The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough

corrected had experienced engineers been responsible for the reconstruction is a question no one can answer.
    What it meant in practical terms was that the depth of the spillway was now only about four feet lower than the top of the dam at its center. In other words, if more than four feet of water were going over the spillway, then the lake would start running over the top of the dam at the center where the pressure against it was the greatest.
    The fourth change was unnoticed by Fulton because it had not as yet taken place when he made his inspection. The water then, as he says, was only forty feet deep, which is about the depth it had been kept at during the old days before the first break in 1862. The club, however, brought the level of the lake up to where it was nearly brim full, meaning that the depth ran to sixty-five feet or thereabouts. In spring it sometimes rose even higher. With the lake that full, it was not beyond reason to imagine serious trouble in the event of a severe storm.
    But, as both Fulton and Morrell had made abundantly clear, with the discharge pipes gone, the club was faced with the unfortunate position of not being able to lower the level of the lake, ever, at any time, even if that were its expressed wish.
    The water that high at the dam also meant that the over-all size of the lake was increased. The lake backed up well beyond where it had been in the old days, which lead to the widespread misconception, still current today in and around Johnstown, that the club had actually raised the height of the dam from what it had been.
    How satisfied Morrell was after the business of the letters was over and done with is not known. For when the sun went down behind Laurel Hill on Monday, August 24, 1885, Daniel J. Morrell was in his grave at Sandy Vale. He had been ill for several years, having suffered what appears to have been an advanced case of arteriosclerosis. He had gone into a steady mental decline not long after he took out his membership in the South Fork fishing club. In 1884 he had given up all his various civic responsibilities and retired from business. After that, it seems, senility closed in hard and fast. He was seen almost never, “lost in mental darkness,” as one account put it years later. When he died, “calmly and peacefully” at eight in the morning on Thursday, August 20, 1885, he was sixty-four years old.
    On Sunday thousands of mourners queued up along the south side of Main Street to go through the iron gates, up the long front walk, and into the big house to view the remains. For three hours the doors were open and a steady procession filed through.
    The next day, from noon until five, the whole town was shut down. The procession that marched out to the cemetery was as fine a display of the town’s manhood as anyone had ever seen. Ahead of the hearse tramped men from the Cambria mines and railroads, the rolling mills and blast furnaces, row on row, like an army, followed by the merchants and professional men, the police, the city fathers, men of every sort who worked for or did business with or depended on the Cambria Iron Company, which meant just about everybody. The only sound was the steady beat of their heavy boots and shoes on the cobblestones.
    After the hearse came the special carriages for the mourners. Bill Kelly and his wife were there; so was Captain Bill Jones, and a Cleveland steel man and family friend named Marcus Alonzo Hanna.
    There never was a bigger or better funeral in Johnstown.
    Two years later, on March 29, 1887, the day a wagonload of fruit trees arrived at his cottage on Lake Conemaugh, Benjamin F. Ruff died suddenly in a hotel in Pittsburgh. The cause of death according to the papers was a carbuncle on the neck.

“There’s a man came from the lake.”

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    The hard, cold rain that had started coming down the night before had eased off considerably by the morning of Friday, May 31. But a thick mist hung in the valley like brushwood smoke and