Run For Your Lives! (June 1966 | Volume: 17, Issue: 4)

Run For Your Lives!

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Authors: David McCullough

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June 1966 | Volume 17, Issue 4

The southwestern corner of Cambria County, Pennsylvania, is high, burly mountain country with fast trout streams and miles of dark forest. The air smells clean and wonderful, even in the drab little coal towns tucked back in the hills, and the views are awesome, with far-off patches of green farmland under a sky filled with towering white clouds. Then, at Johnstown, it is as though the bottom dropped out of the old earth and left it angry and smouldering.
 
The city sits down in a great hole in the Alleghenies, along a gorge that is anywhere from 500 to 1,000 feet deep and has sides as steep as a sluice. It is shrouded in smoke most of the time, and you can hear it whistling and clanking from miles off. For, like Pittsburgh, which is seventy-five miles to the west, Johnstown is a steel center. Blast furnaces light up the sky at night; carloads of coal rumble along the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad within a few blocks of the tree-shaded town square; and the rivers, the Stony Creek and the Little Conemaugh, are the color of a new baseball glove.
 
The rivers meet at Johnstown. The Stony Creek flows in from the south; the Little Conemaugh drops down the mountains from the east. At Johnstown, they form the Conemaugh, which later joins the Kiskiminitas to the west, which in turn flows into the Allegheny above Pittsburgh. The rivers are really no more than big mountain streams.
 
Below “the Point,” where the rivers meet, a massive seven-arched stone bridge carries the Pennsylvania tracks across the Conemaugh. The bridge was built in 1887. It is one of the oldest structures in Johnstown and the city’s most haunting reminder of the horror that took place there seventy-seven years ago and gave to Johnstown, for better or worse, its fame as the Flood City.

The official memorial to the flood is up on the high ground, in Grandview Cemetery, where 777 white marble headstones are set out beneath a sculptured granite “Monument to the Unknown Dead.” These unknown dead are not quite a third of the people who died in the valley below, for in Johnstown, on Friday, May 31, 1889, within a few hours, more than 2,200 people were killed. The number of “missing” totaled 967.

The Johnstown destroyed by the flood was a bustling, two-fisted company town that seemed well on its way to farmland fortune. The company was the Cambria Iron Company, a fifty-million-dollar iron and steel empire that employed six thousand men, owned and operated its own trains, tracks, coal mines, and coke ovens, a company store, a woolen mill, a brick works, and some 700 houses for its mill hands. Its principal products were steel rails and barbed wire, the latter turned out in the Gautier Works, a subsidiary.

Before the Civil War, Cambria was the biggest iron works in the country. In 1861, the first Bessemer-type