David McCullough Library E-book Box Set

by David McCullough

  He wrote about a fist fight down in Cambria City between a local deputy sheriff and a drunken National Guard lieutenant named Jackson, who was put under arrest and sent back to Pittsburgh after several bystanders, including Davis, stepped in to break things up. He described the offers coming in from people all over the country who wished to adopt a Johnstown orphan, and told the story of a man named John McKee, whose body had been found inside a cell of the town jail. McKee had been locked up for twenty-four hours for overcelebrating on Memorial Day.

  And along with the reporters, working their way among the ruins, came the photographers, lugging their ponderous, fragile equipment. They made pictures of men standing on freight cars in the midst of Main Street, of wagons loaded down with coffins, and of the great barren mud flat where Woodvale had been. The monstrous debris that clogged the city was pictured from virtually every angle, and at least one photographer decided to improve slightly on his composition by having a man lie down and play dead in the foreground. The picture later became one of the most popular stereoptican views of the disaster. But by the time the photographers were about, any body so exposed would have been long since found and removed; moreover, the shirt on the man’s back looks a bit too neat and clean and the things around him are a little too nicely arranged.

  Upturned houses, gangs of laborers carrying shovels and axes and threading their way through huge dunes of rubbish, like a drab, derby-hatted army moving through the remains of a fallen city, the jerry-built shelters on the hillsides, farm women in poke bonnets working at the commissaries, they all made splendid subjects. But the most popular subject by far was a house owned by John Schultz which had stood on Union Street but was now stranded at the east end of Main. It had been pitched up on its side, and through an upstairs window a gigantic tree had been driven, its roots jutting thirty feet into the air. The building looked as though it had been skewered by some terrible oak-flinging god. One by one men and boys would crawl out on the tree to sit for a portrait, their faces registering no emotion, their feet dangling in light that had little more color than it would have in the final printed photograph. Six people had been in the house when the water struck, and they had all come out alive.

  At one point it was estimated that there were no less than 200 amateur photographers about town, enough in any case that they had become a serious nuisance. So the word went around that if you were an able-bodied man but had no official business in town, then you had to work if you wanted to stay on. It was, as one observer said, a policy which had a “most salutary effect.”

  Harper’s Weekly, Frank Leslie’s, and some of the other picture magazines had sent artists to cover the story. There were two or three writers gathering material for quick books. And in New York the World even managed to get Walt Whitman, who had celebrated his seventieth birthday on the day of the flood, to write a poem which was promptly printed on page one.

  A voice from Death, solemn and strange, in all his sweep and power,

  With sudden, indescribable blow—towns drown’d—humanity by thousands slain,

  The vaunted work of thrift, goods, dwellings, forge, street, iron bridge.

  Dash’d pell-mell by the blow—yet usher’d life continuing on,…

  And in the Denver, Boston, and Brooklyn papers, long excerpts were published from a novel called Put Yourself in His Place, which had been written by a well-known English author named Charles Reade nearly twenty years before. Its closing chapters described the bursting of a reservoir and a dreadful flood which were surprisingly similar to what had happened at Johnstown.

  Reade had based his book on the failure of the Dale Dyke at Sheffield, England, which had taken 238 lives in 1864; but for the millions of Americans who now read the excerpts, the “Hillsborough” of his story, with its steel mills and coal mines “fringed by fair woods,” and its reservoir in the mountains to the east, seemed so like Johnstown as to be uncanny. The story told of people dreaming of floods, of workmen who had long “misliked” the foundation of the dam. When the break came, it was only after a storm had raised the level of the lake so far that it started flowing over the center of the dam. Then down the valley came “an avalanche of water, whirling great trees up by the roots, and sweeping huge rocks away, and driving them, like corks, for miles.”

  Meanwhile, the headlines blared away, day after day. “Agony”…“WOE!”…“PESTILENCE!”…and by midweek, “DEATH GROWS—A GIANT! One Pervading Presence Throughout the Conemaugh Valley, FIFTEEN THOUSAND CORPSES, A Tale of Grief That Can Only Be Told in Bitter Tears, Another Day of Utter Despair.”

