Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever (10 page)

Slocum was renamed Young Bear, raised by the Delaware, and in her late teens married a fellow tribesman. Apparently, he was killed and she married again, because her second husband was a Miami warrior called Deaf Man because he somehow became totally deaf between thirty and forty years of age. After the War of 1812, Young Bear, who had four children with Deaf Man, moved with her family to the Mississinewa River Valley in Indiana. In 1835, Young Bear mentioned her identity to an Indian trader, which eventually led to her being reunited with her brothers, who wanted her to come back to Pennsylvania. She didn't. She couldn't understand English, and as a woman in her early sixties, she was completely assimilated as a Miami Indian. She was, however, allowed to remain in the Mississinewa River Valley, with her immediate family while the rest of her tribe was pushed off to Kansas. Young Bear died in 1847 at the age of
seventy-four, over thirty years before Sam Bundy came into the world on August 31, 1881.

Bundy was assimilated among the white men, but he hadn't forgotten his heritage. He lived in Peoria, for starters, which was populated with Miami Indians. And when some of the Peru locals showed up at Bundy's doorstep in Peoria, he understandably wanted no part of plunging into the darkness and rowing his boat through the river. But the more he was told about the flood, and as he came to realize that this was truly unprecedented, he didn't need to be convinced. He said he would be happy to go, which is how at one o'clock in the morning, Sam Bundy came to sliding his boat into a wild river and found himself looking for people to save.

March 25, New Castle, Pennsylvania, midnight

There were ominous signs that some communities in western Pennsylvania might find themselves in the midst of a flood. It had been raining nonstop all day Monday, and the Shenango River and Neshannock Creek were rising. The latter took over Neshannock Avenue, East Street, South Mill Street, and several other roads, but that in itself wasn't alarming. It was an area of the city that always flooded during heavy rains. Still, city officials were warily on watch.

March 25, 1
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., Chicago

Ernest Bicknell's train finally pulled into the station, a full thirteen hours late. Exhausted, the Red Cross director had been keeping up with the news of the flood by talking to conductors and grabbing every newspaper he could get his hands on at train stations along the route. He had long since decided that as bad as things were in Omaha, the worst there was over and he was needed more in Indiana and Ohio. He stuck around in Chicago long enough to have a meeting with the officers at the United Charities of Chicago (the forerunner of a nonprofit that's now called Metropolitan Family Services). The officers then started raising money for the flood victims and within a few hours, several thousand dollars, clothing, supplies, and furniture had already been pledged or collected.

Bicknell doesn't say in his biography, but you have to think that he must have looked at his train, heaved a deep sigh, and wondered why
airplane travel wasn't fully developed yet. He boarded in any event, so he could once more travel through the flood-stricken lands of Indiana and Ohio.

1:30
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., West Liberty, Ohio

The railroads were well aware that flooding might swamp railroad tracks, and rivers had a way of weakening bridges. So that's how and why Phillip Henn, a 47-year-old passenger conductor, found himself, late at night and in the rain, inspecting a bridge for a train that traveled between Indiana and Pennsylvania. Henn was walking on the bridge, looking for trouble, and, boy, did he find it: one of the spans on the trestle collapsed, and he plunged into the Mad River below. If he screamed, nobody was there to hear it.

Shortly after, at 1:30
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., the Pennsylvania Railroad passenger train No. 3 came roaring toward the Mad River and onto the bridge that was now mostly no longer there. The engine fell through the rest of the bridge, and gravity brought at least several more passenger cars into the Mad River.

Incredibly, there weren't many deaths in the train crash. The passengers were able to stagger to their feet and climb out of the windows, shaken but alive. The engineer, James Wood, and the fireman, C. E. Tilton, were first into the river, but somehow survived. The brakeman, Elwood Howells, drowned.

Claibourne, Ohio, about 2
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Pearl Clifton Biddle, a 34-year-old family man and roofer specializing in tin, awakened to hear frantic barking. Biddle's dog slept under the back porch, and so Biddle opened the door, expecting a coyote, a cat, perhaps a burglar—but what he saw was much harder to comprehend.

