by Jon Wilkman
A few buildings at the Harry Carey ranch were left standing, and to Carey’s relief, the company safe survived intact.9 The Indian Trading Post was a ruined tourist memory, surrounded by downed fences and dead animals. Farther west, a former two-story concrete Southern California Edison substation, with six- to eight-inch walls, was totally destroyed. A new substation was severely damaged. A tangle of wires, transformers, and a water tower remained, but no workers’ homes.
West of Saugus, the reinforced concrete of U.S. Highway 99 ended in fractured slabs. Ambulances waited to treat survivors and transport them to hospitals in Newhall and towns farther south. In a makeshift first-aid station, a rancher’s wife, Mrs. Ethel Holsclaw, couldn’t stop sobbing. “The baby was sleeping with me. I clutched him tight as we were swept out on the water in the dark … I know that he was alive when we hit a whirlpool that took him away from me … I landed on dry land. Why did I have to live?”10 The distraught mother was one of fifty persons treated for injuries in Newhall. A Red Cross nurse described the situation to a newspaper reporter. “There’s little that doctors and nurses can do; it’s a job for the undertakers. They escaped or they died.”11
Volunteers carry a victim of the flood, covered by a sheet. (Los Angeles Department of Water and Power)
The gas station, café, and tourist cabins at Castaic Junction were gone, and at least four miles of Highway 99 were disjointed or blocked by debris. Nearby, Southern Pacific tracks were twisted and torn loose. In an SP work camp, one Anglo foreman and seventeen Mexican railroad workers and their families were dead.12 Stretches of State Highway 126, heading into the Santa Clara River Valley, were tilted at odd angles and interrupted by collapsed hillsides. Along the route, telephone poles were bent or broken. Severed power lines lay limp in thick layers of mud. Oil derricks were overturned. The few trees that survived were stripped of their leaves. Most were bunched in upended heaps.
Beneath the hillside outcropping known as Blue Cut, a sign stood beside a partially intact section of railroad track, identifying the Southern Pacific siding called Kemp. Below were the remains of the Edison construction camp. Protruding from the silt, like toys tossed aside, about fifty automobiles owned by workers who lived in the SCE tent community were scattered among shattered plywood flooring and shreds of canvas. Of the 145 men at Kemp, only 50 survived.13 When searchers found the body of one victim, they noticed his wristwatch. The hands were stopped at 1:24.
Crushed cars owned by workers at the Edison Camp at Kemp (Los Angeles Department of Water and Power)
Survivors remembered watchman Ed Locke as a hero. With the black humor that made the tragedy bearable for some, “Scotty” Gordon, a wizened local rancher, chuckled as he described discovering Locke’s body: “We found Ed Locke with his gun and belt on where he fell,” Gordon told a reporter. “And, ha ha ha ha—a jug of wine at his side. Someone had put it there.”14
Almost all who escaped from Kemp were stripped naked by the force of the flood. Scotty Gordon used his “little flivver coupe” to take survivors to Camulos, where they received dry clothes. In Piru, “a very nice lady” provided a place to sleep at a local hotel, the Cozy Inn.15 Sixteen-year-old Harry Lechler watched as a man, a Kemp survivor, arrived unexpectedly and walked slowly to a piano in the lobby. Without a word, the stranger sat at the keyboard. “He played beautifully,” Lechler remembered.16
Along the floodpath, a few who witnessed the disaster celebrated survival and life. After the water receded, around 8:30 in the morning, a teenage boy was seen in the flooded area. With his trousers and sleeves rolled up, he was shoveling mud from the parlor of his parents’ home. As he heaved the muck aside, he whistled and sang “hallelujah.” His two sisters, sitting on a pile of debris, added their voices as accompaniment.17
Survivors from the Southern California Edison Camp at Kemp (Author’s collection)
The prayers of Santa Paula Sunday-school teacher Mrs. Pearl Barnard had been answered. She and the white chicken that rode the flood with her were spared. “I discovered I was on the side of an old barn. I called several times to people on the side. I asked if they could help me, and two young Mexican boys came and rescued me. I came up to a building and I said ‘Oh here’s Mrs. Merrill’s home. She will take care of me.’ And she did, and I went to bed and slept until 2:30.”18 Later, Mrs. Barnard’s story was published in a religious tract, featuring a picture of the thankful believer, posed in front of the wreckage of her home.
