The experience of the newspaper correspondents in the Conemaugh valley
was the experience of a lifetime. Few war correspondents, even, have
been witnesses of such appalling scenes of horror and desolation. Day
after day they were busy recording the annals of death and despair,
conscious, meanwhile, that no expressions of accumulated pathos at their
command could do justice to the theme. They had only to stand in the
street wherever a knot of men had gathered, to hear countless stories of
thrilling escapes. Hundreds of people had such narrow escapes that they
hardly dared to believe that they were saved for hours after they
reached solid ground. William Wise, a young man who lived at Woodvale,
was walking along the road when the rush of water came down the valley.
He started to rush up the side of the hills, but stopped to help a young
woman; Ida Zidstein, to escape; lost too much time, and was forced to
drag the young woman upon a high pile of metal near the road. They had
clung there several hours, and thought that they could both escape, as
the metal pile was not exposed to the full force of the torrent. A
telegraph pole came dashing down the flood, its top standing above the
water, from which dangled some wires. The pole was caught in an eddy
opposite the pile. It shot in toward the two who were clinging there. As
the pole swung around, the wires came through the air like a whip-lash,
and catching in the hair of the young woman, dragged her down to instant
death. The young man remained on the heap of metal for hours before the
water subsided so as to allow him to escape.
One man named Homer, with his child, age six, was on one of the houses
which were first carried away. He climbed to the roof and held fast
there for four hours, floating all the way to Bolivar, fifteen miles
below.
A young hero sat upon the roof of his father's house, holding his mother
and little sister. Once the house swung in toward a brick structure
which still rested on its foundation. As one house struck the other, the
boy sprang into one of the windows. As he turned to rescue his mother
and sister, the house swung out again, and the boy, seeing that there
was no possibility of getting them off, leaped back to their side. A
second time the house was stopped--this time by a tree. The boy helped
his mother and sister to a place of safety in the tree, but before he
could leave the roof, the house was swept on and he was drowned.
One man took his whole family to the roof of his floating house. He and
one child escaped to another building, but his wife and five children
were whirled around for hours, and finally carried down to the bridge
where so many people perished in the flames. They were all rescued.
District Attorney Rose, his wife, two brothers and two sisters were
swept across the lower portion of the town. They had been thrown into
the water, and were swimming, the men assisting the women. Finally, they
got into a back current, and were cast ashore at the foot of the hills
back of Knoxville.
One merchant of Johnstown, after floating about upon a piece of wreckage
for hours, was carried down to the stone bridge. After a miraculous
escape from being burned to death, he was rescued and carried ashore. He
was so dazed and terrified by his experience, however, that he walked
off the bridge and broke his neck.
One man who was powerless to save his wife, after he had leaped from a
burning building to a house floating by, was driven insane by her
shrieks for help.
An old gentleman of Verona rescued a modern Moses from the bulrushes.
Verona is on the east bank of the Allegheny river, twelve miles above
Pittsburg. Mr. McCutcheon, while standing on the river bank watching the
drift floating by, was compelled by instinct to take a skiff and row out
to one dense mass of timber. As he reached it, he was startled to find
in the centre, out of the reach of the water, a cradle covered with the
clothing. As he lifted the coverings aside a pretty five-months-old boy
baby smiled on him. The little innocent, unconscious of the scenes it
had passed through, crowed with delight as the old man lifted it
tenderly, cradle and all, into his skiff and brought it ashore.
Among the miraculous escapes is that of George J. Lea and family. When
the rush of water came there were eight people on the roof of Lea's
house. The house swung around and floated for nearly half an hour before
it struck the wreck above the stone bridge. A three-year-old girl, with
sunny, golden hair and dimpled cheeks, prayed all the while that God
would save them, and it seemed that God really answered the prayer and
directed the house against the drift, enabling every one of the eight to
get off.
