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 corps of government engineers that arrived last night has already
demonstrated the valuable assistance which it is capable of rendering in
these times of emergency. With but a few hours rest, those men were up
ere sunrise this morning, and by eight o'clock a pontoon bridge had been
stretched across the river at Kernville. Acting in conjunction with the
Pennsylvania military authorities they are pursuing their labors at
various other points, and by sundown it is confidently expected that
pontoon bridges will be erected at all places where the necessities of
traffic demand. It is the fact, probably not generally known, that the
great government of the United States owns only 500 feet of pontoon
bridges, and that these are the same that were used by the federal
forces in the civil war, twenty-five years ago. The bridges that are to
be used at Johnstown were brought from West Point and Willet's Point,
where they have been for years used in the ordinary course of
instruction in the military and engineer corps.
Secret Society Relief.
The following official announcements have been made:
A Masonic relief committee has been organized and solicits aid for
distressed Freemasons and their families.
WILLIAM A. DONALDSON, Chairman.
OFFICE OF SUPREME COMMANDER, KNIGHTS OF THE MYSTIC CHAIN, WILMINGTON,
DEL., June 8, 1889.--In view of the great calamity that has befallen our
brothers at Johnstown, Pa., and vicinity, I, H.G. Rettes, Supreme
Commander, request that wherever the Order of the Knights of the Mystic
Chain exists there be liberal donations made for our afflicted brothers.
Affairs at the tremendous stone bridge wreckage pile seem to have
resolved themselves into a state of almost hopelessness. It is amazing
the routine into which everything has fallen in this particular place.
Every morning at seven o'clock a score of Lilliputs come mechanically
from huts and tents or the bare hillside, and wearily and weakly go to
work clearing away this mass, and at the rate they are now proceeding it
will actually be months before the debris is cleared away and the last
body found. Fortunately the wind is blowing away from us or we would
have olfactory evidence that what is not found is far worse than what
has been exposed.
Then it may be good business and good policy to have these few workers
fool around the edge of the wreckage for five or ten minutes adjusting a
dynamite blast, then hastily scramble away and consume as much more time
before a tremendous roar announces the ugly work is done, but the
onlookers doubt it. Sometimes, when an extra large shot is used, the
water, bits of wood and iron, and other shapes more fearfully
suggestive, fly directly upward in a solid column at least three hundred
feet high, only to fall back again in almost the same spot, to be tugged
and pulled at or coaxed to float down an unwilling current that is
falling so rapidly now that even this poor mode of egress will soon be
shut entirely off.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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