SOME OF THOSE PEOPLE WERE LUCKIER THAN OTHERS. AFTER Max McCachren made his mighty throw, tossing the little girl he’d found on the raft up to the man leaning out a window, his raft just kept going, rushing and turning right down toward the stone bridge where the fire was burning people alive. As Max neared that inferno, reflected and refracted by the choppy water, he could make out a place where the water, on the right side as he approached, had worn away the earth: at that hole the flood was pouring through the dam of debris like a rapids. Max leaned and paddled and kicked and he got his craft heading that way.
Arriving at the flume, he got the raft into it. He shot the rapids. Others were running that exit, too, clinging to floats, and many were thrown off, but Max slid past the entire fiery obstruction and was sent downstream past Johnstown. About four miles farther down, a crowd on the shore was working with poles and ropes to get people out. Max caught hold and they pulled his raft to shore.
And in the days and weeks following that strange and horrible night, as the work went on in Johnstown, and the reporters kept seeking out and publishing one amazing or distressing or inspiring story after another, Maxwell McCachren became famous, momentarily nationally, permanently in town. The story of the throw was gold.
Meanwhile, by asking questions and following up on word of mouth, James Quinn was able to find out who had rescued his daughter: Max, for one, but also the two men in the window who had carried her to the Metz house. They turned out to be Henry Koch, the proprietor of a hotel near the house where they’d rescued Gertrude, and George Skinner, a porter working for Koch. James was able to find and thank them all, and when the per capita relief payment was made, James split Gertrude’s share three ways and gave it to those three men.
The press loved Gertrude’s story. Seizing upon George Skinner, reporters ginned up the rescue into the tale of the innocent white Little Eva and the faithful black Uncle Tom from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In 1889, that angle was good for jerking a few tears. Yet the angle had nothing to do with what had happened to any of the people involved, or with what they’d done. Stories like that couldn’t get at the devastating emotional effects that the arrival of the gigantic wave, from the lake above, had on real people.
The real Gertrude, for one thing, wouldn’t talk, for a long time, about what had happened between the time the water burst into the third-floor room, where she’d huddled in the wardrobe with Aunt Abbie and Libby, killed by the wave, and the time she was brought to the Metzes’ house with the Bowser sisters and other flood refugees, where her father finally found her. When the subject came up, she felt frozen by fear.
On first being found by Papa and her sisters, of course she’d felt enormous happiness, relief, and comfort. That morning they’d gone together down Adams Street, the first street just above the flood level, picking their way through disgusting, slimy wreckage, with Gertrude at once exhausted by her experience and embarrassed by her mismatched shoes: she made Papa carry her most of the way to the Leises’ house. There the family picked up the baby and went to the larger home of another clerk at the Quinn store, Mrs. Ludwig. At bedtime, Gertrude slept with Helen and Rosemary on a mattress on the parlor floor, while the baby, whose condition seemed not to have worsened at all, slept in an upstairs room. Tended by a grandmotherly German woman of the house, warm and cozy, Gertrude Quinn at last fell blissfully asleep.
But as the days and weeks went by, things weren’t blissful. Despite their relief in finding Gertrude alive and unharmed, terrible loss and pain had fallen on the whole Quinn family, and Gertrude was the youngest of the Quinn children who were out of the infant stage: she felt it all.
The Quinns were well-off, and they were a bright, idiosyncratic, happy, and resilient family. They weren’t, in fact, typical of the community, in the way that the papers of the day, always eager to define normalcy in terms of the well-off, might have wanted to present them. The vast majority of people in the Johnstown area with lives demolished by the great wave had far fewer resources than the Quinns. And yet the real effects of the lake that had been sent down the valley could be felt even in the lives of one of the more prosperous families in town.
Gertrude’s mother, with the youngest Quinn children, had been staying with family all the way out in Scottsdale, Kansas. News of Johnstown came quickly, of course, to Kansas, yet news from James to Rosina couldn’t go quickly: it took days to get the telegraph and postal service working. And what James Quinn had to tell his wife was much worse than the fact that Johnstown wouldn’t be a place to live for a long time to come, or that the family store begun by her father was gone, along with all its inventory, cash, and assets, never to be recovered, or that the family had no home, literally no possessions but what they wore, and Rosemary’s umbrella. Those losses would have been devastating enough.
But Rosina also had to be told, to begin with, of the injuries to her own mother: Gertrude’s grandmother had been taken from the wreckage of her home with her face and head covered with blood. Her scalp had been taken off from between her eyes to the back of her neck. Thirty-two sutures closed the wound, and she would live.
But of course James had far worse to tell his wife than that. Gertrude, it was clear, had been the only person to escape from the Quinn house when it fell into the flood. Abbie and her infant son had been lost to the flood, and Libby had, too. Their bodies hadn’t yet been found.
