“We counted 107 people floating by and dead without number. A section
of roof came by, on one of which were sitting a woman and a girl.”
Other tales by eye-witnesses confirm the fact that the horror has never
been excelled by anything of its kind in history.
Indeed, it will never perhaps be known what the real extent of the
awful calamity is.
Johnstown, with its former population of ten thousand or thereabouts,
was almost entirely swept away when the awful floods came, and many of
the villages between that point and Nineveh are things of the past so
far as life is concerned. Indeed the whole valley is a veritable Valley
of the Shadow of Death.
So great was the crush of the wreckage, debris and dead bodies, at some
points along the valley that dynamite had to be used, thus adding to
the horror of the scene.
Nineveh is twenty-three miles below Johnstown, yet a large number
of the bodies found at Nineveh were those of former residents of
Johnstown, who had been swept that great distance down the valley to
their death.
There are incidents where bodies were carried a hundred miles and there
deposited.
A relation of some of the real facts, circumstances and scenes and
incidents of the terrible disaster would be considered Munchausenish by
the majority of our readers, but some of them were miraculous. Here is
one. S. H. Klein, a New Yorker, had a queer experience. He was at the
Merchants’ Hotel and he worked like a beaver during the trying times of
Friday night and Saturday morning, aiding in the rescue of no less than
sixty persons from the floating debris. Among these were the Rev. Mr.
Phillips, his wife and two children. Mr. Phillips is a stalwart man and
when the flood struck his house he fled to the roof with his family.
Presently the house floated and the sturdy dominie placed his wife and
two children on a table. Then he got under the table, and, letting it
rest with its precious burden on his head, arose to his feet. As the
house floated down on the tide it grazed the hotel building, and Mr.
Klein and others assisted in hauling the imperilled parson and his
family into an upper window of the hotel.
Here are other incidents: The story of the mishap to the day express
train at Conemaugh bridge is developing slowly through the efforts of
the railway authorities to obtain definite information. Of the 300
passengers on the train, all but eight seem to be accounted for, and it
is believed that these eight are lost. They are Bessie Bryan, daughter
of Mahlon Bryan of Philadelphia, and her companion, Miss Paulson of
Pittsburgh; Mrs. Easley, Rev. Mr. Goodchild and Robert Hutchinson, of
Newark, N. J.; Andrew Leonard, Mrs. J. Smith and Chris Meisel, manager
of the Newark baseball club.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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