Batgrl (Book Data Kept Elsewhere)’s Reviews > The Johnstown Horror!!!: Or Valley of Death, Being a Complete and Thrilling Account of the Awful Floods and Their Appalling Ruin > Status Update

"...Shad Jones, a colored man known to every traveling man who has ever stopped at Johnstown for his ability to hold four eggs in his mouth and swallow a drink of water without cracking a shell." - Thank you Mr Walker (the author) for continuing to not be amusing. So glad to almost be finished.

"There would have been no flood if these rich men had not built an artificial pond in which to catch fish."

Clara Barton finally mentioned! The reason I've kept reading, was wondering if she'd be in the book at all. Red Cross has been mentioned twice before, one sentence or two, no real detail.

"With one train from the West came several hundred of the morbidly curious, bent on all the horrors which they could stomach." - disaster tourism.

"...because pestilence stalks in Johnstown, and the bloated, disfigured masses of flesh cannot be held much longer." - bodies were placed in many temporary areas, like the schoolhouse. A lot of the book is about bodies, their recovery, burial, worries about disease, etc.

"He closed with a bitter attack on the lazy Huns and Poles, who refused to aid in the work of relief and yet are begging and even stealing the provisions that are sent here to feed the sufferers." - hey look, it's not just the Hungarians, it's the Poles too this time. Has been mostly anti Hun so far.

Soldiers originally voluntered their services to Adjutant General Hastings to help with policing, protection from looters etc. - the Gen sent them away, apparently with rudeness. Now soldiers are ordered back in to help. Soldiers angry in that the need was there earlier as well as this pt days later. I'm now really wanting to read another (more reputable) source on this bit of military history.

Another reference to Hungarians and "outrages" - lots of stories about groups of this specific ethnicity and how they had been looting dead bodies. As this author is not great with the facts I wonder whether this group did indeed do a greater share of the looting or were already disliked locally.

"Men take queer souvenirs away sometimes. One came up the bank a short time ago with a skull and two leg bones, all blackened and burned by the fire." - judging from the previous chapters he's lucky no one shot him for looting.

"...swept from one end to the other as with the besom of destruction."