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[Illustration: STRICKEN]
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THE TRUE STORY OF
OUR NATIONAL CALAMITY
OF FLOOD, FIRE AND TORNADO
The appalling loss of life, the terrible suffering
of the homeless, the struggles for safety, and the
noble heroism of those who risked life to save loved
ones; the unprecedented loss of property, resulting
in the laying waste of flourishing cities and towns
HOW THE WHOLE NATION JOINED
IN THE WORK OF RELIEF
By LOGAN MARSHALL
Author of
"THE SINKING OF THE TITANIC,"
"THE UNIVERSAL HANDBOOK,"
"LIFE OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT,"
"THE STORY OF POLAR CONQUEST,"
"MARSHALL'S HANDY MANUAL," Etc.
PROFUSELY ILLUSTRATED WITH
AUTHENTIC PHOTOGRAPHS
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COPYRIGHT 1913, BY
L. T. MYERS
The material in this work is fully protected under the copyright laws of
the United States. All persons are warned against making any use of it
without permission.
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Prayer by Bishop David H. Greer:
O Merciful God and Heavenly Father, who hast taught us in Thy holy
word that Thou dost not willingly afflict or grieve the children of
men, give ear to the prayers which we humbly offer to Thee in
behalf of our brethren who are suffering from the great water
floods.
Cause them in their sorrow to experience the comfort of Thy
presence, and in their bewilderment the guidance of Thy wisdom.
Stir up, we beseech Thee, the wills of Thy people to minister with
generous aid to their present needs, and so overrule in Thy
providence this great and sore calamity that we may be brought
nearer to Thee and be knit more closely one to another in sympathy
and love.
All which we humbly ask, through Jesus Christ Our Lord. Amen.
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[Illustration: WHERE THE NATION'S SYMPATHIES ARE CENTERED]
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
The Greatest Cataclysm in American History . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
CHAPTER II
The Death-Bearing Flood at Dayton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
CHAPTER III
Dayton's Menace of Fire and Famine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
CHAPTER IV
Dayton in the Throes of Distress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
CHAPTER V
The Recuperation of Dayton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
CHAPTER VI
Dayton: "The City of a Thousand Factories" . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
CHAPTER VII
The Devastation of Columbus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
CHAPTER VIII
Columbus: The Beautiful Capital of Ohio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138
CHAPTER IX
Cincinnati: A New Center of Peril . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
CHAPTER X
The Flood in Western Ohio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152
CHAPTER XI
The Flood in Northern Ohio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
CHAPTER XII
The Flood in Eastern Ohio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
CHAPTER XIII
The Flood in Eastern Indiana . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
CHAPTER XIV
The Desolation of Indianapolis and the Valley of the White River. . 184
CHAPTER XV
The Roaring Torrent of the Wabash . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
CHAPTER XVI
The Plight of Peru: A Stricken City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197
CHAPTER XVII
The Death-Dealing Tornado at Omaha . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204
CHAPTER XVIII
Struggles of Stricken Omaha . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212
CHAPTER XIX
Omaha: "The Gate City of the West" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217
CHAPTER XX
Other Damage from the Nebraska Tornado . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220
CHAPTER XXI
The Tornado in Iowa and Illinois . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
CHAPTER XXII
The Tornado in Kansas and Arkansas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228
CHAPTER XXIII
The Tornado in Indiana . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231
CHAPTER XXIV
The Tornado in Pennsylvania . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239
CHAPTER XXV
The Freak Tornado in Alabama . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243
CHAPTER XXVI
The Flood in New York . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246
CHAPTER XXVII
The Flood in Pennsylvania . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 254
CHAPTER XXVIII
The Flood in the Ohio Valley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263
CHAPTER XXIX
The Flood in the Mississippi Valley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 270
CHAPTER XXX
Damage to Transportation, Mail and Telegraph Facilities . . . . . . 277
CHAPTER XXXI
The Work of Relief . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285
CHAPTER XXXII
Previous Great Floods and Tornadoes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 294
CHAPTER XXXIII
Lessons of the Cataclysm and Precautionary Measures . . . . . . . . 308
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The Unleashed Gods
By Percy Shaw
Iron and rock are our slaves;
We are liege to marble and steel;
We go our ways through our purse-proud days,
Lifting our voices in loud self-praise--
Forgetting the God at the wheel.
We build our bulwarks of stone,
Skyscraper and culvert and tower,
Till the God of Flood, keen-nosed for blood,
Drags our monuments into the mud
In the space of a red-eyed hour.
Kings of the oceans are we,
With our liners of rocket speed,
Till the God of Ice, in mist-filled trice,
Calls to us harshly to pay his price
As we sink to the deep-sea weed.
