Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever (20 page)

Wangerin then suggested that they cross the bridge to look at the water from the other side of the river, but with the churning water splashing onto and over the bridge, Herbert and Oilar gave it an uneasy look and decided to pass on the idea. Wangerin didn't see a problem, however. This was a modern, sturdy bridge, after all. The asphalt pavement over the bridge, for instance, was an innovation when it had been built just nine years earlier, replacing a wooden predecessor that had lasted for sixty years.

Wangerin started across the bridge and was joined by Charles Burkhouse. Burkhouse, a 44-year-old carpenter who everyone called Charley, may or may not have been friends with Wangerin, but they were both born in Europe. One student would later refer to them as “foreigners,” perhaps not unkindly; but as men who were making their way through small-town America, they at least had that bond in common. Wangerin was born in Germany and had moved to the United States sixteen years earlier; Burkhouse originally hailed from Holland.

People, including college students, had been walking across the bridge all morning and throughout the early afternoon. Crossing the bridge may have seemed adventurous, but probably not dangerous.

Back where Wangerin had left Herbert and Oilar, they began talking with William F. Stillwell, president of the Henry Taylor-Lumber Company. The 56-year-old Stillwell, a native of Cincinnati, Ohio, had moved to Lafayette in 1877 and likely brought up the infamous 1883 flood that sent many families and business owners fleeing in West
Lafayette. But, still, the casualty level of the 1883 flood was blessedly low, other than the occasional hapless individual—an eighteen-year-old collecting driftwood around Indianapolis met his doom in the White River. Having seen his share of floods, Stillwell probably wasn't too concerned.

Instead, paying little attention to Wangerin and Burkhouse or the river beneath them, Stillwell and the others were watching their side of the riverbank. The water was chewing up the dirt, and mice and rats were fleeing, following their instincts and doing their best to avoid the rising flood. After observing the adventures of these rodents, Stillwell felt he had better things to do and left. A few minutes later, Herbert and Oilar heard a crash. Rather, they felt it. They said later that it was like being in an earthquake.

At least one pier—the vertical support that holds up a bridge—broke away, followed by two spans—the flat section between the piers that people and vehicles cross on. The bridge, in other words, was collapsing due to the erosion of the riverbank, engineers would later determine, and Wangerin and Burkhouse were both walking on the disintegrating structure.

Like the rats, Wangerin and Burkhouse's survival instincts took over. What was behind them was tumbling into the river, but what was ahead of them wasn't. They broke into a run.

They reached the levee that the bridge was attached to, just as the bridge behind them sank into the raging river.

But they swiftly skidded to a stop. Part of the levee, the part in front of them, had broken apart as well. So there was no bridge behind them, and the river now flowed on all sides of the piece of the levee on which they stood. Wangerin and Burkhouse were marooned on their own little dirt island.

But it wouldn't be an island for long. The river was now rushing past their waists.

The hundreds of horrified bystanders—a number growing exponentially with each passing minute—started screaming, yelling, and pleading for somebody to do something. Confusion abounded. Herbert and Oilar could see two men standing on a broken chunk of the levee but weren't sure if it was Wangerin and Burkhouse or two other unfortunate souls. City officials, now understanding what they were
dealing with, rushed to rope off the Main Street Bridge, lest they have people crossing during its collapse. In the chaos, two Purdue students who had come to see the river decided that they weren't going to stand and watch two men die. They grabbed a canoe.

Bystanders warned Leland Philputt Woolery, a 22-year-old freshman from Indianapolis, and George Beckwith Ely, a junior, not to go.

It was too dangerous, and the current was too fast and unpredictable, they were warned, but the young men couldn't be dissuaded by the rational suggestion that they could lose a fight against Mother Nature. Woolery, in particular, may have been on an adrenaline high. He had just been accepted into a fraternity, Phi Delta Theta, and would soon be initiated. His first year of college was going, well, swimmingly.

