Arthur E. Morgan, the engineer who would later be brought into Dayton, Ohio, to create a flood-control system for the region, wrote about the flood in his book The Miami Valley and the 1913 Flood, published in the year 1917, and laid out a long list of reasons why the river and creeks didn’t stay in their beds, most of the reasons for which were man-made. He did account for some factors that had nothing to do with human beings, like “the rolling country with its short, steep slopes leading to innumerable little brooks and gullies, which in turn empty into the larger streams, tends to hurry the rainwater off the land and into the rivers.” He added: “The soil, a mixture of clay, sand, and gravel, is sufficiently dense to prevent water from sinking into it rapidly during heavy rains.”
But generally, Morgan gently placed the blame on people, citing the following reasons:
1) We were shovel-happy. “The digging of more than two thousand miles of ditches and drains for agricultural drainage and along highways and railroads, within the Miami watershed, has removed innumerable little storage reservoirs over the surface of the land, and by improving the overgrown and obstructed paths of the water, has tended to hurry it much more rapidly to the main streams.…”
2) We were chopping down too many trees. “… while cutting of the forests, with the removal of the surface layer of leaves and mold, probably results in a similar tendency.”
3) We were building too much, too quickly. “The paving of city streets, and the construction of sewers would also hasten the flow of storm water, but the areas affected by city improvements are so small that their effect is negligible.”
4) Our dams were sometimes doing more harm than good. “The rivers of the region have formed for themselves natural channels of only sufficient size to carry the usual flow, and as the flow during the great floods is many times as great as that of ordinary spring freshets, the river channels fail entirely to meet extreme conditions,” wrote Morgan, who had a tendency to be wordy. “Here and there along the rivers artificial obstructions have been created which to a greater or less extent interfere with stream flow, and the construction of cities in the valley hinders the free passage of overflow water. The levees built along the winding rivers to confine the flood waters, while they serve the purpose admirably until broken or overtopped, thereafter act as submerged dams.”
There was a fifth factor in the large death toll surrounding the flood if not the flood itself, and it was yet another manmade one, which Morgan does not mention. Garbage. People across the country were dumping it into rivers and streams. In January 1913, the city council of Lowell received permission from the Massachusetts government that it had the authority to keep their part of the Merrimack River clean and fine anyone who ignored the laws. In years past, residents had been tossing in barrels, tin cats, cotton waste from the textile factories, and even dead cats and dogs. Cities and towns across America eventually came around to Lowell’s way of thinking, but it would take time.
But the local laws weren’t always much help, which illustrates why the states and federal government eventually had to get involved in the clean water cause. During the same month, the Daily Courier in Connellsville, Pennsylvania reported that several businesses had been dumping garbage into the Youghiogheny River all winter, despite a law from the board of health that forbade them to. It was getting to be an eyesore, too. The Connellsville Garbage & Fertilizer Company had recently started dumping their refuse on the edge of the riverbank. “Must dump it somewhere,” an unidentified official was quoted as saying.
But while public officials saw blight, Connellsville’s impoverished residents saw an opportunity. Mothers and children quickly made a beeline for the river’s edge and snatched up the potatoes, grapes, oranges, and other fruits and vegetables that stores hadn’t seen fit to sell.
Across the country, mines were dumping waste into rivers, streams, ponds, and lakes, and for decades, even local governments were putting their trash into the waterways. In the 1906 trade magazine Municipal Journal and Engineer, it was noted that “many of the inland cities on the great rivers continue to use the primitive method of stream dumping.”
The article then cited some figures, which were then “some years” old, but still, it gives an idea of how the nation’s water supply was probably faring in 1913. In recent years, according to Municipal Journal and Engineer, eight cities were dumping into the Mississippi River 152,675 tons of garbage, manure, and the entrails of meat from butchers’ shops, 108,250 tons of human excrement, and 3,765 animal carcasses.