After riding the flood for nine miles, determined thirteen-year-old Thelma McCawley was stranded in the branches of a tree. She struggled for hours to get free, until she dozed off—too exhausted to fight any longer. At dawn, the sun woke her. “It was like I had gone to sleep and had had a bad dream,” she said.19
While San Francisquito Canyon, and much of the Santa Clara River Valley, was a dead zone, dawn for most Angelenos began like any other Monday. Southern California Edison’s Long Beach power plant was running “into the red,” at full capacity to provide electricity to the city after L.A.’s Powerhouse 2 was leveled by the flood. By six A.M., the lights were on again in Ventura and Santa Barbara.20 In Los Angeles, water flowed for showers and morning coffee.
It didn’t take long before urgent radio broadcasts, word of mouth, and headlines in afternoon papers made it clear that March 13 wasn’t just another day. In Santa Paula, a special edition of the Chronicle was delayed by the power outage and a severed gas line (gas fueled the flames needed to mold the lead type used by the paper’s Linotype presses). It wasn’t until one P.M. on Tuesday that the problems were solved and copies of the Chronicle with banner headlines went on sale at local newsstands.21
With main roads washed out and ten bridges gone or damaged, the quickest and most comprehensive way to grasp the extent of the destruction was by air. By midmorning, as many as six aircraft crisscrossed the stricken area.22 Pilots aided search-and-rescue operations by dipping low to indicate a body below. They discovered that victims with upturned faces were easier to find. Circling vultures provided independent confirmation of a new corpse, including a man “crucified” on a tall tree thirty feet above the canyon floor.23 Adding to the misfortunes of Southern California Edison, a plane with two SCE employees aboard got lost in the early-morning fog and crashed into a mountainside. When searchers found the wreckage, there was only one survivor—another name added to Edison’s casualty list.
Paramount Pictures dispatched the first newsreel cameramen to the scene. Joseph Johnson and Irby Kovermam left Los Angeles in a fast car, while Sanford Greenwald headed for a landing strip where a biplane waited. Greenwald was in the air before the pilot admitted he didn’t know where San Francisquito Canyon was. As they flew north, their destination was unmistakable. “The Valley looked wiped clean of every sign of life,” the cameraman wrote later.
From the air, the Paramount newsmen could see much of the fifty-four-mile floodpath. Greenwald hefted his camera and got to work. “It was a mean job to shoot from a plane. To see anything but mud and water you had to get down real close.” He ordered the pilot to dive. “When we were a few feet from the water, when we took a picture [we] climbed up fast for safety.” An unexpected gust of wind almost slammed them against a hillside, but the cameraman got his footage and he headed to Los Angeles, where the film was processed and screened in local theaters that night.24
The news took more time to spread across the country. In New York, Monday, March 13, was a day of “frenzy,” with record trading on the New York Stock Exchange exceeding four million shares. American prosperity seemed to have no ceiling. What could go wrong? Herbert Hoover was emerging as the Republican presidential candidate, promising probity and even more profit and good times, even though there were headlines from distant Los Angeles, featuring sad stories about a dam few had heard of.
Reporters descended on Saugus and Newhall, the easiest towns to reach near the disaster area. The only route from the west crossed the single-lane Montalvo Bridge, which had barely survived. Along
with representatives of local papers, journalists from the United Press and the Associated Press showed up with notepads and cameras. They were able to file stories from the scene as soon as telephone and telegraph lines were reconnected. One and a half million feet of wire were rushed from Los Angeles and one hundred Pacific Telephone linemen reestablished long-distance connections by midnight on the thirteenth, just in time for East Coast newspaper editions the next day.25 Editors wanted dramatic copy and pictures to match.
