Logan Marshall

“ The scenes were full of human pathos. Torn bodies, disfigured almost beyond recognition, were being dug from debris. Whole families, marooned for four long days and nights in the upper stories of houses that had escaped as if by miracle, many of them without food or water and in fear of constant death by flood or flame, were being reached by rescuers.
Many of those rescued were in a critical condition from the long hours they had spent in the bitter cold—their clothing soaked by the incessant rainfall of three days and nights and no fuel or bedding with which to combat their fearful condition. ”

“ But there is something greater in its tragedy than all this—something greater than a great region where splendid cities, towns and humble villages alike are without resource—something greater than a region of broken dams and embankments and of placid rivers gone mad in flood, bridgeless, uncontrollable, widened into lakes, into seas. It is the hundreds of dead who died a hideous death, and the hundreds of thousands of living who are left helpless and homeless, and all but hopeless. ”

“ MEN THAT SHOWED THEMSELVES HEROES
But perhaps the finest thing of all is the memory of the heroes that showed themselves. When death and disaster, in the form of flood and fire, swept Dayton, John H. Patterson arose with the tide to the level of events. Patterson is the man, more than any other, who brought cosmos out of chaos. When the flood was rising and nobody knew what the result would be, John H. Patterson began to wire for motor boats. ”

“ The widespread calamity, which smote with its cruelest force the beautiful city of Dayton, is one of those for which no personal responsibility can be placed. Like the tidal flood which devastated Galveston and the earth upheaval which laid San Francisco in ruins, it is a convulsion which could not have been foreseen or stayed. ”

“ THE TERROR OF THE FLOOD
With the rest of the country, fair Dayton sorrowed for Omaha. Two days later Omaha, bowed and almost broken by her own misfortune, looked with sympathy across to Dayton, whose woe was even greater. A thousand communities in the United States read the story and in their own sense of security sent eager proffers of assistance to the striken districts. And not one of them has assurance that it may not be next. There is no sure definition of the course of the earthquake, the path of the wind, the time and place of the storm-cloud. Science has its limitations. ”

“ But the great hidden teaching of disaster is that the laws of nature are eternal and inexorable; that they move with unerring precision and resistless force. And this truth applies not only to the tremendous powers of the hurricane, the flood and the earthquake, but to economic principles, which are simply a translation into human terms of the laws manifested in inanimate nature. ”

“ Great as was the Johnstown flood, it shrinks into insignificance before the appalling hurricane-brought flood of Galveston, which devastated the city and swept thousands of its inhabitants to their death. There is little in the new city which arose to remind one of the awful tragedy—unless it be the strong sea-walls constructed to keep out future floods. ”

“ The shade trees that stood in the streets so trim and beautiful are all bedraggled and bent, their branches festooned with floating wreckage and all manner of offensive things, their leaves sodden, their trunks caked with mud. The streets are seas of yellow ooze. Garden fences and hedges are twisted or torn away. Reeking heaps of indescribable refuse lie moldering where there were smooth lawns and bright flower beds. The houses that stand are all smeared with the dirt that shows the height of the flood. ”

“ Dayton came out in force on Saturday to look around and judge for itself the extent of the tragedy that confronted its people. Business men with forces of assistants penetrated the business section and set about the task of learning whether they had been stripped of their possessions completely.
Haggard faces, worn out with sleepless nights and days of weary struggle and apprehension for the future, brightened with the flush of new-born hope as some of the searchers found that the flood had not proved completely disastrous for them. ”

“ The evening of Easter Sunday in Omaha was doubtless as placid and uneventful as a thousand predecessors, until an appalling roar and increasing darkness announced to the initiated the approach of a tornado, and in a few minutes forty-seven city blocks were leveled to the ground. The fairest and best built part of the city could no more withstand this awful force than the weakest hovels. ”

“ While a blizzard raged in Ohio from Cleveland to Cincinnati, with the temperature down to twenty-eight degrees above zero, the railroads—which means all the railroads in every section, the New York Central, the Pennsylvania, the Erie, the Baltimore and Ohio, and their allied lines—threw into the battle thousands upon thousands of men, trainload after trainload of machinery, and money rewards as a stimulus for the repair of miles of washed-out tracks and shattered bridges. ”

“ It seems horrible—it is horrible—to think of that yellow flood pouring into pleasant rooms where a few hours before the family sat in peace and fancied security—roaring over the threshold, swirling higher and higher against the walls, setting the cherished household treasures astray, driving the furniture hither and thither, drowning out cheerful rooms in darkness and death. ”

“ The tornado seemed to spring out of the southwestern part of the city as if it came from the swollen waters of the Wabash River. It first smashed into Gardentown, a suburb of the city, where a great many working people live, and every building in its path crumpled down before it. The lightning sped over building after building, setting many of them on fire. ”

“ The sympathetic response of the American people never fails to measure up to the summons of any calamity. Relief is plentiful and prompt. The awful story of the flood and tornado was no sooner told than the machinery of government, the organized forces of the Red Cross and individual efforts in every city within reach were co-operating to provide succor and supplies to the sufferers. Tents for shelter, cots, food by the trainload, hospital and medical supplies, were almost immediately on their way to the stricken district. ”

