The Mysteries of History (May 31 Edition)
Johnstown Flood; Tulsa Massacre
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” — Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana, 1905
“He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see.” — Alice O’Connor, 1961
1889 — Johnstown Flood
public domain image
On this date in 1889, over 2,200 people in Johnstown, Pennsylvania lost their lives in a terrifying and cataclysmic flood. The cause of the flooding was the collapse of the South Fork Dam above the city. That 900 by 72 foot earthen dam was the largest of its kind, which formed the then-largest man-made Lake in the Country, Lake Conemaugh.
Heavy rain the day before caused the spillway at the dam to become clogged with debris. An engineer on site, unable to remove the debris, sped on his horse into the nearest village to warn the residents there of the impending disaster. Unfortunately, though, he was unable to warn those in Johnstown in time as the telegraph lines were down.
When the waters burst forth, the sound was so loud that it could be heard for miles. All of the water from Lake Conemaugh hurtled downhill at 40 mph, sweeping up everything in its path. The wall of water and debris increased in size as it collected railroad engines, houses, boulders, trees and other vegetation, dirt, and victims — everything in its path.
Even the residents who were able to make it to the top floors of the taller buildings in Johnstown were sometimes pulled down into the raging waters by whirlpools that formed.
A bridge below the town built up with debris and then caught fire, causing many people who had been “riding” bits of debris to burn to death.
Five years later, Johnstown was rebuilt but, being located in a flood plain, it endured another disastrous flood in 1936, and then again in 1977.
The following is what I wrote about the Johnstown Flood in my book Still Casting Shadows: A Shared Mosaic of U.S. History — Volume 1: 1620-1913:
“We have first raised a dust and then complain we cannot see.”—Bishop Berkeley
He rides head first into a hurricane and disappears into a point
—from the song “Lost in the Flood” by Bruce Springsteen
“I think none was afraid to meet God, but we all felt willing to put it off until a more propitious time.”
—“Reverand” H.L. Chapman, survivor of the Johnstown Flood
. . .
The Johnstown Flood, one of the worst disasters in history, took place on May 31st. The amount of water unleashed was so massive and its power so enormous that people downstream from it in many cases didn’t even see any water coming toward them—instead, they saw only what the water was pushing along in front of itself: Megatons of dirt, mud, rocks, trees, houses, flotsam, jetsam, effluvia, as well as animals and humans dead, living, and in between.
To some, the onrushing mass appeared to be a giant black cloud. The sound was described by some as thunder-like. One man said, “It sounded to me just like a lot of horses grinding oats.”
Being situated at the bottom of a gorge at the confluence of two rivers, the residents of Johnstown were used to flooding. There was another danger, though, that apparently wasn’t viewed as an imminent threat—450-acre Conemaugh Lake fifteen miles distant from and above the city. Pittsburgh industrialists purchased the lake as a private fishing spot.
The earth dam that held back the waters (in normal conditions) had not been designed by an engineer. Although many did doubt its integrity, the view of most was that it was safe—after all, it had held for many years. Some even laughed aloud when told the dam was on the verge of bursting. A survivor of the flood, G.B. Hartley, later recalled: “Strange as it may seem, we were dis cussing the possibility of the dam breaking only a few hours before it really did. We were sitting in the office shortly after dinner. Everyone laughed at the idea of the dam giving way. No one had the slightest fear of such a catastrophe.”
Warnings were even sounded by those situated near the dam, but warnings about the dam had been given so many times in the past that when a telegram arrived from the nearest station up the valley, most paid no heed to it. The telegram read:
SOUTH FORK DAM IS LIABLE TO BREAK: NOTIFY THE PEO PLE OF JOHNSTOWN TO PREPARE FOR THE WORST.
Over time, the spillway had become clogged with debris and rocks. Thus, the lake’s waters had nowhere to overflow as the heavy rain continued, eventu ally raising the water level of the dam to its very top. Instead of overflowing in a controlled way, pressure built up until the lake finally burst its bonds, the tons of earth shoving the earthen dam outward. The formerly pent-up water then hurtled toward the town.
The amount of water unleashed into the valley was the equivalent of thirty six minutes of the flow over Niagara Falls. In his book “The Johnstown Flood,” historian David McCullough writes:
The water advanced like a tremendous wall. Giant chunks of the dam, fence posts, logs, boulders, whole trees, and the wreckage of the Fisher place were swept before it…George Lamb’s home [was] destroyed as swiftly as everything else. Lamb had been afraid of the dam but had not fled to higher ground until he heard the roar of the flood bearing down on him. He made a frantic effort to save two pigs but gave it up and got to the hillside with his family in time to see his house climb the face of the water, which, because of the narrowness of the valley at that point, was about sixty feet high. He watched the house roll and toss momentarily; then it was flung against the near hill and smashed to splinters.
A train engineer saw what was coming, and blew his horn in warning. Most did not have time to escape, though—waters rushing forty miles per hour deluged the city (and several smaller towns between the lake and Johnstown), carrying houses, animals, trees, telegraph poles, bridges, machinery, rubbish, and even locomotives—also miles of barbed wire when the deluge knocked over a wire factory and took its inventory with it, hurtling the tangled, spiky mass pell-mell down the valley.
Theoretically, based on the volume of water and decline in elevation, the f loodwaters could have reached ninety miles per hour. In actuality, though, the water moved in fits and starts. So much debris was carried along that it would sometimes create a temporary dam before the force of water behind it built up enough to again burst its bonds.
