Daily Tobacco Leaf Chronicle

MADE MAD BY GLANDERS.
A Lot of Human Driftwood from the Great Johnstown Flood.

I was going up Broadway the other day with a brave physician of Johnstown, Pa., one of the heroes who, oblivious of the fact that a majority of his relatives had been swept away to a horrid death, and that a slower but no less horrid death by pestilence menaced all who remained in that terrible charnel house, did not desert the stricken vale of death.

"Hello!" he said. "There goes Abe Murphy. I haven't seen him in many a day."

He pointed to a poor, broken down, dejected figure of a man, who, with head bent and muttering lips, was slowly shuffling up the street.

"Johnstown man?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Victim of the flood?"

"No; victim of the undertakers—like many another."

"Is he mad?"

"Crazy as a bedbug."

"You see," he went on, "when our great harvest of death took place Johnstown was simply paralyzed for means to house and identify its dead before burying it. At first there was no attempt, or only the slightest, at identification. Pittsburg sent a raft of volunteer undertakers, and the first and only thought was to get the bodies under ground and save the living from pestilence. But in time the thing was supposed to be organized, and men were paid to properly handle and register the corpses and care for their valuables as fast as they were brought to light. The way in which this work was done was shameful in the extreme. Not only were there wholesale robberies of valuables from the bodies of the dead—that is, the known dead—but the records were mixed up in a manner to make the heart sick. Men were buried for women and children for men, and then the numbers, as it seemed, were all put in a box and shook up, so that it became a lottery to find your loved ones, even after you had found a description which was reasonably sure to hit the case.

"Well, sir, poor Abe Murphy suffered. All his family, a wife and six children, went down in the flood, and he has only been able to find one child living, and he a big dunce of a boy. He worked like a good fellow at the time of the flood, saved several lives, and afterward turned in with a will to help to gather the harvest of bodies and do other labor which called for strong arms and a willing heart. Only now and then he would knock off work and go looking for his own among the dead. He was a big, strong fellow, and even the agony of his grief showed no signs of turning his head. But there came a time when he began to search among the lists describing the dead and their supposed location, and after awhile he came upon the description of his favorite daughter, which was so full and accurate that there could be no mistake about it. It bore a certain number in one of the cemeteries. Procuring the necessary authority and filled with hope, he went and had the grave bearing this number opened, and what do you think they found? The body of a full grown man! The cemetery officials sought long and earnestly to find the child, and many graves were disturbed. But there seemed a fate against it. Only Gabriel's trump will make that child come forth and answer 'I am here.'

"Later he had a similar experience with another child, and then with his wife. The latter, though, was merely a case of careless describing or of mistaken supposing on the part of Abe. But it was all the same to him by this time. His tortured mind had crossed the ragged edge of reason, and everything in the way of disappointment only added to his insanity, until it became incurable. What he suffered no man knows. He got to haunting the cemeteries and the dead houses until he became a nuisance, and finally the medical staff, assisted by the Red Cross funds, took him away and put him into merciful confinement. He is now harmless and shows no desire to go back to Johnstown, and, as he has a bit of property, he is allowed his liberty. His son is working on a farm in the west. The father has no interest in him."
—New York Herald.