Millions of historian David McCullough’s books have been sold, with two garnering Pulitzer Prizes and some made into movies or included as Ken Burns’s documentary resources. Yet McCullough’s writing career began with a focus on a long-forgotten tragedy that nearly wiped out a small town 57 miles east of Pittsburgh.
The thorough volume “The Johnstown Flood” celebrated its 55-year history last year, with the famous author still discussing his debut work before he passed in 2022. As is the case with all McCullough books, mesmerizing details abound due to accurate and attentive research. The acknowledgment page informs readers that the author pored over innumerable newspaper clippings, first-person accounts, letters, diaries, court records, engineering reports, and more to gain a comprehensive as well as sensory understanding of the events that befell Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on May 31, 1889.
From opening to closing sentences, McCullough takes readers to the place and time. Readers do not glean just historical insight; they experience it vicariously. “Again that morning there had been a bright frost in the hollow below the dam, and the sun was not up long before storm clouds rolled in from the southeast” is the book’s first line.
We see Johnstown laid out; meet some of the residents, store owners, and leaders; learn how the people of the steel-making town enjoyed Memorial Day; and then settle in for an impending rain. However, the storm was not the main problem. Shoddy workmanship and oversight of an upstream dam—made to create a lake for affluent, summering industrialists—became blue-collar Johnstown’s nemesis.
What happened when the dam broke and sent a wall of 20 million tons of water careening toward the town defies imagination. Onlookers who survived the calamity described the water as a “mountain coming” or “a large hill rolling over and over.”
McCullough wrote in chapter five: “Most of the people in Johnstown never saw the water coming; they only heard it; and those who lived to tell about it would for years after try to describe the sound of the thing as it rushed on them. It began as a deep, steady rumble, they would say; then it grew louder and louder until it became an avalanche of sound, ‘a roar like thunder.'”
More than 2,000 people perished in crumbling houses and businesses by drowning, or by becoming crushed on the town’s main bridge, which became a temporary stopgap piled with trees, debris, animals, buildings, and more. In short, it was a nightmare realized—a disaster that one reporter wrote afterward as something “no pen can describe.”
McCullough noted that “the Johnstown Flood had become the biggest news story since the murder of Abraham Lincoln.”
Because of the magnitude of the tragedy, after learning of Johnstown’s fate, people in and around Pittsburgh packed relief trains with aid, food, water, and volunteers. Within a day or two, “wagons loaded down with salt pork, bedding, goods of every kind, rolled down flood-gullied roads.” Doctors, nurses, and work crews took trains as close to the town as possible and then worked their way to Johnstown by foot or wagon.
Also, towns and cities situated safely away from the catastrophe, especially Pittsburgh, tended to an onslaught of survivors brought in from Johnstown. Sick, injured, traumatized adults and children were cared for, as were orphaned children. “People had dropped everything to help,” wrote McCullough. “Ladies groups were sorting clothes and packing medical supplies in church basements all over town.”
The book’s ending does not disappoint. Readers begin “The Johnstown Flood” by glimpsing the start of a normal day in a small American town, and they end the read trudging along with tenacious survivors three years later: “Then the choir sang ‘God Moves in a Mysterious Way,’ the monument was unveiled, and people started back along the winding road [from the cemetery] that led down into town.”
