The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough Page A

overhead the sky was very dark.
    Even before night had ended there had been signs of trouble. At five o’clock a landslide had caved in the stable at Kress’s brewery, and anyone who was awake then could hear the rivers. By six everyone who was up and about knew that Johnstown was in for a bad time. The rivers were rising at better than a foot an hour. They were a threatening yellow-brown color and already full of logs and big pieces of lumber that went bounding along as though competing in some sort of frantic race.
    When the seven o’clock shift arrived at the Cambria mills, the men were soon told to go home and look after their families. By ten there was water in most cellars in the lower part of town. School had been let out, and children were splashing about in the streets with wooden boxes, boards, anything that would make a boat.
    One of the most distinguished residents of the lower part of town was the Honorable W. Horace Rose, Esquire, former cavalry officer, former state legislator, former district attorney of Cambria County, a founder of Johnstown’s Literary Society, father of five, respected and successful attorney at law. Rose was a Democrat with a large following among Republicans as well as his own party, and including those Republicans who ran the town and Cambria Iron. He was an expert horseman, slender, erect, and full-bearded, with strong blue eyes and a soft voice which he seldom ever raised.
    He had been born in a log house that had stood at the corner of Vine and Market. At thirteen he had been orphaned when both parents died of cholera within the same hour and had been on his own ever since, first as a bound boy in a tannery, later as a carpenter. When he was nineteen, John Linton, Johnstown’s leading lawyer, took him into his office to “read law.” Not long after he opened his own office, which he built himself, and got married to Maggie Ramsey of Johnstown. Then came the war, during which he was wounded, captured, and released in time to take part in General Sheridan’s Shenandoah Valley campaign.
    The house Horace Rose and his family lived in was downtown, on lower Main Street. He had witnessed nearly every one of Johnstown’s floods over the years, and when he heard that the rivers this particular morning were both coming up rapidly at the same time, something they had not done before, he decided to go out after breakfast and see how things were going.
    By the time he and his two youngest sons, Forest and Percy, had finished hitching the team, there was water on the stable floor. Rose took care to use his second-best harness and had one of the boys drive their cow to the hillside, expecting to bring her back down again in a few hours, when the water subsided. Then they climbed into an open wagon and headed down Main, with Rose driving.
    His intention was to pick up anyone toward the river who wished to be evacuated. But by now, which was somewhere near nine, the water that far downtown was too deep to get through safely. So he wheeled around and headed back up Main, going as far as Bedford, where he paused to pass the time with his old friend Charles Zimmerman, the livery-stable owner. For a few moments they watched another cow being led to higher ground.
    “Charlie,” Rose said, “you and I have scored fifty years, and this is the first time we ever saw a cow drink Stony Creek river water on Main Street.”
    “That’s so,” Zimmerman agreed. “But the water two years ago was higher.”
    About then the rain started coming down again as hard as it had during the night, heavy and wind-driven. Rose stopped off long enough to buy his sons rubber raincoats, then proceeded over to the end of Franklin to his office, which was less than a hundred feet from the roaring Stony Creek. For another half-hour he and the boys set about placing his papers and other things well above the flood line of 1887, which was about a foot from the floor. Then they started for home, stopping once more on the