IT TURNED OUT THAT WHAT MISS MINNIE CHAMBERS WAS HOLDING on to, all through the night, was a pipe that came up through a roof of one of the Cambria Iron Works buildings. The pipe didn’t fail her, all that awful night. The building stayed put. Minnie held on.
When the day dawned, gray and misty yet without rain, the waters were down, leaving Minnie on top of a huge pile of wreckage. She was freezing cold, and stuck up there, badly bruised. Some men came by and helped her climb down. They took her to some friends in the town of Prospect, and aside from those bruises, and despite her amazing ride, Minnie Chambers had no injuries at all.
Mrs. Stevenson and her daughters, after breaking the plaster ceiling on their second floor and climbing up through the attic floor, had ridden the waves for a long time until suddenly the house landed on dry ground and wreckage in front of a Dr. Walters’s house on Vine Street. They left the attic, went into the house, and made it through the night.
In the end, Alma Hall didn’t go down. At the break of day, Rev. Beale looked out the door of the building and saw that the water had subsided. The flood wasn’t gone, but it was down and falling farther.
Some in the building had suffered broken bones and other injuries, but most were able to get out of Alma Hall. Many had been separated from family. Some of them still had hopes of seeing their loved ones alive again. Others had certain knowledge that they never would: they’d seen their loved ones die. Some of those survivors, overcome with grief, as well as with horror at the ways in which those they loved had met their ends, felt envy for the dead.
But all of the survivors, whether rescued as family groups or left alone, whether sure of tragedy or hopeful for reunion, felt battered, hungry, exhausted, and stunned. Small children hadn’t been fed in sixteen hours or more. Stumbling awkwardly through a window facing onto Main Street, nearly three hundred overnight residents of Alma Hall climbed onto the wreckage around the building and took a long, hard look at their city.
What they saw was just as hard to take in as the great wall of water. There simply was no Johnstown. The wreckage they were standing on just went on and on.
In the gray, dank weather—the rain had stopped, for now, but the morning sky was dark—wherever a building stood, it stood out, often crooked and leaning, lonely against the sky or the slopes of the surrounding hills. All else was a mountainous chaos of debris, piled in some places as high as those few buildings that still stood. Many survivors had lost people. Everyone had lost almost everything else.
And there was no sound, not really. Johnstown was normally a loud place. That noise came from industry. There was no industry today, and the quiet was eerie, a sign not of peace but of incalculable death and destruction.
The Reverend Beale and his family started into the wreckage, heading for a hill at the foot of the steeply climbing Frankstown Road, past the edge of the flood’s path, where other survivors were gathering. The Beales and others from Alma Hall crawled and picked their ways through a landscape. This landscape was made of freight cars, houses, bridges, trees, furniture. And dead bodies.
When they arrived at the foot of steep Frankstown Road, they found about three thousand people gathered, just as stunned and grief-stricken and hungry and exhausted as they: every age, every kind of person, cold, with little clothing, stunned. Everyone was injured or bereaved or simply horrified to the point of insanity or all of the above. From here you could see that fires were still burning in various parts of the wreckage.
Still, of these three thousand people, not one adult was crying. Everybody was keeping a face so tight, Beale thought, it was as if their heads were held by a vise.
Beale’s first thought was for relief of his own family, so he walked them up the steep hill to the home of a friend who lived high enough to have escaped disaster. He left his wife and children there, for care and food and sleep, and went back down to the gathered survivors to see what he could do to help bring order to this horrible confusion.
First, the group had to find shelter for the women and children, as Beale had done for his own. People up on the hills were offering help, and as quickly as possible, shelter was found there. Still, there weren’t many people living on the hills, and the houses up there were poor and small. Thirteen families went into one house. Nineteen, with nothing to change into, went to sleep on the floor of another.
The survivors below, mostly the men now, kept gazing back at the site of the former city. St. John’s Catholic Church had burned in the fire: it was a hulk, still smoking. Other church spires were simply gone. Almost nobody in this group any longer owned a house, a bed, clothes. They stood there hatless—a bizarre experience in 1889—many without shoes, many nearly naked, many physically battered. There were Civil War veterans in the crowd who said they’d never seen anything like it.
Beale, as overcome as anyone else, had nothing to compare this situation to, but he was getting a worrying idea. He recalled reports from the Franco-Prussian War, a little under twenty years before: the day the Prussians took Paris, it was said, that city was subjected to thieving and looting and anarchic behavior on the grandest scale.