By 1925, the first commercial “tele-photo” service was in use, allowing photographic images to be distributed over phone lines. The system was slow and unreliable, and the quality often poor. While newspapers waited for printed images to arrive by overnight air, stories like the St. Francis Dam disaster made the effort worthwhile, attracting attention on newsstands. The technology was impressive, but one newsman admitted, “While modern science has made it possible to flash the pictures of the California disaster across the country, it has not yet found a way to prevent such calamities as the one portrayed.”26
In the rush for headlines, names of people and places were misspelled; rumors became facts, and facts garbled. A story spread that “more than a hundred frantic Indians” were searching for tribe members at the Harry Carey Trading Post.27 When it was learned that the thirty or forty Navajo performers and artisans had left for their Arizona reservation days before, another rumor circulated that they had been forewarned by a medicine man, identified as Dineh-Til-Begay. It was reported that the shaman had urged his tribesmen to escape because the white man’s dam was about “to break wide open very soon and drown everything in its path.”28
In a somber but hopeful letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times, humorist Will Rogers wrote: “Four Sundays ago I drove all over that beautiful valley in California and visited the Harry Carey ranch … We have great sectional rivalries, but it don’t take much to wipe it out when something happens.”29
At first, some reporters from the East Coast press, faced with covering a Los Angeles story that didn’t involve movie scandals or bathing beauties, had difficulty finding their bearings. The New York Journal featured a banner headline claiming FLOOD SWEEPS VALLEY FOR 200 MILES! The Washington Times announced that “Pasadena, a few miles below and directly in the path of the raging waters, is one of the most beautiful home sites in the world.”
Indeed, Pasadena had beautiful homes, but the site of the Rose Parade was nowhere near the floodpath. Later, maps showed up in print to define the mysterious terrain to East Coast readers, many of whom were interested to learn if the floodpath was close to Hollywood. One paper reported that Will Hays, president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, had expressed concern about the loss of life because Hollywood studios “may have to do quite a lot of recasting.”30
The Hearst-owned Chicago American, eager to feature photographs, printed images from other disasters, including the 1927 Mississippi floods, informing readers that the images were what the devastation in California “looked like.” When photographs weren’t enough, drawings were printed. The pictures may have sold newspapers, but even the most accurate photographs were only snapshots of the extent and personal impact of the disaster.
In the first hours of daylight, Los Angeles Police Chief James “Two Gun” Davis sent hundreds of armed officers to protect property and establish order. The L.A. cops were joined by men from the County Sheriff’s department. Hundreds of curious “Autoists” were told to steer their cars elsewhere. Only the press and legitimate visitors were allowed to pass on a temporary bridge erected with scrap timber.31
On March 13, when a team of investigators from the Los Angeles Bureau of Power and Light succeeded in getting past the barricades that blocked access to San Francisquito Canyon, they were met by a Pathé News cameraman and a representative of the Portland Cement Company who was anxious to learn whether Mulholland had used his product to construct the failed dam.32 Another exception was Nat Fisher, a small-time movie producer from Hollywood. Fisher’s company was no MGM, and unlike The Temptress, his project had no script or star like Greta Garbo. But the obscure mini-mogul thought images of what was left of the St. Francis Dam, and the damage it caused, might sell movie tickets.
Newspaper drawing of flood survivors (Ventura County Museum of History and Art/Wendy Larsen Cleaves Collection)
Hundreds of volunteers tramped the floodpath. Twenty-nine-year-old Harold Hubbard was among the first local reporters to try to capture what was happening in words. His hastily written notes reflected impressions that would be incorporated into articles for the Hollywood Citizen-News: “A negro swam and waded out of the torrent and was stopped as he ran through Saugus … entirely nude.” “All bodies recovered were badly mangled, generally had arms and legs broken. Death in many instances … from blows rather than drowning.” “Officers stopping inquisitive motorists … inquired for badges when the motorist wanted to visit the scene of the flood. Those who produced them were required to join the ranks of those enforcing law and order.” “One officer called to the scene in the early morning hours, and who had been forced to work without eating until nearly noon, observed a man take a drink and then hide the bottle in an automobile. The officer went and finished the bottle.”33
Near the Ruiz homestead, Jim Erratchuo, a Ruiz relative, was in shock and inconsolable. When the flood hit, “I realized the devil was on me,” he remembered.34 In the weeks before, he thought the dam looked dangerous, but he never thought of leaving the canyon. “That was my home, and being that the power house was there, I thought everything would be OK.”35 Wearing a long fur coat, Erratchuo waded up and down the stream bed, searching for his wife, Rosarita, and their fourteen-month-old son.
