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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)

The first train that passed New Florence, bound east, was crowded with
people from Pittsburgh and places along the line, who were going to the
scene of the disaster with but little hope of finding their loved ones
alive. It was a heart-rending sight. Not a dry eye was in the train.
Mothers moaned for their children. Husbands paced the aisles and wrung
their hands in mute agony. Fathers pressed their faces against the
windows and endeavored to see something, they knew not what, that would
tell them in a measure of the dreadful fate that their loved ones had
met with. All along the raging Conemaugh the train stopped, and bodies
were taken on the express car, being carried by the villagers who were
out along the banks. Oh, the horror and infinite pity of it all! What a
journey has been that of the last half hour! Swollen corpses lay here
and there in piles of cross-ties, or on the river banks along the
tangled greenery.

It was about nine o'clock when the first passenger train since Friday
came to the New Florence depot with its load of eager passengers. They
were no idle travelers, but each had a mission. Here and there men were
staring out the windows with red eyes. Among them were tough-looking
Hungarians and Italians who had lost friends near Nineveh, while many
were weeping, on all sides. Two of the passengers on the train were man
and wife from Johnstown. He was dignified and more or less
self-possessed. She was anxious, and tried hard to control her feelings.
From every newcomer and possible source of information she sought news.

"Ours is a big, new brick house," said she with a brave effort, but with
her brown eyes moist and red lips trembling. "It is a three-story house,
and I don't think there is any trouble, do you?" said she to me, and
without waiting for my answer, she continued with a sob, "There are my
four children in the house and their nurse, and I guess father and
mother will go over to the house, don't you?"

In a few moments all those in the car knew the story of the pair, and
many a pitying glance was cast at them. Their house was one of the first
to go.

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