Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever (35 page)

12
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., Fort Wayne, Indiana

Assistant Fire Chief George Jasper heard the news about the failed rescue at the orphanage. Jasper was directing the rescue work in Lakeside, a neighborhood in the city, but, alarmed, he immediately ordered several of his firemen to take six boats to the Allen County Orphans' home to assist in transporting the orphans to dry land.

1
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., Dayton, Ohio

The lunch hour came and went at the Beckel House. “Will try to give a lunch at four o'clock,” a staff member had announced shortly after breakfast, with the warning, “and that will be all we can give today.” As the Beckel House survivors discussed their ongoing, seemingly never-ending situation, everyone heard an alarmingly loud noise, and as they ran to the window, they saw that a drug store about half a block away had collapsed, and slowly, much of it began to float away. Moments later, there was another crash, and everyone heard a man across the street on a roof shout that three buildings south of the Phillips Hotel had just gone down.

Judge Jones believes it was 1:30
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., when a man near him said in a worried, low voice: “What if a fire breaks out?”

Almost immediately, someone shouted, “Oh, merciful God, there it is!”

Not three hundred feet away from the Beckel House, a column of flames climbed into the air. The floating remains of the drug store
were on fire, and it had crashed into St. Paul Evangelical Church about three hundred feet away, across the street. In the same block, to the east of the building that was now on fire within clear view of them, were three wholesale liquor stores. There was also a paint and supply store, a paint warehouse, a hardware store,
and
an ammunition shop. You couldn't find a more inviting place for a fire.

Everyone—guests, staff, and the refugees who came from the street the previous day—whispered to each other, possibly trying not to frighten everyone into a wild panic. Everyone was in agreement. The fire was going to spread from the church to the stores containing ample liquor, which would then turn into a fiery hell. This fiery hell would then take down the entire block and almost certainly leap across the oil-slicked, waterlogged street and take down the block of buildings that the Beckel House was in.

Everyone agreed. It was time to get as far away as possible from the fire, even if it meant that they would be tempting a watery fate.

Everyone started for the exit.

Everyone in the vicinity—not just the Beckel House guests, but the people in all of the buildings anywhere near the fire—started to move, some of them walking, many of them running, but all of them rushing from roof to roof, and when that wouldn't work, creating makeshift bridges. While the Beckel guests would head for the sturdy Callahan Building, many Dayton residents were making their way to the Beaver Building, a five-story concrete, fire-proof power plant that had been erected just four years earlier. By the time everyone had gathered there, the building housed three hundred men, women, and children, including fifteen babies.

Meanwhile, at the Beckel House, several people—probably the staff—collected Clarence Bennett, the dying owner, from his bed and carried him on a stretcher. A housekeeper, who had apparently been injured when the northeast corner of the hotel initially collapsed, had one broken arm in a sling, and she was going to somehow have to travel from building to building. There were possibly one or maybe two children among them as well, Jones would recall. Then everyone commenced what Jones called “a remarkable march of retreat. Some two or possibly three hundred persons clambered, climbed, and crawled from one end of the square on Third Street, from Jefferson
to Main. Just how it was done, in every particular, probably no one can ever tell. We got out on the roof of the Beckel annex. We went up and down fire escapes. We cautiously crossed frail-looking skylights. We scaled fire-walls. We took ladders along, and from slippery roofs went to open windows, passed through buildings, and from windows to roofs again. We reached a ten-foot alley. A ladder was pushed across it to the next building, and we crawled over, one at a time.”

Somehow, all made it across the ladder straddling the water-filled alley to safety, away from the encroaching inferno.

They reached the twelve-story Callahan Building, which was at the end of Main Street. They could go no further.

It was a tall, towering building, impervious—at least it seemed so—from collapsing in a flood, although everyone worried about that nonetheless. But the building, to the best of anyone's knowledge, wasn't fireproof, and just a few hundred feet behind the Beckel House group was what Jones described as a “roaring, leaping pillar of flame, devouring everything before it.”

