Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever

by Geoff Williams

  Then it happened. The house disintegrated into the river. The cries from the wife and children stopped, and the shouting from the crowd started as everyone searched for signs of survival. But there were none, and it was over in a matter of seconds. Somewhere down the river was almost everyone that made up George Klingshirn’s life: his wife, his nine children, his young son-in-law, and a future daughter-in-law who was only eighteen years old.

  And over the bystanders’ din, everyone could make out George, who released an agonized wail that didn’t stop.

  WEDNESDAY,

  MARCH 26, 1913

  Chapter Eleven

  Fighting Back

  March 26, Wednesday

  Midnight, Indianapolis

  Ben Hecht, the cub reporter out of Chicago, was still stuck in a hotel in Indianapolis. But at midnight, Hecht pretended to be tired and said he was going to retire to his room. Instead, he slipped out of the hotel and into bone-chilling temperatures. If it was still raining, it would soon be snow.

  Shivering, Hecht walked along the White River, looking for a place to cross.

  After midnight, Cleves, Ohio

  Hecht wasn’t the only one going for a walk that night. Edward Woods, a 25-year-old machinist living outside of Cleves, a village outside of Cincinnati, went on one himself. The water, as it seemed to be doing everywhere, was rising, and so he and his wife, Katie, made the calculated decision that they couldn’t wait until sunrise. They needed to get out of their house, and fast. Corny, but it must be said: the Woods escaped through the woods.

  Katie took the hand of her four-year-old son, Richard, and Edward carried Nellie in a container called a half-bushel chip basket, which was usually used for their produce.

  The family trudged across swampy hills covered in forestland, and often were, without warning, walking and then wading through kneeand waist-deep water. If they had had a flashlight, lantern, or some sort of light source, it wouldn’t have made much of a difference. They were blindly making their way across the land.

  That’s how Edward came to stumble and fall into some stream of river water, dropping the basket containing Nellie, which moved away from him as if he had just placed it on one of Henry Ford’s conveyor belts. The current seized it. Terror-stricken, Edward scrambled through the water, chasing after Nellie, who was crying and drifting away, traveling off somewhere in the darkness. Edward kept racing after Nellie, undoubtedly tripping and stumbling in the darkness, all the while listening for her crying until eventually she was crying no more. Then Edward realized that he wasn’t sure where Katie and Richard were, either. What had seemed like a smart, preventative, and proactive decision had turned into a parent’s worst nightmare. Both of his children and wife were lost.

  Distraught and thinking Nellie was dead, Edward hurriedly tried retracing his steps, searching for Katie and Edward. Rain-soaked, he wandered aimlessly through the forest and swamp for the next two hours, shouting for Katie and Richard, to no avail. And then he heard it. A baby crying.

  He later realized he was half a mile away from where he had first dropped the basket. Following the baby’s wailing and poking through the bushes, Edward finally found his baby daughter in her basket, wedged in the lower branches of a willow tree. Nellie was wet and uncomfortable, probably hungry and certainly frightened, but she was alive, and she looked okay. Edward, holding his daughter in a tight embrace against his chest, started hiking again. When he reached the village of Cleves, he found Katie and Richard waiting for him.

  After midnight, Dayton

  For many people, there was no going to bed between Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning. Arthur John Bell, the intrepid phone operator in Dayton, was giving interviews or at least passing on information, telling a reporter in Phoneton, Ohio, that the water was still rising, that he estimated the depth of the water at nine feet, and that the current was running strong. Bell had been on the job all day, but if he wanted to sleep, either his adrenaline or commitment to keeping the phone lines open and active wouldn’t let him.

  Columbus, Ohio, shortly after 1 A.M.