Speaking of which, federal regulation of drinking water quality wouldn’t begin until the next year when the U.S. Public Health Service would begin setting standards for the bacteriological quality of drinking water. Unfortunately, those standards were only for drinking water for ships and trains, but we were getting there as a nation in terms of setting some long-overdue water sanitation guidelines.
Still, by the early 1900s, even though it had long been proven that you could catch diseases like cholera from polluted water, cities finally began on their own working on cleaning their water, many of which went with a cloth filtration system; others, a slow sand filtration. Five years earlier, in Jersey City, New Jersey, the water pumping station began putting chlorine in their water. Great strides were being made in offering people what they drank, though it’s hard to imagine that anyone today would feel comfortable drinking a nice tall glass of water that came out of a kitchen faucet in 1913*—especially when you consider that most water pipes were made of lead. Most cities by 1913 recognized that drinking water from lead pipes was a good way to get lead poisoning—that had been on health officials’ radar since the late nineteenth century. But it would take another ten years, at least, before cities and towns began curtailing the use of lead pipes. It took a while, partly because the Lead Industries Association argued their cause and convinced plenty of water-regulating officials that lead pipes were a perfectly safe manner of transporting drinking water.
So by the dawn of the flood, many of the larger cities were cleaning up their acts, but the smaller communities with less river traffic and weaker budgets were far behind the collective understanding that dumping trash into waterways was a bad idea. If the rivers, creeks, and streams in the states affected by the Great Flood of 1913 had all been clear, yes, the flood would have occurred and would likely have still been grim, but the garbage made matters worse. Just as the debris piled up and eventually broke free, releasing the Wabash River onto Peru, it contributed to the problems in many other overwhelmed communities in the region. There was one last reason for the flood, and it does not allow for any real historical or scientific analysis: just plain bad timing.
It was the end of the winter. The ground wasn’t frozen—which can be problematic when there’s flooding—but it was still oversaturated with melted, and melting, snow. The rain that came with the tornadoes couldn’t evaporate, or be absorbed, fast enough. Additionally, the melting snow already had rivers at a higher volume than was typical for this time of year.
A week after living through the flood himself, Professor William R. Lazenby, the head of the department of forestry at Ohio State University, explained to a student reporter what had happened: “Conditions in Ohio at the time of the recent flood were unusual. The ground was filled with water, literally watersoaked. Had the same amount of rain fallen in Ohio when the ground was in a dryer condition the flood damage would have been less to a great extent. The intensity of a flood is due to its rapidity. Only when the surface water passes off quickly is the greatest damage done and the danger great.”
The Flood of 1913 never would have happened if an identical storm had visited during the end of a dry, hot summer. It also might not have happened if Arthur Ernest Morgan had come along earlier, and the nation had been a little wiser and more sophisticated when it came to flood control. But we weren’t there yet in 1913, and in the early wet spring after a long cold wet winter, much of the soil throughout the United States, particularly in Ohio and I
ndiana, was still frozen. The cracks in the earth, the loose, wind-blown and dry dirt, that would normally capture much of the rainfall, was nowhere to be found. When it began to rain, the water had nowhere to go except the muddy and polluted rivers, streams, and creeks, and they were already dangerously full.
March 25, midnight, Dayton
It was still raining and had been for about twenty-four hours straight now. The police are warned that the Herman Street Levee is weakening. They begin blasting the warning sirens.
Peru, Indiana, around midnight
It was still raining here too. While many families went to bed as usual, many people started waking up when the river smashed open their front doors. Residents were also roused awake by the sounds of lions and tigers roaring and horses neighing furiously.
Gilbert Kessler, with his cousin, heard the sounds from the courthouse, and it slowly dawned on them that the sounds were coming from the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus, one of approximately thirty traveling circuses that made its way around the country. This one had its headquarters just outside of Peru, an expanse of 1,500 acres, and spent the winters here, preparing and planning out their shows during the warmer months. In fact, they had a big show planned in about two weeks, on April 12, in St. Louis.