Muscle and brain are our slaves;
We are liege to iron and steel;
But who shall say, tomorrow, today,
That we shall not halt on our onward way
To bow to the God at the wheel?
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[Illustration: HELPING HANDS]
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CHAPTER I
THE GREATEST CATACLYSM IN AMERICAN HISTORY
THE UNCONTROLLABLE FORCES OF NATURE--THE DEVASTATION OF OMAHA--THE
TERROR OF THE FLOOD--A VIVID PICTURE OF THE FLOOD--THE TRAGEDY OF
DEATH AND SUFFERING--THE SYMPATHY OF NATIONS--THE COURAGE OF THE
STRICKEN--MEN THAT SHOWED THEMSELVES HEROES.
Man is still the plaything of Nature. He boasts loudly of conquering it;
the earth gives a little shiver and his cities collapse like the house
of cards a child sets up. A French panegyrist said of our own Franklin:
"He snatched the scepter from tyrants and the lightning from the skies,"
but the lightning strikes man dead and consumes his home. He thinks he
has mastered the ocean, but the records of Lloyds refute him. He
declares his independence of the winds upon the ocean, and the winds
upon the land touch his proud constructions and they are wrecks.
He imprisons the waters behind a dam and fetters the current of the
rivers with bridges; they bestir themselves and the fetters snap, his
towns are washed away and thousands of dead bodies float down the angry
torrents. He burrows into the skin of the earth for treasure, and a
thousand men find a living grave. Man has extorted many secrets from
Nature; he can make a little use of a few of its forces; but he is
impotent before its power.
Thus we pause to reflect upon the most staggering and tragic cataclysm
of Nature that has been visited upon our country since first our
forefathers won it from the Indian--the unprecedented succession of
tornadoes, floods, storms and blizzards, which in March, 1913,
devastated vast areas of territory in Ohio, Indiana, Nebraska and a
dozen other states, and which were followed fast by the ravages of fire,
famine and disease.
THE DEVASTATION OF OMAHA
The terrible suddenness and irresistible power of such catastrophes make
them an object of overwhelming fear. The evening of Easter Sunday in
Omaha was doubtless as placid and uneventful as a thousand predecessors,
until an appalling roar and increasing darkness announced to the
initiated the approach of a tornado, and in a few minutes forty-seven
city blocks were leveled to the ground. The fairest and best built part
of the city could no more withstand this awful force than the weakest
hovels. Twelve hundred buildings were destroyed, most of them homes, but
among them many churches and school houses. The just and the unjust
fared alike in this riot of destruction and then the tornado rushed on
to find other objects on which to wreck its force in Council Bluffs and
elsewhere. It left in its wake many fires, but fortunately also a heavy
rain, while later a deep fall of snow covered up the scene of its awful
destruction.
THE TERROR OF THE FLOOD
With the rest of the country, fair Dayton sorrowed for Omaha. Two days
later Omaha, bowed and almost broken by her own misfortune, looked with
sympathy across to Dayton, whose woe was even greater. A thousand
communities in the United States read the story and in their own sense
of security sent eager proffers of assistance to the striken districts.
And not one of them has assurance that it may not be next. There is no
sure definition of the course of the earthquake, the path of the wind,
the time and place of the storm-cloud. Science has its limitations. Only
the Infinite is master of these forces.
In the legal parlance of the practice of torts such occurrences as these
are known as "acts of God." Theologians who attempt to solve the
mysteries of Providence have found in such occasions the evidence of
Divine wrath and warning to the smitten people. But to seek the reason
and to know the purpose, if there be purpose in it, is not necessary.
The fact is enough. It challenges, staggers, calls a halt, compels men
and women to think--and even to pray.
But the flood did not confine itself to Dayton. It laid its watery hand
of death and destruction over a whole tier of states from the Great
Lakes to New England, and over the vast area to the southward which is
veined by the Ohio River and its tributaries, and extending from the
Mississippi Valley almost to the Atlantic seaboard. And as this awful
deluge drained from the land into Nature's watercourses the demons of
death and devastation danced attendance on its mad rush that laid waste
the borderlands of the Mississippi River from Illinois to the Gulf of
Mexico.
A VIVID PICTURE OF THE FLOOD
Those who have never seen a great flood do not know the meaning of the
Scriptural phrase, "the abomination of desolation."
An explosion, a railroad wreck, even a fire--these are bad enough in
their pictorial effect of shattered ruins and confusion. But for giving
one an oppressive sense of death-like misery, there is nothing equal to
a flood.
