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

by Geoff Williams

  Silently praying and vocally shouting to his family that Lois was alive, Charles threw additional clothes on, concluding that they might come in handy later, and he practically jumped into the boat with Marquardt and Korn. Thankfully, it was a smooth enough ride, and the firemen were able to get Charles to the land without any problems. From there, it was a mile to Marquardt’s house. The two firemen then bid Charles good-bye and went back to looking for people to save.

  As he walked underneath a canopy of clouds and some rain, it struck Charles that on the thankfully mostly-dry street that he had to travel on, there were no streetcars functioning and no cars to be seen. They had either been called into service to help rescue people, to transport them from shoreline landings to hospitals, and, with most of the city’s roads impassible, there wasn’t much incentive to have a car on the streets.

  His three-and-a-half-foot stride always had worked out well for him, but this felt like the longest mile Charles had ever traveled.

  But eventually he reached the Marquardt house and, as he walked onto the porch, he saw Charles, Jr. and Lois peering out the windows, and the two twins, just a couple weeks shy of their first birthday, started toddling toward the door to meet their father.

  “Viola was the first to open the door,” Charles wrote later, “and the joy of our meeting was felt no more keenly by anyone than I, with my arms full of babies and wife. Father soon came in, too, and to say that we were thankful to all be together again is putting it entirely too mild.”

  There was another happy reunion of note on this day in Dayton, although the exact timing is unknown. A neighbor of William Hartzell, a carpenter whose last name was Siler, recognized Bishop Wright and contacted Katharine. Siler told her that her father was at Hartzell’s house. Orville picked him up and brought him back to the friend’s house where he and his sister were staying.

  Soon after, however, Orville and Katharine took their father to the house of Lorin Wright, one of their brothers, and camped in with his family. It was a new home, which he and his family had just moved into a week earlier. Orville, Katharine, and Milton would stay with Lorin and his family for the next three weeks and a day.

  Approximately 7:30 A.M., just outside of Dayton, Ohio

  Ben Hecht reached the Miami Junction telegraph station, which was manned by twelve men. Hecht told them about Hagerty, and three men went after him. The remaining telegraph operators were busy sending messages out to an anxious country.

  Hecht talked to the head operator, hearing amazing stories for the first time, of horses swimming into second-floor windows and houses floating away with families on the roofs. Hecht asked the head operator if he could file an entire article about Dayton to the Chicago Journal. Hecht was given a firm “no.”

  Because of all the messages going back and forth, the head operator had been given instructions that no message any longer than two words could be sent out by any sender, who was also allowed to leave their signature. Most of the messages being sent out from the telegraph office were “am safe” messages from family members and even the stymied journalists, who figured that their editors might want to know they had reached Dayton alive.

  “Can I use your typewriter?” Hecht asked.

  “It’s no use,” came the reply. “You can only file two words.”

  Hecht started writing his article, and after about an hour, Hagerty arrived. Hagerty did not collapse into a corner and lie on a bed recovering, which is what Hecht would have liked to see. Hagerty managed to secure his own typewriter and convince the operator to let him send it out. “He was not a man to be trusted to stay silent,” wrote Hecht.

  But Hecht soon produced his own story, six pages of double-spaced copy.

  “Just read it, even if you can’t send it,” said Hecht to the head operator, who began to protest.

  The head operator read the article and suddenly started fighting back tears. He reddened. “Some have dropped from exhaustion. The Western Union men, who were the first to break into the city, haven’t slept since Tuesday. ‘Safe.’ ‘Safe.’ The monotonous words of rescue and death have jammed the wires since the first one opened,” read Hecht’s article in part.

  As Hecht describes it in his memoirs, his article was about the heroes of the Miami Junction telegraph station, telling readers about “the twelve men who had sat for thirty hours without leaving their posts, without knowing if their own families were alive or drowned, and tapped out the thousands of happiness-bringing ‘Am Safe’ messages to other relatives. The names and descriptions of each of the twelve heroes were in my story.”

  “Take a rest, Jim,” the head operator called out, and a few moments later, he was tapping out the article, sending it out for the rest of the world to read.

  Morning in Columbus

  A police skiff, after a lot of difficulty, rescued two families hiding out in a house in the middle of the city. A railroad track was near the house, and from the accounts that exist about the rescue, it sounds as if a wire was tied from the train to a boat, and once the train began moving, it—with the wire attached—began dragging the boat with two families in it through the current.

  But before that could happen, there were two telegraph men who had to bring the coil of wire to the train, and they were now stranded on the other side of the riverbank. They and a Columbus Citizen news reporter managed to climb up one telegraph pole, and use the wire to cross the river and climb back down the other side of the river. They then gave rescuers the wire. It was tied to the boat, and an oarsman took it to the house where the Eis and Cooke families were.

  The families were sick with fear. The previous day, Esther Eis had been talking to her neighbors who were no longer among the living, as far as the Eis and Cooke families knew. Thomas Wey and his wife Catherine and their four children were in a house next door along with another family, James and Catherine Griffin and their eight offspring, ranging from twenty-seven to nine years old. Esther remembers one young woman nursing a baby, probably the Griffins’ 24-year-old daughter Cathrine Engle, and she was out of her mind with fear.

