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 Sunday dinner was a great success. The bill of fare was vegetable
soup, cold ham, beans, canned corn, pickled tripe and black coffee. It
is worthy of note that the table in the officers' quarters did not have
a delicacy upon it which was not shared by the men. The commissary ran
short and had to borrow from the workmen's supplies. The dinner to-day
was cooked by "Shad" Jones, a colored man known to every traveling man
who has ever stopped at Johnstown for his ability to hold four eggs in
his mouth and swallow a drink of water without cracking a shell. He lost
his wife in the flood and the 14th has adopted him.
On this, the ninth day, the waters began to give up their dead. Stony
Creek first showed their white faces and lifeless bodies floating on
the surface, and men in skiffs went after them with their grappling
rods. Several of them were taken ashore during the afternoon and carried
to the Presbyterian Church morgue, which was the nearest. Then, too, the
dead among the wreckage on shore came to light just the same as on other
days. Their exhumation excites no notice here now. Dr. Beale, keeper of
the records of morgues, counted the numbers on his finger tips and said
there were more than fifty found to-day in Johnstown alone.
In one dead man's pocket was $3,133.62. He was Christopher Kimble, an
undertaker and finisher, who, when he saw the water coming, rushed down
stairs to the safe to save his gold and there he was lost. Several
bodies were taken from the human raft burned beyond all recognition.
The body of Miss Bessie Bryan, the young Philadelphian, was identified
to-day as it lay in a coffin by a grave from which it had been exhumed
in Grand View Cemetery. "Returning home from a wedding in Pittsburgh
with her friend, Miss Paulsen, caught by the flood on the day express,
found dead and buried twice," will be the brief record of her wild sad
fate.
Whiskey and Rioting.
Lieutenant Wright, Company I, with a detail of ninety-eight men, was
called to the banks of Stony Creek over the raft to-night, to protect
the employees of the Philadelphia Gas Company. There they found a gang
of rioters. The rioters this afternoon found a barrel of whiskey in the
field of debris, and before the militia could destroy it they had
managed to take a large quantity of it up on the mountain. To-night they
came down to the camp intoxicated, attacked the cook, cleared the supper
table and were managing things with a high hand when a messenger was
despatched for the guard. Before Lieutenant Wright's men reached there
they had escaped. The Beaver Falls gang was surprised this afternoon by
the militia, and gallons of whiskey, which they had hidden, were
destroyed. A dozen saloons were swept into the creek at the bridge, and
it is supposed that a hundred or more barrels are buried beneath the
raft.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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