I do not speak now of the loss of life, which is unspeakably dreadful,
but of the scenic effect of the disaster. It just grips and benumbs you
with its awfulness.
In the flat country of the Middle West there is less likelihood of
swift, complete destruction than in narrow valleys, like those of
Johnstown and Austin in Pennsylvania. But the effect is, if anything,
more gruesome.
After the crest has passed there are miles and miles of inundated land,
with only trees and half-submerged buildings and floating wreckage to
break the monotony; just a vast lake of yellow, muddy water, swirling
and boiling as it seeks to find its level.
[Illustration: THE CITIES AND TOWNS INCLOSED BY THE HEAVY BLACK DOTTED
LINES WERE THE CHIEF SUFFERERS BY THE SWEEP OF WATERS]
The scene in a town is particularly ghastly. How ghastly it is, you
would have realized if you could have gone with the writer into the
flooded districts of Ohio and Indiana, traveling from point to point in
automobiles and motor boats, penetrating to the heart of the flood in
boats even before the waters receded, and afterwards on foot. The upper
floors of houses not torn from their foundations look all right, but it
fairly makes you sick to see the waves of turbid water lapping at second
floor sills, with tangled tree branches and broken furniture floating
about. It seems horrible--it is horrible--to think of that yellow flood
pouring into pleasant rooms where a few hours before the family sat in
peace and fancied security--roaring over the threshold, swirling higher
and higher against the walls, setting the cherished household treasures
astray, driving the furniture hither and thither, drowning out cheerful
rooms in darkness and death.
If anything can be worse than this, it is the scenes when the waters
recede. The shade trees that stood in the streets so trim and beautiful
are all bedraggled and bent, their branches festooned with floating
wreckage and all manner of offensive things, their leaves sodden, their
trunks caked with mud. The streets are seas of yellow ooze. Garden
fences and hedges are twisted or torn away. Reeking heaps of
indescribable refuse lie moldering where there were smooth lawns and
bright flower beds. The houses that stand are all smeared with the dirt
that shows the height of the flood.
But inside those houses--that is the dreadful thing. The rooms that the
water filled are like damp caves. Mud lies thick on the floors, the
walls are streaked with slime, and the paper hangs down in dismal
festoons. Some pictures may remain hanging, but they are all twisted and
tarnished. The furniture is a tumbled mass of confusion and filth. But
the worst is the reek of decay and death about the place.
THE TRAGEDY OF DEATH AND SUFFERING
But there is something greater in its tragedy than all this--something
greater than a great region where splendid cities, towns and humble
villages alike are without resource--something greater than a region of
broken dams and embankments and of placid rivers gone mad in flood,
bridgeless, uncontrollable, widened into lakes, into seas. It is the
hundreds of dead who died a hideous death, and the hundreds of thousands
of living who are left helpless and homeless, and all but hopeless.
Just for one moment think--we in our warm, comfortable houses,
comfortably clad, safe, smiling and happy--of the half million of our
fellow creatures out yonder shivering and trembling and dying, in the
grasp of the "destruction that wasteth at noonday," swiftly pursued by
"the pestilence which walketh in darkness." The leaping terror of the
flames climaxes the terror of the harrowing day and the helpless,
hopeless night of agony and sorrow and despair.
Think of the men, women, children and the little babies crushed and
mangled amid the wreck of shattered homes--but yesterday as beautiful
and bright as ours--the pallid faces of hundreds floating as corpses in
the stately streets turned into rushing rivers by the relentless
floods--brothers and sisters of ours, freezing and starving in homes
turned suddenly into broken rafts and battered houseboats amid the muddy
deluge, while the pitying stars look down at night upon thousands, wet,
weeping, shivering, hungry, helpless and homeless, with the host of
their unrecognized and unburied dead, in this frightful holocaust of
fire and flood and pestilence.
Think of the region where people are huddled shivering on hills or
housetops, watching the swelling waters; where practically every
convenience, means of communication, comfort, appliance of civilization
has been wiped out or stopped; where there is little to eat and no way
of getting food save from the country beyond the waters; where
millionaire and pauper, Orville Wright and humble scrub-woman, stand
shoulder to shoulder in the bread-line that winds towards the relief
stations, all alike dependent for once on charity for the barest
sustenance.
THE SYMPATHY OF NATIONS
These are the tragedies that touch our hearts. These are the tragedies
that have brought messages of condolence from King George of England,
from the King of Italy, from the Shah of Persia and from other monarchs
of Europe. These are the tragedies that impelled a widow in a small town
in Massachusetts, in sending her mite for the relief of the unfortunate,
to write: "Just one year ago, when the ill-fated Titanic deprived me of
my all, the Red Cross Society lost not a moment in coming to my aid."
