Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever (34 page)

Fighting the river's onslaught, Gebhart swam to the telegraph pole, lunging for it and then wrapping an arm around Miss Hammond, whose grip on the post was loosening.

At the orphanage, Moore and Ormiston reversed course, helping their two girl passengers back out of the boat, so they could row toward Gebhart, Hammond; and the three little girls they were trying to save.

Twisted, Gebhart's back was pressed up against Miss Hammond's, one of his arms clinging to the telegraph pole, and the other to Miss Hammond.

Miss Hammond, meanwhile, held on to Della, Opal, and Kittie, telling the girls to keep their mouths shut and not to swallow the water. She shouted to Moore and Ormiston to hurry.

Moore and Ormiston rowed as hard as they could against the current, which kept smashing them back.

Miss Hammond felt Kittie Wise, who had had a death grip around her teacher's waist, slipping from under her arm to her back. Della, too, was struggling to keep her head above the waves.

Gebhart twisted his body around as far as humanly possible, so that he could barely make out little Kittie Wise, her arms hugging her teacher's waist. But Kittie was under the water and didn't appear to be moving.

Gebhart had no hands free to help Kittie. To let go with either hand would result in Miss Hammond, himself, and all the girls being released into the fast-moving waters. Sickened and panic-stricken, Gebhart realized he was watching Kittie drown a mere few feet from him.

He bent over, dunking his head under the water, using the one part of his body that was still available. He grabbed her clothing with his teeth. And he pulled.

But he couldn't pull hard enough, and after a moment, just as his strength and oxygen was giving out, Gebhart just knew:
She's dead.
And he opened his mouth, pitched his head back up, and, choking for air, turned to see Moore and Ormiston rowing toward them.

“Hurry,” screamed Miss Hammond, “I can't hold on much longer!”

As Moore and Ormiston rowed toward them, Gebhart endeavored to pull Miss Hammond and the girls closer to the telegraph pole, maneuvering himself so that with one arm, he was embracing the post and the teacher. With his free arm, he began loosening Kittie Wise's grip, to free her from Miss Hammond.

“Don't let her go,” begged Miss Hammond. “Take her in the boat, too.”

“I can't do it,” said Gebhart. “She's dead. We've got to let her go and save the living.”

Then he pried Kittie's hands off and released her to the river, which eagerly accepted her.

At about that moment, Moore and Ormiston rowed up beside them, struggling to keep the boat in, and Gebhart held on to the boat and the post, steadying the craft enough so that both men could pull up the girls, one of whom, Della, was now also limp and lifeless.

Next, they hauled Miss Hammond into the boat. Gebhart was going to follow, but the boat lurched free from the post and one of the oars hit him in the chest. Gebhart, clinging to the boat, managed after a few moments to pull himself into it.

Ormiston and Moore rowed everyone back to the orphanage where Mrs. Overmeyer was sobbing. Miss Hammond held on to Della, trying to wake her. Opal clung to Miss Hammond's muff. She was still taking care of it, just like she had been told.

Inside the orphanage, puddles collecting at the survivors' feet, Della lay on a sofa, unmoving. When Dr. Frank Dinnen opened her eyes, the pupils were rolled back.

10:15
A
.
M
., Dayton, Ohio

After enduring a night in total darkness, except for a two- or three-inch candle that was used sparingly, a man only known as Dr. Reeve, in a letter to his daughter, Lottie, in California, painted a grim picture of life in downtown Dayton.

“I am sitting at upper window, mother's room,” wrote the 87-year-old Reeve, who could see the Callahan building from his home. “Outside a raging torrent pours down Wilkinson street, another mighty river down Third Street toward west. No human being in sight—no signs of life. Below, in our yard on piles of wreckage, a fine piano. Yesterday, I had got breakfast at the Arcade and brought some to mother. Danger whistles had sounded before I was up, I supposed for breaking of levee; but I banked on the great flood of '66, when this house stood high and dry with all around overflowed.”