The choices seemed pretty obvious. Stay and burn, or jump into the icy, muddy water and eventually drown, or fight the current for as long as possible and then die from the cold and exhaustion. Nobody seemed willing to burn to death, but nobody felt like trying the water. Not just yet.

2:30
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., Fort Wayne, Indiana

The river water was out of control. There were two opposing currents in front of the orphanage, creating a whirlpool. The fire department had strung two ropes up from the bridge near the orphans' home, allowing the boats to connect themselves by a pulley and make the trip in relative safety. Only it was hardly safe. It ensured that the current could not carry the boat itself away, but capsizing was still a possibility. Only the strongest oarsmen were making the attempt to reach the orphanage.

The police were now involved. Earlier in the morning, Police Chief Abbott had issued an order that anyone using a boat to save chickens, household goods, or some otherwise meaningless item compared to human life should give up their vessel immediately if it was needed.
Well, it was needed now. Abbott ordered all available boats to the orphans' home. Only three boats would remain in three other neighborhoods—Lakeside, Spy Run, and Bloomingdale. The rest were at the bridge, where the boats were being tied together to form a giant raft. He would soon give his okay for a life-saving crew from Chicago to come in and help, but they wouldn't be here for hours, and in the meantime, he would try to do what he could. He currently was overseeing an operation in which all of the boats in the city were being tied together to form a giant raft bridge that apparently the children could use to cross from the orphanage to dry land. It wouldn't work—it thankfully never got to the stage where any child attempted to use it—and the chief probably knew it was a weird idea, but he was running out of other ideas, options, and time.

Columbus, Ohio, 2:47
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.

Governor Cox, who was plenty concerned about the entire state, and the city he lived in, received word that the entire downtown section of Dayton was now on fire and would probably be destroyed.

The papers were full of equally dire news for Dayton. A boatman rescuer told a reporter that over at the courthouse, he saw bodies floating like logs.

Cox was feeling more than desperate. He ended up putting out the statement, remarkable by today's standards since few, if any, politicians would likely suggest something that might put ordinary citizens in harm's way: “Farmers and everybody who by any possible means can get boats to Dayton ought to do it this afternoon even at the risk of their own lives. I appeal through the United Press to all the people along the rivers leading into Dayton to try to get boats here. I appeal especially to the people at Troy, where I understand, there is a boat club. The buildings on Third Street in Dayton are now afire and people now in them are dying.”

Around 3
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., Dayton, Ohio

On Third Street in Dayton, the guests of the Beckel House were on the second floor of the Callahan Building and trying to come up with some way to avoid burning or drowning. Two of the men secured the tools, or makeshift tools, that enabled them to cut a cable in the
elevator shaft. They tied one end to the building and the other to what Jones called a “rude kind of scow,” a flat-bottomed boat, possibly created from the elevator, one would think. Wherever they found the scow, it worked well enough. The group sent the scow through a second-story window and into the water and managed to get it across the river to the old courthouse, where there was some high ground around and at least one person there, able to secure the elevator cable.

But the scow, which everyone envisioned being able to ferry each guest across, then capsized and floated away.

One man came up in a boat and helped further secure the cable, Jones would recall, but the man in the boat wouldn't stay and maybe couldn't. “His craft whirled away on the current,” wrote Jones, adding, remarkably, given how many rescuers were out and about in Dayton: “That was the only boat we saw during the flood.”

It wasn't for lack of trying, however. Fred Patterson, John H. Patterson's son, and a boat mate, Nelson Talbott, were trying their best to get to downtown, but the swiftly moving forces were too powerful and unpredictable.

“We penetrated almost to the center of the city,” Fred told reporters. “Everywhere persons cried out to us to rescue them, but it was impossible, for we were barely able to keep afloat. Large sums of money were offered us to take persons from perilous positions. The windows of the Algonquin Hotel seemed filled with faces and the same conditions prevailed at most of the buildings we passed. We did not see any bodies.”

