The Johnstown Flood (6 page)

Then there were Robert Pitcairn and Andrew Mellon, two excellent friends to have if you were doing business in Pittsburgh. Pitcairn ran the Pittsburgh Division of the Pennsylvania Railroad, which, as jobs went in those days, was a most lofty position indeed. In terms of pure power and prestige, few men outranked him.

Mellon was a shy, frail-looking young man, still in his thirties, and exceedingly quick-witted. Along with his father, old Judge Mellor, he was in the banking business, T. Mellon & Sons, and up to his elbows in the financial doings behind much of Pittsburgh’s furious industrial growth. It had been the Mellons who lent Henry Frick the money to buy his first coal land, and who backed him again (with something like $100,000) during the panic of 1873 when he wanted to buy up still more. (One story has it that Judge Mellon, who was a staunch Methodist, made the loan only after Frick implied that he would use his influence to have the Overholt distillery shut down.) Frick and young Andrew were not far apart in age and became fast friends, traveling to Europe together, dealing in business for years, but never calling each other anything but Mister Frick and Mister Mellon.

James Chambers and H. Sellers McKee ran what they claimed was the largest window-glass works on earth. Durbin Home and C. B. Shea ran Pittsburgh’s leading department store, Joseph Home and Company. D. W. C. Bidwell sold DuPont blasting powder for coal mining. Calvin Wells, A. French, James Lippincott, and John W. Chalf ant were in the steel business in one way or other.

And so the list went. It included names from the Pittsburgh “Blue Book” (Thaw, Laughlin, McClintock, Scaife) and from the lists of directors of several Pittsburgh banks (Schoonmaker, Moorhead, Caldwell). There were among them the founders of the city’s new business club, the Duquesne Club, and the new preparatory school for young men, Shady Side Academy.

There were also among them, it is interesting to note, a future Secretary of the Treasury (Mellon, who would serve under Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover) and a future Secretary of State (Knox, who would be Attorney General under McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt before taking over the State Department under Taft). There was one future Congressman (George F. Huff, who was a banker and coal operator), a future diplomat (John G. A. Leishman, who would be America’s first Ambassador to Turkey), and a future President of the Pennsylvania Railroad (Samuel Rea).

Frick and Mellon would not only go on to amass fortunes of spectacular proportions, but would also demonstrate surprisingly good taste in putting together two of the world’s finest private art collections. Carnegie, who was already worth many millions, would wind up with more money than any other American except old John D. Rockefeller and would give away well over $300 million of it with no little fanfare.

In 1889, however, all that was still a good way off. The Carnegie whiskers had not as yet turned their glistening white. No palaces had been built for Carnegie or Frick on New York’s Fifth Avenue. No Rembrandt’s had been bought, no daughters married off to titled Europeans, no parks donated, no foundations established. Carnegie thus far had built only one of his free libraries, in Braddock, near Pittsburgh and the site of his gigantic Edgar Thomson works, which he had named after his old friend Thomson, who also happened to be his best customer. At the dedication of the Braddock library in March of 1889, Carnegie used the opportunity to say that he would certainly like to build another one in Homestead someday, but that there had been really far too much labor trouble over there. The implication was pretty obvious and suggested that the purpose behind these earliest benefactions at least may not have been altogether altruistic.

Good works, public service, and any ideas about giving away surplus money were all still things of the future.

It was in fact during the month of May 1889 that Carnegie was finishing up a magazine article to become known as “The Gospel of Wealth,” in which he said, and much to the consternation of his Pittsburgh associates, “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.” The gist of the article was that the rich, like the poor, would always be with us. The present system had its inequities, certainly, and many of them were disgraceful. But the system was a good deal better than any other so far. The thing for the rich man to do was to divide his life into two parts. The first part should be for acquisition, the second for distribution. At this stage the gentlemen of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club were attending strictly to the first part. Business was the overriding preoccupation for now, and business in Pittsburgh, either directly or indirectly, meant the steel business, which in 1889 was doing just fine.

True, orders for steel rails had tapered off some. Breakneck railroad building in the west had meant palmy days in the accounting offices along the Allegheny and Monongahela. Seventy-three thousand miles of track had been put down in the 1880’s, or more than twice as much track as there had been in the whole country when the war ended at Appomattox. Steel production had more than tripled during those ten years. But now there were also orders for all sorts of architectural steel, huge beams and girders for totally new kinds of buildings called “skyscrapers” which were going up in Chicago. In 1887 the Government had made its first order for American steel for ship armor. A new kind of Navy was being built, a steel Navy, including, in 1889, a battleship called the
Maine,
the biggest thing ever built by the Navy, for which Carnegie, Phipps & Company was making the steel plates.

And if the rail business was not quite as good as it had been, the United States was, nonetheless, producing about two tons of rails for every one made in England. As a matter of fact, for three years now, the United States had been the leading steel producer in the world. Pittsburgh, which before the war had not had a single mill as big as those in Johnstown, was now throbbing like no other industrial center in the land. The sprawling complex of mills in Chicago had been providing serious competition of late. Prices were not as high as the steel men would have liked to see them (they never were), and there was more talk among them every week about cutting wages. But if the labor leaders could be dealt with (and there was no reason to think they could not be), then there was every reason to believe that Pittsburgh would keep booming for years.

As far as the gentlemen of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club were concerned no better life could be asked for. They were an early-rising, healthy, hard-working, no-nonsense lot, Scotch-Irish most of them, Freemasons, tough, canny, and, without question, extremely fortunate to have been in Pittsburgh at that particular moment in history.