Reeve and his wife were stuck in their house with another couple, a Mr. and Mrs. Penfield, and he noted in his letter that he had recently seen a horse struggling in the current and pass by his home. He also had just come from his flooded first floor in an unsuccessful attempt to retrieve a lamp from the back office. The water had fallen four inches from the previous day, and so he took off his clothes and went down to the last step, “up to my arm pits in the cold water, but the room so full of floating furniture that I could not make my way to it.”

As for food, things were bleak, but Reeve and his wife and the Penfields were in part being kept alive by their neighbors. “All we have is some crackers, nuts and a few apples. This morning, some young men on the roof of the next house gave us coffee.”

Mrs. Penfield was able to reach over from their roof and grab the coffee from one of the men, stretching out to hand them a drink.

The black coffee, sans sugar and cream, was helpful to keep dehydration at bay, but, as Dr. Reeve lamented, they were otherwise in pretty poor shape: “We have no water, no light, no telephone connection, no cars, no papers—nothing.”

Of course, the Reeves and Penfields were hardly alone, especially when it came to food, which was in serious lack of supply throughout Dayton. Daisy Wallace, a resident of Dayton, held down the fort with her two teenage boys and her live-in father; her husband, Clinton, was apparently stuck at work. Mrs. Wallace managed to keep her family alive on Tuesday and Wednesday, but the cupboards were bare. This was, naturally, an age before refrigerators existed, and although many families had iceboxes, people didn't tend to store more than a day's worth of food in them. When the flood struck, the only food item in the entire Wallace household was a grapefruit. They were stuck in their home without food or drink, other than their grapefruit, for forty-eight hours.

At the Bell Telephone Company, the twenty women and fourteen men trapped were getting hungrier by the moment. The day before, around 4
P
.
M
., a cord was thrown from the building to the Y.M.C.A., and the staff there filled a basket with forty sandwiches inside, so that the telephone workers could then pull it slowly back to them. That had helped a lot, but it was, after all, one sandwich apiece, and
six additional split thirty-four ways, and by Wednesday morning, the telephone workers were famished once again. But this time, the Y.M.C.A. workers signaled that they had no more food to spare, and they had three hundred people trapped in their building.

March 26, around 11
A
.
M
., Fort Wayne, Indiana

Della was somehow revived. She was in shock, and Dr. Dinnen suspected she might be in the beginning stages of pneumonia, but for the moment she seemed to be in pretty fair shape. That evening, he would tell a local reporter, “Little Della is just chuck full of water.”

Dr. Dinnen also examined Miss Hammond. He felt Miss Hammond was in a state of shock and should be taken to her house in the next boat to leave the orphanage.

Less than an hour after Gebhart and Hammond reached the orphanage, they made another attempt to ferry the children away. This time, Henry Masterson and Private Charles Reynolds, an Indiana National Guardsman, were at the oars. Gebhart and Hammond were passengers, along with four boys from the orphanage who were given the now-dubious honor of being selected for the voyage. Harold Boggs, fourteen, Clyde Feightner, eleven, Glenn Baird, ten, and Burtan Rhoades, ten, climbed into their vessel.

The thinking was that three men in the boat might be able to protect the children more easily.

It went fine, at first. But as the boat reached the Broadway Street bridge, the current sped up, and as the boat came near to a house, there was a rope strung up from it to another house, and while Masterson, Reynolds, Hammond, and the young boys successfully ducked their heads, missing the rope, Gebhart wasn't so lucky. It caught him, so that while the boat went forward, he didn't, and suddenly the boat capsized once again, with its passengers pitching into the water.

Masterson and Gebhart emerged from underneath the rushing water first, finding the water shallow enough that they could stand and pull the boys onto the porch of a store. Theresa Hammond had, as the boat toppled over, lunged for the rope and clung to it. Private Reynolds, however, missed grabbing it, and if he had a chance to stand, he could not find his footing, and the current whipped him away down the street.

George Young, a Fort Wayne resident, suddenly became part of the story. He was watching everything unfold from across the street and immediately made his way through the water, hanging on to the rope, heading toward Miss Hammond. Another man on the scene, Clyde Siples, set his sights on trying to save Private Reynolds. And if Reynolds's plight hadn't been so perilous, Siples might have laughed.