Leaving the Main Street levee, they rowed into the muddy brown mess that was now sixteen feet deep, with the onlookers fearfully watching. Then, about thirty feet from the new shoreline, a wave crashed into the canoe's side, and Woolery and Ely were pitched into the rushing rapids.

When Ely emerged from under the water, he spotted a roof—of a coal barn, it would turn out—and swam toward it. The crowd broke into cheers, and once he reached it, he fought to hang on to the roof. It took a while, but he managed to pull himself out of the water and scramble up the slippery slope. For the moment, he was safely above the water.

Woolery didn't have as much luck.

As the waves beat against him, he found the top of a tree, but he lost his grip when the overturned canoe crashed into him. Then the current sucked Woolery away from Ely and the coal barn and toward what was left of the Brown Street levee, where Wangerin and Burkhouse watched, incredulous.

Woolery was an agricultural student. It is possible that he didn't know how to swim, or, like most men of the time, couldn't swim well enough to save his life, especially in an erratic current and while weighed down with wet clothes, so it's also plausible that even an Olympic swimmer couldn't have defeated the Wabash River that day.

The thousands of people watching could only stare and shout in terror as Woolery was pulled through the river and then abruptly disappeared underneath the water. When he resurfaced, he seemed to be either unconscious or dead. Then the river took him again.

Later that day, Woolery's father, Frank, received a heartbreaking telegram from one of his son's soon-to-be fraternity brothers. Frank Woolery was informed that at 2:10
P
.
M
., his beloved son Leland had drowned in the Wabash River while trying to save two men.

The rest of the details were left to Woolery's imagination.

On the roof of the barn, meanwhile, Ely was standing on borrowed time. The river was climbing, six inches every hour, and lashing out. Ely didn't fear that the barn would be underwater any time soon, but if a steel bridge didn't have any hope against the Wabash, what were a barn's chances? Any minute, it seemed, the barn would separate into a million splinters, or eventually, given enough time, it and Ely would be swallowed by the Wabash River. Further down the river and still waist-deep in water, clinging to the levee's railing, Wangerin and Burkhouse were worried about the same fate.

By now, Ely's mother had been called, and she watched from the shore with the other residents. She was frantic, hoping against all hope that her son wouldn't meet Woolery's fate, and police captain John Kluth was well aware of her presence. It must have felt surreal. Everyone had been safely watching what was a curiosity, and now, within minutes, Lafayette had lost one young man and three more men's lives were in danger.

But Purdue University was known for its schools of agriculture, pharmacy, and engineering, and Kluth made all of the college's engineering students proud that day.

Kluth didn't feel he could send any of his officers in a boat to bring back either Ely or Wangerin and Burkhouse, not after what everyone had just witnessed. It would be a suicide mission. But Kluth surveyed the situation and thought he might be able to save George Ely.

Kluth noticed that a telephone wire ran from the shoreline to the roof of the office at the coal barn, and then all the way across the rest of the river to the Main Street levee.

First, Kluth directed his men to cut the telephone wire on the shore's end, across the river from the levee. Then an officer tied a rope to the end of the wire, and, shouting to Ely, they made it clear that he was to pull the wire until he had the rope on the roof. Then he was to untie the rope.

Once that was done, Ely had one end of the rope, and the police officers had the other. To the end of the rope that they had, they tied a boat. Ely soon understood. He needed to pull the boat through the waves and to him. Once he did, he could attempt to row back to shore.

It was a clever plan, but the waves whipped the boat so badly that it was soon clear that Ely would need the strength of ten men to pull the boat to the barn.

Kluth had another idea.

Meanwhile, one of Purdue's professors, a veterinary surgeon, Dr. Roy Birmingham Whitesell, determined that someone might be able to row out for Wangerin and Burkhouse if coming from another direction and leaving the shoreline at a point much closer to the two men. The thirty-year-old secured a canoe and embarked into the choppy waters.

Kluth was still putting his plan in motion. Either Kluth or one of the deputies got the boat back to the shore and thus had one end of the rope that led back to George Ely. From there, they tied a pulley to the end of the rope, and Ely was able to bring the pulley through the water and to his roof. Then Ely fastened the pulley onto the telephone wire that led back to the Main Street levee.

