Interestingly enough, along with the typhoid, there ran a long spell of unusually good health in Johnstown. There were fewer colds, fewer cases of measles, and fewer people complaining of “spring disorders” than there would have been under normal conditions. Those who managed to stay healthy through the first frightful days immediately following the disaster, stayed very healthy from then on. The regulations and precautions enforced by the sanitation people undoubtedly had a great deal to do with this, but so, most everyone would later agree, did the fact that there was by the end of the first week something almost like a spirit of exhilaration in the air. There was so much happening all around. Every day there was some kind of excitement. Those who had survived, despite how much they may have suffered, began to discover new energy in themselves. They were alive, and bad as things were that was still a lot better than being dead. And there was now so very much to be done.
There were exceptions, to be sure. Dr. Swan, for example, was so broken in spirit by what he had been through that he would never be able to practice medicine again. And the only fatality among the polyglot army of people brought in to help was a suicide among General Hasting’s troops. Sunday afternoon a moody farm boy with a wife and two children back home became so depressed by what he had seen that he went into his tent and shot himself through the head.
But for nearly everyone else the almost absurd idea that they were going to pick up and start over again, to rebuild everything, began working like a tonic. They started pulling together what was left of their old lives and got to work on the new.
Most of them had precious little left of the old. Dr. Matthews, who had opened a new practice in Johnstown just a few months before the flood, found not a shred of all that he had owned except for one shaving mug. Of George and Mathilde Heiser’s earthly possessions, the only thing recovered was a big wardrobe which young Victor retrieved from the wreckage on Main Street. When he pried open the door, he found his father’s old Civil War uniform inside, and in one pocket a single penny. It represented his entire inheritance.
Men like Horace Rose and John Fulton had lost their homes and virtually everything else they owned. James Quinn and his brother-in-law were able to recover scarcely a single board from their dry-goods store. The only possessions recovered from the Quinn home were some books, a photograph album, and some silverware, which were found scattered a mile or more from where the house had stood.
Quinn, like hundreds of others, had sent his children off to Pittsburgh to live with relatives, while he stayed on to do what he could to help. But there were a few days before they left which the children would remember always. For nearly every child who survived, the week after the flood was a time of high adventure. The dynamite blasting at the bridge, the commissaries with their wondrous stacks of goods, the mobs of strangers tramping through the streets, the Iron Company’s little wood-burning switching engines with their bell-shaped stacks shunting back and forth moving supplies, the nuns, the soldiers, the Pittsburgh firemen in their long rubber coats, were all something to see.
Gangs of small boys made great sport of sneaking past the sentries posted about town, or crawling among the rows of tents. Little prefabricated houses, called “Oklahomas,” were being put up everywhere, and often, if he acted sensible enough, a boy could get a chance to help out. And every child, it seemed, took up relic hunting. “Every yard would yield something if one had the energy to dig,” Gertrude Quinn wrote later. Gold and jewelry were supposedly being found all over town. One story had it that a crockery jar full of $6,500 worth of gold had been found in the mud where old William Macpherson had had his grocery store. Gertrude Quinn’s sister Marie found a two-and-a-half-dollar goldpiece. And it was no trick at all to find half dimes or three-cent pieces or even a shirt stud with what looked like a diamond in it.
On Sunday, the 9th, the sun broke through for the first time since the flood. The spring green of the hills gleamed in bright morning sunlight, and overhead there were only a few small, soft clouds, and all the rest of the sky was a clean blue. Work went on the same as any other day. The air, already warmer than it had been for weeks, rang with the sound of picks and axes, hundreds of hammers, and, strangely it seemed at first, church bells.
On the embankment near the depot, just back from where Hastings had his headquarters, the chaplain of the 14th Regiment, H. L. Chapman, and David Beale began conducting the first services since the flood.
There were no more than thirty people gathered at first, but as time passed the crowd grew. Soldiers hanging about nearby drifted over. People came from the depot and over from the center of town. Beale stood on a packing box and told a story about over-hearing a newcomer in the valley ask a small boy how bad things were in Johnstown, to which the boy was said to have replied, “If I was the biggest liar on the face of the earth I could not tell you half.”
The rest of the service went as might be expected until John Fulton got up and started saying things that soon had the crowd stirring.
He said the Cambria shops would be rebuilt. “Amen!” answered several voices. “Johnstown is going to be rebuilt,” he said. “Thank God!” someone answered again.
He said he could not speak for the Gautier works, but he was sure, nonetheless, that they, too, would be rebuilt, and bigger than ever. The Cambria men would be taken care of, he told them, and if you still have your family left, he said, then “God bless your soul, man, you’re rich.” His sermon was simple: “Get to work, clean up your department, set your lathes going again. The furnaces are all right, the steel works are all right. Get to work, I say. That’s the way to look at this sort of thing…Think how much worse it could have been. Give thanks for that great stone bridge that saved hundreds of lives. Give thanks that it did not come in the night. Trust in God. Johnstown had its day of woe and ruin. It will have its day of renewed prosperity. Labor, energy, and capital, by God’s grace, shall make the city more thriving than ever in the past.”