  The Broad Street Bridge that spanned the Scioto River finally collapsed. It was the last link between the eastern and western halves of the city, and the Scioto River was still rising. For Albert Dutoit, the train engineer who had spent much of Tuesday traversing railroad tracks to reach the city, it was vexing. He couldn’t cross the river on his own, and the one bridge—the Rich Street Bridge—that hadn’t fallen was being guarded by police officers and soldiers with the National Guard who wouldn’t let him or any resident on it. The only action they allowed on the bridge was for automobiles to travel over it one at a time if they were carrying victims who had been rescued. Rescue workers were also allowed to go over, and that was about it. Besides, it was too dangerous to go downtown, officials no doubt said. But that precisely was why Dutoit wanted to go downtown, of course. His family was there, and, for all he knew, in grave danger.

  Peru, Indiana, around 1 A.M.

  It began snowing. If you’ve ever been stranded on a rooftop, freezing and wondering if your house will be swept away and what it will feel like to drown, you can begin to understand how discouraging the sight of snow was for many people, including the rescuers. And yet many people freezing on their rooftops were also dehydrated but hadn’t dared drink from the filthy river. The snow gave many Peru residents their first actual fresh, safe drink of water.

  Sam Bundy and several other men were still navigating their boats—with nothing more than lantern light to guide them—to houses and trees and picking up people. Bundy was going on twenty-four hours without a break. A lot of people started to notice, full of awe, admiration, and appreciation. A reporter for Huntington, Indiana’s paper wrote a fawning piece about Bundy that was syndicated in a couple other papers in the region. As the nameless reporter said, accurately, Bundy’s accomplishments were “a tale of calmness and courage, of strength and skill, of nerve and nobility, of a clean-limbed body and a clear-eyed soul. A tale that will be worth the telling to one’s children, and to one’s children’s children.”

  The account noted that Bundy’s physical prowess far outmatched the white rescuers. “And those white boatmen were not to be sneered at,” the Huntington Press stated. “They had grit, and muscle and stout hearts and capacity for endurance beyond most men, but at the end of twenty-four hours, they had to give up. Some of them were enough rested after twelve hours to go back. When they returned, Chief Bundy was still on the job.”

  1:30 A.M., Indianapolis

  It was snowing so hard that rescuers could no longer see, and those without gloves and proper clothing were at risk of developing hypothermia. Listening to the screams and crying from people on rooftops, slowly freezing to death themselves, the reluctant rescuers were forced to row back to dry land until sunrise.

  Indianapolis, 2 A.M.

  Ben Hecht found his way across the White River. It was a high railroad trestle. The river was lapping against the bottom of it and would soon overcome it, but for the moment it looked passable. Hecht lurked about, searching a nearby shack until he found a lantern. He lit it and headed toward the trestle.

  Hecht saw a figure approaching him. He held up the lantern and immediately felt the defeated feeling of knowing he wasn’t going to get his scoop. In front of him was Christian Dane Hagerty, the Associated Press’s former legendary foreign correspondent who now was the director of the AP’s Chicago bureau.

  Hagerty, according to Hecht’s memory, was fifty-five years old now—actually, he was only thirty-seven, but to an eighteen-year-old he probably seemed like he was in his fifties. The legendary Hagerty had also witnessed enough history to give him the gravitas of an older statesman in journalism. He had covered the Boer War, the Russo-Japanese War, the Boxer Rebellion, the Spanish-American War, and a score of other notable calamities. He once traveled across the country, from New York to San Francisco, by car—in 1906, when traveling by car for even a couple of hours was something of an adve
nture—with another reporter, in an unsuccessful attempt to set a world’s record, most likely fastest cross-country trip. He was on his second marriage and would have a third in the next few years. He had spent time in a Mexican prison on more than one occasion, and legend had it that in the autumn of 1911 in western Chihuahua during the Madero revolution, he was ordered to be shot at sunrise. But as the joke went, Hagerty never woke that early, and so the execution didn’t take place.

  He was something of a colorful character.

  According to Hecht, Hagerty was fat,* “his waist line gone, his voice hoarsened by the river of whisky that had flowed down his gullet. His eyes were bloodshot.” But there he was, a clear threat to Hecht’s plan to scoop the other reporters.

  “I’m going to cross the bridge,” Hecht told him. “I don’t think you’d better come along. It’s risky. You can see it’s shaking already.”

