Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever (24 page)

Viola Adams couldn't shed her overcoat, which may have been what kept her alive. It was suggested later that the coat, spread out over the water, kept her buoyant. Still, as she fought the deadly current, she kept going under and swallowing water. But somehow, a man named Dudley Artz, manning a boat and rowing against the current on Warder Street, spotted her and came to her rescue just as Viola was going under the water for a third time.

If someone was going to be drowning and seconds mattered, you couldn't pick a better person to scoop you up. Artz was a charter member of the nearby Stillwater Canoe Club, and neighbors watching reported that he somehow rolled Viola, waterlogged overcoat and all, into his boat without any significant water going into the craft.

Once ashore, a Dr. D.E. Miller took immediate charge of Viola, but after it was clear she didn't have any water in her lungs, Dudley Artz
and Miller had trouble finding anyone to take the young mother into a house, where she could get warmth and rest. Artz's brother ended up accepting her.

Charles, Jr., meanwhile, had been separated from his mother and, like a ragdoll being carried by the current, washed down Warder Street and onto Geyer Street, and that should have been that for the little baby, but he had a guardian angel in another rescuer in a boat, an Elbert Riley who had two women in the back of his boat. Riley was fighting for his and his passenger's lives, trying to steer clear of a whirlpool that was creating an island of lumber and debris. Just as he was clearing it, someone from some apartments—the Folsom Apartments—shouted:
“Get that baby out of the water!”

That voice, which would never be identified, saved Christopher, Jr. Riley looked down into the water and for a second, he could see an object under the surface, sinking and heading into the whirlpool. Taking an oar out of its socket, while trying to avoid being sucked into an eddy, was an incredibly brave and risky move, but Riley decided to chance it. He stretched his oar right where he thought the baby might be. When he raised the oar, he discovered it had caught the baby, scooping him up, flat on his stomach.

Riley pulled the baby and oar into the boat and quickly dumped the wet, dying infant into the laps of the women, who screamed.

Riley shouted at them to hold the baby in their laps, so that the baby was face down, allowing any water to possibly spill out of his mouth and lungs. Then he threw the oar back into its socket and rowed as hard as he could, trying to keep them all from crashing into the whirlpool and its pile of debris.

When they reached dry land, Elbert Riley and his passengers must have been stricken. The infant he had fished out of the water wasn't breathing. But Dr. Miller was nearby and feverishly began trying to get the water out of the lungs of Charles Otterbein Adams, Jr. For what seemed the longest time, Miller kept at it, while a miserable crowd watched. Then suddenly the baby offered a little cry, and for the doctor and crowd, it was the happiest sound imaginable.

Stunned to hear that Viola and Charles, Jr. were alive, Charles pushed himself up, enough that he could look over the side of the boat. About a block away, he could see a woman in a boat, wearing a
black coat, whom he assumed was Viola. What shape she was in, he didn't know. He didn't see Charles, Jr., but he took the men's word for it that his son had been rescued. The idea of asking the men to take him to his wife and son apparently didn't occur to Charles, or, more likely, everyone recognized that they just couldn't, given the current and Charles's current condition. He was in no shape to do anything.

Grandpa Adams was just as wet and cold as Charles but probably drew strength from seeing his son exhausted and then euphoric again and knowing that Viola and Charles, Jr., were nearby and alive. Grandpa Adams told Korn and Marquardt to take him on to the landing on Geyer Street. He would find them.

At Uncle Ottie and Aunt Fannie's house, it became a group effort and family activity to get Charles warmed up. Uncle Ottie gave Charles a rubdown with liniment. He also put some liniment in some water and gave it to Charles to drink. It would never be advised today to drink liniment, a liquid often used to help muscle fatigue, but back in the day, ads for products like Sloan's Liniment would suggest: “For growing youngsters, give 10 drops of Sloan's Liniment to ten youngsters in half a pint of moist mash twice a week only. Put five drops of Sloan's Liniment in every quart of drinking water.”

The ingredients in Sloan's Liniment included turpentine.

