And now begins the task of burying the dead and caring for the living.
It is Wednesday morning. Scarcely has daylight broken before a thousand
funerals are in progress on the green hill-sides. There were no hearses,
few mourners, and as little solemnity as formality. The majority of the
coffins were of rough pine. The pall-bearers were strong ox-teams, and
instead of six pall-bearers to one coffin, there were generally six
coffins to one-team. Silently the processions moved, and silently they
unloaded their burdens in the lap of mother earth. No minister of God
was there to pronounce a last blessing as the clods rattled down, except
a few faithful priests who had followed some representatives of their
faith to the grave.
All day long the corpses were being hurried below ground. The
unidentified bodies were grouped on a high hill west of the doomed city,
where one epitaph must do for all, and that the word "unknown."
Almost every stroke of the pick in some portions of the city resulted in
the discovery of another victim, and, although the funerals of the
morning relieved the morgues of their crush, before night they were as
full of the dead as ever. Wherever one turns the melancholy view of a
coffin is met. Every train into Johnstown was laden with them, the
better ones being generally accompanied by friends of the dead. Men
could be seen staggering over the ruins with shining mahogany caskets on
their shoulders.
In the midst of this scene of death and desolation a relenting
Providence seems to be exerting a subduing influence. Six days have
elapsed since the great disaster, and the temperature still remains low
and chilly in the Conemaugh valley. When it is remembered that in the
ordinary June weather of this locality from two to three days are
sufficient to bring an unattended body to a degree of decay and
putrefaction that would render it almost impossible to prevent the
spread of disease throughout the valley, the inestimable benefits of
this cool weather are almost beyond appreciation.
The first body taken from the ruins was that of a boy, Willie Davis, who
was found in the debris near the bridge. He was badly bruised and
burned. The remains were taken to the undertaking rooms at the
Pennsylvania Railroad station, where they were identified. The boy's
mother has been making a tour of the different morgues for the past few
days, and was just going through the undertaking rooms when she saw the
remains of her boy being brought in. She ran up to the body and demanded
it. She seemed to have lost her mind, and caused quite a scene by her
actions. She said that she had lost her husband and six children in the
flood, and that this was the first one of the family that had been
recovered. The bodies of a little girl named Bracken and of Theresa and
Katie Downs of Clinton Street were taken out near where the remains of
Willie Davis were found.
Two hundred experienced men with dynamite, a portable crane, a
locomotive, and half a dozen other appliances for pulling, hauling, and
lifting, toiled all of Wednesday at the sixty-acre mass of debris that
lies above the Pennsylvania Railroad bridge at Johnstown. "As a result,"
wrote a correspondent, "there is visible, just in front of the central
arch, a little patch of muddy water about seventy-five feet long by
thirty wide. Two smaller patches are in front of the two arches on each
side of this one, but both together would not be heeded were they not
looked for especially. Indeed, the whole effect of the work yet done
would not be noticed by a person who had never seen the wreck before.
The solidity of the wreck and the manner in which it is interlaced and
locked together exceeds the expectations of even those who had examined
the wreck carefully, and the men who thought that with dynamite the mass
could be removed in a week, now do not think the work can be done in
twice this time. The work is in charge of Arthur Kirk, a Pittsburg
contractor. Dynamite is depended upon for loosening the mass, but it has
to be used in small charges for fear of damaging the bridge, which, at
this time, would be another disaster for the town. As it is, the south
abutment has been broken a little by the explosions.
"After a charge of dynamite had shaken up a portion of the wreck in
front of the middle arch, men went to work with long poles, crowbars,
axes, saws, and spades. All the loose pieces that could be got out were
thrown into the water under the bridge, and then, beginning at the
edges, the bits of wreck were pulled, pushed and cut out, and sent
floating away. At first the work of an hour was hardly perceptible, but
each fresh log of timber pulled out loosened others and made better
progress possible. When the space beneath the arch was cleared, and a
channel thus made through which the debris could be floated off, a huge
portable crane, built on a flat-car and made for raising locomotives and
cars, was run upon the bridge over the arch and fastened to the track
with heavy chains. A locomotive was furnished to pull the rope, instead
of the usual winch with a crank handle. A rope from the crane was
fastened by chains or grapnels to a log, and then the locomotive pulled.