Beale saw a little boy on horseback. He gave the boy some money and told him to find a working telegraph office. Governor James Beaver had to send military assistance right away.
So the monster had moved on. Soon it ceased to exist.
Literally. All of that water went somewhere, of course, but the monster was nowhere. The monster had been created by specific conditions. Because they involved motion, and the release of energy, it couldn’t live long. Now all that gave testimony, or even size and shape, to the monster’s brief and terrible career was the scope of destruction it had left behind. From the scale of destruction, some of the monster’s features can be calculated.
The water’s volume per second, as it flowed through the former South Fork dam, might be called equal to the volume per second going over Niagara Falls. Yet sheer volume unleashed wasn’t the only thing that caused the incredible destruction, not only to Johnstown but to all the towns on the way to Johnstown, and after Johnstown, once the water made it past the railroad bridge, to towns on the Conemaugh like Cambria City, all the way west to Bolivar, and southward, on the Stony Creek, to the area below Moxham. Mass is one thing, and the water picked up many more tons of mass. Speed is another, varying as the water came down. If 20 million tons of water fell 404 feet, the real enormity of the phenomenon came from the fact that all of its energy had to be fully released before the water could come to rest. Some part of that energy was used up in resisting the friction between the water and rocky floor and sides of the valley.
But the balance of the energy could, in a sense, actually be witnessed, or at least reconstructed mentally from what could be witnessed, in the aftermath. That energy, now expended, was visible in what the whole valley, the city of Johnstown, and some of the towns just west of Johnstown looked like now. The monster that no longer existed had been made of the release of its own energy, and when the stunned, half-naked, chilled, and ravenous citizens of Johnstown surveyed the scene, the monster was already long gone.
Even as the fire at the bridge raged and devoured people alive, the dam of debris that the water had made at the railroad bridge began to fail. Water ate away at the embankment on the side across from town, deeply enough to give channels for escape. That sent water shooting through to those corporate-named towns Millville and Cambria City. Much of the energy had been spent by then, and the bridge slowed the water down, but not enough to keep the flood from wreaking havoc on those two towns. Their fate too was part of the Johnstown Flood.
Below those towns, however, the water could begin to spread and come to some kind of rest, a broad, deep flood, not a force of outrageous violence. The Conemaugh Valley widens there, and for a time it straightens, losing its characteristic tight bends, and the plain is flat, inviting the water to stop hurtling and fighting and piling up and rolling, inviting it to spread out and lie down. Also, totally destroying Johnstown and Cambria City and other towns nearby had taken some of the fight out of the thing. So here it finally died, scattering bodies and debris as far as Bolivar, yet with no further ability to rip and tear and beat and kick things down.
This was only, after all, a lot of H2O. It had formed no intention of becoming a monster. The 20 million tons that had so recently been stopped by a sporting club dam went, now, where it had been heading in the first place: down the valley of the Conemaugh, into the Allegheny, into the Ohio, into the Mississippi, into the Gulf of Mexico.
The crew of clerks up on the Cambria company store’s third floor, having rescued and fed so many people that day and night, were rescued themselves, by boat, on Saturday morning, and they went around rescuing still more people. Thomas Magee still held the company cash he had saved from the safe.
Magee would hold on to the money till Monday. Then he would return it, fully intact, to a superior.
Victor Heiser, who had leaped and jumped and climbed and swung, timing every move, through such an incredible number of adroit escapes and dumb-luck near misses, had seen his parents disappear when his house was crushed, but Victor was sixteen, and an only child. Now that it was over, he thought they might be alive, that there might be news of them, that somewhere in the astonishing wreckage of Johnstown he might rejoin them.
When he’d been swept from under the falling freight car at the last minute into open water, Victor had known generally where he was: coasting through water many feet over Central Park. He’d also begun to feel his second-to-second danger less intensely, and with time to look up he could see his neighbor, Mrs. Fenn, riding the wave. She was straddling a tar barrel, rocking and rolling, almost going under on each roll, covered with tar from the barrel.
Victor didn’t yet know that Mrs. Fenn had lost her husband and all of her seven children. He wanted to help her, but there was nothing he could do. He was being swept down toward the railroad bridge.
Yet unlike so many unlucky others, he was thrown back by the countercurrent, up into a backwash along the hillside, and he found himself slowing down. Determined to take quick advantage of the fact, and seeing the roof of a submerged but still-standing house near the edge of the hill, he jumped from his tin float. He landed on the roof. A group was sitting up there, stranded.
