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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.

Name: 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.
Author: Johnson, Willis Fletcher

Johnson, Willis Fletcher

Floods -- Pennsylvania -- Johnstown (Cambria County)

"A man who starts on a journey on ten minutes' notice likes the journey
to be short, with a promise of success and of food and clothes at its
end. Starting suddenly a week ago, the _Times's_ correspondent has since
had but a small measure of success, a smaller measure of food, and for
nights no rest at all; a long tramp across the Blue Hills and Allegheny
Mountains, behind jaded horses; helping to push up-hill the wagon they
tried to pull or to lift the vehicle up and down bridges whose
approaches were torn away, or in and out of fords the pathways to which
had disappeared; and in the blackness of the night, scrambling through
gullies in the pike road made by the storm, paved with sharp and
treacherous rocks and traversed by swift-running streams, whose roar was
the only guide to their course. All this prepared a weary reporter to
welcome the bed of straw he found in a Johnstown stable loft last
Monday, and on which he has reposed nightly ever since.

"And let me advise reporters and other persons who are liable to sudden
missions to out-of-the-way places not to wear patent leather shoes. They
are no good for mountain roads. This is the result of sad experience.
Wetness and stone bruises are the benisons they confer on feet that
tread rough paths.

"The quarter past twelve train was the one boarded by the _Times's_
correspondent and three other reporters on their way hither a week ago
Friday night. It was in the minds of all that they would get as far as
Altoona, on the Pennsylvania Road, and thence by wagon to this place.
But all were mistaken. At Philadelphia we were told that there were
wash-outs in many places and bridges were down everywhere, so that we
would be lucky if we got even to Harrisburg. This was harrowing news. It
caused such a searching of time-tables and of the map of Pennsylvania as
those things were rarely ever subjected to before. It was at last
decided that if the Pennsylvania Railroad stopped at Harrisburg an
attempt would be made to reach the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad at
Martinsburg, West Virginia, by way of the Cumberland Railroad, a train
on which was scheduled to leave Harrisburg ten minutes after the arrival
of the Pennsylvania train.

Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.