At five o’clock on Monday evening hundreds upon hundreds of citizens are arriving upon the scene. Coffins are coming in by the carload, and the result of philanthropic and necessary aid began to pour in.
The best story of the horror can be gathered from the tale of an eye-witness, C. W. Linthicum. Said he:
“My train left Pittsburgh Friday morning for Johnstown. The train was due at Sang Hollow at 4.02, but was five minutes late.
“At Sang Hollow, just as we were about to pull out, we heard that the flood was coming. Looking ahead up the valley, we saw an immense wall of water thirty feet high raging, roaring, rushing toward us.
“The engineer reversed his engine and rushed back to the hills at full speed, and we barely escaped the waters. We ran back three hundred yards and the flood swept by, tearing up tracks, telegraph poles, houses and trees.
“Superintendent Pitcairn was on the train. We all got out and tried to save the floating people. Taking the bell-cord, we formed a line and threw the rope out, thus saving seven persons.
“We could have saved more, but many were afraid to let go the debris. It was an awful sight. The immense volume of water was roaring along, whirling over huge rocks, dashing against the banks and leaping high in the air, and this seething flood was strewn with timber, trunks of trees, parts of houses, and hundreds of human beings, cattle and almost every animal.
“The fearful peril of the living was not more awful than the horror of hundreds of distorted, bleeding corpses whirling along the avalanche of death.
“We counted 107 people floating by and dead without number. A section of roof came by, on one of which were sitting a woman and a girl.”
Other tales by eye-witnesses confirm the fact that the horror has never been excelled by anything of its kind in history.
Indeed, it will never perhaps be known what the real extent of the awful calamity is.
Johnstown, with its former population of ten thousand or thereabouts, was almost entirely swept away when the awful floods came, and many of the villages between that point and Nineveh are things of the past so far as life is concerned. Indeed the whole valley is a veritable Valley of the Shadow of Death.
So great was the crush of the wreckage, debris and dead bodies, at some points along the valley that dynamite had to be used, thus adding to the horror of the scene.