Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever (11 page)

At the worst, figured Charles, if the river overflowed the levee, it couldn't possibly go farther than the end of their street, Rung Street, based on what had happened during the last serious flood in 1898.

Still, the concerned couple decided that Charles could check out the Miami again and see what they were dealing with. He put on his overcoat, grabbed his umbrella, and headed out the door, leaving 33 Rung Street to walk several blocks to the river. The rain was unforgiving, and the sky still dark, but Charles didn't feel alone. The streets were full of people coming and going, doing the exact same thing.

Charles surveyed the river. It was as bad as everyone feared. In fact, the river, which was perilously close to coming over the 25-foot levee, would rise to 29 feet. Charles didn't know that, of course, but he was frightened.

Adams hurried back to his house.

Zanesville, Ohio, 4:55
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The electric power plant stopped working, and the bleary-eyed residents, many of them awake and watching the water outside their homes, were now in the darkness and facing an unseen enemy. Judging from the screams that could be heard throughout the city, some residents were either already in trouble or very, very edgy.

Columbus, Ohio, 5
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The police stations were now being overwhelmed with telephone calls, requesting help from people whose homes were flooded. Some police stations began calling the fire department, hoping for a little backup.

Dayton, Ohio, 5:30
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Dayton's city engineer, Gaylord Cummin, reported that the water was at the top of the levees. It was, he calculated, flowing at 100,000 feet per second. He predicted that the water would be overflowing the levees and appearing in the streets within half an hour.

In the northern part of Dayton, the levees began overflowing right about the time Charles Adams returned to his house. He didn't have to convince Viola that they needed to prepare for a flood. Charles's father, who lived nearby, had already come over to help his son's family. Charles's father was named John, and so we don't have images of forefathers in a flood, John Adams shall henceforth be referred to as Grandpa Adams.

Everyone went to work, prepping the house for the flood and developing a plan to leave before it came.

March 25, Dawn, Peru, Indiana

Mayor John Kreutzer, hearing that the Wabash River was rising about a foot an hour and hammering south Peru, asked for bleary-eyed volunteers to brave the rain and help citizens near the river move their belongings or leave for safer ground.

His request for help was heeded. Rescuers were out in force, as they were in communities throughout the Midwest. Sam Bundy had been out in his boat for several hours now, and Glenn Kessler, the man visiting his cousin in Peru who had heard the circus animals all night at the courthouse, was soon another. Indeed, the flood was doing plenty of damage—the bridge near Broadway Street was just about to collapse—and there were plenty of people who needed saving.

Edward Murray and his wife and kids were among them. Edward was awakened by the incessant barking of the family dog. Their pet—whose name and breed is unknown—saw the approaching water and recognized that something was very wrong (the water flooding into the first floor probably clued the animal in). The dog barked repeatedly, hurling his small body against his master's closed bedroom door until it opened. Edward and his wife Mary followed their dog to the windows and must have been flabbergasted and then full of fear. The house was surrounded by water.

By now, their twelve-year-old daughter, Mabel, and Edward's 77-year-old mother, Susanna, were also awake. Or if they weren't, they were once Edward opened the window and began shouting for help.

Their dog shouted, too, in his own way, barking furiously and placing his front paws onto the windowsill.

The Murrays were fortunate compared to many of the neighbors. It wasn't long before Edward, Mary, Mabel, Susanna, and their dog were scrambling into a rescue boat—possibly helped by Bundy, but there were many rescuers out and about—and being ferried to dry land.

Peru's town officials had already mobilized because the Murrays were quickly shuttled into a waiting motorcar. But it was then that the Murrays heard the tragic sound that made everyone sick. Just before the Murrays had climbed into the car, their dog had run underneath the belly of the vehicle, which was almost certainly an inexpensive car, possibly an Orient Buckboard, which had floorboards that were so flexible, they sometimes sagged and even occasionally, if there was enough weight in the car, were split into two. The Murrays, after clambering into the car and onto its floorboards, heard an agonized yelp from their dog.

