Hungarians there were in Johnstown (perhaps 500 of them were living in the valley at the time of the flood) were subjected to days of abuse. Speaking little English, fearful and suspicious even under normal circumstances, they now became so terrified of the angry crowds that hung outside their homes that they dared not go out even to collect their share of the relief provisions. Their children were starving; the men grew desperate. At one point about twenty of them were encouraged to come out to help dig graves in the cemetery above Minersville. After working all day, on their way back home in the dark, they were set upon by a gang armed with clubs and were badly beaten.
But by midweek the Hungarian scare was over. There were still rumors, but papers like the Philadelphia Press were saying, “There is not an inch of truth in them,” and nearly everyone in Johnstown knew that that was so. While in Chicago the Herald wrote that the “Magyars” there were “justly indignant” over the stories, and tried to resolve the whole unfortunate business by adding, “The wretches who now prey upon the dead at Johnstown and refuse to aid in the work of rescue, are undoubtedly Bulgarians, Wallachs, Moldavians, and Tartars, classes degraded in all their manners as is the North American Indian….”
Sometime Monday Colonel Unger came into town from South Fork, accompanied by the Shea brothers, John Parke, and one or two other employees of the fishing and hunting club. Understandably, the press was most interested in talking to them.
Unger gave the Pittsburgh Post a brief rundown on what had happened at the dam Friday morning and how he and his men had tried to prevent the disaster. He estimated that the loss to the club was about $150,000 and said that the club members who had been at the lake were all safe and that they had gone off to Altoona.
Parke seemed more interested in getting word to his people in Philadelphia that he was alive and in good health, but was quoted by the New York Sun, “No blame can be attached to anyone for this greatest of horrors. It was a calamity that could not be avoided.” He said the fault was “storm after storm” and that “by twelve o’clock everybody in the Conemaugh region did know or should have known of their danger.”
But an employee by the name of Herbert Webber, who must have been interviewed separately, launched into a long description of the dam the morning before it failed. He told the reporters that at around eleven he had been attending to a camp a mile back from the dam when he noticed that the surface of the lake seemed to be lowering. He could not quite believe what he saw, he said, so he went down and made a mark on the shore, and sure enough he found his suspicions were well founded. For days before, he went on, he had seen water shooting out between the rocks on the front of the dam, so that the face “resembled a large watering pot.” The force of the water was so great “that one of these jets squirted full thirty feet horizontally from the stone wall.” When he ran up to the dam that morning, he declared, he saw the water of the lake “welling out from beneath the foundation stones.”
The story was preposterous, of course, and had no connection with what actually happened, but the reporters had no way of knowing that. The watering-can image made splendid copy, so out it went, along with everything else.
But by this time at least one enterprising reporter had already made his way to the club. In Pittsburgh that Monday the headline across the front of the Post read: “TO THE DAM AT LAST.” The story had been sent out at nine the night before and said, as Unger had, that the Pittsburgh people were safe and, as Parke had, that warnings had been sent down the valley before the break. In another two days more reporters would show up at South Fork. They would begin looking over the construction of the dam itself and start questioning the local people about the club. South Fork would shortly become the center of a stormy series of events, but for now Johnstown remained the major focus of attention.
One survivor after another was interviewed and dozens of frightful personal experiences were penciled into reporters’ notebooks. The heroism of Bill Heppenstall (Hepenthal several papers spelled it), the adventures of Gertrude Quinn, and John Hess’s ride into East Conemaugh were described at length.
Numerous stories were collected of ironic or incredible things that happened. All of Johnstown’s three or four blind people had survived the flood. Frank Benford’s dun-colored mare was found in an alley next to where the Hulbert House had been, up to her belly in debris, alive, but blinded in both eyes. Old Mrs. Levergood, widow of Jacob Levergood, whose father had owned the town way back in the early days, was found dead, all the way up at Sandy Vale, still seated in her rocking chair.
Then there was the story about the engineer at the Cambria works who early in the afternoon of that fateful Friday had started a letter to an old college friend, “Thank God, I am through with a day such as I hope never to pass again.” A “gay girl” of the town was said to have jumped from a hotel window during the very worst of the flood in a fatal effort to save a drowning child. There was a Newfoundland dog that supposedly hauled a Woodvale woman to safety and then swam back to save a drowning baby. And another dog, a water spaniel named Romeo, was said to have towed his mistress, Mrs. Charles Kress, to the windows of Alma Hall. And just above the hideous pileup at the stone bridge, on a billboard at the depot, there was a large poster, undamaged by the flood, which several reporters made a point of mentioning. Put there a few days before the flood to announce the arrival of Augustin Daly’s A Night Off, its very large headline read, “Intensely Funny.”
Among the best pieces describing the human condition in Johnstown during these days were several by a late-arriving cub reporter for the Philadelphia Press whose name was Richard Harding Davis. The son of two prominent Philadelphia literary figures, he was strikingly handsome, twenty-five, elegant, aloof, and loving every minute of his first real assignment. At Lehigh he had been the most popular figure on campus, despite what one of his classmates described as his “strict adherence to everything English in the way of dress and manner.” His first job had been on the Philadelphia Record where he sported a long, yellow ulster, carried a cane, and was rather hard for the old newspapermen to swallow. As it was, he only lasted three months. He was caught one day by the city editor writing up an assignment with his kid gloves on and was promptly fired on the spot.
But with the Press he had fared better. He had sold a few short stories, interviewed Walt Whitman, and sent some samples of his work off to Robert Louis Stevenson with a request for advice. Stevenson advised writing “with co
nsiderate slowness and on the most ambitious models.” The slowness Davis would never quite master, nor would he try really; and the only ambitious model he ever seems to have set his sights on was his own very clear picture of himself as the world’s most dashing and celebrated foreign correspondent.
At the time the Johnstown story broke, Davis had been on vacation. It took several days for him to persuade the paper to send him, and when he finally arrived, he got off to a characteristic start. “A Philadelphia reporter was sent here to finish up the disaster, but the disaster is likely to finish him,” wrote The New York Times man. On alighting from his train, Davis “paralysed Newspaper row” by asking for the nearest restaurant. When it was explained that everyone had to forage on the country, Davis wanted to know where he could hire a horse and buggy, which set off another round of laughter. “But,” concluded the Times man, “he capped the climax by asking where he could buy a white shirt. A boiled shirt here is as rare as mince pie in Africa.”
Boiled shirt or no, he went to work, concentrating on human-interest stories. He wrote of walking over thousands of spilled cigars and of a pretty, young relief worker named Miss Hinkley of Philadelphia who was
…sitting busily writing at a table beside an open window which looked out on the yard of the morgue, and in which forty odd coffins filled with the dead were being examined by the living. Miss Hinkley’s hair was as carefully arranged and her tailor-made gown as neat and fresh as if she had stepped that moment from the Quaker City’s Rittenhouse Square. Reporters became painfully conscious of clothes that have been slept in for seven nights, and chins that had forgotten razors.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 261