Reynolds, flailing and traveling fast down the water, grabbed hold of the first thing he could find: an outhouse.

He kept trying to straddle it like a boat, but it was, it was later described, like trying to step onto a rolling barrel. But he hung on to the outhouse, his weight and legs slowing the outhouse down. Siples was able to reach both in his boat, and Reynolds scrambled aboard.

They both rowed toward the Henche shop where George Young and Theresa Hammond were waiting with Gebhart, Masterson, and the four boys. The dripping-wet adults surveyed their surroundings and progress. Four boys were shivering and soaked, but no longer trapped at the orphanage, which was something positive. Still, four girls were dead, and fifty-four orphans were still marooned. Gebhart, Reynolds, and Masterson rowed back to the orphanage and conferred with Mrs. Overmeyer, Dr. Frank Dinnen, and the other officials, deciding that with two capsized-boat incidents behind them, for now, despite the rising water on the first floor, and the safety of the structure in doubt, the orphans and their guardians would stay put after all.

Morning and into the afternoon, Peru, Indiana

The Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus was furiously trying to adapt to the rushing water and save their animals. The cat trainers spent their morning putting in platforms that they built for the animals to stand on, over the water, which was rising six inches every hour.

The trainers left, hoping they had found a way to save their animals, but as the day went on, they didn't feel very good about their chances. Still, they had done what they felt they could do. They couldn't just let the animals loose on Peru. There were already some rogue elephants out there.

But the platforms weren't enough. Most of the lions, tigers, leopards, and panthers drowned in their cages, a tragic ending for animals that
had once roamed the lands of Africa. But there were a few exceptions. Three lions named Sultan, Brutus, and Mitch somehow outlasted the flood on their platforms, and the polar bears probably enjoyed the chilly water—they certainly acted as if they did, trainers later noted, and Big George, a hippo that lived in a big tank in the corner of the elephant barn, managed to come out just fine. The trainer in charge of Big George told reporters that the hippopotamus had remained under water for twelve hours at a time—an impossibility, as thirty minutes is a hippo's biological capacity—which makes one wonder about this guy's experience in working with hippos. Expertise aside, however, at least Big George came through, especially when there was so much other carnage.

The Bengal tiger rammed his body against his cage repeatedly, creating a hole large enough for him to crawl through and escape certain death. It would be lovely to say that then the Bengal tiger rallied the surviving animals, cornered Captain Emil Schweyer, the trainer who had caught them in Africa and brought them to this flooded no man's (and animal's) land, and then given the man a piece of their minds. Or at least that the tiger escaped to the surrounding forests and lived a happy life feeding off deer and fox. But instead, after all of the Bengal tiger's hard work in smashing an opening in his cage, the animal lunged into the awesome force that was the river.

Not even a Bengal tiger could beat it.

Sam Bundy, meanwhile, was still saving lives all over town. On Wednesday morning, March 26, 1913, Bundy hadn't taken a rest since 1
A
.
M
., March 25.

Bundy's physical prowess impressed the community. He seemed to have no fear of the water, and really, he didn't. But he respected it.

Bundy's method was to steer his boat closer to the river banks, where the current was slightly less wild. It meant he had to travel across more water than if he stuck it out in the middle, and it could take more time, but Bundy was getting results and avoiding the catastrophic boat capsizing that other, rasher rescuers were dealing with. At this point, locals were keeping track of how many people Bundy had saved in his boat. The number was closing in on a hundred.

12
P
.
M
., Zanesville, Ohio

City officials, for some time now, had been watching their historic Y-shaped bridge, which crossed both the Licking and Muskingum rivers, knowing it was in its final hours. It was first built in 1814, 99 years earlier, although it had been rebuilt a couple of times due to damage from smaller floods since the 1850s. Realizing it was going to collapse completely and create further havoc downriver, city officials decided it would be better to control the collapse and effectively euthanize it. Dynamite was laid out, and the resulting explosion was, naturally, heard for miles. It probably saddened the officials to blow it up, but with no bridge floating downriver and crashing into homes, it was an act that may well have saved some lives.