His dog was in the back yard—swimming.

Biddle didn't let the surreal sight delay him for too long. He ran out into the rain and rescued his dog and waded out to his chicken house to bring his chickens in, probably with the help of his wife, Lillian, and their nine-year-old daughter, Florence. Once that was done, he raced to the pigpen, managing to steer seven piglets and their mother through the water and to his back porch. Then, leaving the animals behind on his porch, he ran through the neighborhood, a modern-day
Paul Revere on foot, warning of an impending danger, pounding on doors and waking up everyone he could find.

Biddle must have missed Alma Donohoe, sixty, for she woke up a few hours later. She discovered water lapping against the shore of her mattress, and terrified, she waded into her living room. She must have been amused—at least later when she thought about it—to see her kitten, floating in the room, alive and well, a passenger in a sewing basket. She and her kitten then hurried to her younger brother Joseph's home.

Miss Donohoe was fortunate, however. She escaped the flood with an amusing story to share with her family, friends, and hopefully Pearl Biddle.

Delaware, Ohio, about 2
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.

Approximately twenty miles southeast of Richwood, about the time Biddle was banging on doors, nobody in Delaware needed to be told that a flood was coming. The Olentangy River had taken over eight blocks of the town that resides twenty-seven miles north of Columbus, Ohio. Delaware's 45-year-old mayor, Bertrand V. Leas, who a few short years earlier had been a hardware store owner, first rowed his wife, Marie, and two young children, Florence and Bertrand Jr., to safety and then went back for his neighbor.

Samuel Jones, the patriarch of the family, wasn't there, possibly because he was back at the lumber yard where he was a foreman. Mrs. Sophrona Jones and her fifteen-year-old daughter, Esther, were at the house, however, along with at least two neighbors, Hazel Dunlap, twenty-two years old, and an unknown woman, possibly Hazel's mother. Guided by a lantern and the other lantern light from other rescue boats in the neighborhood, Leas began taking his passengers through the fast-moving current. The rain was dumping on them, and the water and sky were dark, but while they couldn't see what was out there, the sound of rain and rushing water and debris crashing by made it abundantly clear that maybe they were better off not knowing.

And then it happened just twenty feet later: a wave, crashing over the boat and knocking everyone into the water. Somehow, the mayor clung to Mrs. Jones and managed to keep her afloat until rescuers could get to her. But they couldn't get to him. Mayor Leas was swept away.

But not for long. He grabbed on to a rope hanging from the window of a lumber building and climbed up to the roof. Rescuers, however, thought he was a goner, and initial reports went to newspapers across the country that Mayor B. V. Leas had drowned, along with twenty other residents. The numbers were a little off, but they were grim nonetheless—it was probably closer to fourteen who died, and among them were three of the mayor's passengers: Esther Jones, Hazel Dunlap, and the unknown woman.

Deep into the night, still in Delaware, Ohio

Throughout the previous day in the college town of Delaware, Ohio, the flooding at first was subtle: six inches deep in some of the lower streets. But as the day wore on, it was a foot deep. By evening, the Olentangy River had covered the entire lower part of the town, with the second stories and roofs sticking out of the water.

Florence Wyman, a student at Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, later said that about two hundred young women in Monnett Hall, their dormitory, walked the floors and cried and prayed. Their university was on the highest hill in the town, but they were only a few blocks away from homes that were deluged. Even if the women closed their windows, they could still hear the water's roar and people, on their roofs, begging and screaming for help. Every once in a while, the young coeds would hear a woman shrieking, which everyone took as the sound of someone seeing a loved relative losing their grip or footing and falling into the water.

There were no boats at the university, and with it being dark, and the town drenched by what was now a cold drizzle, there was nothing anyone could realistically do until morning.

Tiffin, Ohio, middle of the night

It was still raining. People in the northern half of Ohio were recognizing the danger that they were in, and the streets of Tiffin were emptying. But it could be difficult to know what to do when your family wasn't together. Theresa Klingshirn, nine Klingshirn children ranging from a nineteen-year-old to a two-year-old, and her son-in-law, Ray Hostler, and a future daughter-in-law, Regina Ranker, were inside the house. The evening before, when her husband George left for
work on the night shift at the lime kiln, when it was apparent that the streets were dangerous but he believed the home was their sanctuary, the father and husband had put on his coat and stressed to the family: “In any event, do not leave the house.”