These are tragedies, too, that have prompted wage-earners all over the
country to contribute to the relief of the flood sufferers a part of
their own means of support that could ill be spared--soiled and worn
bills and silver pieces laid down with unspoken sympathy by men and
women and children, too, who wanted nothing said about it and turned and
went out to face the struggle for existence again. These people did not
think twice about whether they should help those in greater necessity
than their own. They had been helping one another all their lives, and
it seemed not so much a duty as a natural thing to do to respond to the
call from the West, where people had lost their lives and others were
homeless and suffering.
THE COURAGE OF THE STRICKEN
This spirit of helpfulness is a fine thing. But even finer was the
spirit of self-help. Secretary Garrison's telegram to President Wilson
from the flooded districts that the people in the towns and cities
affected had the situation well in hand and that very little emergency
assistance was needed, was a splendid testimonial to the courage and the
resourcefulness of the people of the Middle West and the admirable
cheerfulness which they exhibited during the trying days that followed
the beginning of the calamity. There was not a whimper, but on the
contrary there was a spirit of optimism that must prove to be most
stimulating to the rest of the country.
MEN THAT SHOWED THEMSELVES HEROES
But perhaps the finest thing of all is the memory of the heroes that
showed themselves. When death and disaster, in the form of flood and
fire, swept Dayton, John H. Patterson arose with the tide to the level
of events. Patterson is the man, more than any other, who brought cosmos
out of chaos. When the flood was rising and nobody knew what the result
would be, John H. Patterson began to wire for motor boats. He did not
ask, he demanded. And the motor boats came. Patterson took all of the
carpenters from the National Cash Register--one hundred and fifty
skilled woodworkers--and set them to work making flat boats. The entire
force of the great institution was at the disposal of the people who
needed help. And not a man or a woman was docked or dropped from the
payroll. Everybody had time and a third.
As for John H. Patterson himself, he worked in three shifts of eight
hours each; and for forty-eight hours he practically neither slept nor
ate. And then, by way of rest, he took a Turkish bath and a horseback
ride, and forty winks, and was again on the job--this man of seventy,
who has known how to breathe and how to think and who carries with him
the body of a wrestler and the lavish heart of youth!
There were many other heroes--too many to mention here--but we cannot
forget John A. Bell, the telephone operator who was driven to the roof
of the building, where with emergency instruments he cut in on one of
the wires, and for two days and nights, in the driving rain, without
food or drink or dry clothing, kept the outside world informed as to
what was going on and the needs of the sufferers. What Bell endured
during those long hours was enough to kill the heart in a very strong
man. Yet his greeting to Governor Cox, over the crippled wire Thursday
morning, was: "Good morning, Governor. The sun is shining in Dayton."
Could anything be finer! Men with such spirit are great men, and the
spirit that was in John H. Patterson and John A. Bell is the same spirit
that was in John Jacob Astor, and Archie Butt, and George B. Harris, and
Charles M. Hayes, and the band of musicians on the Titanic that played
in water waist deep.
As I stood amid the slimy ruins of Dayton the day after the waters
receded, Brigadier-General Wood said to me, "There go Patterson and
Bell. Would you like to shake hands with them?" And I said, "Just now I
would rather shake hands with those two men than own the National Cash
Register Company."
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The Storms
By Chester Firkins
And you are still the Master. We have reared
Cities and citadels of seeming might,
But in the passing of a single night
You rend them unto ruin. We who feared
Nor flood nor wind nor wreckage fire-seared,
We shudder helpless in the thunder-light;
The garners cherished and the souls endeared
Emptied and sudden-slaughtered in our sight.
You, whom the Cave Man battled, whom we call
Nature, because we know no better name,
Goddess of gentleness and torture-flame,
Still are you despot; still are we the thrall;
Still we can only wait what Fate may fall
From your wild pinions that no man can tame.
Nor gold or gain, nor battlement or wall
Shall guard us from the primal flood and flame.
Our castled cities tower to your skies.
'Gainst wind and wave we pile our stone and mold.
Powered of genius, panoplied of gold,
We build the bastions of our high emprise.
But yet, but let the plunging torrent rise,
The winds awake on glutted rivers rolled--
We die as the reft robin fledgeling dies--
We perish as the beast in jungles old.
We dream that we are conquerors of Earth;
We think that we are mighty, that we dare
Scorn your grim power--till we glimpse the flare
Of burning Death 'mid holiness of Birth.
What is our godliness and wisdom worth
Against your strength embattled unaware?
You are the Master, ever, everywhere,
Deadly and gentle o'er the wide World's girth.
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