  The phrase “no pen can describe…” kept cropping up again and again, but the pens kept right on describing. The story took up the entire front page of both The New York Times and the World for five straight days. The Boston Post carried little else on its front page for twelve days running. It was called “The Great Calamity,” “The Nation’s Greatest Calamity,” “The Historic Catastrophe.” Frank Leslie’s said outright, “It is the most extraordinary calamity of the age.” Great battles had destroyed more life, said one writer after another, but no battle left such a ghastly trail of horror and devastation. That such a thing had happened in the United States of America in the year 1889 seemed almost more than the editorial writers could accept. Several papers, including Frank Leslie’s, allowed that similar slaughter might occur in India or China or other remote lands “where human life is cheap,” but how in the world had it ever happened here?

  All over the country newspapers published column after column of names of the dead. An extraordinary amount of space was given over to telling of the “Slaughter of the Innocents.” The bodies of women and children found among the wreckage or in the deep, flood-dumped silt downstream were described in grim detail. Every reporter at Johnstown it seems saw at least one dead mother still clutching her dead child, and much was made of the fact that more women died in the disaster than men. (Of the bodies finally recovered 923 were men, 1,219 women.)

  Victorian sentimentality had a heyday. The most pathetic-looking “Johnstown orphans” imaginable were drawn by New York artists and published beside long accounts of lost children. There were stories published of families tenderly bidding each other a final good-by just as the flood was about to pounce on them and of people tucking farewell notes into bottles before they slipped beneath the water for the last time.

  One publisher, Kurz & Allison of Chicago, eventually got out a color lithograph which became one of the popular works of art of the age. In the upper right-hand corner a dam bursts almost directly on top of a Johnstown where all the women and children are bare-foot and many are in their night clothes at four in the afternoon. The women are fainting, falling, down on their knees praying, while the men, most of whom are amply clothed and shod, dash about trying bravely to contend with the rush of fire and water.

  The newspapers, too, went very heavy on the horrors to be seen among the ruins of Johnstown, sometimes stretching the art nearly to the breaking point. This memorable sample, written at Johnstown on Wednesday, June 5, appeared the following day in the Philadelphia Press:

  …One of the most ghastly and nauseous sights to those unaccustomed to scenes of death is the lunching arrangement for the undertakers. These men are working so hard that they have no time for meals, and huge boilers of steaming coffee, loaves of bread, dried beef and preserves are carried into the charnel house and placed at the disposal of the workers. Along comes one weary toiler, his sleeves rolled up, and apron in front and perspiring profusely despite the cold, damp weather. He has just finished washing a clammy corpse, has daubed it with cold water, manipulated it about on the boards and in the interval before the body of another poor wretch is brought in, gets a cup of coffee and a sandwich. With dripping hands he eats his lunch with relish, setting his cup occasionally beside the hideous face of a decomposing corpse and totally oblivious to his horrible surroundings.

  Whatever the reporters may have lacked in the way of facts, they made up
for in imagination. Distortions, wild exaggerations, and outright nonsense were published in just about every major paper in the country. One reporter described buzzards (“incited by their disgusting instinct”) circling over the stone bridge; another claimed the rivers were literally dammed with dead bodies. There were tales of wild dogs ravaging the graves of flood victims and devouring corpses by the dozens. Indianapolis readers were told that “each blackened beam hides a skull.”

  There seems little doubt that there was plenty of drinking going on, but one writer for the New York World had men staggering about with whole pailfuls of whiskey. (“Barrels of the stuff are constantly located among the drifts, and men are scrambling over each other and fighting like wild beasts in their mad search for it.”) A large family was pictured sailing by during the height of the flood singing “Nearer, My God, to Thee” in harmony. And of those stories emphasizing the pitiful fate of the innocent, perhaps the most imaginative was one filed from New Florence. A bride from Johnstown (she was supposedly married just before the flood) was quoted: “Today they took five little children out of the water, who had been playing ‘Ring around a rosy.’ Their hands were clasped in a clasp which even death did not loosen, and their faces were still smiling.”