H. M. Bennett and S. W. Keltz, engineer and conductor of engine No. 1165
and the extra freight, which happened to be lying at South Fork when the
dam broke, tell a graphic story of their wonderful flight and escape on
the locomotive before the advancing flood. Bennett and Keltz were in
the signal tower awaiting orders. The fireman and flagman were on the
engine, and two brakemen were asleep in the caboose. Suddenly the men in
the tower heard a roaring sound in the valley above them. They looked in
that direction and were almost transfixed with horror to see, two miles
above them, a huge black wall of water, at least 150 feet in height,
rushing down the valley. The fear-stricken men made a rush for the
locomotive, at the same time giving the alarm to the sleeping brakemen
in the caboose, but with no avail. It was impossible to aid them
further, however, so Bennett and Keltz cut the engine loose from the
train, and the engineer, with one wild wrench, threw the lever wide
open, and they were away on a mad race for life. It seemed that they
would not receive momentum enough to keep ahead of the flood, and they
cast one despairing glance back. Then they could see the awful deluge
approaching in its might. On it came, rolling and roaring, tossing and
tearing houses, sheds and trees in its awful speed as if they were toys.
As they looked, they saw the two brakemen rush out of the caboose, but
they had not time to gather the slightest idea of the cause of their
doom before they, the car and signal tower were tossed high in the air,
to disappear forever. Then the engine leaped forward like a thing of
life, and speeded down the valley. But fast as it went, the flood
gained upon it. In a few moments the shrieking locomotive whizzed around
a curve, and they were in sight of a bridge. Horror upon horrors! ahead
of them was a freight train, with the rear end almost on the bridge, and
to get across was simply impossible. Engineer Bennett then reversed the
lever, and succeeded in checking the engine as they glided across the
bridge. Then the men jumped and ran for their lives up the hillside. The
bridge and the tender of the engine they had been on were swept away
like a bundle of matches.
A young man who was a passenger on the Derry express furnishes an
interesting account of his experiences. "When we reached Derry," he
said, "our train was boarded by a relief committee, and no sooner was it
ascertained that we were going on to Sang Hollow than the contributions
of provisions and supplies of every kind were piled on board, filling an
entire car. On reaching Sang Hollow the scene that presented itself to
us was heart-rending. The road was lined with homeless people, some with
a trunk or solitary chair, the only thing saved from their household
goods, and all wearing an aspect of the most hopeless misery. Men were
at work transferring from a freight car a pile of corpses at least sixty
in number, and here and there a ghastly something under a covering
showed where the body of some victim of the flood lay awaiting
identification or burial in a nameless grave. Busy workers were engaged
in clearing away the piles of driftwood and scattered articles of
household use which cumbered the tracks and the roads. These piles told
their own mournful story. There were beds, bureaus, mattresses, chairs,
tables, pictures, dead horses and mules, overcoats, remnants of dresses
sticking on the branches of trees, and a thousand other odd pieces of
flotsam and jetsam from ruined homes. I saw a man get off the train and
pick up an insurance policy for $30,000. Another took away as relics a
baby's chair and a confirmation card in a battered frame. On the banks
of the Little Conemaugh creek people were delving in the driftwood,
which was piled to a depth of six or seven feet, unearthing and carrying
away whatever could be turned to account. Under those piles, it is
thought, numbers of bodies are buried, not to be recovered except by the
labor of many days. A woman and a little girl were brought from
Johnstown by some means which I could not ascertain. The woman was in
confinement, and was carried on a lounge, her sole remaining piece of
property. She was taken to Latrobe for hospital treatment. I cannot
understand how it is that people are unable to make their way from Sang
Hollow to Johnstown. The distance is short, and it should certainly be a
comparatively easy task to get over it on foot or horseback. However,
there seems to be some insuperable obstacle. All those who made the trip
on the train with me in order to obtain tidings of their friends in
Johnstown, were forced to return as I did.
"The railroad is in a terrible condition. The day express and the
limited, which left Pittsburg on Friday morning, are lying between
Johnstown and Conemaugh on the east, having been cut off by the flood.
Linemen were sent down from our train at every station to repair the
telegraph wires which are damaged. Tremendous efforts are being exerted
to repair the injury sustained by the railroad, and it is only a
question of a couple of days until through communication is
reëstablished. Our homeward trip was marked by a succession of sad
spectacles. At Blairsville intersection two little girls lay dead, and
in a house taken from the river was the body of a woman. Some idea of
the force of the flood may be had from the statement that freight cars,
both loaded and empty, had been lifted bodily from the track, and
carried a distance of several blocks, and deposited in a graveyard in
the outskirts of the town, where they were lying in a mass mixed up with
tombstones and monuments."
[Illustration: RUINS OF THE CAMBRIA IRON CO'S STORE.]