Ely climbed onto the pulley, and as Purdue's student newspaper would put it, he “made a slide for life.”

As soon as he reached the shore, Ely, assuming the best, asked where Leland Woolery was. Someone broke the news to him that his pal had drowned, and reality came crashing over Ely. He fainted. Then he was carried to a car, with, one hopes, his mother trailing after him. When the car Ely was in drove through some water at the edge of the river, just before speeding away, the crowd broke into a roar of applause and approval.

But the danger wasn't over yet. Wangerin and Burkhouse were still stuck on the Main Street levee, and Dr. Whitesell was risking his life, fighting the waves, doing everything he could to get his canoe to the two men. It took a while, but eventually, he reached them, and the men clamored into the boat. One hopes that they, or anyone else in the crowd that day, never walked across a bridge during a flood again.

2
P
.
M
., Middletown, Ohio

The bridge over the Great Miami River collapsed, after being hammered by house after house hitting it.

2
P
.
M
., Columbus, Ohio

On the west side of the city, a plant owned by the Beck Electrical Supply company burned to the ground, but adding to the confusion: for the longest time, firefighters—who were having trouble reaching any fire due to the rivers in the surrounding streets—thought it was the Barch Brothers' Junk Shop that was going up in flames. That alarmed everyone, because residents knew that if the junk shop went down, two more houses next to it would go, and then a carriage factory beside it.

It was a confusing afternoon.

True, most of the 120,000 residents of Columbus were either safe enough on the second story of a building or out of reach from the affected areas, but you couldn't travel far without finding some part of the city that was underwater. Two main rivers, the Scioto and Olentangy, travel through Columbus and meet up just west of downtown, and there were other waterways, such as Alum Creek, Big Walnut Creek, and Darby Creek, to contend with.

For the thousands who were in the water's way, it was a miserable existence. William Bard, a contractor, was rescued by a police officer from the second story of his home; but after their boat capsized, the two men had to wait at the top of a pile of lumber for an hour until another police boat could pick them up.

Albert B. Gore, who isn't an ancestor—not a direct one, anyway—of the future vice president, was a mail carrier and after finishing his morning delivery, he heard that his house was surrounded by water. The 54-year-old postal worker immediately dropped whatever he was doing and set out to rescue his wife and daughter. The only way he could envision getting to his house was to cross the Scioto Bridge, which was in danger of collapsing. Police officers tried to stop him, but Gore crossed and managed to find a boat and rowed six blocks to his house. He took his wife, Flora, and his 23-year-old daughter, Edna, away from their home, but not before promising a girl next door that he would come back for her. Gore brought his wife and daughter to the Rich Street Bridge, which had become something of a landing for refugees of the flood, and then he kept his promise. About two in the afternoon, he went back for the girl.

Flora and Edna begged him not to go back, but Gore insisted and perhaps his wife and daughter felt better when another neighbor or
friend, John Hughes, said he would go with him. But the extra help didn't help; Gore and Hughes's boat overturned. Hughes reached the shore. Gore never made it. What became of the girl Gore wanted to rescue isn't known. With any luck, she was able to huddle in her attic and wait out the flood.

Tempers were flaring. One man caught up with the police chief on the Rich Street Bridge directing rescue efforts and demanded that he send some officers to rescue his two sons, trapped in their flooding home. The chief said that they would have to remain where they were until they had rescued some women and children who were in greater danger. Next thing everyone knew, the man and police chief were slugging it out. Several officers pulled the father away, and while they were going to arrest him, they decided, under the circumstances, to just let him go.

But nobody could be rescued fast enough. After their house was destroyed, John D. Underwood, a carpenter, found himself climbing a sprawling elm tree near Green Lawn Cemetery, with his wife, Mayme, and four of their five children: Josephine, twelve, Albert, thirteen, and two more offspring, nineteen-year-old Francis and five-year-old son Edgar. (John Riley Underwood, twenty-one, was out and about, perhaps at work when the flooding began.)