  “I’ve been following you for an hour,” Hagerty informed him. “I yelled at you a few times, but you’re evidently deaf.”

  “I’m not deaf,” said Hecht, who likely hadn’t heard him over the incessant rumbling of the water.

  “Glad to hear it,” said Hagerty. “I knew a deaf newspaperman in Africa once. Wore my fingers out talking to him. Get going,” Hagerty then said, “and keep the lantern raised.”

  Hecht obeyed, miserable and suddenly frightened. The river was definitely rising, and just a few feet away was instant death if he slipped. He walked quickly on the trestle with no railing whatsoever, but carefully, holding the lantern so he wouldn’t make a misstep, and listened to Hagerty wheezing behind him.

  When they reached the other side, Hagerty pointed and said, “Dayton is that way. Get going.”

  They walked, following railroad tracks, and Hecht listened to Hagerty panting, coughing, and spitting out phlegm. Hecht was hoping Hagerty might give up the idea of going to Dayton, which was, after all, over a hundred miles away. Neither man wore an overcoat. They could have used one.

  “Want me to carry the lantern?” Hagerty asked.

  “No, it’s my lantern,” said Hecht.

  Hagerty laughed. “I saw you steal it.”

  The two kept walking.

  Indianapolis, 3 A.M.

  As the night wore on, the crying and shouting had become less frequent, and by now, people who had been listening noticed that it was eerie quiet, as if many people had been silenced by the flood. And perhaps some had.

  Middletown, Ohio, 3 A.M.

  Not that anyone noticed except the weather watchers, but the Great Miami River started to fall, ever so slightly.

  The middle of the night, somewhere in Indiana

  Chris Hagerty was in the middle of a long anecdote when, as Hecht would recall in his biography, “two Italians were on the roadbed ahead of us trying to lift a handcar onto the tracks.”

  They were going to Dayton, and they agreed that Hecht and Hagerty could come along if they helped pump the handcar. “I looked at Hagerty in the lantern light,” wrote Hecht half a century later. “His face was purple. He looked frozen, spavined* and on his last legs.”

  Hagerty told them, “Go ahead. You start, and we’ll relieve you in fifteen minutes.”

  Sometime in the middle of the night, Brookville, Ohio

  While Hagerty was doing his best to get the Associated Press to Dayton, a nameless Associated Press reporter in another city had established contact with a telegraph operator in a tiny town, twenty miles northwest of Dayton. The telegraph operator, whose name didn’t appear in the report, spelled out what the city was facing:

  “Practically half of Dayton is under water from thirty to forty feet. At the lowest estimate 200 lives have been lost. The city is without electric lights, street car service or water service. It is impossible to estimate the damage. There is much suffering and the people are in need of food and clothing. All bridges have been swept away. There is no communication with the outside world. Many persons were caught in their homes with all avenues of escape cut off.”

  As if that news wasn’t bad enough for readers of the next day’s morning papers, the telegraph operator concluded with a final, not-so-cheery thought for everyone living in the Dayton area: “The water is still rising and a heavy rain falling.”

  Rain wasn’t the only thing falling. Temperatures were, too. It was challenging enough to be trapped on a roof, without food, without worrying about freezing to death. But for thousands of families and individuals, that’s exactly what people were facing.

  Middle of the night, Dayton, Ohio

  Charles Adams couldn’t sleep. In the early evening, after he had rested a bit and warmed up, he wanted to go find his wife and son, but his family begged him to wait until the morning, when it would be daylight and perhaps the flood waters wouldn’t be so rough. Charles reluctantly agreed. But he couldn’t sleep. Whenever he shut his eyes, he saw little Lois, floating away.

  His sister-in-law, meanwhile, was frantic because her husband, Emerson, hadn’t returned from checking on her parents. She imagined he might also easily be floating face-down somewhere.

  It was a long, miserable night for the Adams and Fries families. Even if Charles and his sister-in-law Mary were able to occasionally forget for a few minutes or seconds about their loved ones, there were constant reminders of what was happening outside, such as the sounds of debris crashing into their house with a thud and the cries of help from people who weren’t in a house as sturdy as the reverend’s seemed to be.

