For many years, the 1889 Johnstown Flood was one of American entertainment’s most popular subjects. A wealth of primary and secondary material proliferated for almost a century after the disaster, from eyewitness accounts to reporters’ narratives, from photographs to movies and songs. In confronting the nature and quantity of that material, Ruthless Tide is indebted to modern historical and scientific works that place the earlier record in responsible perspective.
The best-known modern book on the subject is David McCullough’s groundbreaking The Johnstown Flood, first published in 1968; its nearest predecessor similar in scope was Richard O’Connor’s Johnstown: The Day the Dam Broke, published in 1957. O’Connor’s book mentions interviews with eyewitnesses but gives no specifics. McCullough’s book, by contrast, remains notable in part for reliance on detailed, recorded interviews with survivors, Victor Heiser most comprehensively. In the half century since the book was published, some have dissented from aspects of its interpretation; some have emphasized other aspects of the primary record, as this book does as well. None, however, has superseded McCullough’s work, and many who write on the flood itself, and on related matters like the life of Henry Clay Frick, the development of the steel industry, and the history of western Pennsylvania, have followed it closely.
McCullough has served Ruthless Tide not only as a source—Chapter Fourteen follows him especially closely on post-flood publicity and the failed efforts to litigate—but also as an introduction to the primary and eyewitness records on which this book is largely based. Another major modern secondary source used here to similar ends is Michael R. McGough’s highly detailed The 1889 Flood in Johnstown, Pennsylvania (2002). Despite McCullough’s and McGough’s occasional conflicts, or perhaps because of them, reading the two works in concert offers a more comprehensive view of the flood, its background and ramifications, and the primary record than was previously available.
Other important secondary work recently available and relied on here: the 2016 hydrological study by Coleman, Kaktins, and Wojno; Steven Ward’s 2011 physics-based flood simulation; Emily Godbey’s 2006 study of disaster tourism at Johnstown; the dispute on the recovery effort carried on in the 1990s in Pennsylvania History; and Jed Shugerman’s legal analysis of the advent in the courts of “strict liability” (2000). Going back to 1940, Nathan Shappee’s unpublished doctoral dissertation remains the only full-scale scholarly study of the early development of Johnstown, its sudden industrialization, and the ecological heedlessness that made regular spring flooding so threatening even before the dam broke.
The primary record from which McCullough, McGough, and other writers have drawn their narrative accounts is rich. Some of the survivors were able writers of books: The most comprehensive and responsible overall contemporaneous account is Rev. Beale’s Through the Johnstown Flood, packed with detail on the politics of recovery, sanitation, and emergency government. J. J. Mclaurin’s The Story of Johnstown, published, like Beale’s book, only a year after the event, has long served modern writers as a source of flood stories. Clara Barton sets out her point of view on General Hastings and the relief and recovery effort in general, as followed closely here, in the Johnstown chapter of her book A Story of the Red Cross.
With the comparatively recent development of the Internet, much of the primary record has become directly available not only to researchers and authors but also to the general public. The Johnstown Flood Museum, the Johnstown Area Heritage Association, and the Johnstown National Memorial have put many of those sources online; the memorial has also posted nearly the entire body of the important testimony given during the railroad company’s investigation of the disaster.
Eyewitnesses of course disagree, and sometimes even with themselves. John Parke’s two accounts of the day the dam broke—one in the Special Report of June 1889 and one in the Report of the Committee of 1891—differ in some particulars, causing discrepancies in later accounts. Club members contradicted themselves. Testimony of railroad company employees could be self-serving and confusing. Like earlier books, Ruthless Tide seeks to weave existing strands into a cogent narrative; in the bibliography, interested readers will find many paths for exploring texture and controversy in the underlying record.
The narrative and interpretive approaches taken in Ruthless Tide rely to an unusual degree on two first-person accounts that other books have cited only lightly: Gertrude Quinn Slattery’s Johnstown and Its Flood and Tom L. Johnson’s My Story. Each in its own way is fresh and idiosyncratic; readers of Ruthless Tide who get interested in Gertrude and Tom are likely to enjoy their books, too. On the larger matters of monopoly power, the iron and steel industries, the rise of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the nascent labor movement, readers may especially enjoy, for example, David Nasaw on Carnegie, David Brody on pre-union steelworkers, and Albert Churella on the railroad.
As to location scouting, the two museums and the national memorial mentioned above as online resources fully repay visiting in real life. Related sites in southwestern Pennsylvania very much worth the trip include the Staple Bend Tunnel, the Allegheny Portage Railroad National Historic Site, the Railroaders Memorial Museum, and the Horseshoe Curve National Historic Landmark.
All works mentioned in this note, along with the others behind the story told in Ruthless Tide, are cited in full in the bibliography.