A Day of Work and Worship
Governor Beaver has assumed the command. He arrived in Johnstown
yesterday, the 8th, and will take personal charge of the work of
clearing the town and river. For that purpose $1,000,000 from the State
Treasury will be made available immediately. This action means that the
State will clear and clean the town.
It was a day of prayer but not a day of rest in Johnstown. Faith and
works went hand in hand. The flood-smitten people of the Conemaugh,
though they met in the very path of the torrent that swept their homes
and families into ruin, offered up their prayers to Almighty God and
besought His divine mercy. But all through the ruin-choked city the
sound of the pick and the shovel mingled with the voice of prayer, and
the challenge of the sentinel rang out above the voice of supplication.
There was no cessation in the great task the flood has left them with
its legacy of woe. Four charges of dynamite last night completed the
wreck of the Catholic Church of St. John, which had been left by the
flood in a worthless but dangerous condition.
The thousands of laborers continued their work just as on any week day,
except that there was no dynamite used on the gorge and that the
Cambria Iron Works were closed. There was the usual reward of the
gleaners in the harvest-field of death, fifty eight bodies having been
recovered. The most of those have been in Stony Creek, up which they
were carried by the back rush of the current after the bridge broke the
first wave.
Roman Catholic services were held in the open air.
Father Smith's Exhortation.
When the mass was over and Father Troutwine, who conducted it, had
retired, Father Smith stood before them. "We have had enough of death
lately," he said in a voice full of sympathy, "the calamity that has
visited us is the greatest in the history of the United States. You must
not be discouraged. Other places have been visited by disaster at times,
yet we know that they have risen again. You must not look on the fearful
past. The lives of the lost cannot be restored."
Here he paused because they were weeping around him, and his own voice
was broken, but continuing with an effort, he told them to reflect for
consolation upon the manner in which their friends had gone to death.
They had looked to God, he said, and wafted in prayers and acts of
contrition, their souls had left their bodies and appeared at the throne
in heaven. "Surely never such prayers fell save from the lips of saints,
and the lost of the valley are saints to-day while you mourn for them.
God, who measures the acts of men by their opportunities, had pardoned
their sins. You who are left living must go to work with a will. Be
men, be women. The eyes of the world are upon you, the eyes of all
civilized nature. They listen, they wait to see what you are going to
do."
Father Smith closed by telling them that the coming fast days of this
week need not be observed in the midst of such destitution as this, and
they might eat without sinning any food that would give them life and
strength. When the father had finished the congregation filed slowly out
past the high pile of coffins, for St. Columba's was a morgue in the
days just passed.
The Protestant Services.
Chaplain Maguire held service in the camp of the 14th to-day. His pulpit
was a drygoods box with the lid missing. It had been emptied of its
freight into the wide lap of suffering. Before him stood the blue-coated
guardsmen in a deep half circle. There was a shed at his back and a
group of flood survivors, some in old clothing of their own, some in the
new garments of charity. They were for the most part members of the
Methodist congregation of Johnstown to which he had preached for three
years.
"I hunted a long time yesterday for the foundations of my little home,"
he said, "but they were swept away, like the dear faces of the friends
who used to gather around my table. But God doesn't own this side alone;
He owns the other side too, and all is well whether we are on this side
or the other. Are your dear ones saved or lost? The only answer to that
question is found in whether they trusted in God or not. Trust in the
Lord and verily ye shall dwell in the land and be fed."
It was not a sermon. Nobody had words or voice for preaching. Others
spoke briefly and prayed. They sang, "Jesus, Lover of My Soul."
A Song in the Waters.
The shrill treble of the weeping women in the shed was almost lost in
the strong bass of the soldiers. "Cora Moses, who used to sing in our
church choir, sang that beautiful hymn as she drifted away to her death
amid the wreck," said the chaplain. "She died singing it. There was only
the crash of buildings between the interruption of the song of earth and
its continuation in heaven."
Dr. Beale's Address.
Dr. Beale, whose own Presbyterian Church was one of the first morgues
opened and who has lived among dead bodies ever since is the cheeriest
man in Johnstown. He made a prayer and an address. It was all
straight-from-the-shoulder kind of talk, garbed in homely phrase.
In the address he said: "I have been asked to say something about this
disaster and its magnitude, but I haven't the heart. Besides I haven't
the words. If I was the biggest truth teller in the world I could not
tell the tale."
Then the preacher went hammer and tongs at the practical teachings of
the flood. "That night in Alma Hall when we thought we would all die I
heard men call on God in prayer and pledge themselves to lead better
lives if life was given them. Since then I heard those same men cursing
and swearing in these streets. Brethren, there was no real prayer in any
of those petitions put up by those of godless lives that night. They
were merely crying out to a higher power for protection. They were like
the death-bed fears of the infidel, for I have seen seventeen infidels
die and everyone showed the white feather. Nay, those prayers were
unsanctified by the spirit, but let us who are here now living, dedicate
ourselves to the service of Almighty God. There were those who were to
be dedicated that night. I know one who, when it came, sent his family
up the staircase, and taking up his Bible from his parlor table, opened
at the 46th Psalm, first verse, and, following them, read, and the
waters followed him closely. And through the flood he read the word of
God and there was peace in that house while terror was all around it."
Mothering the Orphans.