  4 A.M., Mayfield, Michigan

  John Hawthorne was the engineer of the plant overseeing the dam that provided electricity to several towns in the area, like Mayfield and Kingsley. The dam itself was forty-five years old, just about three years younger than Hawthorne, who possibly chose the night shift to work, since he wasn’t married and apparently did not have a large family, other than a sister in Canada and a niece in Elkhart, Indiana.

  He was alone when the wooden dam, and the water behind it, came careering two hundred feet downward and into the power house, splitting it into two, and carrying off its occupant.

  The sheriff and coroner, after locating Hawthorne’s body early the next morning in the daylight, tried to piece everything together, particularly why Hawthorne was completely naked. They surmised that he realized what was about to happen and was afraid his clothing would become caught in the machinery surrounding him. He must have removed some of his wardrobe and then the rest was ripped away in the flood.

  Or else the water disrobed him completely. Such was the relentless fury and power of the flood.

  March 26, 4 A.M., Indianapolis

  Maybe he was worried about his family. Maybe by experiencing that wave of invincibility that got a few other young people his age in trouble, he underestimated the risks. Maybe he was simply tired and not thinking clearly. Maybe his co-workers begging him not to go wound up making him more determined than ever to give it a try because he decided he was up for the challenge. Whatever was on his mind, nineteen-year-old Chester Arnold should not have attempted to swim home.

  Even at the best of times, no one should have ever attempted to swim the White River. It was a cesspool, a waterway filled with butchered entrails and dead hogs, along with human excrement dumped out from outhouses and industrial waste. The Indiana Engineering Society had issued a report seven years earlier, stating, “The odor is distinct for 40 miles down the river. Animals will not drink it. It cannot be used for the laundry or other domestic purposes when the cisterns and wells go dry.”

  Arnold lived in a city that serviced eighty passenger trains, and it was on this early morning, at the Indianapolis Belt Railway Company, that he stood on elevated railroad tracks that were for the moment still above the White River. He had been trapped by the water at a shop that he worked at, but he and his fellow workers managed to get free, but not so free that Arnold could make it home. So he decided that he could swim from the Peoria & Eastern Railroad tracks and then reach the Vandalia Tracks. From there, he must have believ
ed he could walk the rest of the way to his house. And when he jumped in, he obviously believed he could swim the currents between the tracks. But he couldn’t have been more wrong.

  Two men would later tell the local paper that they tried to rescue Chester Arnold, but with no tree branches to try to bend his way, with no life preserver tied to a nylon rope or any other equipment handy that might have been helpful, their rescue attempt was probably mostly screaming and jumping in the air and willing him back to the railroad tracks.

  A few minutes after 5 A.M., Tiffin, Ohio

  Chester Arnold’s fatal mistake was taking a hugely unnecessary risk, but some people found themselves in trouble because they were afraid of taking any risk. They just wanted the flood to go away. Addline Axline, born Adison J. Alexander, was one such person. From the beginning of the deluge, she wanted to remain in her house. Almost twenty-four hours earlier, her husband, William, a few months away from his sixty-third birthday, left for work at the Tiffin Tribune, where he was the foreman of the printer’s department. It was a demanding job, in which the successful printers needed both a mechanical and business mindset, since, being a low-profit-margin industry, one needed to work fast and efficiently. A foreman often found himself covered in printer’s ink, and yet the newspapers needed to be clean and tidy.

  William undoubtedly had a busy day on Tuesday, with the paper covering the flood, and while he was gone, neighbors beseeched her to leave. Citing all the familiar excuses—where would she go; she wanted to at least wait for her husband—Mrs. Axline stayed put. But then when her husband came for her, she still didn’t want to leave. She refused. So in the end, Mr. Axline, who had been married to his wife since 1877 and stuck with her through good times and bad, determined that he would stay with her. They had no children, only each other. It must have seemed impossible to imagine leaving her behind.