"Johnstown is annihilated," telegraphed Superintendent Pitcairn to
Pittsburg on Friday night. "He came," says one who visited the place on
Sunday, "very close to the facts of the case. Nothing like it was ever
seen in this country. Where long rows of dwelling-houses and business
blocks stood forty-eight hours ago, ruin and desolation now reign
supreme. Probably 1500 houses have been swept from the face of the earth
as completely as if they had never been erected. Main street, from end
to end, is piled fifteen and twenty feet high with débris, and in some
instances it is as high as the roofs of the houses. This great mass of
wreckage fills the street from curb to curb, and frequently has crushed
the buildings in and filled the space with reminders of the terrible
calamity. There is not a man in the place who can give any reliable
estimate of the number of houses that have been swept away. City
Solicitor Kuehn, who should be very good authority in this matter,
places the number at 1500. From the woolen mill above the island to the
bridge, a distance of probably two miles, a strip of territory nearly a
half mile in width has been swept clean, not a stick of timber or one
brick on top of another being left to tell the story. It is the most
complete wreck that imagination could portray.
"All day long men, women, and children were plodding about the desolate
waste looking in vain to locate the boundaries of their former homes.
Nothing but a wide expanse of mud, ornamented here and there with heaps
of driftwood, remained, however, for their contemplation. It is
perfectly safe to say that every house in the city that was not located
well up on the hillside was either swept completely away or wrecked so
badly that rebuilding will be absolutely necessary. These losses,
however, are nothing compared to the frightful sacrifice of precious
human lives to be seen on every hand.
"During all this solemn Sunday Johnstown has been drenched with the
tears of stricken mortals, and the air is filled with sobs and sighs
that come from breaking hearts. There are scenes enacted here every hour
and every minute that affect all beholders profoundly. When homes are
thus torn asunder in an instant, and the loved ones hurled from the arms
of loving and devoted mothers, there is an element of sadness in the
tragedy that overwhelms every heart.
"A slide, a series of frightful tosses from side to side, a run, and you
have crossed the narrow rope bridge which spanned the chasm dug by the
waters between the stone bridge and Johnstown. Crossing the bridge is an
exciting task, yet many women accomplished it rather than remain in
Johnstown. The bridge pitched like a ship in a storm. Within two inches
of your feet rushed the muddy waters of the Conemaugh. There were no
ropes to easily guide, and creeping was more convenient than walking.
One had to cross the Conemaugh at a second point in order to reach
Johnstown proper. This was accomplished by a skiff ferry. The ferryman
clung to a rope and pulled the boat over.
"After landing one walks across a desolate sea of mud, in which there
are interred many human bodies. It was once the handsome portion of the
town. The cellars are filled up with mud, so that a person who has never
seen the city can hardly imagine that houses ever stood where they did.
Four streets solidly built up with houses have been swept away. Nothing
but a small, two-story frame house remains. It was near the edge of the
wave and thus escaped, although one side was torn off. The walk up to
wrecks of houses was interrupted in many places by small branch streams.
Occasionally across the flats could be seen the remains of a victim.
The stench arising from the mud is sickening. Along the route were
strewn tin utensils, pieces of machinery, iron pipes, and wares of every
conceivable kind. In the midst of the wreck a clothing store dummy, with
a hand in the position of beckoning to a person, stands erect and
uninjured.
"It is impossible to describe the appearance of Main street. Whole
houses have been swept down this one street and become lodged. The wreck
is piled as high as the second-story windows. The reporter could step
from the wreck into the auditorium of the opera house. The ruins consist
of parts of houses, trees, saw logs and reels from the wire factory.
Many houses have their side walls and roofs torn up, and one can walk
directly into what had been second-story bed-rooms, or go in by way of
the top. Further up town a raft of logs lodged in the street, and did
great damage. At the beginning of the wreckage, which is at the opening
of the valley of the Conemaugh, one can look up the valley for miles and
not see a house. Nothing stands but an old woolen mill.
"Charles Luther is the name of the boy who stood on an adjacent
elevation and saw the whole flood. He said he heard a grinding noise far
up the valley, and looking up he could see a dark line moving slowly
toward him. He saw that it was houses. On they came, like the hand of a
giant clearing off his table. High in the air would be tossed a log or
beam, which fell back with a crash. Down the valley it moved and across
the little mountain city. For ten minutes nothing but moving houses were
seen, and then the waters came with a roar and a rush. This lasted for
two hours, and then it began to flow more steadily."