“Amen!” again from the crowd.
That Johnstown should be rebuilt was by now taken as a matter of course. That it should be rebuilt right where it was before was also something everybody took for granted. No matter how dreadfully the valley had been ravaged, it was still their home. In fact, there is no record of anyone ever seriously considering the idea of not rebuilding in that particular place. The only question now was how long was it going to take to get things rolling once more.
The scene on the hillside would be remembered for years. Fulton, tall and spare, with his iron-gray beard and dark brow, certainly looked and sounded like a man of God; but he was also, as everyone knew, the voice of the Cambria Iron Company speaking, and as sincere as he may have been in asking them to trust in the Lord, his audience had had somewhat more experience putting its trust in the Cambria Iron Company. And either way, any man who could speak for both God and the Iron Company was someone to listen to closely.
The idea that the stone bridge had actually saved lives was a new one to most people, but the more they thought about it, the more they accepted it. The fire at the bridge seemed to epitomize the worst of the flood’s horrors, but the fact was the death toll would have been far greater, perhaps even twice as great, had the bridge collapsed. The whole town would have been plunged down the valley to almost total destruction.
But it was when Fulton began talking of still another matter that a tense stillness came over the crowd and his every word could be heard over the sounds from the city below.
“I hold in my possession today,” he said, “and I thank God that I do, my own report made years ago, in which I told these people, who, for purposes for which I will not mention, desired to seclude themselves in the mountains, that their dam was dangerous. I told them that the dam would break sometime and cause just such a disaster as this.”
Then he changed to another subject. But he had said enough. In just two sentences he had hit on something that had been smoldering in people’s minds for days. There had been plenty of talk
about what had happened at South Fork and about the club. People were bitter, and with their renewed energy had come anger, deep and highly inflammable, and perhaps even contributing to that energy.
It was not that Fulton had been the first to raise the question of the dam and who was to blame for the flood; what was important was that he, John Fulton, had said what he had. The issue was now right out in the open, full-scale and officially. Moreover, there was no longer any question about which side the Iron Company might be on; and, perhaps most significant of all, if things came to a showdown, which everyone felt sure they would, Fulton, it would appear, held a piece of paper of considerable importance.
IX
“Our misery is the work of man.”
The excitement in Pittsburgh continued day after day. Johnstown seemed to be the only thing people were talking about, and the papers carried almost nothing but flood news, with stories running on and on, page after page, and in even greater detail than what was being published elsewhere. The two cities had always had ties, through the steel business and family connections. Now almost everyone in Johnstown, it appeared, had relatives in Pittsburgh.
Refugees from the disaster kept pouring into Union Station by the thousands. The sick and the injured had to be cared for. Children, hundreds of them, lost or orphaned, many wearing tags for identification, had to be fed and looked after. Homes had to be found for them and all the others. On Wednesday, the 5th, four trains full of survivors, most of them women and children, came in.
People had dropped everything to help. Ladies’ groups were sorting clothes and packing medical supplies in church basements all over town. The Masons, the Republican Club, factory workers were organizing, collecting, donating, and proudly announcing their accomplishments to the papers. The involvement grew so that the local merchants began complaining of a serious drop off in trade. “From a business point of view” things were the worst they had been for years, according to one report. Several firms canceled their regular newspaper advertisements in order to express their sympathies for the people of Johnstown, and Young’s picture store on Wood Street attracted considerable attention by displaying in its window a painting of South Fork dam done a few years earlier by a local artist.
Everybody, it seemed, had his own latest story from Johnstown. A husband had heard from another man at the mill, a brother had just come back from the railroad depot, a cousin who worked at the Mellon bank had overheard something, two sons from the big Italian family across the alley had actually been there with one of the Flinn gangs, and they all had stories to tell, inside information. The city was alive with the most hair-raising tales and rumors. And nowhere was there more talk, or were things in such turmoil, than at the Pennsylvania depot and yards, where tons of food and supplies were still piling up, and the crowds were so thick, any hour of the day, that you could barely make your way through.
The railroad itself had never known such times, not even during the worst of the war years. Every schedule had been canceled. All normal business had been stopped. Nothing went east but trains bound for Johnstown, and as it was, the traffic was almost more than could be handled. If there had been only the storm damage to contend with, troubles would have been bad enough; but train after train kept steaming in from across the country, men and supplies had to be kept moving, repair equipment had to be sent forward, and everything that went up had to come back by the same route.
Pitcairn, with full authorization from the main office in Philadelphia, did everything possible to speed things up. The Pennsylvania had already donated $5,000 to the relief fund, but that was of small consequence compared to what was accomplished to keep the line open. Pitcairn himself worked almost without letup. All available manpower east and west was rushed into the area, and the cost of everything was assumed by the line.