About once in five times the log came out. Other times the chain slipped
or something else made the attempt a failure. Whenever a big stick came
out men with pikes pushed off all the other loosened debris that they
could get at. Other men shoveled off the dirt and ashes which cover the
raft so thickly that it is almost as solid as the ground.
"When a ten-foot square opening had been made back on the arch, the
current could be seen gushing up like a great spring from below, showing
that there was a large body of it being held down there by the weight of
the debris. The current through the arch became so strong that the
heaviest pieces in the wreck were carried off readily once they got
within its reach. One reason for this is that laborers are filling up
the gaps on the railroad embankment approaching the bridge in the north,
through which the river had made itself a new bed, and the water thus
dammed back has to go through or under the raft and out by the
bridge-arches. This both buoys up the whole mass and provides a means of
carrying off the wooden part of the debris as fast as it can be
loosened.
"Meanwhile an attack on the raft was being made through the adjoining
arch in another way. A heavy winch was set up on a small island in the
river seventy-five yards below the bridge, and ropes run from this were
hitched to heavy timbers in the raft, and then pulled out by workmen at
the winch. A beginning for a second opening in the raft was made in this
way. One man had some bones broken and was otherwise hurt by the
slipping of the handle while he was at work at the winch this afternoon.
The whole work is dangerous for the men. There is twenty feet of swift
water for them to slip into, and timbers weighing tons are swinging
about in unexpected directions to crush them.
"So far it is not known that any bodies have been brought out of the
debris by this work of removal, though many logs have been loosened and
sent off down the river beneath the water without being seen. There will
probably be more bodies back toward the centre of the raft than at the
bridge, for of those that came there many were swept over the top. Some
went over the arches and a great many were rescued from the bridge and
shore. People are satisfied now that dynamite is the only thing that can
possibly remove the wreck and that as it is being used it is not likely
to mangle bodies that may be in the debris any more than would any other
means of removing it. There are no more protests heard against its
use."
Bodies continue to be dug out of the wreck in the central portion all
day. A dozen or so had been recovered up to nightfall, all hideously
burned and mangled. In spite of all the water that has been thrown upon
it by fire engines and all the rain that has fallen, the debris is still
smouldering in many spots.
Work was begun in dead earnest on Wednesday on the Cambria Iron Works
buildings. The Cambria people gave out the absurd statement that their
loss will not exceed $100,000. It will certainly take this amount to
clean the works of the debris, to say nothing of repairing them. The
buildings are nearly a score in number, some of them of enormous size,
and they extend along the Conemaugh River for half a mile, over a
quarter of a mile in width. Their lonely chimneys, stretching high out
of the slate roofs above the brick walls, make them look not unlike a
man-of-war of tremendous size. The buildings on the western end of the
row are not damaged a great deal, though the torrent rolled through
them, turning the machinery topsy-turvy; but the buildings on the
eastern end, which received the full force of the flood, fared badly.
The eastern ends are utterly gone, the roofs bent over and smashed in,
the chimneys flattened, the walls cracked and broken, and, in some
cases, smashed entirely. Most of the buildings are filled with drift.
The workmen, who have clambered over the piles of logs and heavy drift
washed in front of the buildings and inside, say that they do not
believe that the machinery in the mills is damaged very much, and that
the main loss will fall on the mills themselves. Half a million may
cover the loss of the Cambria people, but this is a rather low estimate.
They have nine hundred men at work getting things in shape, and the
manner in which they have had to go to work illustrates the force with
which the flood acted. The trees jammed in and before the buildings were
so big and so solidly wedged in their places that no force of men could
pull them out, and temporary railroad tracks were built up to the mass
of debris. Then one of the engines backed down from the Pennsylvania
Railroad yards, and the workmen, by persistent effort, managed to get
big chains around parts of the drift. These chains were attached to the
engine, which rolled off puffing mightily, and in this way the mass of
drift was pulled apart. Then the laborers gathered up the loosened
material, heaped it in piles a distance from the buildings, and burned
them. Sometimes two engines had to be attached to some of the trees to
pull them out, and there are many trees which cannot be extricated in
this manner. They will have to be sawed into parts, and these parts
lugged away by the engines.
[Illustration: 250,000,000 FEET OF LOGS AFLOAT IN THE SUSQUEHANNA.]