They were men who put on few airs. They believed in the sanctity of private property and the protective tariff. They voted the straight Republican ticket and had only recently, in the fall of 1888, contributed heavily to reinstate a Republican, the aloof little Harrison, in the White House. They trooped off with their large families regularly Sunday mornings to one of the more fashionable of Pittsburgh’s many Presbyterian churches. They saw themselves as God-fearing, steady, solid people, and, for all their new fortunes, most of them were.

Quite a few had come from backgrounds as humble as Carnegie’s. Phipps and Pitcairn were Scotch immigrants who had been boyhood pals with Carnegie in what was known as Slabtown, one of the roughest sections of Allegheny, across the river from Pittsburgh. Leishman grew up in an orphanage. Frick, despite the wealth of grandfather Overholt, had started out in business with little more than a burning desire to get rich.

They and the others were now living in cavernous, marble-floored houses in the new East End section of Pittsburgh. Several made regular trips to Europe, and those who did not always stopped at the finest hotels in New York or wherever else they went. They now considered themselves, each and all, as among the “best people” in Pittsburgh. They pretty well ran the city. They were living the good life as they thought the good life ought to be lived. But never for very long did they take their eye off the real business of the human condition as they saw it—which was business. That they should spend some time together in the summer months, away from Pittsburgh, but not too far away, mind you, seemed, no doubt, a perfectly natural extension of the whole process.

The reaction in Johnstown to their doings on the mountain was mixed. That the Pittsburghers with all their money should think enough of the country around Johnstown to want to summer there was, of course, terribly flattering. As far back as the 1850’s there had been some discussion in Johnstown about the area’s potential as a summer resort. One
Tribune
editor decided to set forth Johnstown’s charms in no uncertain terms. “Our scenery is grand beyond description,” he wrote, “the atmosphere cool, and invigorating; trout in the neighboring streams large and numerous; drives good; women beautiful and accomplished; men all gentlemen and scholars, hotels as good as the best.” For all anyone knew, the South Fork venture might lead to other resort developments in the area. The valley might become famous; property values would mount. It was not an unpleasant thought.

The club had already provided a lot of work in the South Fork area, and much to the irritation of the club’s management it had also provided some excellent sport for local anglers. Slipping onto the property in the early morning or toward sundown was no problem for a local man or boy. The well-stocked lake and streams provided any number of suppers in the neighborhood from the time the dam was first restored. The grounds were well posted, but that discouraged nobody especially. If anything, it only added to the fun.

When the club responded by putting in fences over the best trout streams, the fences mysteriously disappeared. Relations then deteriorated fast, with the club authorities threatening to shoot any invaders caught on the grounds after dark. During a flood in 1885, one farmer named Leahy, whose property adjoined the lake, decided to rent out fishing space on some of his submerged acreage. The clubmen said he ought not to do that and threatened to take him to court. This had no effect on Leahy, so they tried to buy him out, but he said he was not interested in selling. It was only after an intermediary was brought in, and lengthy negotiations transacted, that the farm was purchased for $4,000 and the fish thereby further protected.

Any love lost locally by such tactics apparently bothered the club management not in the least. A classic undeclared war between poacher and country squire went on for years. It never became a shooting war, despite the threats, but it did leave widespread resentment in the area around the lake that would one day come back to haunt the clubmen.

Far more important, however, was the way people felt about the dam.

Even before the first full season at South Fork got under way in 1881, the dam threw a terrific scare into the people in the valley. On the morning of June 10, during a flash flood, a rumor spread through Johnstown that the dam was about to break. This was the first spring in years that there was a head of water of any size behind the mammoth earth embankment, and it was the first of the many springs from then until 1889 that just such rumors would fly from door to door, across back alleys, up and down Main Street, and all along the line between Johnstown and South Fork.

This time the Cambria Iron Company sent two of its men to the lake with instructions to make a critical examination. The dam looked perfectly solid to the Johnstown men, and they returned home with their report in time to make the evening edition of the paper. The fact that they had found the water only two feet from the breast of the dam did not seem to disturb them especially, or the editors of the
Tribune.

The paper summed up its story as follows: “Several of our citizens who have recently examined the dam state it as their opinion that the embankment is perfectly safe to stand all the pressure that can be brought to bear on it, while others are a little dubious in the matter. We do not consider there is much cause for alarm, as even in the event of the dyke breaking there is plenty of room for the water to spread out before reaching here, and no damage of moment would result.”

There it was, in one sentence. In the first place, the dam was probably sound, and even if it did fail not a great deal would happen since the dam was so far away. It was a strange piece of reasoning to say the least, but there it was in the evening paper for everyone, including the alarmists, to read and talk about.

Still, that very night, panic swept through the west end of town, which was the lowest end of town and that part which would have been hardest hit by anything coming down the valley of the Little Conemaugh. People were up through the night “in mortal dread for fear the old Reservoir near South Fork might break,” the
Tribune
reported the next day. So apparently the paper could say what it might about “no damage of moment”; people were still unsettled, and especially on nights when the dark and the drenching rain blotted out the landscape and imaginations filled with an ancient terror of death raging out of the mountains.

But nothing happened. Dawn rolled around as usual; the day began. The long shadow of Green Hill slipped back from mid-town as the sun climbed into the sky; life went on. And it looked as though the paper and everyone who thought along the same lines were right after all. There was really no cause to get excited.

From then on, practically every time there was high water in Johnstown there would be talk about the dam breaking. One longtime resident was later quoted at length in the newspapers in New York and elsewhere: “We were afraid of that lake…. No one could see the immense height to which that artificial dam had been built without fearing the tremendous power of the water behind it…doubt if there is a man or a woman in Johnstown who at sometime or other had not feared and spoken of the terrible disaster that might ensue. People wondered and asked why the dam was not strengthened, as it certainly had become weak; but nothing was done, and by and by they talked less and less about it…” He also evidently had misgivings about the “tremendous power” of the men who had owned the dam, for he chose to withhold his name.