In the latter part of the eighteenth century there were but two white
men living in all this region. The first one there was Thomas Blair,
whose cabin was on the mountain at Blair's Gap, where the Portage
Railroad afterwards came over. The other was Michael Maguire, who came
along in 1790, and going through the Gap, concluded to settle among
the Indians about twelve miles away, at what was afterwards Loretto.
These rugged pioneers spent most of their time fighting and watching
the Indians and wild beasts, and gathered a few companions
around them. Here afterwards came Prince Demetrius Augustine
Gallitzin, who left the Russian army in 1792 and visited America,
designing to travel. He became a Catholic priest, and liking these
mountains, established a mission at Loretto in 1798, spending a
fortune in maintaining it, his missionary charge ultimately extending
over the whole mountain region. He attracted a population of about
three thousand, chiefly Germans and Irish, repeatedly refused the
episcopacy, and continued his labors until his death at Loretto in
1840. His remains lie in front of his church, surmounted by a
monument, while the centenary of this St. Michael's Church of Loretto
was marked in October, 1899, by erecting his bronze statue, the
Prelate-Prince Gallitzin being portrayed as he appeared in the
Allegheny wilderness, wearing cassock, surplice and a skull-cap in
lieu of the beretta, this being his usual head-gear at service.
Loretto, named after the city on the Adriatic, was the first nucleus
of population in this elevated district, and is about five miles north
of the railway. Loretto was the first settlement in this region, but
afterwards the coal and iron attracted the Welsh, who came in numbers,
and founded the town of Ebensburg, about eleven miles from the
railway. They gave their familiar name of Cambria to the county. Here
on the mountain side, at an elevation of over two thousand feet, are
the Cresson Springs, a noted health resort, with a half-dozen
medicinal springs, the chief being an astringent chalybeate and a
strong alum.
The route west of the mountain is down the valley of the Conemaugh, in
a district underlaid with coal, and having at every village evidence
of this industry. The Conemaugh is "the other stream" of the Indians,
and winding down its tortuous valley, with coal and iron all about,
the railway comes to the settlement of Conemaugh, which spreads into
the larger town of Johnstown, the seat of the great Cambria Steel
Works. The Conemaugh Valley is a deep canyon, and Conemaugh village
was the western terminus of the mountain portage, where the canal
began. A little flat space about a mile beyond, at the junction of
Stony Creek, was in early times an Indian village, then known from its
sachem as "Kickenapawling's Old Town." When the white men ventured
over the mountain, there came among them a hardy German pioneer named
Joseph Jahns, who built a log cabin on the flat in 1791, and from him
the cluster of little houses that grew afterwards became known as
Jahnstown. Then came the Welsh miners and iron-workers, and they set
up charcoal furnaces, and soon changed the name to Johnstown. From
this humble beginning grew the largest iron and steel establishment in
Pennsylvania. Its ores, coal and limestone were originally all dug out
of the neighboring ridges, though now it uses Lake Superior ores. The
Conemaugh Valley is here enclosed by high hills, and in the centre of
the town the railroad is carried across the river on a solid stone
bridge with low arches.
This region, on May 31, 1889, was the scene of one of the most
appalling disasters of modern times. A deluge of rain for the greater
part of two days had fallen upon the Alleghenies, and made great
freshets in both the Juniata and the Conemaugh. On the South Fork of
the Conemaugh, fifteen miles above Johnstown, is Conemaugh Lake, a
reservoir there formed by damming the stream, so that it covered a
surface of five hundred acres--the dam, a thousand feet long, being in
places one hundred feet high. This had been made as a fishing-ground
by a club of Pittsburg anglers. The excessive rains filled the lake,
and the weakened dam burst, its twenty millions of tons of waters
rushing down the already swollen Conemaugh in a mass a half-mile wide
stretching across the valley and forty to fifty feet high, carrying
everything before it. The lake level was about three hundred feet
higher than Johnstown, and every village, tree, house, and the whole
railway, with much of the soil and rocks, were carried before the
resistless flood to Johnstown, where the mass was stopped by and piled
up behind the stone railway bridge, and there caught fire, the
resistless flood, to get out, sweeping away nearly the whole town in
the valley bottom. This vast calamity destroyed from three to five
thousand lives, for no accurate estimate could be ever made, and ten
millions of property. It took the flood about seven minutes of actual
time to pass over the fifteen miles between the lake and Johnstown,
and there was left, after it had passed, a wide bed, like a great
Alpine glacial _moraine_, filled with ponderous masses of sand and
stones and wreckage of every description, the resistless torrent being
afterwards reduced to a little stream of running water. It required
many months to recover from this appalling destruction; but the people
went to work with a will and rebuilt the town, the steel works and the
railway, which for a dozen miles down the valley had been completely
obliterated. This terrible disaster excited universal sympathy, and a
relief fund amounting to nearly $3,000,000 was contributed from all
parts of the world.