by Jon Wilkman
Despite an outpouring of grief and generosity, the Santa Clara River Valley was a divided community. Along with the American Red Cross, La Cruz Azul Mexicana, another charitable organization, founded in San Antonio, Texas, in 1920, was there to help. The local branch, La Cruz Azul de San Fernando, was staffed by women from local Mexican families who focused on the needs of Latino victims of the flood, many of whom were poor and primarily Spanish-speaking. When needed, La Cruz Azul and Mexican Consulate translators coordinated services with other relief organizations, and advocated for fair and proper treatment.
Poor Mexican American children receiving help from the Red Cross (Los Angeles Times)
Even with the assistance of the National Red Cross and the Salvation Army, the communities of the Santa Clara River Valley, from Piru to Montalvo, were determined to do their best to care for their own as they mourned those they had lost. In the weeks and months ahead, representatives of sixteen American Legion posts joined the emergency response, contributing more than seven thousand hours of volunteer service.45 Many of those who performed the hardest jobs weren’t Legionnaires. They were Mexican laborers, some, according to reports in the Spanish-language press, recruited from as far as San Bernardino, 120 miles away.46 However, when representatives of the African-American community of Los Angeles volunteered to send laborers, the suggestion was quietly declined.
The Fillmore Herald summed up the situation in Santa Paula as of March 23: “163 families have been left without food, clothing or shelter for a total of 768 persons. A total of 273 homes have been destroyed as follows: 135 gone, 87 badly damaged, many beyond repair, and 51 flooded.”47 Doris Navarro recalled: “We went to see what had happened to our place. And there was nothing there. Not a thing. You couldn’t tell that anybody lived there. The water just took everything.”48
The response from Los Angeles had been swift. Before dawn on March 13, representatives of the Department of Water and Power, led by Harvey Van Norman and Assistant Engineer J.E. Phillips, were on the scene, surveying the damage, supporting search-and-rescue efforts, and arranging for funerals, burials, and bouquets of flowers.
Not surprisingly, official visitors from Los Angeles weren’t always greeted warmly. On March 14, when two DWP officials showed up at a temporary morgue in the Fillmore American Legion headquarters, they reported that the Legionnaires “were not communicative and left us with the impression that they were resenting the presence of Los Angeles people.”49 While this important work took place, William Mulholland stayed at DWP’s downtown headquarters. There had been threats against his life, and the Chief’s home was patrolled by an armed guard.50
Less than twenty-four hours after the flood, initial anger, shock, and confusion in the Santa Clara River Valley were replaced by a hastily organized search-and-cleanup procedure. Based on previous Red Cross and Salvation Army experience and American Legion military marching orders, coordinated with Los Angeles County sheriffs and city police, volunteer crews were split into squads. The first was equipped with rifles to kill animals that might spread pestilence. One slightly injured cow stood embedded in the mud for hours without attempting to move. The riflemen granted the beast a reprieve and pulled her free.
A second volunteer brigade carried shovels to probe the mud for bodies and clear debris. An ancillary search was launched to find blacksmiths who could fashion hooks to pull apart wreckage. In extreme cases, they detonated sticks of dynamite to clear the way. Crews stretched chain nets across some sections of the river to snare floating dead. Uniformed Boy Scouts with white flags on poles marked the location of victims. Paul Morris remembered finding a boy he’d gone to school with: “And he had tried to climb a tree, and there were all mud prints from his hands down the side of the tree. If we’d have found him early that morning, we might have saved him. I don’t know.”51
Norris Proctor recalled another eerie discovery: “They found a body in the sand. All that was sticking out was fingers. And when they dug it out, it was standing straight up and down. It was buried in silt that deep.”52 One newspaper article described a grisly encounter with a young mother with loose flesh between her fingers, “all that was left of the baby she clutched until its death.”53
Another article warned that “ghouls” were at work, scavenging the dead for valuables, especially around the SCE camp at Kemp. An Edison supervisor reported that “we found pocketbook after pocketbook belonging to [missing] men … who were known by their friends to have certain amounts of money in them. They were empty.”54 Police threatened to shoot to kill any corpse robbers they came across.