It didn't seem to hurt Charles, however, who remarked that what he really needed was a shot of whiskey. The family then got Charles, who was shaking violently, into a bed between woolen blankets.

It didn't work, he soon realized. He couldn't sleep. His mind was likely too littered, wondering where Viola and Charles were and thinking about poor Lois. His legs were also in pain and still freezing.

Charles climbed to his feet and tried to walk, hoping to improve his circulation. But his pacing did little good. He soon decided to climb back into bed.

March 25, 4
P
.
M
., Delaware, Ohio

There was one bit of good news that papers were able to report to their readers. Mayor Bertrand V. Leas of Delaware, Ohio was seen marooned on the second floor of a building surrounded by water. He wasn't dead, as had been believed. Rescuers were doing what they could to reach
him. He had, at this point, been sitting on the roof of this building for the last fourteen hours.

March 25, 4
P
.
M
., Indianapolis

The water had risen enough that streetcar service and water service had ended, and, because there was no water, the city would have to do without fire protection as well. Fire Chief Charles E. Coots eventually would resort to bringing a cistern, which is often used to catch rainwater, and, with a machine called a pumping engine, his men could pump water from the cistern through a hose. It was a crude way of fighting fires, but it was better than nothing.

But all in all, Indianapolis was holding its own. It had stopped raining earlier in the day, and while the rivers, particularly the White River, were rising, the streets weren't yet flooded.

The electric and gas were still on, although many people worried that if there was, say, a gas explosion, that lack of a functioning fire department might be a problem. If there was good news for anyone in the city of Indianapolis, which had an estimated six square miles of its downtown underwater, it may have been for the hotel owners. By nightfall, due to an influx of residents driven from their homes, the hotels were now full. Their existing guests, the ones who had come before the flood and who weren't going anywhere, tended to book for another night as well.

One hotel guest who wasn't happy to be spending the night was Ben Hecht, the cub reporter from the
Chicago Journal.
He had arrived in Indianapolis only to be told that the trains weren't going anywhere remotely close to Dayton, which was about 115 miles to the east. So Hecht found himself holed up at the Claypool Hotel, sitting in the barroom with a crowd of other reporters. Train service was expected to resume the next day. For the moment, the reporters drank, and Hecht listened to tales of adventure from other, older journalists.

He was frustrated to be trapped in a hotel, but he enjoyed the stories. Hecht admired his fellow journalists deeply and idealized his chosen profession. As he wrote years later, “No other profession, even that of arms, produces as fine a version of the selfless hero as journalism does.… A good newspaperman, of my day, was to be known by the fact that he was ashamed of being anything else. He scorned offers
of double wages in other fields. He sneered at all the honors life held other than the one to which he aspired, which was a simple one. He dreamed of dying in harness, a casual figure full of anonymous power; and free. For the newspaperman, the most harried of employees, more bedeviled by duties than a country doctor, more blindly subservient to his editor than a Marine private to his captain, considered himself, somewhat loonily, to have no boss, to be without superiors and a creature always on his own.”

Hecht, listening to his fellow journalists, came to a decision that he kept to himself. He was going to Dayton, train or no train.

Approximately 4
P
.
M
., Tiffin, Ohio

Jacob Knecht, a fifty-year-old sausage maker who worked at the Beckley Meat Market, was trapped on his house with his two sons, Clarence, a 25-year-old with a promising future at the U.S. Glass Company, and Wilson, fifteen years old. Jacob's son-in-law, George Schwab, twenty-two and just four days shy of his twenty-third birthday, was also on the roof.

For many people, the roof could be a sanctuary; but as people in Tiffin were finding out, many houses only had a matter of time before they were washed into oblivion.

Rescuers had determined that they couldn't do anything for Knecht and the young men. The icy water, they calculated, was moving at sixty miles an hour.

The force was too much. People from dry land and from their own homes watched in horror as the Knecht house cracked from its foundation. The entire house exploded into splinters, wood, debris, and memories. Only the roof remained as anything recognizable: it had turned into something of a raft. All four men began screaming for help that their neighbors couldn't give.

They didn't have much chance to ponder the surreal turn of events or to try and enjoy the ride. Up ahead, they could see their fate.