Dr. Beale announced that Miss Walk wanted twenty-five children for the
Northern Home and then began shaking hands with his congregation and
pressing on them the lessons of his sermon. "Ah, old friend," he said,
to a sandy moustached man in the grand army uniform, "You came safe out
of the flood, now give that big heart of yours to Jesus."
The Baptist congregation also held an open-air service. The unfortunate
Episcopal congregation is quite disorganized by the loss of their church
and rector. They held no service, yet in a hundred temporary houses of
the homeless the beautiful old litany of the faith was read by the
devout churchmen.
The Soldiers' Sunday.
Sunday brought to the soldiers of the 14th no rest from the guard and
police work which makes the Johnstown tour of duty everything but
holiday soldiering. Even those who were in camp fared no better than
those who were mounted guards over banks, stores and supply trains, or
driving unwilling Italians to work down at Cambria City. There was no
shade nor a blade of grass in sight. The wreck of the city was all their
scenery, and the sun beat down upon their tents till they were like
ovens. They policed the camp thoroughly, sweeping the bare ground until
it was as clean as a Dutch kitchen. The boys had heard that Chaplain
Maguire was to preach and they didn't leave a straw or a chip in his
way.
A Young Guardsman's Suicide.
A sun-browned young soldier of C Company, 14th Regiment, sat on the
river bank in front of the camp this afternoon and watched across the
valley the fire-scarred tower of the Catholic Church, blown to complete
ruin under the force of dynamite. After the front had sunk into a brick
heap, he arose, looked down once at the sunny river and the groups of
many soldiers doing there week's washing at the foot of the bank, and
then strode slowly to his tent. A moment later there seemed to be a
lingering echo of the fall of the tower in C Company's street. Captain
Nesbitt, dozing in his quarters, heard the sound, and running in the
direction of it found that Private William B. Young, aged 28, of
Oakdale, had placed the muzzle of his rifle against his left temple and
gone to swell by one the interminable list of the Conemaugh Valley's
dead.
[Illustration: A RAILROAD TRAIN DELAYED BY THE FLOOD.]
Despondency, caused by a slight illness and doubtless intensified by a
night's guard duty among the gloomy ruins, is the only known cause of
the soldier's act. He had been somewhat blue for a day, but there seemed
to be no special weight upon his mind. His brother-in-law, private
Stimmler, of the same company, said that he was always despondent when
ill, but had never threatened or attempted his life. He was a farmhand,
and leaves a wife and two children.
The Dinner "Shad" Jones Cooked.
The Sunday dinner was a great success. The bill of fare was vegetable
soup, cold ham, beans, canned corn, pickled tripe and black coffee. It
is worthy of note that the table in the officers' quarters did not have
a delicacy upon it which was not shared by the men. The commissary ran
short and had to borrow from the workmen's supplies. The dinner to-day
was cooked by "Shad" Jones, a colored man known to every traveling man
who has ever stopped at Johnstown for his ability to hold four eggs in
his mouth and swallow a drink of water without cracking a shell. He lost
his wife in the flood and the 14th has adopted him.
On this, the ninth day, the waters began to give up their dead. Stony
Creek first showed their white faces and lifeless bodies floating on
the surface, and men in skiffs went after them with their grappling
rods. Several of them were taken ashore during the afternoon and carried
to the Presbyterian Church morgue, which was the nearest. Then, too, the
dead among the wreckage on shore came to light just the same as on other
days. Their exhumation excites no notice here now. Dr. Beale, keeper of
the records of morgues, counted the numbers on his finger tips and said
there were more than fifty found to-day in Johnstown alone.
In one dead man's pocket was $3,133.62. He was Christopher Kimble, an
undertaker and finisher, who, when he saw the water coming, rushed down
stairs to the safe to save his gold and there he was lost. Several
bodies were taken from the human raft burned beyond all recognition.
The body of Miss Bessie Bryan, the young Philadelphian, was identified
to-day as it lay in a coffin by a grave from which it had been exhumed
in Grand View Cemetery. "Returning home from a wedding in Pittsburgh
with her friend, Miss Paulsen, caught by the flood on the day express,
found dead and buried twice," will be the brief record of her wild sad
fate.
Whiskey and Rioting.
Lieutenant Wright, Company I, with a detail of ninety-eight men, was
called to the banks of Stony Creek over the raft to-night, to protect
the employees of the Philadelphia Gas Company. There they found a gang
of rioters. The rioters this afternoon found a barrel of whiskey in the
field of debris, and before the militia could destroy it they had
managed to take a large quantity of it up on the mountain. To-night they
came down to the camp intoxicated, attacked the cook, cleared the supper
table and were managing things with a high hand when a messenger was
despatched for the guard. Before Lieutenant Wright's men reached there
they had escaped. The Beaver Falls gang was surprised this afternoon by
the militia, and gallons of whiskey, which they had hidden, were
destroyed. A dozen saloons were swept into the creek at the bridge, and
it is supposed that a hundred or more barrels are buried beneath the
raft.
Among the most interesting relics of the flood is a small gold locket
found in the ruins of the Hurlbut house yesterday. The locket contains a
small coil of dark brown hair, and has engraved on the inside the
following remarkable lines: "Lock of George Washington's hair, cut in
Philadelphia while on his way to Yorktown, 1781." Mr. Benford, one of
the proprietors of the house, states that the locket was the property of
his sister, who was lost in the flood, and was presented to her by an
old lady in Philadelphia, whose mother and herself cut the hair from the
head of the "Father of His Country."