There have been many famous rides in history. Longfellow has celebrated
that of Paul Revere. Read has sung of Sheridan's. John Boyle O'Reilly
has commemorated in graceful verse the splendid achievement of Collins
Graves, who, when the Williamsburg dam in Massachusetts broke, dashed
down the valley on horseback in the van of the flood, warning the people
and saving countless lives:
"He draws no rein, but he shakes the street
With a shout and a ring of the galloping feet,
And this the cry that he flings to the wind:
'To the hills for your lives! The flood is behind!'
"In front of the roaring flood is heard
The galloping horse and the warning word.
Thank God! The brave man's life is spared!
From Williamsburg town he nobly dared
To race with the flood and take the road
In front of the terrible swath it mowed.
For miles it thundered and crashed behind,
But he looked ahead with a steadfast mind:
'They must be warned,' was all he said,
As away on his terrible ride he sped."
There were two such heroes in the Conemaugh Valley. Let their deeds be
told and their names held in everlasting honor. One was John G. Parke, a
young civil engineer of Philadelphia, a nephew of the General John G.
Parke who commanded a corps of the Union Army. He was the first to
discover the impending break in the South Fork dam, and jumping into the
saddle he started at breakneck speed down the valley shouting: "The dam;
the dam is breaking; run for your lives!" Hundreds of people were saved
by this timely warning. Reaching South Fork Station, young Parke
telegraphed tidings of the coming inundation to Johnstown, ten miles
below, fully an hour before the flood came in "a solid wall of water
thirty feet high" to drown the mountain-bound town.
Some heeded the note of alarm at Johnstown; others had heard it before,
doubted, and waited until death overtook them. Young Parke climbed up
into the mountains when the water was almost at his horse's heels, and
saw the deluge pass.
Less fortunate was Daniel Peyton, a rich young man of Johnstown. He
heard at Conemaugh the message sent down from South Fork by the gallant
Parke. In a moment he sprang into the saddle. Mounted on a grand, big,
bay horse, he came riding down the pike which passes through Conemaugh
to Johnstown, like some angel of wrath of old, shouting his warning:
"Run for your lives to the hills! Run to the hills!"
The people crowded out of their houses along the thickly settled streets
awe-struck and wondering. No one knew the man, and some thought he was a
maniac and laughed. On and on, at a deadly pace, he rode, and shrilly
rang out his awful cry. In a few moments, however, there came a cloud of
ruin down the broad streets, down the narrow alleys, grinding, twisting,
hurling, over-turning, crashing--annihilating the weak and the strong.
It was the charge of the flood, wearing its coronet of ruin and
devastation, which grew at every instant of its progress. Forty feet
high, some say, thirty according to others, was this sea, and it
travelled with a swiftness like that which lay in the heels of Mercury.
On and on raced the rider, on and on rushed the wave. Dozens of people
took heed of the warning and ran up to the hills.
Poor, faithful rider! It was an unequal contest. Just as he turned to
cross the railroad bridge the mighty wall fell upon him, and horse,
rider, and bridge all went out into chaos together.
A few feet further on several cars of the Pennsylvania Railroad train
from Pittsburg were caught up and hurried into the cauldron, and the
heart of the town was reached.
The hero had turned neither to the right nor left for himself, but rode
on to death for his townsmen. When found Peyton was lying face upward
beneath the remnants of massive oaks, while hard by lay the gallant
horse that had so nobly done all in his power for humanity before he
started to seek a place of safety for himself.
Mrs. Ogle, the manager of the Western Union telegraph office, who died
at her post, will go down in history as a heroine of the highest order.
Notwithstanding the repeated notifications which she received to get out
of reach of the approaching danger, she stood by the instruments with
unflinching loyalty and undaunted courage, sending words of warning to
those in danger in the valley below. When every station in the path of
the coming torrent had been warned, she wired her companion at South
Fork: "This is my last message," and as such it shall always be
remembered as her last words on earth, for at that very moment the
torrent engulfed her and bore her from her post on earth to her post of
honor in the great beyond.
Miss Nina Speck, daughter of the Rev. David Speck, pastor of the First
United Brethren Church, of Chambersburg, was in Johnstown visiting her
brother and narrowly escaped death in the flood. She arrived home clad
in nondescript clothing, which had been furnished by an old colored
washerwoman, and told the following story of the flood:
"Our house was in Kernsville, a part of Johnstown through which Stony
Creek ran. Although we were a square from the creek, the back-water from
the stream had flooded the streets in the morning and was up to our
front porch. At four o'clock on Friday afternoon we were sitting on the
front porch watching the flood, when we heard a roar as of a tornado or
mighty conflagration.
