Rensselaer Republican, Volume 23, Number 50, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 August 1891 — The Lost at Johnstown. [ARTICLE]

The Lost at Johnstown.

1 The latest attempt to register the survivors of the flood at Johnstown,has resulted in failure. The difference be-tween-the total number of those-«ho, report themselves 1o be survivors, and the number of people Johnstown is supposed to have had before she was engulfed by the destroying ...wave, is only 1,000; and the list of dead from the various morgues aggregate 3,900. There is now no hope that the numbei who lost their lives through the bursting of the South Fork dam will ever be determined with any degree of accuracy. It is not probable that another attempt will be made to register the survivors. No one knows exactly how many people Johnstown had before the flood, and what is a more discouraging fact, there are people who In the presence of relief supplies and with the prospect of a division of relief funds are only too willing to figure among the survivors of once happy Johnstown. This is one of the weaknesses of human nature, and people in the Conemaugh region are no better than the average. A count of the dead handled at the morgues, and the findings of searchers for bodied in the river below Johnstown, will form the only reliable death record. And there are*- undoubtedly many bodies now slowly wasting away in the water, held down by sand or by rocks or snags. —Wisconsin.