  “She seemed almost crazed,” Esther said later. Everyone was terrified, Esther included, and at one point the Weys and the Griffin children told Esther that their house seemed to be moving.

  Esther tried to be encouraging, telling them that the house would be just fine. But in the middle of the night, Esther could see that her neighbor’s house also looked like it was floating. She called everyone who was awake in her home to the window. They soon saw that the house with the Wey and Griffin families inside indeed was bobbing in the floodwaters.

  Then without any further warning, the house completely collapsed. They never saw the occupants inside, and Esther and her comrades assumed the families were lost. According to Ohio’s death records, however, most of the Griffin and Wey families miraculously survived. Of the Weys, only Catherine Wey and her 21-year-old daughter Anna didn’t make it. Of the Griffins, the three youngest, two girls and a boy, ranging from nine to fourteen, perished, but the rest of the family somehow survived, including Cathrine Engle and possibly her baby, for there are no Engle infants listed in Ohio’s death records in March or April 1913, nor do any Engles appear in Ohio’s official death tally.

  But the 1920 census records show that Cathrine Engle had young children, none who were alive during the flood, so if her baby survived the collapse of the house and the current, he or she may have not lived for long, succumbing to another one of the countless day-to-day hazards of the era.

  Albert Dutoit, the train engineer racing through Ohio in search of track line to take him to his family, emerged at the Rich Street Bridge this morning, without his train, which he left behind once he could go no further with it. Police officers stood guard at the bridge, refusing to let people cross it into downtown, which was becoming something of a water wasteland.

  Surveying the situation, Dutoit noticed a group of workhouse men who were helping with the rescue effort—and they were crossing the bridge. Dut
oit slipped into the group and pretended to be one of them, and then when he was across the bridge, he slipped away without being spotted.

  From there, he managed to make his way to his house, which was surrounded by a vast body of water. Dutoit caught up with some Columbus Dispatch reporters with a motorboat and persuaded them to help him rescue his family.

  Knowing a good story when they heard it, they probably didn’t need much convincing. Minutes later, he was soon helping his wife, his eight-month-old baby, and three sons out of their second-story window.

  Meanwhile, the National Guard was ready to start fanning out across the state. Colonel H. G. Catrow and a party of military officers were under orders from Governor Cox to spare no effort to get to Dayton; but the Scioto was one to three miles wide, and Catrow’s motorboat, like so many vessels before him in the region, overturned.

  Catrow, the military men, and the newspapermen with them all survived—another boat picked them up—but it was clear that they couldn’t cross the Scioto River. It was just another indignity Mother Nature heaped on the government.

  Still, later in the afternoon, Catrow and a group of newspapermen waded across the Fifth Street Avenue bridge and, unable to get any trains, evidently located a car to make an attempt to travel on the muddy highway toward Dayton.

  It was not an easy trip. Fred Ward, reporter for the Columbus Citizen, made the journey from Dayton to Columbus, a distance of seventy-one miles, leaving on a Wednesday and getting there on a Thursday, taking twenty-five hours to do so. First, he left in an automobile, reaching Jamestown, twenty-nine miles away, in two hours. He switched to another car and traveled for another hour, making it to the community of Washington Court House, twenty-one miles away. So far, not too shabby, considering that these were 1913 cars on extremely muddy roads. He spent the night there and the next morning hired, rented, or somehow found a third car to use, apparently taking a couple of hours to reach Mt. Sterling, a mere fifteen miles away.

  At Mt. Sterling, all of the bridges except for a railroad trestle were destroyed, and so he borrowed a railroad handcar and, with the help of two men, got it as far as Orient, nine miles away. In Orient, Ward hired a driver to take him via horse and buggy to Grove City, another nine miles away and closing in on Columbus. The postmaster in Grove City let Ward borrow his car, and he finally reached his newspaper’s office at 4:30 P.M. Catrow and his crew were ready to see some action.

  8 A.M., Indianapolis

  Indianapolis residents were waking up to discover that the previous evening’s nightmare was real. The Washington Street Bridge over the White River was no longer in existence. The Morris Street Bridge was still up but closed. The Kentucky Avenue Bridge was impassable but still standing. The Oliver Avenue Bridge was closed since part of the structure had disappeared into the current. A number of bodies, including those of young children, were occasionally spotted drifting in the water, like that of a woman whose body, face down, floated under the Morris Street Bridge around eight o’clock in the morning. Thousands of people were being sheltered in churches, hotels, and, at least in one case, even a dog pound. Thousands more were also trapped in factories, taverns, rooftops, trees, and on telephone poles.

  Somewhere in this chaos was Dr. Fletcher Hodges, who had a patient in Haughville, then a village west of downtown Indianapolis and now a part of the city. He wanted to check on him but was refused passage on the Oliver Avenue Bridge.

  Fletcher wasn’t pleased, since there were no other bridges he could cross. Unless.…

  An idea forming in his mind, he decided to do what reporters Ben Hecht and Chris Hagerty had done the night before and cross along a freight bridge. He went to the Vandalia Railroad Bridge, which was in danger of collapsing at any time, despite empty railroad cars having been pushed on the edges, along the land, to strengthen the foundation.

