The Johnstown Horror!!!: or, Valley of Death, being A Complete and Thrilling Account; of the Awful Floods and Their Appalling RuinWalker, James Herbert
History
The Johnstown Horror!!!: or, Valley of Death, being A Complete and Thrilling Account; of the Awful Floods and Their Appalling Ruin
All that night and all the next day, and far into the morning of Monday,
these dreadful shrieks resounded from that place of doom. The fire
burned on, aided by the fire underneath, added to by fresh fuel coming
down the river. All that time the people stood helpless on the bank and
heard those heartrending sounds. What could they do? They could not
fight the fire. Every fire engine in the town lay in that mass of
rubbish smashed to bits. For hours they had to wait until they could get
telegraph word to surrounding towns, and hours more until the fire
engines arrived at noon on Monday.
Wrecks of Five Iron Bridges.
The shrieks ceased early in the morning. Men had began to search the
ruins and had taken out the few that still lived. The fire engines began
to play on the still smouldering fire. Other workmen began to remove the
bodies. The fire had swept over the whole mass from shore to shore and
burned it to the water. A great field of crushed and charred timbers was
all that was left. The flood had gorged this in so tightly that it made
a solid bridge above the water. A tremendous, irresistible force had
ground and churned and macerated the debris until it was a confused,
solid, almost welded, conglomerate, stretching from shore to shore,
jammed high up against the stone bridge and extending up the river a
quarter of a mile, perhaps half as wide. In this tangled heap and crush
of matter were the twisted wrecks of five iron bridges, smashed
locomotives, splintered dwellings and all their contents; human beings
and domestic animals, hay and factory machinery; the rich contents of
stores and brick walls ground to powder--all the products of human
industry, all the elements of human interests, twisted, turned, broken
in a mighty mill and all thrown together.
A Sickening Spectacle.
I walked over this extraordinary mass this morning and saw the fragments
of thousands of articles. 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 from limb to 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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