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
There is to-day no lack of supplies, save at Cambria City, which has
been overlooked and neglected, but where the destitution is great. The
people there are in great want of food. Bread has given out, and ham is
about the only food to be obtained. In only one of the wrecked houses
left untouched by the flood I found from twenty to twenty-five refugees.
The commissary at the Pennsylvania Railroad depot is heaped so high with
stores that distribution goes on with difficulty. The Grubbtown
commissary is in the same condition. The Red Cross people got fairly to
work in their supply tent to-day, and during the morning alone
distributed five hundred packages of clothing. Their hospital on the
hill, back of Kernville, is in excellent order, and the patients
quartered in the village houses are comfortably situated. There have
been no deaths at the Cambria hospital. The doctors there have cared for
500 cases indoors and out. Even Grandma Teeter is doing well. She was
taken out of the wreck at the bridge on Saturday with her right arm
crushed. It had to be amputated, and the old woman--she is eighty-three
years of age--stood the operation finely.
Miss Hinckley, of Philadelphia, is busy in Kernville making known the
plans of the Children's Aid Society. She does an immense amount of
running about and visiting houses. Many children made orphans by the
flood are now being cared for. There are a hundred or more of them; just
how many no one knows.
"I have great difficulty," said Miss Hinckley to me to-day, "to persuade
the people who have taken children to care for that our society can be
trusted to take charge of what will surely be a burden to them. All my
work now is to inspire confidence. We have received hundreds of letters
from people anxious to adopt children. They are ready now in the first
flush of sympathy, but I am afraid that they will not be willing to take
the children when we are ready to place them."
Many Dead Still in the Ruins.
The ruins still shelter a ghastly load of dead. Every hour at least one
new body is uncovered and borne on a rough stretcher to some one of the
many morgues. The sight loses none of its sadness and pathos by its
commonness; only the horror is gone, giving place to apathy and stupor.
Stalwart men, in mud-stained, working clothes, bring up the body, the
face covered with a cloth. The crowds part and gaze at the burned corpse
as it passes. At the morgue it is examined for identification, washed
and prepared for burial. Not more than half of these recovered now are
identified.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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