Their beloved dog, their savior, who had scampered underneath the car, had just been crushed under their collective weight.

Water was entering the cages at the Wallace-Hagenbeck Circus. In the hay barn, where the deer, llama, kangaroo, camels, and other similar docile creatures lived, the river had already made its presence known, and some of the animals that had been roaring and crying out from their cages had already been drowned. The animals that were still alive were picked up by the circus workers and carried to a higher story in the barn, where there were dry cages.

In the room that housed the cats—including lions, a Bengal tiger, panthers, leopards, and a jaguar—the water was a few inches high but hardly life-threatening.

The elephants, on lower ground, would have begged to differ. Elephant trainer John Worden and his three assistants, John Clark, Jack Morris, and Charles Williams, waded in waist-deep water that was flooding the elephant barn, which was a foot below ground level. They apparently closed the door behind them, which was a mistake.

The elephants had been trumpeting furiously, but once they saw their trainers, they stopped. They stood obediently as the men held their breath, dropped under the muddy water, and removed the heavy chains that held the elephants' feet to the floor.

Worden called the elephants to fall in line, just as they had done so many times in rehearsal and for cheering crowds. They marched forward until they reached the barn door.

Then one of Worden's assistants let the big barn door swing open, which released a rush of water into the barn. Frightened, the elephants reversed course, stampeding back away from the entrance, only there was nowhere to go that was safe.

Worden started screaming their names, shouting for Tess, Nellie, Nancy, Bedelia, Josky, Jennie, Diamond, Satan, Baby, Trilby, Pinto, and Jumbo—twelve animals in all—to fall back in line, jabbing them with hooks, trying to steer them outside of the barn. Three times, the elephants did what they were told, only to draw back at the chilly wind. The barn was terrifying, but the elephants sensed that outside was no better.

Worden and his assistants were now in freezing water up to their shoulders. Worden suddenly felt his right leg cramp up, and he started to fall until he saw Nellie put forth her right foreleg, allowing him to climb onto it. He did, and Nellie, with her trunk, lifted Worden up to her back. To Worden's shock, he was able to lead Nellie outside of the barn and toward the two-story brick house where the circus trainers lived. The other trainers, giving up on the elephants, swam after Nellie and Worden.

The trainers all reached the house, on higher ground than the barn but nevertheless filling up with water on the first floor.

Nellie couldn't come inside the house, obviously. She remained outside and retreated back to the barn.

About an hour later, eight of the elephants, led by Nellie, returned to the house and decided that, well, maybe she could come inside. She and the other elephants beat against the doors and smashed apart the windows, but the house was too strong for them—to the utter relief of the seventy-five circus employees inside.

Worden and his trainers handed the elephants a bale of hay that they were going to use for some bedding for the employees, but once
they were out of food, the water was so deep on the first floor that they realized they had no choice but to run upstairs with the rest of the circus crowd. From the second-story window, Worden and his crew watched anxiously and helplessly as the elephants splashed around the house in the rain and increasingly deeper water and listened helplessly as they trumpeted for help. After a while, they noticed that there weren't eight elephants but seven, and then six. It was becoming increasingly clear that some of the elephants had drowned. Worden couldn't help but be pleased to see that Nellie, who he would always feel had saved his life, still wearily trudging through the water. He fervently hoped that somehow she would make it.

But the Wallace-Hagenbeck Circus had twelve elephants and not the eight that were encircling the house. The workers couldn't help but wonder: Where were the others?

Some of the people at the courthouse could have answered that. They could see several elephants, running loose through the water and looking for any place dry to go, or at least higher ground. Seven-year-old Mary Jane Ward also saw the elephants. She would grow up to be an accomplished author, her most famous title being
The Snake Pit,
which was turned into an acclaimed 1948 movie starring Olivia de Havilland. Ward wrote shortly after the flood of seeing escaped elephants thrashing in the water and described an altogether surreal scene. The boat took her and her aunt out of their house's bedroom window just as the new piano floated out the front door. As rescuers rowed them to safety, little Jane could see not just elephants but crying monkeys hanging from trees.