They were headed right for the Huss Street Bridge.

It was dismal luck. Later, the bridge would wash out, and if it had washed out earlier, maybe things would have ended differently for at least some of the men. But because it was there, all four men realized that they didn't have much of a chance if they smashed into it.

So about twenty feet before that alternate fate, the men jumped off. Nobody ever saw Clarence, Wilson, and George alive again.

Jacob Knecht, on the other hand, emerged on the other side of the bridge alive and embraced the top of a willow tree and remained there.

Just outside the United American Mechanics' National Orphans' Home, the man in charge of it, a Mr. Simpson, tried to swim to Knecht, but the water was either too cold or too evil-looking to spend any real time in it. He quickly returned to the riverbank.

Adolph Unger, a West Point cadet, tied a rope around his waist and charged into the freezing water. He attempted to swim, but either his line was too short or the water too wild. He couldn't make it closer than 150 feet and returned to land, a chilly, wet mess.

Men gathered along the shore, throwing out every idea they could come up with to reach Jacob, but fifteen minutes after grabbing the willow tree, freezing and weak, the sausage maker knew he was about to succumb to the inevitable.

“Thanks, good-bye, boys, I'm—” and then the water forced its way into Knecht's mouth, obscuring his last words. He was swept into the river.

After the Knecht house went down, the people watching the Klingshirn house, mostly full of children, became even more determined to somehow get the family out. Considering the Klingshirns could see the Knecht house go down, they must have been even more frantic afterward. Tiffin residents Harry Houck and Don Souder embarked in a boat, with a rope tied to it, to help keep them from losing control and being sent down the current.

Everyone watched, excited as Houck and Souder showed everyone how a rescue was done. They were fighting the waves with their oars, paddling with everything they had, but it was working. Their rowboat was forty feet away from the house. Then thirty. Then twenty-five.

At twenty feet, the rope snapped, and Houck and Souder were sent downstream. Fortunately, they managed to steer themselves to safety.

Houk's son and another neighbor then took off in another rowboat, with another rope tied to them, and approached the house next door to the Klingshirns. They reached the Hostler house, right next door.

Everyone began cheering as the two young men reached the second-story window. Mary Hostler climbed into the boat, holding her baby,
Madeline, swaddled in a heavy blanket. Then they successfully made the perilous journey back to land and into George Klingshirn's arms. Watching them reach land must have been encouraging to the Klingshirns and Ray Hostler watching from next door. Mary and Madeline were Ray's wife and daughter, and Theresa Klingshirn's oldest daughter and granddaughter.

But Houck's son and O'Connell could not navigate their way to the Klingshirns. Even though they were right next door to the Hostlers, in the manner that the current ricocheted off their house, it was too powerful for anyone to reach. George Klingshirn, watching all of this, was visibly horrified, but since he didn't climb into a boat himself, he must have recognized the futility of trying to reach his home. Everyone would have to hope that the foundation of the Klingshirn house was stronger than the Knechts' home.

March 25, late afternoon, Peru, Indiana

The river was four feet deep in the streets surrounding the courthouse and nearby businesses, which might not have been so terrible had the rapids not appeared to be moving as fast as a locomotive. Actual trains, as it were, weren't able to get within two miles of the city; in fact, the train dispatcher for the L. E. & W. Railroad, reported that his office was unusable due to the high water inside: the tables were floating.

Residents, meanwhile, were doing everything they could to ensure the tables were turning. Frank McNally, a 37-year-old butcher, brought his canoe up to a fast-submerging house where two seventeen-year-old cousins lived, Icea Hesser, and Georgia Delight Shields, who had just moved in. Shields's mother, Mattie, was in the house, as was the head of the household and her mother's employer, Thomas Lovatt, a 68-year-old wealthy manufacturer of farm plows, and possibly his seventeen-year-old son, George. It was a complicated household: Lovatt had had an affair in 1896 behind the back of his wife Louisa and kept up his dalliances for several more years until she had had enough and divorced him. From there, he seems to have hired Mattie, who was herself a divorcee, to manage the household.