And although Johnstown was the largest community in the path of the f lood (it was a large enough city to have had three babies born on the day of the flood, two of whom were named Flood, and the other Noah), many towns were also affected (in some cases completed and literally wiped out). In Woodvale, a town with 1,000 inhabitants, 314 died.
As for Johnstown itself, McCullough described the scene this way:
As the wave hit Front Street, buildings began falling, one on top of another; some seemed to bounce and roll before they were swept downstream. Locomotives from the roundhouse went swirling about like logs in a millrace.…When the wave struck, it was probably about twenty-eight to thirty feet high, though, understandably, it looked a great deal higher to anyone caught in its path. The roundhouse was crushed, as one onlooker said, “like a toy in the hands of a giant.” The passenger trains were swamped in an instant.…Yard engines went spinning off, one after another.…Now several hundred freight cars, a dozen or more locomotives, passenger cars, nearly a hundred more houses, and quite a few human corpses were part of the tidal wave that surged on down the valley.
Most people in Johnstown heard, but did not see, the floodwaters approaching. The force of the air pushed out as a vanguard to the waters by that roiling mass was strong enough to blow over trees and small buildings.
An Associated Press writer who experienced the flood firsthand wrote of the urgency of escaping: “It was a race for life. There was seen the black head of the flood, now the monster Destruction, whose crest was raised high in the air, and with this in view even the weak found wings for their feet.”
Much of the debris carried downhill by and with the floodwaters stacked up against a stone bridge on the edge of town furthest from the lake, eventu ally building up into an island of refuge thirty acres in size. Those seeking ref uge there were disappointed, though: The wreckage caught fire, and an estimated eighty to two hundred perished in the flames. The theory is that oil in the debris leaked down into overturned coal stoves buried amid the mass of crunched houses and thus was the whole mass ignited.
After the flood finally subsided, the death total stood at more than twenty two hundred (some say the victims could have numbered as many as five thou sand), including ninety-nine entire families. One unlikely survivor was an infant who survived unharmed an eighty-mile ride in its bassinet, finally end ing up in Verona, a small town about ten miles upriver from Pittsburgh.
Some of the bodies were not recovered until years later; many may have never been recovered at all, as the force of the water sometimes slammed peo ple deep into the muck and mire.
In the aftermath of the disaster, the “class card” was played, with no holds barred. McCullough helped explain this in “The Johnstown Flood” wherein he wrote:
For an age which by no means looked upon pleasure as something to be expected in life, let alone life’s chief objective, the very fact that the lake had been put there solely for pleasure seemed almost more than anybody could take.
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania newspaperman J.J. McLaurin laid the blame squarely at the feet of the hedonistic club members who owned Conemaugh Lake (among whose members were found, perhaps most notably, Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick), as he wrote:
50,000 lives in Pennsylvania were jeopardized for eight years that a club of rich pleasure-seekers might fish and sail and revel in luxurious ease during the heated term.
Mining a similar vein, a man named Isaac Reed penned the following poem:
Many thousand human lives— Butchered husbands, slaughtered wives Mangled daughters, bleeding sons, Hosts of martyred little one, (Worse than Herod’s awful crime) Sent to heaven before their time; Lovers burnt and sweethearts drowned, Darlings lost but never found! All the horrors that hell could wish, Such was the price that was paid for—fish!
Despite the common sentiment against and widespread ire aimed at the rich “playboys,” specifically for their alleged negligence in failing to maintain their dam in a safe manner, the plaintiffs prevailed in none of the lawsuits brought against the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club.
Left: public domain image from wikimedia commons; right: image generated by Google Gemini
Questions: Is flooding possible in your area? Do you have a plan of what to do and where to go if such occurs? Do you have a “go bag”? Have you heard the Led Zeppelin song When the Levee Breaks?
1921— Tulsa Race Massacre
public domain image from wikimedia commons
On this night in 1921 in the predominantly negro Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma — an area jealously referred to as “Black Wall Street” by some — a thousands of whites arrived seeking vengeance to the damage inflicted on their self-regard inflicted by the affluence of the black businessmen in the area.
The crazed mob burned over 1,200 homes and businesses as well as a school and a hospital in a 35-city-block region of the Greenwood neighborhood, and killed hundreds of people, just for being there and showing them up, not unlike the German rage against Jews in the World War 2 era.
What “set off” the angry mob was a false accusation against a young black man. It was printed in a local newspaper that there had been an attempted rape in downtown Tulsa by a black man named Dick Rowland. In response to this rumor, the young white lady in question, Sarah Page, an elevator operator, denied any assault had taken place and refused to press charges against Mr. Rowland. It seems that what actually happened in the elevator was that Mr. Rowland had accidentally stepped on Ms. Page’s toe, causing her to yell out in pain, at which he, in a panic, fled (which was an indication of what he thought people would assume the cause of the outcry was and what they would then try to do to him).
For decades the Massacre was hushed up. Only in recent times has justice been sought, investigations carried out, and reparations made to survivors.
Questions: Had you heard of the Tulsa Race Massacre prior to reading this article? Have you read the book Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 : The History of Black Wall Street, and its Destruction in America's Worst and Most Controversial Racial Riot? What, in your opinion, was the prime motivator of those who initiated the violence — Racial Prejudice? Jealousy? Greed? Gullibility? Boredom? Something else?
