It was not "good morning" in Johnstown
or a "good night" that passed as a salutation between neighbors who meet
for the first time since the deluge, but "How many of your folks gone?"
It is always "folks," always "gone." You heard it everywhere among
the crowds that thronged the viaduct and looked down upon the ghastly twenty
acres of unburied dead, from which dynamite was making a terrible exhumation
of the corpses of two thousand mortals and five hundred houses. You
heard it at the rope bridge, where the crowds waited the passage of the
incessant flow of empty coffins. You heard it upon the steep hillside
beyond the valley of devastation, where the citizens of Johnstown had fled
into the borough of Conemaugh for shelter. You heard it again, the
first salutation, whenever a friend, who had been searching for his dead,
met a neighbor: "Are any of your friends gone?"
It was not said in tears or even seemingly
in madness. It had simply come to be the "how d’ye-do" of the eleven
thousand people who survived the twenty-nine thousand five hundred people
of the valley of the Conemaugh.
Still finding bodies by scores in the
debris; still burying the dead and caring for the wounded; still feeding
the famishing and housing the homeless, was the record for days following
the one of which Johnstown was swept away. A perfect stream of wagons bearing
the dead as fast as they were discovered was constantly filing to the various
improvised morgues where the bodies were taken for identification.
Hundreds of people were constantly crowding to these temporary houses,
one of which was located in each of the suburban boroughs that surrounded
Johnstown. Men armed with muskets, uniformed sentinels, constituting
the force that guarded the city while it was practically under martial
law, stool at the doors and admitted the crown by tens.
In the central dead-house in Johnstown
proper there lay two rows of ghastly dead. To the right were twenty
bodies that had been identified. They were mostly women and children,
and they were entirely covered with white sheets, and a piece of paper
bearing the name was pinned at the feet. To the left were eighteen
bodies of the unknown dead. As the people passed they were hurried
along by an attendant and gazed at the uncovered faces seeking to identify
them. All applicants for admission, if it was thought they were prompted
by idle curiosity, were not allowed to enter. The central morgue
was formerly a school-house, and the desks were used as biers for the dead
bodies. Three of the former pupils lay on the desks dead, with white
pieces of paper pinned on the white sheets that covered them, giving their
names.
But what touching scenes are enacted
every hour about this mournful building! Outside the sharp voices
of the sentinels are constantly shouting: "Move on." Inside weeping
women and sad-faced, hollow-eyed men are bending over loved and familiar
faces. Back on the steep grassy hill which rises abruptly on the
other side of the street are crowds of curious people who have come in
from the country round about to look at the wreckage strewn around where
Johnstown was.
"Oh! Mr. Jones, " a pale-faced woman
asks, walking up, sobbing, "can’t you tell me where we can get a coffinn
to bury Johnnie’s body?"
"Do you know," asks a tottering old
man, as the pale-faced woman turns away, "whether they have found Jennie
and the children?"
"Jennie’s body has just been found at
the bridge," is the answer, "but the children can’t be found."
Jennie is the old man’s widowed daughter,
and was drowned, with her two children, while her husband was at work over
at the Cambria Mills.
Just a few doors below the school-house
morgue is the central office of the "Registry Bureau." This was organized
by Dr. Buchanan and H.G. Connaugh, for the purpose of having a registry
made of all those who had escaped. They realized that it would be
impossible to secure a complete list of dead, and that the only practicable
thing was to get a complete list of the living. Then they would get
all the Johnstown names, and by that means secure a list of the dead.
That estimate will be based on figures secured by the subtraction of the
total registry saved from total population Of Johnstown and surrounding
boroughs.
"I have been around trying to find my
sister-in-law, Mrs. Laura R. Jones, who is lost," said David L. Rogers.
"How do you know she is lost?" he was
asked.
"Because I can’t find her."
When persons can’t be found it is taken
as conclusive evidence that they have been drowned. It is believed
that the flood has buried a great many people below the bridge in the ground
lying just below the Cambria Works. Here the rust of waters covering
the railroad tracks ten feet deep with a coating of stones. Whether
they will ever be dug for remains to be seen. Meantime, those who
are easier to reach will be hunted for. There are many corpses in
the area of rubbish that drifted down and lodged against the stone bridge
of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Out of this rubbish one thousand bodies
have already been taken. The fire that was started by the driftwood
touching against the burning Catholic Church as it floated down was still
burning.