Legitimate “body gatherers,” carrying stretchers and canvas sheeting, followed the Boy Scouts who marked the location of victims with flags. The bodies were loaded onto wagons pulled by mules. The sturdy animals struggled to move through thick mud. Once the wagons arrived at a passable road, the corpses were loaded onto motorized trucks, covered with the canvas sheeting, and driven to morgues for storage and, hopefully, identification.
The last step of the search-and-recovery process was performed by men who burned debris and piles of animal carcasses.55 In some cases, charred human remains were found afterward in what had become unintended funeral pyres, adding to the uncertainty of the final death count. To protect the living, officials from the health department followed with purification equipment to test and treat water for disease-causing contamination, especially typhoid fever.56
The work continued day and night. Exhausting shifts lasted from four to eight hours. Hollywood klieg lights were brought from Universal Studios to illuminate the disaster area during after-dark operations. “We intend to comb every inch of the Valley,” Captain William Bright of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s homicide division declared as truckloads of volunteers continued to arrive. “Searchers have only scratched the surface,” Bright told a reporter. “And it’s possible the death toll may be doubled before the end of the week. From 3 to 5 feet of silt and debris cover some sections of the Valley and it will take days to make a thorough search.”57
Bureau of Power and Light engineer C. Clarke Keely had been with a rescue crew in San Francisquito Canyon since before dawn on March 13. He was joined by another BPL employee, Powerhouse 1 nurse Katherine Spann, one of the last persons to see the St. Francis Dam intact when she drove past late Monday night. The work crews constructed a makeshift tram with two-by-six-inch lumber. Keely and the rest of the team loaded bodies onto an improvised “skip car.” It was late afternoon before supply trucks arrived with food. The exhausted engineer cut a slice of cheese and ate raw eggs. It started to drizzle and rain. As darkness fell, Keely crawled under a truck and finally got some sleep.58
Local funeral homes were overwhelmed. When Oliver Reardon, the Ventura County Coroner, called for volunteers to staff makeshift morgues, 150 people showed up. In Newhall, a combination poolroom and dance hall was hastily repurposed. The large space was draped with festive decorations left from a recent celebration. A prominent sign greeted arrivals with a cheery WELCOME!
Investigators examine the body of child who died in the flood (Author’s collection)
Rows of bodies, covered with white sheets, lay on pine boards lined along the dance-hall walls. Searching for loved ones, men and women slowly moved past. The sound of shuffling shoes was mingled with sobs and soft gasps. When a visitor paused, a volunteer lifted a sheet to allow a glimpse of a victim’s face, many of whom were brutally beaten by the impact of the flood. The body of Lou Burns, the man whose pre-midnight phone call was the last human contact with Powerhouse 2, was found torn apart at the waist. Months later, his legs were discovered miles away.59
Few visitors to the morgues left unmoved. Movie star and Newhall resident William S. Hart arrived one day and stood solemnly over the body of an unidentified blond-haired boy. The steely-jawed actor “cried like a baby,” a deputy sheriff in charge of the identification process told reporters. The next day, a massive array of roses, lilies, and ferns were delivered with a little envelope.
A handwritten card read: “To a little unknown soldier of the Santa Clara Valley flood. With heartfelt sympathy from ‘the Newhall cowboy.’”60
Later, Hart shared his emotional response to the catastrophe in a letter to old friend, former lawman, and now Hollywood resident and movie consultant Wyatt Earp. After encountering the body of the nameless victim, Hart announced he would pay the child’s burial expenses. The plan was to dress the little boy in a cowboy suit and lay him to rest in the Ruiz family cemetery in San Francisquito Canyon. When the day arrived, news photographers captured the rugged western hero kneeling solemnly beside a grave. Unfortunately, it didn’t belong to the “little soldier.” The deceased three-year-old had been identified a couple of days before, and relatives had found another final resting place. The grave marker in the photograph was honorary.
