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
One man had to mount the different members of his family on logs. The
mother and children alike sat astride of them, and then, with the father
on the other end, were poled across to the high ground.
Another man, whose house was in a worse place, swam ashore and, throwing
a rope back to the mother, who was surrounded on the porch of the house
by the children, yelled for her to tie one end to the little ones so he
could pull them over the fast running water. This operation was
continued until the entire family was rescued.
Willing workers from the neighborhood were not long in getting huge
bonfires started, and with the aid of these and dry clothing brought in
haste by people whose homes stood on higher ground the family were soon
warmed.
The same willing hands hastily constructed sheds, and with immense
bonfires the people were kept warm till daylight. Others, more
fortunate, were able to save enough from their houses to make
themselves comfortable for a short season of camping. One poor family I
noticed had saved enough carpet to make a tent out of, and under this
temporary shelter the mother was doing her best to prepare a meal and
attend to her other household duties.
Sheltered by Friendly Neighbors.
In Brookville a great many houses were submerged, but no lives were
lost. While the people were driven from their homes, they were more
fortunate than the people of Bryants, because they could at once find
shelter under the roofs of the neighbors' houses.
All of the saw mills, the chief industry of the town, were closed down.
Some because the water was over the first floor, and others because
their entire working force were on the creek trying to construct
temporary booms, by which they expected to save at least a portion of
the property from being swept away. One man rigged a boom with the aid
of a cable 1,600 feet long and thick enough to hold the heaviest
steamer. About fifty logs were chained together for further protection.
This arrangement for a time checked the mass of logs, but just when
everybody was thinking it would stop the output a small dam gave way,
bringing down with it another half million feet of lumber. When this
struck the temporary boom it parted, as if the huge cable was a piece of
thread, and the logs shot past.
Just at Bryants, however, a gorge formed shortly after two o'clock
Friday afternoon, and within a remarkably short time there was a pile of
logs wedged in that stretched back fully a quarter of a mile and the
top of which was more than ten feet high. This of course changed the
course of the stream a little, but the natural gorge had saved enough
logs to amount to more than $100,000 in money.
The following comments by one of our journals sum up the situation after
receiving the dreadful news of the three preceding days:
The Great Calamity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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