Daybreak, West Liberty, Ohio

Phillip Henn, the passenger conductor who had been checking out the bridge over the Mad River when it collapsed underneath him, was still alive. After his fall into the river, he grabbed on to some floating debris from the bridge and was carried about a half mile to another bridge, which he was able to grab hold of. With the water higher than ever, he was able to climb up the bridge—it wasn't a far ascent—and once he was up, he simply sat.

He didn't try to walk off the bridge. For starters, he had a broken leg, and he was weak from the cold and from losing blood. All he could do
was sit in a daze and wait to die. But even if he had been able to walk, the river had surrounded the bridge, on each end. It had washed out the middle of the bridge as well, just leaving the railings, one of which he was perched on, above the rushing river.

But as the sun came up, not that anyone could tell with the clouds and rain disguising it, several people spotted Henn sitting on the bridge, including J. Oliver King, a 22-year-old farmhand, and William Leib, a farmer a few days shy of his twenty-ninth birthday, and a man named Coran Grimes.

It would take several hours before they could reach him, and, of course, it didn't help matters when Henn passed out from the trauma, but King and Leib waded onto the bridge while hanging onto a rope, and brought the passenger conductor back to riverbank alive. Both King and Leib would be given Andrew Carnegie Heroism awards, bronze medals and $1,000, for their efforts, and several other rescuers in other communities were also thusly awarded. But there weren't enough medals to go around for the heroism that would be displayed over the next several days.

5:50
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Arthur John Bell
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was the division plant manager and came into his office the night before to be on hand in case flooding started putting telephone batteries out of commission or the power went out. It seemed like a proactive, responsible thing to do, and Bell didn't want to take any chances from a personal standpoint. He had recently been promoted from being a lineman, someone who repaired telephone lines, and wanted to prove to his superiors that they had known what they were doing when they had chosen him for this job.

Bell's instincts paid off because, sure enough, just before six
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Another important Dayton figure believed there would be a flood. John H. Patterson, president of NCR and recently disgraced executive, had been watching the river much of the night, perhaps thinking of
his impending jail sentence. He knew that Dayton was susceptible to flooding, having lived in the area his entire life. His family had been born and bred in Dayton and he and his family understood the power of the Great Miami River and its three tributaries, ever since his grandfather, Colonel Robert Patterson, moved to Dayton in the early 1800s. Colonel Patterson was an impressive ancestor for Patterson, who was born seventeen years after his grandfather's death, to look up to. He was the founder of the city of Lexington, Kentucky, and served with the famed General George Rogers Clark and about a thousand Kentuckians from the Kentucky militia and, among other military engagements, forced Indians from the banks of the Great Miami River in 1788.

In 1805 when the colonel moved to Dayton, he was awarded 2,400 acres of land, land he would pass on to his heirs and that would eventually become part of John H. Patterson's company, the National Cash Register Company.

Patterson had probably heard many tales about the flooding river from his predecessors, but he had also witnessed its power numerous times and once experienced it firsthand. In 1862, when Patterson was seventeen, Dayton had a flood that surrounded a house, and inside there was a family: Joseph Dickensheet, his wife Julia, and their six children, ranging from twelve down to six years of age.

Several neighbors had attempted to reach the house by boat, and all had failed. Stepping out of a crowd that had grown into the hundreds, Patterson and a classmate decided they would give it a try. Bystanders begged them not to go, but the teenagers insisted, and youth won out. Not only did they go, they reached the home, and the entire family was able to lower themselves out the second-story window, or perhaps climb off the roof, and into the boat. As the crowd literally went wild, Patterson and his friend steered the boat toward the shore, and everyone made it back safe and sound.