Given the violence of the flood, the process of identifying victims could be difficult. Whenever possible, unrecognizable fatalities were given names by evaluating telltale clues, including scraps of clothing, dental work, tattoos, or notable scars. One man was identified by army discharge papers found in his pocket. While searching in a morgue, another man made a different kind of discovery. Recently, his wife had left him, and he suspected she had run off with someone else. After the flood, when he went to recover possessions in his damaged home, he found that a valuable watch he rarely wore was missing. In the morgue, looking for his wife, the abandoned husband stopped over the body of a man and was surprised to see his watch on the victim’s wrist. He was convinced it was a gift purloined by his wayward spouse.61
Actor William S. Hart kneels at the honorary gravestone of “The Little Unknown Soldier of the Santa Clara Valley Flood.” (Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society)
The death total would escalate until newspapers claimed it reached more than four hundred, with only estimates of missing or unidentified. Two boats were hired to patrol the coast, looking for bodies carried out to sea. One victim washed ashore on the beach near Oxnard, sixty-five miles from where he had lost his life.62 As corpses were recovered, Ventura County Coroner Reardon kept a careful count. He gave each fatality a number and recorded their remains with photographs.
Before dawn on March 13, crime-scene photographer Leslie T. White received a telephone call. He was ordered to rush to an airport where a plane waited to fly him to the site of a major disaster. White was told that a large dam had collapsed, releasing a flood that may have killed hundreds. It was rumored that the disaster was caused by a dynamite attack.
When the photographer’s plane encountered a thick fogbank, the pilot headed for Ventura, where he landed just before running out of gas. After hiring a car and driving into the Santa Clara River Valley, White was assigned to photograph and help catalog the corpses gathered in real and makeshift morgues. His assistants were an ex-wrestler and “brawny truck driver.” He noted that “due to constant collision with wreckage, skulls were battered out of shape,” but after photographing brutalized face after face, he grew accustomed to the horror. His tough-looking assistants didn’t.
“My companions … attempted to maintain their morale by a process of alcoholic fortification,” the photographer recalled later. “But the more they indulged in this personal ‘embalming’ the more appalled they were by the gruesome piles of corpses.” White had doubts when women volunteers stepped forward as replacements. “The girls proved I was wrong for they worked smoothly and efficiently, with no evidence of superstitious terror.”63 The result was a grisly photo album that personalized the human cost of the St. Francis flood.
As soon as corpses were photographed for the record, identified, and claimed by relatives, burials began. One of the most dramatic ceremonies took place in San Francisquito Canyon on Sunday, March 18. A procession of mourners made their way in cars and on foot along the St. Francis floodpath, toward the Ruiz family cemetery. Mule-drawn wagons carried the coffins until the mud proved too thick. The pine boxes were shifted to the shoulders of pallbearers for the final half mile. On the hillside beside the gathering of old grave markers, a musician played a portable organ. Reporters took notes as Newhall reverend “Bill” Evans, known as “the Shepherd of the Hills,” offered a eulogy.
Hymns were sung and a Unitarian minister delivered a short sermon, asking, “Could God have prevented this flood? Why did not God intervene and save California from this disaster?”64 No answer was offered. Men removed their heavy coats, picked up shovels, and covered the caskets with dirt. After more hymns and prayers, the simple service ended in silence.