Shortly afterward, Fred's father released a statement to the public, hoping someone with some influence would help them: “Our greatest need is a dozen motorboats and men to run them.”

Help would be coming. Governor Cox issued a telegram to the editor of the New
York Times,
saying that his motive for contacting them was to spread the word that Dayton needed everyone's attention. “Please give great publicity to our appeal for help,” wrote Cox. “My judgment is that there has never been such a tragedy in the history of our Republic.”

Cox went on to mention that the next morning at daylight, fifty boats would go into the business district from South Park. The naval
militia, with a hundred boats, was scheduled to leave Toledo at midnight. Yes, Cox was sending in the navy.

For now, though, Dayton residents, especially those downtown, were still on their own, which is how the Beckel House guests came to have an elevator cable stretched across the wild river street but no boat to cross it in. Three or maybe four of the strongest men in the group nevertheless grabbed on to the cable and struggled across it, each of them going across hand by hand, neck-deep in freezing cold water. Several times, they were almost ripped away from the cable but each man hung on until they arrived at the other side. Still, it soon became clear that virtually nobody else had the stamina and strength after two nightmarish days to try this method of escape. They were still stuck choosing between burning to a crisp or drowning in an icy current of filth.

3
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., Fort Wayne, Indiana

Chief Abbott tasked four Fort Wayne residents—Jack Miller, Bob Wartell, August Melsching, and Ed Hiatt—with taking three jugs of water to the orphanage. If that went well, they would return and take food to the children and adults overseeing them.

The police and fire chief sent a request to Winona Lake, Indiana, a popular recreational town forty miles northwest, which had a big lake and several boats. They asked for all the motor boats that they had so they could be shipped aboard a Pennsylvania train. Still, the chiefs realized that at the earliest, the motor boats wouldn't reach them until nightfall, which meant the rescue work would have to be done by lantern light. And possibly in the snow. As the four men ferried over water and food, a heavy blizzard hit Fort Wayne.

Somewhere in the afternoon, Chicago

The Chicago Association of Commerce wired $100,000 to the National Red Cross. It was just one of hundreds, if not thousands, of organizations sending money to the flood-relief cause.

Sometime in the afternoon, Peru, Indiana

Frank McNally and Icea Hesser, the seventeen-year-old he saved from drowning, were finally able to leave the tree that had been their home for the last twenty-four hours.

Climbing into the boat, the two must have asked their rescuers about Hesser's cousin, Delight. Nobody had seen her. Somehow it didn't matter to McNally that he brought approximately seventy-five people from danger and onto dry land. Long after he was warm and dry, McNally would keep thinking of Shields. The guilt was eating away at him. He would overcome his emotions, but not for a while. Weeks later, he would be put on a suicide watch.

But McNally wasn't the only one thinking of Shields. As word got around of her accident and other boats overturning, the local populace became terrified, causing some to make arguably irrational decisions. Indiana Senator Stephen Fleming, who was in charge of a relief train sent to Peru from beleaguered but in better shape Fort Wayne, observed at the time: “Many people are still in their homes in the inundated city, frightened at repeated capsizings of rescue boats working to and fro among the stricken homes, positively refuse to accept assistance and almost crazed by their fear, insist upon remaining in the houses, although many of them are standing in water in the second floors of their homes.”

But perhaps they were right to be so paranoid. There had been a lot of capsizing, not just with McNally, but other men like John E. May, a farmer from nearby Stanford, Indiana. He rowed all of Monday night and by Tuesday morning had rescued 122 people from their homes. Then around ten in the morning, a passenger ended up capsizing the boat—a woman who was said to have had a bird cage wrapped in a shawl, which may have contributed to the accident. Both the woman and May drowned. He wouldn't be found for another two days.