Mrs. Klingshirn listened. Even if he hadn't said those words, the 39-year-old mother might well have wondered where to go in the middle of the night and surely fretted that her husband might come to the house, believe they were still inside, and attempt to rescue them. But hearing that directive and probably something of a plea probably kept coming back to the whole family.

Staying put must have seemed like the wise course of action to remain where they were, even as several neighbors on East Davis Street packed up and fled; but Mrs. Klingshirn, Ray Hostler, Regina Ranker, and the rest of the children would have been far better off if one of the adults had persuaded everything to enact the old chestnut, well worn even in 1913: better be safe than sorry. It was an expression made for moments like these.

Columbus, Ohio, 3
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The first call for help to the police came in from a house on West Mound Street. The entire area, particularly the Hocking Valley railroad yards, was flooded. The authorities were ready for flooding, they thought. Columbus's weather forecaster had warned the city the evening before of possible flooding, and throughout the night, they had been patrolling the streets in the rain. Not that anyone expected anything all that serious.

Dayton, Ohio, 4
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Mr. E. T. Herbig, the traffic chief of the Bell phone exchanges, had issued orders to the operators to clue him in if anyone saw anything unusual; and having been wakened throughout the night by calls of water rising, the bleary-eyed telephone man came to the company to start work.

Still, people downtown didn't think a full-fledged flood would reach them. Fred Aring, a telegraph operator, noted in his diary that at about 4
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. on this day, “We had received meager reports from operators in north and south of Dayton that the Miami River had been and still
was rising rapidly.” But there were no levees in South Dayton, noted Aring, and so some flooding “was to be expected.… Certainly no general flood is expected.”

Dayton, Ohio, 4:30
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The Platt Iron Works' day engineer was roused awake by a neighbor who informed him that the water was spilling over the levees, and while it wasn't much, it was coming over faster with every passing minute. The day engineer made a few quick adjustments to his home—taking some family photos, valuables, or important papers upstairs—and raced to the plant, where he gave the night engineer and watchman the scoop. They blew the whistle for the next twenty minutes.

Many people heard it, as far as five miles away, but many people had no earthly idea what it meant. People like John P. Foose, a Civil War veteran, didn't know what was happening, but he looked outside at the torrential downpour, and, as he mentioned in a letter to his brother, he saw a troubling sight that gave him an idea of what was coming: “Across the street, the people were up and moving their things upstairs.”

About twenty minutes later, as the Platt Iron Works whistle sputtered to a stop, Foose's two daughters ran to the river to see what was happening. They came back to report that the water was as high as the levee. Foose and the family wolfed down a quick breakfast and began taking the rugs upstairs.

In at least one part of Dayton—a Mrs. Mildred Grothjan would recall years later—one man was walking the rainy streets, shouting through a megaphone, telling everyone to flee for the hills: a flood was coming. But nobody, according to Grothjan, believed him, and everyone in the vicinity remained in their homes.

Charles and Viola Adams awakened, not from the Platt Iron Works, although they were within range of the factory, and not from a guy with a megaphone. What made them sit up in their beds were the loud voices of neighbors outside their bedroom window; they were rapping on doors of the houses on their street.

Charles and Viola, hoping their eleven-month-old twins wouldn't wake up, dressed and went downstairs. They had an idea of what the
commotion was about. The night before, around nine in the evening, they had left their son and daughter with Viola's sister, Estelle, who had been visiting for Easter weekend, and they took a stroll with their umbrellas to look at the Great Miami River. The water was several feet below the levees, but it was obvious that it was rising. Still, they didn't think it would actually overtop the levee. Just a week earlier, the Great Miami River through Dayton had been 2.7 feet deep, and the levees were designed to hold the river at 25 feet. The highest the water had ever been was 21.8 feet.