  But the most splendid story of the lot was one about a man named Daniel Peyton, the so-called “Paul Revere of the Flood,” who was said to have galloped down the valley on a big bay warning everyone to run for the hills. Peyton (in some versions he is Periton) seems to have evolved out of young John Baker of South Fork and John Parke, Jr. He can also be traced to Charles Reade’s Put Yourself in His Place, where a rider sped through the night warning isolated farm families that the water was on the way. In most versions of the Peyton story, including the best-known of several epic poems, The Man Who Rode to Conemaugh, by John Eliot Bowen, which was published first in Harper’s Weekly, the hero gallops the length of the valley just ahead of the onrushing wave. (The fact that there was no valley road on which to make such a ride never seemed to bother any of the authors very much.) Pale, his eyes aflame, he cries out “Run for your lives to the hills!”—then dashes on.

  Spurring his horse, whose reeking side

  Was flecked with foam as red as flame.

  Wither he goes and whence he came

  Nobody knows. They see his horse

  Plunging on his frantic course,

  Veins distended and nostrils wide,

  Fired and frenzied at such a ride.

  Nobody pays any attention to him. They decide he is a lunatic and jokingly dismiss the whole thing.

  “He thinks he can scare us,” said one with a laugh,

  “But Conemaugh folks don’t swallow no chaff;

  ’Taint nothing, I’ll bet, but the same old leak

  In the dam above the South Fork Creek.”

  In one version published as a Sunday-school lesson in 1891, the messenger goes into a saloon to spread the warning and winds up getting so drunk he can go no farther. But in either prose or poetry, in the end the flood finally catches up with poor Peyton, and nowhere is the moment more superbly described than in a book titled The Official History of the Johnstown Flood, which was put together that June by two Pittsburgh newspapermen named Frank Connelly and George C. Jenks. Peyton, in their “official” account, is about thirty years of age, and though he does not come clear from South Fork, but sticks only to the streets of Johnstown (Connelly and Jenks apparently felt they could not quite get away with the valley ride), his message and manner are essentially the same, and his end comes this way:

  …At last he completed the circuit of the city and started in search of a place of safety for himself. To the hills he urged his noble steed. Tired out from its awful ride, the animal became slower and slower at every stride, while the water continued to come faster and faster in pursuit. Like an assassin upon the trail of his victim, it gained step by step upon the intrepid rider. But the hills are in sight. No, he is doomed, for at that moment a mighty wave, blacker and angrier than the rest, overtook horse and rider and drew both back into the outstretched arms of death.

  As the Reverend David Beale wrote, “This fate was very necessary to the story, as it rendered an interview of the hero by another impossible.”

  Though the story appeared in a dozen or more different versions and was accepted outright as fact, it was quickly discredited in Johnstown. For there seemed to be no one who actually saw this Daniel Peyton. Furthermore, as near as anyone knew, and according to every available record, there never was anyone by that name in South Fork, Johnstown, or any other place in the valley. Victor Heiser and some of his friends got so interested in the tale that they spent some time trying to track it down. If there were such a fellow, they wanted to meet him; and if he had been killed as people said he had, then they surely wanted to see him get the credit he had coming. But they never turned up anything, nor did anyone else.

  Still, with all the stretching of facts, with all the fabrication and bunk being printed, no one seemed to mind very much. If the horror of what had happened was not described exactly according to facts, people knew that what had happened was still a great deal worse than any words could convey, however accurate. And if a few small fables had been called up for the occasion, well they were really no more extraordinary than a dozen other stories that were “the God’s truth.”

  For the publishers it was one of the headiest weeks ever. Newspaper circulations broke all records. For days on end, one edition after another sold out almost as soon as it hit the streets. The New York Daily Graphic was selling an unheard of 75,000 copies a day. In Pittsburgh there seemed no letup to the clamor for more news. A new weekly picture newspaper called the Utica Saturday Globe, published in upstate New York but widely circulated, increased its circulation by better than 63,000 with its special addition on the disaster.