Seen from the high hill across the river from Johnstown, the Conemaugh
Valley gives an easy explanation of the terrible destruction which it
has suffered. This valley, stretching back almost in a straight line for
miles, suddenly narrows near Johnstown. The wall of water which came
tearing down toward the town, picking up all the houses and mills in the
villages along its way, suddenly rose in height as it came to the narrow
pass. It swept over the nearest part of the town and met the waters of
Stony creek, swollen by rains, rushing along with the speed of a
torrent. The two forces coming together, each turned aside and started
away again in a half-circle, seeking an outlet in the lower Conemaugh
Valley. The massive stone bridge of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company,
at the lower base of the triangle, was almost instantly choked up with
the great mass of wreckage dashed against it, and became a dam that
could not be swept away, and proved to be the ruin of the town and the
villages above. The waters checked here, formed a vast whirlpool, which
destroyed everything within its circle. It backed up on the other side
of the triangle, and devastated the village of Kernville, across the
river from Johnstown.
The force of the current was truly appalling. The best evidence of its
force is exhibited in the mass of débris south of the Pennsylvania
bridge. Persons on the hillsides declare that houses, solid from their
foundation stones, were rushed on to destruction at the rate of thirty
miles an hour. On one house forty persons were counted; their cries for
help were heard far above the roaring waters. At the railroad bridge the
house parted in the middle, and the cries of the unfortunate people were
smothered in the engulfing waters.
At the Cambria Iron Works a huge hickory struck the south brick wall of
the rolling mill at an angle, went through it and the west wall, where
it remains. A still more extraordinary incident is seen at the
foot-bridge of the Pennsylvania station, on the freight track built for
the Cambria Iron Works. The sunken track and bridge are built in a
curve. In clearing out the track the Cambria workmen discovered two huge
bridge trusses intact, the larger one 30 feet long and 10 feet high. It
lay close to the top of the bridge and had been driven into the cut at
least fifty feet.
It was with an impulse to the right side of the mountain that the great
mass of water came down the Conemaugh river. It was a mass of water with
a front forty feet high, and an eighth of a mile wide. Its velocity was
so great that its first sweep did little damage on either side. It had
no time to spread. Where it burst from the gap it swept south until it
struck the bridge, and, although it was ten feet or more deep over the
top of the bridge, the obstruction of the mass of masonry was so great
that the head of the rush of water was turned back along the
Pennsylvania Railroad bluff on the left, and, sweeping up to where it
met the first stream again, licked up the portion of the town on the
left side of the triangular plain. A great eddy was thus formed. Through
the Stony Creek Gap to the right there was a rush of surplus water. In
two minutes after the current first burst through, forty feet deep, with
a solid mass of water whirling around with a current of tremendous
velocity, it was a whirlpool vastly greater than that of ten Niagaras.
The only outlet was under and over the railroad bridge, and the
continuing rush of the waters into the valley from the gap was greater
for some time than the means of escape at the bridge.
[Illustration: RUINS SHOWING THE PATH OF THE FLOOD.]
"Standing now at the bridge," says a visitor on Monday, "where this vast
whirlpool struggled for exit, the air is heavy with smoke and foul with
nameless odors from a mass of wreckage. The area of the triangular
space where the awful whirlpool revolved is said to be about four square
miles. The area of the space covered by this smoking mass is sixty
acres. The surface of this mass is now fifteen feet below the top of the
bridge and about thirty below the point on the bluff where the surface
of the whirlpool lashed the banks. One ragged mass some distance above
the bridge rises several feet above the general level, but with that
exception the surface of the débris is level. It has burned off until it
reached the water, and is smouldering on as the water gradually lowers.
On the right bank, at about where was the highest water level, a
detachment of the Pittsburg Fire Department is throwing two fitful
streams of water down into the smoke, with the idea of gradually
extinguishing the fire. In the immensity of the disaster with which they
combat their feeble efforts seem like those of boys with squirt guns
dampening a bonfire. About the sixty acres of burning débris, and to the
left of it from where it begins to narrow toward Stony Creek Gap, there
is a large area of level mud, with muddy streams wandering about in it.
This tract of mud comprises all of the triangle except a thin fringe of
buildings along the bluff on the Pennsylvania Railroad. A considerable
number of houses stand on the high ground on the lower face of the
central mountain and off to the right into Stony Creek Gap. The fringe
along the Pennsylvania Railroad is mostly of stores and other large
brick buildings that are completely wrecked, though not swept away. The
houses on the higher ground are unharmed; but down toward the edge they
fade away by degrees of completeness in their wreckage into the yellow
level of the huge tract over which the mighty whirlpool swept. Off out
of sight, in Stony Creek Gap, are fringes of houses on either side of
the muddy flat.