The circus owner, Colonel Benjamin E. Wallace, sixty-five years old, lived inside the city limits of Peru, apart from the winter headquarters, which was two miles east of the community. The phone lines leading to the circus headquarters were quickly toppled by the flood, and he couldn’t reach his employees to see how the seventy-five men and the animals were faring.
His animals were a major attraction for the circus. Many of them had been caught by Captain Emil Schweyer, an eminent animal trainer from Switzerland and, by all accounts, fearless when it came to animals. One story making the rounds around town was that a few weeks earlier, he had come to Peru for a visit, and Colonel Wallace showed him around, warning Schweyer to be particularly careful with the jaguar.
“Show him to me. I’ll eat him alive,” Schweyer reportedly said.
If the account is to believed—it could have been a story manufactured for the press and an impressed public—after Wallace showed him the jaguar, Schweyer entered the cage and grabbed the jaguar’s jaws. Wallace, thinking the guy was a nut, shouted for the trainers, but Schweyer laughed and put his head in the jaguar’s mouth. The jaguar seemed paralyzed until Schweyer left the cage, and then the animal ran for the bars, hoping to nail the animal trainer but instead crashing against the metal. Schweyer laughed again. He sounds like a swell guy.
But Wallace’s prized animals were not doing so well now. The lions and a cacophony of other animals, including camels, bears, monkeys, and exotic birds, kept roaring and making terrified sounds that reached the ears of Wallace and other townspeople, reverberating across the flooded streets of Peru as the Wabash and Mississinewa rivers’ levels climbed higher and higher. Although, after an hour or two, Gilbert noticed that some of the strange sounds had ended and wondered if it was the water that silenced them.
Somewhere around the midnight hour, some townspeople drove out to a nearby village called Peoria, not to be confused with Peoria, Illinois, or even another Peoria, Indiana, in Franklin County. This Peoria was in Miami County, the same county that Peru resides in. This particular group of Peru residents knew there was one man who would be of big help to their community. His name was Sam, and he was a Miami Indian.
The days of wanting to kill American Indians had been a fading memory for many generations in 1913. Just a little over a month earlier, on a rainy February 22, twenty-nine American Indian chiefs from reservations in the west, marched up a hill at Fort Wadsworth, Staten Island, with President William Howard Taft and members of his family.
After a 21-gun salute, they solemnly broke ground for the National American Indian memorial, a sixty-foot bronze statue of an Indian warrior, which would tower 165 feet above the highest elevation around New York harbor. Hollow Horn Bear, sixty-three, once a Brulé Lakota leader who fought against the United States Army on the Great Plains, was chosen to overturn the earth, not with a shovel, but what he would have used years before: a buffalo thigh bone. Pretty Voice Eagle, sixty-eight years old, of the Sioux, was present. He had fought almost seventy battles with the U.S. Army. Two Moon, once a North Cheyenne warrior who fought against General Custer but was now hovering around seventy years of age and almost blind, had also come for the ceremony. Indian folk songs were played by a band, and so was the Star Spangled Banner. Each Indian leader present was given as a gift the first American nickels to feature the profile of an Indian on one side and a buffalo on the other.
President Taft, in one of his last public appearances, offered a short, eloquent speech, arguably delivered several decades too late. “For two centuries, the North American Indian has had a right to be treated not as a relic of pre-historic man but as an existing force with great and immediate and direct influence upon the settlement and development of this country by the white races.”
If you live in New York City or thereabouts and are wondering how in the heck you missed this grand spectacle, you aren’t unobservant. Nobody could get the funding for this memorial, and it was never built. The site chosen is now an abutment for a bridge. Still, the sentiment was nice, although Hollow Horn Bear probably found himself wishing he had skipped the whole thing. He caught pneumonia after being out in the rain and died.