Farther downstream, near Piru, an unidentified half-naked Mexican-American survivor also looked lost and distraught. Rescue crews assumed the loss of his family had made the man insane when he refused help and ran screaming through a citrus grove.36 On Newhall ranchland near Blue Cut, Joe Gottardi couldn’t stop crying as he wandered through his ruined orchard, looking for his wife, Francisa, and their five children. Gottardi didn’t know their dead bodies lay downstream, miles away.
Slowly, small groups of refugees tentatively returned from hillsides and canyons where they had run for their lives. Some survivor stories tested credulity, but proved true. An eighteen-month-old Mexican-American baby was found in a pile of debris. The infant was considered another victim until surprised rescuers discovered she was breathing. A doctor stimulated the infant’s heart, and the tiny survivor started to cry. No one knew the fate of the baby’s mother.37 In Santa Paula, an elderly Mexican woman was seen crying as she sat alone. The old señora was blind.38
Brothers Norris and Bob Proctor lived high above the floodplain in a comfortable two-story home. They had been awakened around two A.M. by automobile headlights and the sounds of engines streaming up Santa Paula Canyon Road. Bob turned to his older brother: “I says, ‘Norris, what’s going on? Why are all those cars coming up the canyon?’ He says, ‘Oh, it must be the Ku Klux Klan. They’re probably out tonight.’”39 When their father, no fan of the KKK, came to tell them that a dam had collapsed, the only dam they knew was a diversion embankment that was only a few feet high, and the boys wondered even more about the commotion. After they learned the truth, they joined their father, the President of the local Chamber of Commerce, and headed downtown to help with relief efforts.
Near a local elementary school, the brothers saw long tables with coffee urns, large pots filled with hot soup, and trays of sandwiches. The tables had been up since seven A.M. Folding chairs sat under canvas tarps hung from buildings to provide shade. Red Cross ladies wore long white smocks and caps to cover their hair as they treated the injured and served food to dazed survivors, many of whom were dressed in loose-fitting donated clothes provided by the Salvation Army. Of the 3,500 people affected by the flood, 2,490 received Red Cross assistance.40 One third of the refugee population was children. With
in a few days, local canteens were providing as many as 2,500 meals a day.41 The Salvationists also dispatched musicians from the organization’s Oxnard String Band to play a selection of “solos, trios and quartets,” hoping to lift the spirits of survivors and rescue workers.42
Late in the morning of March 13, boys searching for survivors spotted thirteen-year-old Thelma McCawley. Her naked body was covered with a borrowed coat and she was rushed to the Santa Paula Red Cross station. Still suffering from measles, she kept calling for her mother. There was concern she wouldn’t survive. “There was a lady came over and started bathing me, because I had silt all over me,” Thelma remembered. “And she started bathing me, and she said, ‘Oh, you’re a white girl!’ And so she had them put me on a stretcher, and took me right across the street to her home. Most of the victims they had brought in were Spanish people.” In fact, most of the victims in Santa Paula were Anglo, but poor Mexicans who lived in the colonias between the railroad tracks and the river were most in need of food and clothing.
When two men from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power visited the busy Santa Paula American Legion headquarters, hoping to learn how they could help, they reported to their bosses: “We looked in the wards to see if we could find someone who could give us an intelligent account of things, but were disappointed as they were all Mexicans and were not in a condition to be interviewed.”43
In a few days, 116 tents from the California State Militia were trucked in to house the homeless in a hastily constructed camp on the outskirts of Santa Paula. The tent community replaced shelter in an abandoned citrus-packing shed. For the next three months, tents would be home for hundreds of refugees, segregated between Anglos and Mexicans. One third were children. Six Mexican babies would be born in the encampment.44 Refugees who were better off, almost all Anglos, found places to stay with family members or friends. With small-town pride, many refused to be considered objects of charity.