  Songs were written, including one called “Her Last Message,” which was more or less based on Hettie Ogle, and another called “That Valley of Tears,” which was about a baby who was swept from the hearthside and drowned in its cradle. The last one, arranged for piano and orchestra, closed with the lines:

  And there midst all that wreck, with cruel waters laved,

  That babe within its cradle bed tho’ dead ’tis saved;

  Saved from a life of toil and worldly care,

  Oh! That we could in thy glorious prospects share.

  Magazines such as Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper got out special editions filled with pages of pictures and maps. Books were dashed off in a few weeks and rushed to the printers. Before the year was out, in less than six months, a dozen books would be written and published, most of them little more than an assembly of newspaper accounts, full of repetition, contradictions, and abundant nonsense. Several became best-sellers. One, a rousing period piece called The Johnstown Horror, was on sale in Johnstown itself in less than a month after the tragedy.

  –2–

  For Johnstown the result of the journalists’ handling of the story was even more staggering. The enormous sympathy aroused by the newspaper accounts, the pictures, the songs and poems, brought on the greatest outpouring of popular charity the country had ever seen. (And this too, alas, the journalists felt obliged to immortalize: “As the bow of promise gilded the Oriental sky after the Noachian deluge, so the dark cloud enfolding the Conemaugh Valley had a ray of brightest sun light. A great, grand glorious tide of sympathy for the sufferers swept the land like a conflagration, warming men’s hearts to deeds of radiant luster.”)

  On the Saturday following the calamity more than $100,000 had been raised in Pittsburgh. By the time they had finished, the people of Pittsburgh would give $560,000. New York City gave $516,000; Philadelphia, $600,000; Boston, $150,000. Nickels and dimes came in from school children and convicts. Churches sent $25, $50, $100. In Salt Lake City thousands of people turned out for a concert given in the huge Mormon Tabernacle, the proceeds of which were sent to Johnstown.

 
In New York’s Madison Square Garden, Jake Kilrain, who was to take on John L. Sullivan in another few weeks for the world championship, put on an exhibition fight with Charley Mitchell to raise money for Johnstown. (Sullivan was invited to attend the show but did not, and was soundly hissed when his telegram of apology was read by the manager.) At the Metropolitan Opera House, Edwin Booth played the third act of Othello and raised $2,500. In Washington, John Philip Sousa gave a band concert. In Paris, Buffalo Bill staged a special production of his Wild West Show, which was attended by the Prince of Wales. And in Altoona, on the night of Monday, June 3, there had been a benefit performance presented by the Night Off troupe.

  Tiffany & Company sent $500. R. H. Macy & Company sent $1,000. Joseph Pulitzer sent $2,000; Jay Gould, $1,000; John Jacob Astor, $2,500. The New York Stock Exchange gave $20,000. An old Confederate soldier sent four $100 Confederate bills, and the citizens of Cupola, Colorado, sent a solid-silver brick.

  There were donations from Nantucket ($1,136.93), Yazoo City, Mississippi ($350), and Tombstone, Arizona ($101). The first check to arrive was supposedly one for $100 from Senator Matthew S. Quay, leader of the Republican forces in Pennsylvania; and Simon Cameron, the state’s crusty, old Republican boss, who would be remembered as the man who defined an honest politician as one “who when he is bought stays bought,” sat down and wrote out what was said to be one of the last checks he ever signed, for $1,000.

  The Hebrew Benevolent Society of Los Angeles contributed $1,000. The United States Brewers Association sent $10,000. The Pittsburgh Society of Spiritualists collected $100. Money poured in from every state and from fourteen countries overseas. The London Stock Exchange gave $5,000. The total donations from Germany came to $30,000. There was money from the Lord Mayor of Dublin, the Mayor of Belfast, and the Sultan of Turkey. Queen Victoria sent her condolences to President Harrison, and from Washington came more than $30,000, including a check from Harrison for $300. (The President had presided over a mass meeting at the Willard Hotel Tuesday afternoon, looking very small and gray as he sat in a big armchair in the center of the stage. He had made a brief appeal for help, during which, according to one account, his voice trembled, and nearly $10,000 had been raised.)