So even if the white man continued to treat Native Americans rather shabbily and keep them quarantined on various reservations throughout the country, the lust for violence and snuffing the Indian out had been replaced with something that seemed close to respect. Samuel Bundy was thirty-one years old, a curiosity but well liked by his white counterparts. Some people—maybe more as a joke than anything—called him Chief Bundy. Most people just called him Sam and knew him to be a good man with a lot of character. They also knew he owned a boat.
It was sixteen feet long and four feet wide with a flat bottom, and Sam Bundy had had some very successful fishing expeditions in his vessel. Perhaps due to the knowledge passed on from his parents and their parents, he truly understood the water.
Bundy wasn’t actually a full-blooded Native American. He was a great-great grandson of Frances Slocum, a white pioneer who would become famous for having been kidnapped on November 2, 1778, by the Delaware Indians. She was taken when she was just five years old.
Slocum was renamed Young Bear, raised by the Delaware, and in her late teens married a fellow tribesman. Apparently, he was killed and she married again, because her second husband was a Miami warrior called Deaf Man because he somehow became totally deaf between thirty and forty years of age. After the War of 1812, Young Bear, who had four children with Deaf Man, moved with her family to the Mississinewa River Valley in Indiana. In 1835, Young Bear mentioned her identity to an Indian trader, which eventually led to her being reunited with her brothers, who wanted her to come back to Pennsylvania. She didn’t. She couldn’t understand English, and as a woman in her early sixties, she was completely assimilated as a Miami Indian. She was, however, allowed to remain in the Mississinewa River Valley, with her immediate family while the rest of her tribe was pushed off to Kansas. Young Bear died in 1847 at the age of seventy-four, over thirty years before Sam Bundy came into the world on August 31, 1881.
Bundy was assimilated among the white men, but he hadn’t forgotten his heritage. He lived in Peoria, for starters, which was populated with Miami Indians. And when some of the Peru locals showed up at Bundy’s doorstep in Peoria, he understandably wanted no part of plunging into the darkness and rowing his boat through the river. But the more he was told about the flood, and as he came to realize that this was truly unprecedented, he didn’t need to be convinced. He said he would be happy to go, which is how at one o’clock in the morning, Sam Bundy came to sliding his boat into a wild river and found himself looking for people to save.
March 25, New Castle, Pennsylvania, midnight
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nbsp; There were ominous signs that some communities in western Pennsylvania might find themselves in the midst of a flood. It had been raining nonstop all day Monday, and the Shenango River and Neshannock Creek were rising. The latter took over Neshannock Avenue, East Street, South Mill Street, and several other roads, but that in itself wasn’t alarming. It was an area of the city that always flooded during heavy rains. Still, city officials were warily on watch.
March 25, 1 A.M., Chicago
Ernest Bicknell’s train finally pulled into the station, a full thirteen hours late. Exhausted, the Red Cross director had been keeping up with the news of the flood by talking to conductors and grabbing every newspaper he could get his hands on at train stations along the route. He had long since decided that as bad as things were in Omaha, the worst there was over and he was needed more in Indiana and Ohio. He stuck around in Chicago long enough to have a meeting with the officers at the United Charities of Chicago (the forerunner of a nonprofit that’s now called Metropolitan Family Services). The officers then started raising money for the flood victims and within a few hours, several thousand dollars, clothing, supplies, and furniture had already been pledged or collected.
Bicknell doesn’t say in his biography, but you have to think that he must have looked at his train, heaved a deep sigh, and wondered why airplane travel wasn’t fully developed yet. He boarded in any event, so he could once more travel through the flood-stricken lands of Indiana and Ohio.
1:30 A.M., West Liberty, Ohio
The railroads were well aware that flooding might swamp railroad tracks, and rivers had a way of weakening bridges. So that’s how and why Phillip Henn, a 47-year-old passenger conductor, found himself, late at night and in the rain, inspecting a bridge for a train that traveled between Indiana and Pennsylvania. Henn was walking on the bridge, looking for trouble, and, boy, did he find it: one of the spans on the trestle collapsed, and he plunged into the Mad River below. If he screamed, nobody was there to hear it.
Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever Page 7