Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

The drought that struck the West in the late 1880s did not occlude the entire continent. In the spring of 1889, the jet stream that had bypassed the West was feeding a thoroughfare of ocean moisture into the eastern states. In the mountains of Pennsylvania, it rained more or less continuously for weeks. The Allegheny and Susquehanna rivers became swollen surges of molten mud. Above Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on the South Fork of the Conemaugh River, a tributary of the Allegheny, sat a big earthfill dam built thirty-seven years earlier by the Pennsylvania Canal Company; it was, for a while, the largest dam in the world. Pounded by the rains, infiltrated by the waters of the rising reservoir, the dam was quietly turning into Cream of Wheat. On May 31, with a sudden flatulent shudder, it dissolved. Sixteen billion gallons of water dropped like a bomb on the town below. Before anyone had time to flee, Johnstown was swallowed by a thirty-foot wave. When the reservoir was finally in the Allegheny River, sending it far over its banks, the town had disappeared. Four hundred corpses were never positively identified. The number of dead was eventually put at twenty-two hundred—twice as many casualties as in the burning of the General Slocum on the East River in 1904; many more than in the San Francisco earthquake and fire; nine times as many as in the Chicago fire. The only single disaster in American history that took more lives was the hurricane that struck Galveston, Texas, eleven y...