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
The train crew, who saw the waters coming, warned the passengers,
escaped, and went home on foot. Conductor Bell duly made his report, yet
for some unknown reasons one of Superintendent Pitcairn's sub-ordinates
has been doing his best to give out and prove by witnesses, to whom he
takes newspaper men, that only one car of that express was lost and with
it "two or three ladies who went back for overshoes and a very few
others not lively enough to escape after the warnings." That story went
well until the smoke rolled away from the wreckage and the bones of the
two sections of the day express east were disclosed. Another very
singular feature was the apparent inability of the conductor of the
express to tell how many passengers they had on board and just how many
were saved. It had been learned that the first section of the train
carried 180 passengers and the second 157. It may be stated as
undoubtedly true that of the number fifty, at least, swell the horrible
tale of the dead.
From the wreck where the trains burned there have been taken out
fifty-eight charred bodies, the features being unrecognizable. Of these
seven found together were the Gilmore family, whose house had floated
there. The others, all adults, which, with two or three exceptions,
swell the list of the unidentified dead, are undoubted corpses of the
ill-fated passengers of the east express.
The Church Loses a Missionary.
To-day another corpse was found in the ruins of a Pullman car badly
burned. It was fully identified as that of Miss Anna Clara Chrisman, of
Beauregard, Miss., a well-developed lady of about twenty-five years, who
was on her way to New York to fill a mission station in Brazil. Between
the leaves of her Greek testament was a telegram she had written,
expecting to send it at the first stop, addressed to the Methodist
Mission headquarters, No. 20 East Twelfth street, New York, saying that
she would arrive on "train 8" of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the day
express east. In her satchel were found photographs of friends and her
Bible, and from her neck hung a $20 gold piece, carefully sewn in a bag.
Is it possible that the Pennsylvania Railroad is keeping back the
knowledge in order simply to avoid a list of "passengers killed" in its
annual report, solely to keep its record as little stained as possible?
It can hardly be that they fear suits for damages, for the
responsibility of the wreck does not rest on them.
Two hundred bodies were recovered from the ruins yesterday. Some were
identified, but the great majority were not. This number includes all
the morgues--the one at the Pennsylvania Railroad station, the Fourth
ward school, Cambria city, Morrellville, Kernville and the Presbyterian
Church.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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