At two P.M. on March 19, a more elaborate funeral was held in Santa Paula. An estimated 2,500 people formed a solemn procession down Main Street to bury fourteen mostly Mexican unidentified victims of the St. Francis flood in the town cemetery. The crowd gathered around coffins covered by wreaths, created by local women from seven truckloads of flowers. Every minister in the Santa Clara River Valley was present. In his sermon, a local clergyman declared, “Science with all its power to instruct and delight is silent, woefully silent these days,” adding, “investigation may prove that the earth grew restless, and thus liberated the destructive waters, or rather it may be proved that man’s constructive work led to destruction. We hope it will not come to light that it was the work of a human fiend.”65
On March 19, 1928, 2,500 people gathered in downtown Santa Paula commemorating fourteen victims of the St. Francis flood, most of whom were Mexican Americans. (Santa Paula Historical Society)
The mass burial in Santa Paula was a moving expression of community unity, but social divisions and unfinished business remained. Manuel Reyes, editor of La Voz de la Colonia, criticized articles in the Santa Paula Chronicle that separated the community into “Whites and Mexicans.” Reyes objected to this confusion of race with nationality. If anything, the editor argued, “we are Americans and Mexicans.”66
An article published in the Los Angeles Examiner the day before the funeral in downtown Santa Paula declared: “Although the greater part of the dead are Mexican workmen and their families, their funerals will be almost regal.”
As the citizens of the Santa Clara River Valley honored the dead, they celebrated local heroes. Reporters were more than happy to share upbeat angles on a decidedly downbeat story. On March 17, twelve-year-old Louis Rivera walked into Newhall holding the hands of his ten-year-old sister Belle and eight-year-old brother Francis. The three were still in their nightclothes and looked half starved. They had spent three nights in a nearby canyon after the St. Francis flood took the lives of their parents and two older brothers. Young Louis was hailed as a hero for his decisive action. Later the Mexican-American farmer’s son stood with nervous pride as movie star William S. Hart and a Newhall minister congratulated him in front of a gathering of Santa Clara River Valley citizens and the press. A cameraman snapped a photo as Hart pinned a medal on the young man’s chest.
Louis Rivera with the young brother and sister he saved (Author’s collection)
Louise Gipe and other late-night telephone operators also were remembered as local heroes. One reporter wrote: “Not knowing whether they were to be drowned in the flood or not, the ‘hello girls’ of Fillmore and Santa Paula called number after number, answered swiftly and efficiently all calls, and made possible the saving of many lives in these cities.”67
The hello girls each received twenty-five dollars from their employer as a reward for their death-defying actions.68 Three Fillmore operators were honored with bronze medals from the Southern California Telephone Company.69 In addition to her undisputed heroism, although she wasn’t one of the medal winners, Louise Gipe had a small-town girl’s shy good looks, with bobbed hair, wide eyes, and full lips. Reflecting the enthusiasm of 1920s newspaper editors for the photogenic, Gipe became a singular symbol for the many other switchboard “girls” who risked their lives.
In a different way, special press attention amplified the genuine bravery of motorcycle patrolman Thornton Edwards. Unlike his more staid colleagues, Edwards was c
omfortable with the boys from the press thanks to his previous work in the movies. Other police officers had spread warnings that night, but as “the Paul Revere of the St. Francis Flood,” Edwards would come to stand for them all. On March 23, he received a citation and medal for bravery from the newly formed California Highway Patrol.
While he was spreading warnings and saving lives, Edwards’s house was washed away. He had made the last payment only the month before. The disaster left him without a home and practically penniless. In response, members of the traffic squad took up a collection. On January 1, 1929, a grateful Santa Paula community made Edwards police chief, which allowed him to move into a Spanish-style home, away from the river, grander than the simple bungalow he’d lost in the flood.
As reporters searched for a “human interest” angle, they turned to another staple—the loyal and heroic dog. Articles featured the spotted canine who remained at Lillian Curtis’s side after she and her little boy escaped the flood near Powerhouse 2. Newspaper readers learned how dogs warned rancher Chester Smith while he slept in his barn. Frank Raggio Jr. wasn’t in San Francisquito Canyon on the night of the flood, but his pet Prince, a St. Bernard–collie mix, survived and stood guard until the family returned. Beast and boy posed together for a press portrait.