That’s when Victor Heiser got a strange idea. He might live.
He looked at his watch. It wasn’t 4:30 yet. He’d been fighting for his life for only ten minutes.
Many others would face horror and death to come, in the fires and in the water, during the long night of terror. But for Victor the worst really was over. He didn’t know it yet. The group on the roof was cut off by ebbing, flowing, cycling water from the safety of the hillside, so near and yet so far, and houses nearby kept going down into the water. They spent the rest of the day trying to help others get onto their roof, and after a while nineteen refugees sat there. When it got dark they decided to climb down into the attic of the house and get out of the rain.
That’s how they spent the long night: hearing, like the denizens of Alma Hall, awful sounds—in this case the occasional whoosh that told them yet another building was going into the water. As exhausted as he was, Victor didn’t sleep. To him, this waiting seemed almost worse than anything he’d been through after getting hit by the wave. If the attic collapsed, they’d all die, trapped. All of his effort and luck would be for nothing. The suspense felt deadlier than the fight.
But at dawn, Victor climbed down, like every other survivor, onto the amazing expanse of wreckage. The water was down to flood level now, submerging only the first floor of the house, and the debris, no longer moving, was navigable. Victor found his way over piles. He waded through shallow water. He used debris to float across the deeper water. Here and there he actually found some solid ground.
He was looking for his parents. In that quest he encountered other survivors, and everybody seemed to be doing the same thing: looking. He saw dead bodies, and he saw people pulling dead bodies out of the pile. If his parents were dead, he hoped at least to find out for sure, to find their bodies. He hoped to bury them decently.
Victor was nearing the railroad bridge now, on the far side, where the eaten-away embankment had finally let the water out. During the night, Victor hadn’t known about the fires. This morning he saw: flames here at the bridge were still leaping, and along with horribly burned dead bodies, many people, injured yet alive, were still stuck on the pile, unable to escape as the flames burned their way nearer and nearer. The trapped were shrieking in terror—men, women, and children—as the flames approached them.
There was, Victor saw, more agony and death to come this morning. When he saw rescue teams climbing the pile, trying to reach and free the trapped victims, he jumped in to help.
For hours that day, Victor Heiser and the others tried to save people from what became, as the flames spread and began consuming the pile, a towering, roaring funeral pyre. They did save some. But they had no axes, no tools at all, and they had to keep ducking back out of the fire or else burn up themselves.
So while Victor helped save people, he also had to watch, helpless, as many burned to death before him. Some of those dying in agony were people he recognized.
Finally he ran into a friend from outside Johnstown. The friend’s house hadn’t been affected by the flood, and Victor went home with him. The family took the youngster in, fed him, gave him a bed.
Now Victor knew. He was alone in the world.
A huge painter and paperhanger named Maxwell McCachren had not only survived that night but had also performed a feat that would make him forever famous in Johnstown. Just as darkness had fallen, he’d been riding the wave on a big, pitching roof, crowded with maybe twenty other people, everybody holding on for dear life and certain that at any moment they’d be tossed into the water. Then they saw something astonishing.
A little girl, maybe five or six. She was upright on her knees on a raft, with a mattress and quilt. She was wearing only underclothes.
They could see that she saw them, too. The girl started shouting for help. She wouldn’t stop.
But really there wasn’t anything they could do. The girl was too far away across the churning, choppy water, and anyone who let go of the roof, even for a second, was likely to slide into the flood.
Then some in the group saw Max McCachren moving toward the edge of the roof.
Max was a big, strong man of thirty-eight, and an emotional man, and the others could see what he was thinking. It was crazy: if he went after the little girl, he would surely drown or be bashed to death. Max was married. He had fifteen children. Some of his fellow riders grabbed at Max, demanding that he stop. “I’m going over to save that baby!” Max said. “Do you people think an angel from heaven is coming down to help you? God helps them that help themselves. . . .”
Gertrude, having stopped announcing that she was a lover of the Lord, was watching this argument on the rooftop across the water and keeping up her shouting at the people. She cried loud tears of rage and fear; she demanded, she pleaded. The roof kept throwing those people around, but that meant nothing to her. She just kept shouting at them, crying, demanding, begging.
Now she saw the big man on the edge of the roof shake off the people trying to hold him.
He jumped off the roof into the violent tide. He disappeared under the water.