This was by far the biggest emergency the Pennsylvania had ever been called on to face, and all its extraordinary power, its almost military-style discipline and organization, its vast resources in men and equipment, were brought to bear on the problem. The results, the swiftness and efficiency with which forces were marshaled, tangles unsnarled, damages repaired, help rushed through, were indeed remarkable and left a lasting impression on everyone involved. For all its highhanded ways, for all the evils people attributed to it, in a crisis the railroad had been worth more than any other organization, including the state, and they would remember that.
Still it would be two full weeks until the line from Harrisburg west would be opened and relief trains could start to Johnstown by way of Altoona. Until then Pittsburgh would remain the one channel through which everything had to pass.
The Allegheny River, with its endless freight of wreckage, also continued to be an immense fascination. Children were brought from miles away to watch the tawny water slip past the shores, so that one day they might be able to say they had seen something of the Johnstown Flood. The most disreputable-looking souvenirs, an old shoe, the side of a packing box with the lettering on it still visible, were fished out, dripping and slimy, to be carried proudly home.
There were accounts of the most unexpected finds, including live animals. But the best of them was the story of a blonde baby found at Verona, a tiny river town about ten miles up the Allegheny from Pittsburgh. According to the Pittsburgh Press, the baby was found floating along in its cradle, having traveled almost eighty miles from Johnstown without suffering even a bruise. Also, oddly enough, the baby was found by a John Fletcher who happened to own and operate a combination wax museum, candy stand, and gift shop at Verona.
Fletcher announced his amazing discovery and the fact that the baby had a small birthmark near its neck. Then he hired a pretty nineteen-year-old, dressed her in a gleaming white nurse’s uniform, and put her and the baby in the front window of his establishment. Within a few days several thousand people had trooped by to look at the Johnstown baby and, it is to be assumed, to make a few small purchases from the smiling Mr. Fletcher. Then, apparently, quite unexpectedly, the baby was no longer available for viewing. The mother, according to Fletcher, had lived through the flood and, having heard the story back in Johnstown, rushed to Verona, identified the birthmark, and went home with her baby.
But there was another subject that was stirring up far more talk in Pittsburgh. It was not until three or four days after the flood that the rest of the country began growing keenly interested in the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, but in Pittsburgh, not surprisingly, the interest had been high since news of the disaster first came through Friday night. And for those who may have forgotten, or who never knew, the nature of the club’s membership, the Pittsburgh newspapers were quick to remind them.
In the beginning there had been some concern over those clubmen who had been at the dam when it failed. But when it became known that they were alive and unharmed, the emphasis immediately shifted to what exactly the other club members might do next.
On Saturday, at the mass meeting called by Pitcairn, Frick and Phipps had been named to serve on the executive board of the Relief Committee. That night, at the home of another member, Charles Clarke, a number of the clubmen met in private to agree on what their policy should be. At that point, like everyone else in Pittsburgh, they knew very little about what precisely had happened at the dam; but judging from the way things looked, the wisest policy for the moment seemed to be to say nothing, except that no immediate action was planned and that the club would make a donation to the people of Johnstown of 1,000 blankets.
But, unfortunately for the others, a few members decided to speak their minds all the same. One member, who asked that his name be withheld, told reporters that in the past he had heard questioning about the strength of the dam, but that he had never looked into the matter personally. Then he told a story of riding from the lake down to Johnstown a few years earlier with a driver who had said, “The time will come when more than you and I will talk about that embankment.” And he finished up by saying that there were some in Johnstown wh
o used an Episcopal prayer, “Lord deliver us from mountain floods!”
Another member, James McGregor, who gave his name without any hesitation, said he refused to believe that there had been any trouble at South Fork. He was certain the whole thing was a mistake.
“I am going up there to fish the latter part of this month,” he said. “I am a member of the South Fork Fishing Club and I believe it is standing there the same as it ever was.
“As for the idea of the dam ever being condemned, it is nonsense. We have been putting in from twenty thousand to fifteen thousand dollars a year at South Fork. We have all been shaking hands with ourselves for some years on being pretty clever businessmen, and we should not be likely to drop that much money in a place that we thought unsafe. No sir, the dam is just as safe as it ever was, and any other reports are simply wild notions.”
His own notions, which appeared in the papers on the morning of Sunday, June 2, were so wild, and so very tactless in the face of what was by then known of the suffering at Johnstown, that the only possible excuse for making such a statement must have been that he actually believed every word of it.
And to make matters worse, he was not alone. Young Louis Clarke next told a correspondent for the New York Herald that there was great doubt “among the engineers” who had examined the reservoir whether, after all, it had been that particular dam which broke. Just which engineers he was referring to is unclear, but he was interviewed along with another club member, James Reed, who said that in the past he himself had climbed all over the dam, studying it closely, and that “in the absence of any positive statement I will continue to doubt, as do many others familiar with the place, that it really let go.” Perhaps, he then suggested, it had been a dam at Lilly which broke.
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