“ These are tragedies, too, that have prompted wage-earners all over the country to contribute to the relief of the flood sufferers a part of their own means of support that could ill be spared—soiled and worn bills and silver pieces laid down with unspoken sympathy by men and women and children, too, who wanted nothing said about it and turned and went out to face the struggle for existence again. ”

“ At midnight residents of Dayton watching the course of the flames from across the wide stretch of flood waters believed the fire got its new start in the afternoon in the store of the Patterson Tool and Supply Company, on Third Street, just east of Jefferson, whence it ate its way west, apparently aided by escaping gas and exploding chemicals in two wholesale drug establishments.
Throughout the night fires lighted the sky and illuminated the rushing waters. Fifty thousand people were jammed in the upper floors of their homes, with no gas, no drinking water, no light, no heat, no food. ”

“ At the height of the flood a house adjoining the factory took fire. There were no means to fight the flames. For several hours the factory was in peril, but a special providence protected it and it came out of both flood and fire unscathed.
"We were lucky," said Orville Wright, whimsically, on Monday. "It is the irony of fate that at the critical moment I was not able to get away with my folks on one of my own machines. However, we came through all right and there doesn't seem to be anything more to be said." ”

“ The fact is enough. It challenges, staggers, calls a halt, compels men and women to think—and even to pray.
But the flood did not confine itself to Dayton. It laid its watery hand of death and destruction over a whole tier of states from the Great Lakes to New England, and over the vast area to the southward which is veined by the Ohio River and its tributaries, and extending from the Mississippi Valley almost to the Atlantic seaboard. ”

“ Just for one moment think—we in our warm, comfortable houses, comfortably clad, safe, smiling and happy—of the half million of our fellow creatures out yonder shivering and trembling and dying, in the grasp of the "destruction that wasteth at noonday," swiftly pursued by "the pestilence which walketh in darkness." The leaping terror of the flames climaxes the terror of the harrowing day and the helpless, hopeless night of agony and sorrow and despair. ”

“ All day and all night strings of automobiles were going back and forth. Those coming to Dayton were seeking friends or relatives. Those going back had people to take back with them.
At night the temperature dropped suddenly. A blinding snowstorm and high winds followed close upon the fall of the thermometer. The blizzard weather caused added suffering. Survivors who escaped the horrors of a flood and fire stricken city at night were huddled roofless in an arctic storm. Countless men, women and children were marooned in the storm who had had no warm food or clothing since Tuesday morning. ”

“ How ghastly it is, you would have realized if you could have gone with the writer into the flooded districts of Ohio and Indiana, traveling from point to point in automobiles and motor boats, penetrating to the heart of the flood in boats even before the waters receded, and afterwards on foot. The upper floors of houses not torn from their foundations look all right, but it fairly makes you sick to see the waves of turbid water lapping at second floor sills, with tangled tree branches and broken furniture floating about. ”

“ Wherever civilization has exercised its beneficent influence upon the minds of men there is felt, for a little time at least, the sense that all humanity is one; that the strife of man against man and nation against nation is but a pitiful thing, and that we may better concern ourselves with trying to make the common lot brighter and so soften the rigors of the existence we all must face. ”

“ Generations must come and go before the Dayton flood will be forgotten, and standing out in bright contrast with all else there will perhaps remain longest the inspiring picture of the energy and fortitude with which the stricken residents set about the retrievement of their city from the devastation of the angry waters. ”

“ Governor Cox, of Ohio, estimated that the damage in Ohio alone by the recent floods was more than $300,000,000—nearly as much as the cost of the Panama Canal. The total cost of the recent flood is vastly greater than that of the Panama Canal!
The American Government can no longer stop to consider money in dealing with the problems of internal economy and of elemental humanity. The floods create an emergency as definite and imperative as war. It is time now to start some movement for the preservation of life and property against such occurrences. ”

“ As if the storm of Easter Sunday were not enough calamity, a blizzard-like storm descended upon the city of Omaha on Tuesday, adding to the grief and horror. The storm, which began shortly after midnight, and continued with gathering force, seriously hampered the work of rescue. More than three inches of snow covered the debris in the section of the city struck by the cyclone. It rendered uninhabitable the houses of many who had prepared to retain temporary homes in partly demolished structures. ”

“ If the great calamity stirred the hearts of the nation with pity, so did the prompt and splendid relief inspire enthusiasm.293 Even though the despatch of United States troops to the scene of devastation in the West lacked legal sanction the whole country unanimously approved the movement which thus itself becomes a signal to all nations, and a corroboration of the truth that the American is not hidebound by fantastic traditions when some serious achievement is to be done. ”

“ Of all the cities devastated by flood in Indiana, Peru was the most desolated. Situated on the Wabash River just below the entrance of the Mississinewa, it suffered more than any of the stricken cities through which the angry, swollen waters of the Wabash flowed.
"This probably will be the last message you will get from Peru," said the man who telegraphed to Governor Ralston on March 25th, asking for coffins, food and clothing. "Two hundred or more are drowned and the remainder of the residents are waiting for daylight." ”

“ Over in North Dayton, when the lowlands were inundated by the rush of the waters of the Mad River, the foreign population, which practically occupies that section, was driven to the upper floors and the housetops. With the extinguishing of the city's lights bedlam broke loose in various portions of North Dayton. Men in the frenzy of their trouble fell to desperate quarreling among themselves, and shots were heard at all hours of the day and night Wednesday and Thursday. ”