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 town seemed like a great tomb. The people of Johnstown have supped
so full of horrors that they go about in a sort of a daze and only half
conscious of their griefs. Every hour, as one goes through the streets,
he hears neighbors greeting each other and then inquiring without show
of feeling how many each had lost in his family. To-day I heard a gray
haired man hail another across the street with this question.
"I lost five; all are gone but Mary and I," was the reply.
"I am worse off than that," said the first old gentleman. "I have only
my grandson left. Seven of us gone."
And so they passed on without apparent excitement. They and everyone
else had heard so much of these melancholy conversations that somehow
the calamity had lost its significance to them. They treat it exactly as
if the dead persons had gone away and were coming back in a week.
The Ghastly Search.
The melancholy task of searching the ruins for more bodies went on
to-day in the soaking rain. There were little crowds of morbid curiosity
hunters around each knot of workingmen, but they were not residents of
Johnstown. All their curiosity in that direction was satiated long ago.
Even those who come in from neighboring towns with the idea of a day's
strange and ghastly experiences did not care to be near after they had
seen one body exhumed. There were hundreds and thousands of these
visitors from the country to-day. The effect of the dreadful things they
saw and heard was to drive most of them to drink. By noon the streets
were beginning to be full of boisterous and noisy countrymen, who were
trying to counteract the strain on their nerves with unnatural
excitement. Then the chief of police, foreseeing the unseemly sights
that were likely to disgrace the streets, drove out and kept out all the
visitors who had not some good reason for their presence. After that and
far into the evening all the country roads were filled with drunken
stragglers, who were trying to forget what they had seen.
One thing that makes the work of searching for the bodies very slow is
the strange way that great masses of objects were rolled into intricate
masses of rubbish.
Horrible Masses.
As the flood came down the valley of the South Fork it obliterated the
suburb of Woodvale, where not a house was left, nor a trace of one. The
material they had contained rolled on down the valley, over and over,
grinding it up to pulp and finally leaving it against an unusually firm
foundation or in the bed of an eddy. The masses contain human bodies,
but it is slow work to pick them to pieces. In the side of one of them
I saw the remnants of a carriage, the body of a harnessed horse, a baby
cradle and a doll, a tress of woman's hair, a rocking horse, and a piece
of beefsteak still hanging on a hook.
[Illustration: THE REMAINS OF CAMBRIA CITY.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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