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
A man who stood on the bluff and saw the first wave of the flood come
down the valley tried to describe it. "I looked up," he said, "and saw
something that looked like a wall of houses and trees up the valley. The
next moment Johnstown seemed coming toward me. It was lifted right up
and in a minute was smashing against the bridge and the houses were
flying in splinters across the top and into the water beyond."
A 13-year-old girl, pretty and with golden hair, wanders about from
morgue to morgue looking for ten of a family of eleven, she being the
sole survivor.
There were half a dozen bulldogs in one house that was heaped up in the
wreck some distance above the bridge. They were loose among the debris,
and it is said by those who claim to have seen it that after fighting
among themselves they turned upon the people near them and were tearing
and biting them until the flames swept over the place.
Slow Time to Pittsburgh.
Irregular is a weak word for the manner in which passenger trains run
between this place and Pittsburgh. The distance is seventy miles and the
ordinary time is two hours. The train that left here at 4.30 yesterday
afternoon reached there at midnight. This is ordinarily good time
nowadays. A passage in five hours is an exceptional one.
Engine 1309, the one that faced the flood below Conemaugh and stood
practically unharmed, backed down to the station as soon as the tracks
were laid up to where it stood and worked all right. Only the oil cups
and other small fittings, with the headlight, were broken.
The superintendent of the Woodvale Woolen Mills, one of the Cambria Iron
Company's concerns, was one of the very few fortunate ones in that
little place. He and all his family got into the flouring mill just
below the woolen mill and upon the roof. The woolen mill was totally
wrecked, though not carried away, and the flouring mill was badly
damaged, but the roof held and all were saved. These two parts of the
mill were the only buildings left standing in Woodvale.
A man in Kernville, on Friday last, had jet black hair, moustache and
beard. That night he had a battle with the waters. On Saturday morning
his hair and beard began to turn gray, and they are now well streaked
with white. He attributes the change to his awful Friday night's
experience.
Wounds of the Dead.
It is the impression of the medical corps and military surgeons who
arrived here early in the week that hundreds, maybe thousands of men,
women and children were insensible to all horror on that awful
afternoon, just a week ago, before the waters of the valley closed in
over them. Their opinion is based on the fact that hundreds and hundreds
of the bodies already brought to light are terribly wounded somewhere,
generally on the head. In many instances the wounds are sufficient in
themselves to have caused death.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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