History of the Johnstown Flood: Including all the Fearful Record; the Breaking of the South Fork Dam; the Sweeping Out of the Conemaugh Valley; the Over-Throw of Johnstown; the Massing of the Wreck at the Railroad Bridge; Escapes, Rescues, Searches for Survivors and the Dead; Relief Organizations, Stupendous Charities, etc., etc., With Full Accounts also of the Destruction on the Susquehanna and Juniata Rivers, and the Bald Eagle Creek.Johnson, Willis Fletcher
History
History of the Johnstown Flood: Including all the Fearful Record; the Breaking of the South Fork Dam; the Sweeping Out of the Conemaugh Valley; the Over-Throw of Johnstown; the Massing of the Wreck at the Railroad Bridge; Escapes, Rescues, Searches for Survivors and the Dead; Relief Organizations, Stupendous Charities, etc., etc., With Full Accounts also of the Destruction on the Susquehanna and Juniata Rivers, and the Bald Eagle Creek.
Johnstown at night now is a wild spectacle. The major part of the town
is enveloped in darkness, and lights of all colors flare out all around,
so that the city looks something like a night scene in a railroad yard.
The burning of immense piles of débris is continued at night, and the
red glare of the flames at the foot of the hills seems like witch-fires
at the mouth of caverns. The camp-fires of the military on the hills
above the Conemaugh burn brightly. Volumes of smoke pour up all over the
town. Along the Pennsylvania Railroad gangs of men are working all night
long by electric light, and the engines, with their great headlights and
roaring steam, go about continually. Below the railroad bridge stretches
away the dark, sullen mass of the drift, with its freight of human
bodies beyond estimate. Now and then, from the headquarters of the
newspaper men, can be heard the military guards on their posts
challenging passers-by.
CHAPTER XXXII.
It is now a week since the flood, and Johnstown is a cross between a
military camp and a new mining town, and is getting more so every day.
It has all the unpleasant and disagreeable features of both, relieved by
the pleasures of neither. Everywhere one goes soldiers are lounging
about or standing guard on all roads leading into the city, and stop
every one who cannot show a pass. There is a mass of tents down in the
centre of the ruins, and others are scattered everywhere on every
cleared space beside the railroad tracks and on the hills about. A corps
of engineers is laying pontoon bridges over the streams, pioneers are
everywhere laying out new camps, erecting mess sheds and other rude
buildings, and clearing away obstructions to the ready passage of supply
wagons. Mounted men are continually galloping about from place to place
carrying orders. At headquarters about the Pennsylvania Railroad depot
there are dozens of petty officers in giddy gold lace, and General
Hastings, General Wiley, and a few others in dingy clothes, sitting
about the shady part of the platform giving and receiving orders. The
occasional thunder of dynamite sounds like the boom of distant cannon
defending some outpost. Supplies are heaped up about headquarters, and
are being unloaded from cars as rapidly as locomotives can push them up
and get the empty cars out of the way again. From cooking tents smoke
and savory odors go up all day, mingled with the odor carbolic from
hospital tents scattered about. It is very likely that within a short
time this military appearance will be greatly increased by the arrival
of another regiment and the formal declaration of martial law.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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