Walk almost anywhere through the devastated
district and you will hear expressions like this: "Why, you see that pile
of wreckage there. There are three bodies buried beneath that pile.
I know them, for I lived next door. They are Mrs. Charles E. Kast and her
daughter, who kept a tavern, and her bartender, C.S. Noble.
Henry Rogers, of Pittsburg, is here caring
for his relatives. "I am scarcely in a condition to talk," he says.
"The awful scenes I have just witnessed and the troubles of my relatives
have almost unnerved me. My poor aunt, Mrs. William Slick, is now
a raving maniac. Her husband was formerly the County Surveyor.
He felt that the warning about the dam should not be disregarded.
Accordingly he made preparations to go to a place of safety. His
wife was just recovering from an illness, but he had to take he on horseback,
and there was no time to get a carriage. They escaped, but all their
property was washed away. Mrs. Slick for a time talked cheerfully
enough, and said they should be thankful they had escaped with their lives.
But on Sunday it was noticed that she was acting strangely. By night
she was insane. I suppose the news that some relatives had perished
was what turned her mind. I am much afraid that Mrs. Slick is not the only
on in Johnstown whose read on has been dethroned by the calamity. I have
talked with many citizens, and they certainly seem crazy to me. When
the excitement passes off I suppose they will regain their reason.
The escape of my uncle, George R. Slick, and his wife, I think was really
providential. The, too, had determined to heed the warning
that the dam was unsafe. When the flood came they had a carriage
waiting at the front door. Just as they were entering it, the water
came. How it was, my aunt cannot tell me, but they both managed to
catch on to some debris, and were thus floated along. My aunt says
she has an indistinct recollection of some one having helped her upon the
roof of a house. The person who did her this service was lost.
All night they floated along on the roof. They suffered greatly from
exposure, as the weather was extremely chilly. Next morning they
were fortunately landed safely. My uncle, however, is now lying at the
point of death. I have noticed a singular coincidence here.
Down in the lower end of the city stood the United Presbyterian parsonage.
The waters carries it two miles and a half, and landed it in the Sandy
Vale Cemetery. Strange as it may seem, the sexton’s house in the
cemetery was swept away and landed near the foundations of the parsonage.
I have seen this myself, and it is commented on by many others."
In one place the roofs of forty frame houses
were packed in together just as you would place forty bended cards, one
on top of another. The iron rods of a bridge were twisted into a
perfect spiral six times around one of the girders. Just beneath
it was a woman’s trunk, broken up and half filled with sand, with silk
dresses and a veil streaming out of it. From under the trunk men
were lifting the body of its owner, perhaps, so burned, so horribly mutilated,
so torn limb from limb that even the workmen, who have seen so many of
these frightful sights that they have begun to get used to them, turned
away sick at heart. In one place was a wrecked grocery store – bins
of coffee and tea, flour, spices and nuts, parts of the counter and the
safe mingled together. Near it was the panty of a house, still partly
intact, the plates and saucers regularly pied up, a waiter and a teapot,
but not a sign of the woodwork, not a recognizable outline of a house.
In another place was a human foot, and crumbling
indications of a boot, but no signs of a body. A hay-rick, half ashes,
stood near the center of the gorge. Workmen who dug about it to-day
have found a chicken coop, and in it two chickens, not only alive but clucking
happily when they were released. A woman’s hat, half burned; a reticule,
and part of a dress told the story of one unfortunate’s death. Close
at hand a commercial had perished. There was his broken valise, still
full of samples, fragments of his shoes and some pieces of his clothing.
Scenes like these were occurring all over
the charred field where men were working with pick and axe and lifting
out the poor, shattered remains of human beings, nearly always past recognition
or identification, except by guess-work, or the locality where they were
found. Articles of domestic use scattered through the rubbish helped
to tell who some of the bodies were. Part of a set of dinner plates
told one man where I the intangible mass his house was. In one place
was a photograph album with one picture still recognizable. From
this the body of a child near by was identified. A man who had spent
a day and all night looking for the body of his wife, was directed to her
remains by part of a trunk lid.