Worst of all: their own Vincent was gone, sixteen, brilliant, funny, enterprising, loving, their firstborn. He died because he broke away from his uncle’s attempt at restraint—the uncle and cousins and others had narrowly escaped the collapse of that building—and tried to make his way through the water to help his father save the younger children. Only Vincent’s straw hat had been seen after the wave hit.
About a week after the disaster, Vincent’s body was found, not far from the corner where on May 31, in a deep and turbulent current, he’d last been seen. That was in the early days of the massive morgue effort: there was no time for a real funeral, and the corpse of the Quinns’ son was carried in a butcher’s wagon to the cemetery and quickly buried.
The Quinn parents had been communicating by now. It was decided that the two younger girls, Rosemary and Gertrude, should go west to their mother in Kansas. Gertrude could hardly wait to see Mama, and their uncle Edward soon arrived in the devastated town to escort them west. For the trip, the girls were taken down to one of the relief commissaries to get clothing—they had nothing of their own—and as they stood in line and were handed outfits, it was actually exciting: warm, clean flannel petticoats, stockings, and shawls. The girls sat right down on the street and put everything on.
James Quinn watched. His girls were in clean clothes. That was something he was now in no position to provide them.
Over the slimy wreckage and through the muddy puddles they went, smelling the new smells of putrefaction and the harsh smells of lime and disinfectant, to the station to board a passenger train, refugees from the Johnstown Flood. With Rosemary and Gertrude sitting side by side and Uncle Edward behind them, they began the long ride westward. As the train picked up passengers from the stations west of the Johnstown area, the girls became the celebrities of the train: flood sufferers, children at that. The people gathered around to pepper them with questions.
Rosemary asked Gertrude to tell what had happened to her that day and night. As usual, Gertrude wouldn’t, so Rosemary launched into a narrative of the family’s sufferings. The people listened closely, silently, grimly.
When Rosemary finished, the people started handing over money, pouring it into the girls’ laps. There was so much that the girls had no way to hold it, and there was no false pride: the Quinn family had nothing now. Uncle Edward gratefully filled his pockets with the money to give to their mother for the family’s support.
In the house in Scottsdale, Gertrude got a new shock. She’d only just happily reunited with Mama when it turned out that Mama was going back to Johnstown, to attend a belated funeral service for Vincent.
Gertrude exploded. She cried and wailed and refused to stay here with her aunt and uncle. Mama sat with her and held her and explained, but Gertrude insisted through her tears that wherever Mama went, she had to go, too.
But the next day she looked for Mama, and Mama was gone.
Now Gertrude could not be comforted. She cried all day, every day.
And she started looking for her mother. She left the house. She walked down the street. Found and brought home, she would leave again, time and again, to find Mama. Her aunt had five small children of her own, and now Rosemary and Gertrude, so the neighbors around the house began to recognize the little flood survivor, and they took part in watching out for her in her wanderings and trying to keep her within some kind of bounds.
Gertrude, as usual, wasn’t easy to deter. Neighbors brought things to distract and cajole her: a big chocolate layer cake that she ate with her fists and turned into a mess, dolls, toys. There was a raccoon in a cage in a neighbor’s yard: the girl could be distracted by its antics for about a minute. Then she’d be crying and running off to find her mother.
One day she heard a train whistle. That train might get her back to Mama and Papa. Gertrude bolted from the yard where she and her cousins had been playing, ran as fast as she could down to the nearby train tracks, and sat down on the rails to wait for the train. She could hear it coming.
Her cousin Stella, seeing that Gertrude was missing, ran outside and spotted both the girl sitting on the rail and the locomotive rushing up the track in the near distance. Stella ran down to the tracks, snatched up Gertrude, and backed up against a fence, out of the way, as the locomotive rushed past them, followed by a long, pounding train of freight cars.
Mama came back. She was different. Gertrude was used to her mother’s smiles and tenderness, but now it was Mama who cried, often, hugging Gertrude and Rosemary and the other children.
Still, Gertrude felt happy in those hugs, protected.
And they were all going back—not to Johnstown yet, but first to Latrobe, Pennsylvania, to stay with a family there, and then to a series of welcoming homes in Pittsburgh. Neighbors came in to help make clothes for the family’s journey, and soon they were back on the train, heading east.
When September began, the Quinns were together in Johnstown, and Gertrude Quinn began to take part in the strange life of loss and recovery that all of the children of the flood would grow up with. The return was shocking at first. They entered their city from the station, their nostrils assaulted by the piles of powerful white disinfectant, a word that Gertrude and other children her age would quickly come to know. They were walking on planks that bridged puddles, mud, empty lots, open cellars.
So much had been done. There were electricity, telegraph, very partial streetcar service (free of charge, thanks to Tom Johnson), ways through the wreckage. Miss Barton and the Red Cross were still in town: thousands of new structures had kitchens and furniture. There were the Red Cross hotels.