"We rushed up-stairs and got out upon the bay-window. There an awful
sight met our eyes. Down the Conemaugh Valley was advancing a mighty
wall of water and mist with a terrible roar. Before it were rolling
houses and buildings of all kinds, tossing over and over. We thought it
was a cyclone, the roar sounding like a tempest among forest trees. We
started down-stairs and out through the rear of the house to escape to
the hillside near by. But before we could get there the water was up to
our necks and we could make no progress. We turned back and were
literally dashed by the current into the house, which began to move off
as soon as [we] were in it again. From the second-story window I saw a
young man drifting toward us. I broke the glass from the frames with my
hands and helped him in, and in a few minutes more I pulled in an old
man, a neighbor, who had been sick.
"Our house moved rapidly down the stream and fortunately lodged against
a strong building. The water forced us out of the second-story up into
the attic. Then we heard a lot of people on our roof begging us for
God's sake to let them in. I broke through the roof with a bed-slat and
pulled them in. Soon we had thirteen in all crouched in the attic.
"Our house was rocking, and every now and then a building would crash
against us. Every moment we thought we would go down. The roofs of all
the houses drifting by us were covered with people, nearly all praying
and some singing hymns, and now and then a house would break apart and
all would go down. On Saturday at noon we were rescued, making our way
from one building to the next by crawling on narrow planks. I counted
hundreds of bodies lying in the debris, most of them covered over with
earth and showing only the outlines of the form."
Opposite the northern wall of the Methodist Church the flood struck the
new Queen Anne house of John Fronheiser, a superintendent in the Cambria
Works. He was at home, as most men were that day, trying to calm the
fears of the women and children of the family during the earlier flood.
Down went the front of the new Queen Anne house, and into the wreck of
it fell the Superintendent, two elder children, a girl and a boy. As the
flood passed he heard the boy cry: "Don't let me drown, papa; break my
arms first!" and the girl: "Cut off my legs, but don't let me drown!"
And as he heard them, came a wilder cry from his wife drifting down with
the current, to "Save the baby." But neither wife nor baby could be
saved, and boy and girl stayed in the wreck until the water went down
and they were extricated.
Horror piled on horror is the story from Johnstown down to the viaduct.
Horror shot through with intense lights of heroism, and here and there
pervaded with gleams of humor. It is known that one girl sang as she was
whirled through the flood, "Jesus, lover of my soul," until the water
stopped her singing forever. It is known that Elvie Duncan, daughter of
the Superintendent of the Street Car Company, when her family was
separated and she was swept away with her baby sister, kept the little
thing alive by chewing bread and feeding it to her. It is known that
John Dibart, banker, died as helplessly in his splendid house as did
that solitary prisoner in his cell; that the pleasant park, with the
chain fence about it, was so completely annihilated that not even one
root of the many shade trees within its boundaries remains. It is known
also that to a leaden-footed messenger boy, who was ambling along Main
Street, fear lent wings to lift him into the _Tribune_ office in the
second story of the Post Office, and that the Rosensteels, general
storekeepers of Woodvale, were swept into the windows of their friends,
the Cohens, retail storekeepers of Main Street, Johnstown, two miles
from where they started. It is known that the Episcopal Church, at
Locust and Market Streets, went down like a house of cards, or as the
German Lutheran had gone, in the path of the flood, and that Rector
Diller, his wife and child, and adopted daughter went with it, while of
their next-door neighbors, Frank Daly, of the Cambria Company, and his
mother, the son was drowned and the mother, not so badly hurt in body as
in spirit, died three nights after in the Mercy Hospital, Pittsburg.
But while the flood was driving people to silent death down the valley,
there was a sound of lamentation on the hills. Hundreds who had climbed
there to be out of reach during the morning's freshet saw the city in
the valley disappearing, and their cries rose high above the crash and
the roar. Little time had eyes to watch or lips to cry. O'Brien, the
disabled Millville storekeeper, was one of the crowd in the park. He saw
a town before him, then a mountain of timber approaching; then a dizzy
swirl of men at the viaduct, a breaking of the embankment to the east of
it, the forming of a whirlpool there that ate up homes and those that
dwelt in them, as a cauldron of molten iron eats up the metal scraps
that are thrown in to cool it, and then a silence and a subsidence.
It was a quarter of four o'clock. At half-past three there had been a
Johnstown. Now there was none.