  Dr. Hodges walked on the top of the railroad cars and then climbed down onto the bridge and made the trek across it. The police and government officials had considered allowing people to evacuate on the bridge, but everyone was worried that people would look down the spaces between the railroad ties, lose their balance or mind, and fall in.

  The doctor escaped that fate, eventually treating his patient. In between crossing the bridge and returning to the same bridge, Dr. Hodges reported seeing the waters enveloping freight cars filled with pigs; saw a rooster atop a house surrounded by water; and encountered an old man who appeared insane with grief, unable to find his relatives.

  But Dr. Hodges made it back to the bridge and carefully crossed the rickety structure, moving from railroad tie to railroad tie, with the White River raging beneath him. Moments after crossing it and making an argument for the creation of a hall of fame solely for doctors who pay house calls, the Vandalia Railroad Bridge sank into the water.

  Hodges was certainly a better physician than whoever was watching over West Indianapolis. It may be the stuff of folklore, but one of the local papers told a story of how there was only one doctor who was accessible and available to attend to sufferers. This doctor was also the victim of a morphine habit. The doctor successfully helped a woman deliver twins in the Methodist church, but the pressure of attending to his patients, and not being able to get morphine for them or himself, was too much. The physician lost his mind and, after making three unsuccessful attempts to jump out of a window, was placed in a straitjacket.

  9 A.M., Peru, Indiana

  Benjamin Wallace, the circus owner, was going out of his mind with worry. He had heard plenty of gossip and innuendo about what had happened to his circus animals, and surely he wondered about his employees, but he had no way to get out of downtown and travel the few miles to the circus headquarters and investigate. He put up a $5,000 reward for anyone who would take a boat out to the circus farm, brave the torrent, and bring back a true report of what was going on out there. He had no takers.

  Early morning, across America

  In the morning papers, which Ben Hecht and Chris Hagerty contributed to, an appeal from President Woodrow Wilson went out to readers across the country, asking them to help the flood sufferers:

  “The terrible floods in Ohio and Indiana have assumed the proportions of a national calamity. The loss of life and the infinite suffering involved prompt me to issue an earnest appeal to all who are able in however small a way to assist the labors of the American Red Cross to send contributions at once to the Red Cross at Washington or to the local treasurers of the Society.

  “We should make this a common cause. The needs of those upon whom this sudden and overwhelming disaster has come should quicken everyone capable of sympathy and compassion to give immediate aid to those who are laboring to rescue and relieve.”

  There was, in fact, a flurry of activity in the Oval Office on the 26th day of March. Wilson fired off a letter to both Senator Thomas S. Martin and U.S. State Representative John J. Fitzgerald, stating:

  “I am directing the War Department to extend the necessary aid to the sufferers from the floods. May I assume that I will have your approval in seeking the subsequent authorization of Congress and the necessary funds?”

  They heartily approved.

  Wilson also dashed off identical letters to both the Ohio governor, James M. Cox, and Indiana’s governor, Samuel M. Ralston, simply saying, “I deeply sympathize with the people of your State in the terrible disaster that has come upon them. Can the Federal Government assist in any way?”

  Cox thought so and promptly replied that day with a telegram reading:

  “We have asked the Secretary of War this morning for tents, supplies, rations and physicians. In the name of humanity see that this is granted at the earliest possible moment. The situation in this State is very critical. We believe that two hundred and fifty thousand people were unsheltered last night and the indications are that before night the Muskingum Valley will suffer the fate of the Miami and Scioto Valleys.”

  President Wilson promptly replied. “Your telegram received. Have directed th
e Secretary of War immediately to comply with your request, and to use every agency of his Department to meet the needs of the situation.”

  Governor Ralston didn’t reply. He couldn’t. He had no idea that the president had contacted him. President Wilson’s telegram couldn’t get through to Ralston due to the floods. While the telegram could be transmitted almost instantly—it was the e-mail of its day—someone had to actually physically deliver the telegram from the office to the recipient, and on March 26, getting a telegram from the telegraph office to the governor’s mansion was a challenging feat.

  That technology was failing or not working the way everyone was accustomed to was disconcerting. At least one newspaper columnist at the time lamented that perhaps the influx of communicative devices, from telegraphs to telephones, was making the nation soft since, suddenly, going without them was sending so many people into a panic, almost suggesting that maybe the country would be better off to go back the way it had been, when nobody could reach each other and everyone was more self-reliant.

  As the Cambridge City Tribune, the paper for Cambridge City, Indiana, lectured its readers in an April 3, 1913 editorial, “Now you know how it was to live in this country in the days when there were no railroads, no daily newspapers, no telegraph, no telephone, no furnaces, no roads, no bridges. In this age, a few days’ isolation is a great hardship.”

  And when telegrams could get through, they may have done more harm than good, in terms of making the public anxious.

  In Zanesville, an Ohio city in the Muskingum Valley that Governor Cox worried about, a telegraph operator sent out a final message: “Entire city under water. It’s coming into our office. The building next door has just collapsed and I am compelled to leave now for safety.…”