But nothing was recognizable to Gertrude. They were walking to a new home, and as they made their way Gertrude saw a team pull a body out of the wreck. It was a young woman. Gertrude looked. Pieces of red-and-white gingham dress stuck to the body. She was hurried on, and at Central Park they found the park gone, no trees, just a mud field covered with tents and patrolled by soldiers.
The new house where they arrived was a kind of stopgap. Or at least James Quinn hoped so. He’d spent all this time trying to find ways to regain some kind of stability. The Quinns and Geises were propertied people, and all their property was gone. Everything they’d owned had been in the center of the town: not one of those buildings stood. Still, they were lucky: James had scared up the money to buy a small, yellow frame house. Its previous owners, a bride and groom, had died in the flood. The Quinns moved in. School started, as best it could.
Gertrude found she’d lost friends. All the schoolchildren had. She’d had a friend also named Gertrude, and two other playmates, Edith and Irene. All three were gone.
The surviving children played, however. And the city they lived in offered strange wonders and attractions of its own now. The temporary housing was funny: there was one kind, very flimsy, called an Oklahoma house, with one room and an attic on top, and there was a round old lady living in one of them. Gertrude and the other kids liked to play outside the lady’s house and offer to do errands for her, in order to watch her go wobbling up the ladder to the attic, barely making it.
There was treasure to be hunted, too. Some men burying the guts of a sheep they’d killed had found a crock holding $6,500 in gold. The kids discussed who might have owned that money, and they started looking for finds of their own. If not a fortune, at least some fascinating objects: every yard had something; all you had to do was dig. In a single day, Gertrude once dug up a batch of old coins, three pennies, some nickels, and jewelry, including a shirt stud with a small diamond. Years after the flood, her sister Marie—once a baby with measles—was playing baseball with a bunch of boys and tripped while running to a base. She looked back and saw something shiny in the ground. It turned out to be a gold piece worth $2.50.
So the Quinn family, battered and set back, stayed in Johnstown. Diminished, they survived.
Rosina Quinn had always missed being in business. Now she started a new store, with James, and they did well. Rosina gained a reputation all over town for her complete grasp of commerce and great toughness in the matter of trade. It was said that nobody who dealt with her ever bested her in a bargain.
Gertrude Quinn grew up as the new Johnstown grew up. The family had no desire to leave. This city was their home, and James told Gertrude the day he found her on the Metzes’ porch, “We’ll be together.”
Victor Heiser, by contrast, had realized on the day after his amazing ride through the debris that at sixteen he was alone in the world. As those first days went by after the flood, he kept searching for his parents. But now he knew he was looking for their bodies, in hopes of giving them burial. He stayed for a time with his friend’s family, but he wandered the Johnstown wreckage, day after lonely day. He looked at hundreds of corpses. His anxiety, tension, and misery were extreme, but this was his task, assigned by himself, and he undertook it without stopping, for two straight weeks.
After a week, his mother’s body was found. The Heisers had a cemetery plot that had survived the flood, and while many of the dead of Johnstown couldn’t be identified, and were buried in a graveyard known as “the plot of the unknown dead,” Victor was able to have his mother buried in the family plot. The boy kept up the search for his father, but after about another week of restless wanderings through the pile, bleakly staring at the faces of the dead, he had to give up.
Sometime later, news came to Victor that his father’s body had been found, but nobody would let him look at it: the corpse was a grotesque mess. So Victor would never know whether his father’s body had been identified and buried or not. Searching the ruins of the family home he’d seen collapse when the wave hit, he found a wardrobe, and hung inside it he found his father’s blue Civil War uniform. That, and a penny in a pocket of the uniform, were all he had from his parents.
There was nothing to keep Victor Heiser in what had been the Johnstown he knew, nothing to anchor a life in the process of the great changes the city would now begin to undergo. Within a year Victor Heiser would be on his way.
Later, people would write about the Quinns and Victor Heiser and the other characters whose stories became well-known aspects of the Johnstown Flood literature, in part because both Gertrude and Victor would grow up to be good storytellers. Gertrude at last did become able to tell her story; one day she would publish a book about it. Rev. David Beale too wrote a book. In old age, Victor Heiser would give the writer David McCullough a long, amazingly clear interview on his experiences in the flood.
But there were so many other survivors, less advantaged than either Gertrude or Victor: perhaps less adroit in relating what had happened to them, perhaps less appealing to reporters at the time or since. Their stories were lost, or were less thoroughly documented, or went entirely undocumented. Their lives too were shattered in the flood. Some would stay in town, and some would leave. The struggles were so many and so hard—with more than two thousand dead, and so much property lost, literally everybody in the region was directly and acutely affected—that the people of Johnstown and the Conemaugh Valley, as well as the whole fascinated nation, had good reason to think that the perpetrators of such an overwhelming disaster were sure to be held somehow accountable.