The man’s head bobbed up. He was swimming, and he was looking at Gertrude.
She kept up her yelling. At top volume, she cried and begged. The man kept disappearing underwater. Then he would come back up. Sometimes she couldn’t see him at all. But she just kept yelling, and somehow he seemed to be managing to catch up to her circling, moving raft.
As Gertrude watched the man swim, she stopped yelling. This man was going to save her, she decided.
Max had reached the raft. He grabbed its side and pulled himself up across the mattress and lifted the girl. She put her arms around his neck. She had an amazingly powerful grip. His heart swelled with joy.
The roof he’d come from had now bobbed far away. Max held the girl while they flowed downstream on their circling, tipping, precarious raft, while people cried and moaned in the dark and debris boomed and banged around them.
Max thought the girl might be about to strangle him. Yet her grip gave him a warm feeling, too.
Then he saw that they were approaching the stone-arched railroad bridge. He saw fire raging, smelled a chemical smoke, heard screams. He was taking the little girl straight into another kind of hell.
From the window of a small house up on the hill, two men were poking long poles down into the water to guide people in. One was a white man, the other a black man. Max leaned and kicked, still holding the girl, trying to get the raft to veer toward that house, but he couldn’t do it: the men in the window were still maybe fifteen feet away, and Max couldn’t perfectly control the flow. He and the girl were going to float past the house, right down to the fire at the bridge.
The men in the window yelled to him, “Throw that baby!”
Max wasn’t sure. Not about his throwing ability. He could throw.
He yelled back, “Do you think you can catch her?”
“We can try!”
What else could they say? Or do? From the window, the white man leaned far out, so far he seemed to be about to topple into the water. The black man got behind him, bent down, and held him by the knees so he wouldn’t fall.
Max broke the little girl’s grip.
Gertrude Quinn found herself flying upward through the air in the rain over the flowing water. The man leaning out the window reached way out.
He caught her, and he held on. The other man pulled. They all tumbled into the room.
The man on Gertrude’s raft sailed off into the night.
Later that night, Gertrude was being carried around the hillside in a dry blanket, her wet clothes gone and so bundled up she couldn’t see out. “What have you got there?” she heard some men say.
“A little girl we rescued,” said her carrier.
“Let’s have a look.”
The blanket was pulled partly away, and Gertrude looked at faces peering down at her, staring, actually, and they scared her. One man squinting at her had a red face and turned-up nose. She thought she’d better reach up and yank that nose.
She didn’t get the chance. “Don’t know her,” they said and the blanket went back over her face. Now her carrier was climbing eight steps to a porch. They’d arrived at a long, three-story frame building, with six apartments: worker housing on the hillside. Gertrude was unbundled inside the house and placed in a woman’s lap. The woman held her close, rocked her, and sent one of her many children to the attic to get some red flannels, just packed away for summer.
“This poor little freezing child,” the woman said. She sent an older child to fill some Mason jars with hot water to warm Gertrude up.
Gertrude hated red flannels: they itched. But the kitchen stove was warm, and yellow lamplight seemed, after where she’d been, to shine like a diamond.
She was scared, too. Tenants from the other apartments had come in, as well as people off the street, and everybody was gathered around looking at her with their kind faces, asking her question after question.
She decided the best thing would be to not answer them. She fell silent.
She shared a bed upstairs with three women, also taken in from the flood. Pretending to be asleep, she peeked at these women out of the corner of her eye. They were sisters, and they kept getting up and going over to the window, looking out, and gasping.
They didn’t want her to hear, so they whispered. “Frightful . . . terrible . . . ghastly.”
When the sisters finally fell asleep, Gertrude slipped out of bed.
She went to the window. She looked out.
Below the hill, only water spread everywhere, and firelight flickering here and there reflected on the flowing surface like an illustration plate of ships burning after a battle at sea.
Gertrude’s new strategy was silence, and she kept it up the next morning.
But the three sisters—their name was Bowser—had a theory. They thought they recognized her.
This small house on the hillside was full of flood refugees, and the household was up before daybreak, trying to cope, in horror like everybody else, with the wreckage of their city and the loss of their loved ones. At about 5:00 that morning on the crowded porch, the sisters asked, “Aren’t you little Gertrude Quinn?”
Gertrude didn’t respond. She was wearing clothes belonging to one of the many daughters of the house, and mismatched shoes, one too large and one too small. She hadn’t had a bath. She sat there looking at everything, her hair full of dried mud, her face dirty.