"This flat is a peculiar thing. It is level and uninteresting as a piece
of waste ground. Too poor to grow grass, there is nothing to indicate
that it had ever been anything else than what it is. It is as clean of
débris and wreckage as though there had never been a building on it. In
reality it was the central and busiest part of Johnstown. Buildings,
both dwellings and stores, covered it thickly. Its streets were paved,
and its sidewalks of substantial stone. It had street-car lines, gas and
electric lights, and all the other improvements of a substantial city of
15,000 or 20,000 inhabitants. Iron bridges spanned the streams, and the
buildings were of substantial character. Not a brick remains, not a
stone nor a stick of timber in all this territory. There are not even
hummocks and mounds to show where wreckage might be covered with a layer
of mud. They are not there, they are gone--every building, every
street, every sidewalk and pavement, the street railways, and everything
else that covered the surface of the earth has vanished as utterly as
though it had never been there. The ground was swept as clean as though
some mighty scraper had been dragged over it again and again. Not even
the lines of the streets can be remotely traced.
"'I have visited Johnstown a dozen times a year for a long time,' said a
business man to-day, 'and I know it thoroughly, but I haven't the least
idea now of what part of it this is. I can't even tell the direction the
streets used to run.'
"His bewilderment is hardly greater than that of the citizens
themselves. They wander about in the mud for hours trying to find the
spot where the house of some friend or relative used to stand. It takes
a whole family to locate the site of their friend's house with any
reasonable certainty.
"Wandering over this muddy plain one can realize something of what must
have been the gigantic force of that vast whirlpool. It pressed upon the
town like some huge millstone, weighing tens of thousands of tons and
revolving with awful velocity, pounding to powder everything beneath.
But the conception of the power of that horrible eddy of the flood must
remain feeble until that sixty acres of burning débris is inspected. It
seems from a little distance like any other mass of wreckage, though
vastly longer than any ever before seen in this country. It must have
been many times more tremendous when it was heaped up twenty feet higher
over its whole area and before the fire leveled it off. But neither then
nor now can the full terror of the flood that piled it there be
adequately realized until a trip across parts where the fire has been
extinguished shows the manner in which the stuff composing it is packed
together. It is not a heap of broken timbers lying loosely thrown
together in all directions. It is a solid mass. The boards and timbers
which made up the frame buildings are laid together as closely as sticks
of wood in a pile--more closely, for they are welded into one another
until each stick is as solidly fixed in place as though all were one. A
curious thing is that wherever there are a few boards together they are
edge up, and never standing on end or flat. The terrible force of the
whirlpool that ground four square miles of buildings into this sixty
acres of wreckage left no opportunity for gaps or holes between pieces
in the river. Everything was packed together as solidly as though by
sledge-hammer blows.
"But the boards and timber of four square miles of buildings are not all
that is in that sixty-acre mass. An immense amount of débris from
further up the valley lies there. Twenty-seven locomotives, several
Pullman cars and probably a hundred other cars, or all that is left of
them, are in that mass. Fragments of iron bridges can be seen sticking
out occasionally above the wreckage. They are about the only things the
fire has not leveled, except the curious hillock spoken of, which is an
eighth of a mile back from the bridge, where the flames apparently raged
less fiercely. Scattered over the area, also, are many blackened logs
that were too big to be entirely burned, and that stick up now like spar
buoys in a sea of ruin. Little jets of flame, almost unseen by daylight,
but appearing as evening falls, are scattered thickly over the surface
of the wreckage.
"Of the rest of Johnstown, and the collection of towns within sight of
the bridge, not much is to be said. They are, to a greater or less
extent, gone, as Johnstown is gone. Far up the gap through which came
the flood a large brick building remains standing, but ruined. It is all
that is left of one of the biggest wire mills and steel works in the
country. Turning around below the bridge are the works of the Cambria
Iron Company. The buildings are still standing, but they are pretty well
ruined, and the machinery with which they were filled is either totally
destroyed or damaged almost beyond repair. High up on the hill at the
left and scattered up on other hills in sight are many dwellings, neat,
well kept, and attractive places apparently, and looking as bright and
fresh now as before the awful torrent wiped out of existence everything
in the valley below.
"This is Johnstown and its immediate vicinity as nearly as words can
paint it. It is a single feature, one section out of fifteen miles of
horror that stretches through this once lovely valley of the Allegheny.
What is true of Johnstown is true of every town for miles up and down.
The desolation of one town may differ from the desolation in others as
one death may differ from another; but it is desolation and death
everywhere--desolation so complete, so relentless, so dreadful that it
is absolutely beyond the power of language fairly to tell the tale."