She also knew by now the name of the woman who had warmed her up the night before: Mrs. Metz, already in the kitchen this morning, cooking for her crowd of refugees. Now Mrs. Metz, having overheard, came out on the porch and widened her eyes at the Bowser sisters.
“Surely not one of the Quinns of Quinn’s Store?” Mrs. Metz said. They widened their eyes back and nodded.
This might be a good thing, Gertrude figured. The store was well-known. Maybe, she thought, since she came from a respected family, she would be invited to live with the Metzes. She was careful to act as if she couldn’t even hear them talking.
“She does look like the little Quinn girl,” one of them said, sotto voce.
“Maybe,” said another, “if we could get some of the sticks and mud out of her hair she would look more human.”
So they’d seen her before. At the store. Evidently she was hard to recognize now.
And they kept asking if she knew her name. Did she know her father’s name? But Gertrude was thinking she might be the only person in her family left alive. She was filled with a new kind of dread.
Suddenly the Bowser sisters called out to a woman walking by across the street from the Metzes’ porch.
“Mrs. Foster,” they called, “do come over here and see if you can identify this child. We think it’s your niece, Gertrude Quinn.”
Mrs. Foster crossed the street in a hurry. Gertrude just sat there.
James Quinn was still on the hillside. With Helen, Rosemary, and the baby, he’d spent the night in the same way that others who lived through the flood had spent it: in a horror of overwhelming grief and loss and terror, facing or hiding from the death and destruction raging below.
James was in despair. For in the end, as he’d watched from the hillside, having barely escaped the huge wave himself, he’d seen his whole house go all the way down into the water. He knew his little Gertrude was in that house.
On the hill, James had found the home of Mr. and Mrs. Leis—another of the poorer hill dwellers. Mrs. Leis worked at the Quinn store when she could spare a minute from her eight children—and the Leises had somehow found the room to take them all in. James spent the night on the porch, pacing. Back and forth he went, crying for Gertrude.
“My poor little white head,” he kept saying, over and over, holding his head in his hands. He could have carried her, as well as the baby. He didn’t know why he hadn’t.
At one point Helen said, “Father, Vincent is missing, too. You don’t say anything about him.”
“Vincent is a boy,” he said. “He can swim, he had a chance—but my baby had no chance!”
No chance: that’s what was destroying him. Also, his last exchange with Gertrude had been a spanking, followed by an angry lecture. If he could ever see his little girl again this side of Kingdom Come, James kept saying, he would never chastise her again, about anything. . . . And he went on pacing.
About 5:30 in the morning, James was at the bottom of the porch, washing his face in a basin of hot water the Leises had provided, when his sister-in-law Barbara Foster appeared, nearly out of breath.
“James!” she said. “Gertrude is alive!”
On the Metz porch, it had taken Barbara Foster a moment of looking closely at that filthy, terrified, staring, strangely dressed girl to see that, yes, this was indeed her little niece. And it was confusing: Barbara could have sworn that, as she’d run for her own third floor the day before, she’d seen James wading into the street with his girls.
Anyway, Barbara had bolted right down the Metzes’ porch steps and run all over the hillside looking for James, and now she’d found him and told him the news. He looked up. He put his hands in the air. He sobbed. He begged her not to say it.
“James!”
“I saw the house go down,” he said, “chimney and all, and slide under the water. My poor little white head had no chance.”
Barbara had to put a stop to this.
“James!” she said. “I’ve talked to Gertrude. She is frightened nearly out of her senses!”
James Quinn came to life. Barbara turned and ran, and he ran after her.
Gertrude was still sitting on the Metz porch with the Bowser sisters when she saw her aunt running toward them, with Papa close behind, and Helen and Rosemary bringing up the rear, and the little girl hurled herself down the steps, landing on Papa’s knee just as he put his foot on the first step, putting her arms around his neck as he hugged her.
Both were crying, and Helen and Rosemary were pushing into the hug, too.
“My poor little sister!” Rosemary cried. “Oh, my poor little sister, we’ll never lose you again!”
The crowd on the porch was swelling with people marveling at this reunion. Mrs. Metz offered to take care of Gertrude for as long as Mr. Quinn wanted, and James started to say that would be a wonderful idea: the Quinns had no home of their own now.
But Gertrude started crying. She clung to Papa, and he changed his mind.
“Of course you’ll go with us,” he said, comforting her. “Even though we have no place to go.”