Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 22, Number 81, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 June 1901 — GHOULS STRIP FLOOD VICTIMS [ARTICLE]

GHOULS STRIP FLOOD VICTIMS

Law Officers Ordered to Shoot Pillager* in Pocahontas Valley. Human ghouls inf the form of desperate negroes and foreigners hovered over the stricken Pocahontas coal regiop ready to strip the (lead and injured of any valuables. The law officers and the militia had orders to shoot down any one found robbing a body or idlhiging a house. The dead,were buried in the best manner possible. No coffins being available many were put away in rude boxes made from , the debris lodged along the banks of the Elkhorn creek. Reports from the Clinch valley district, in Tazewell County, Virginia, say that the little town of Cedar Bluff, located at the junction of Clinch river and Indian creek, was almost entirely destroyed, seventeen houses being washed away, but no lives were lost. Tazewell and Giles counties, Virginia, have suffered equally with their sister counties in the dominion g but the number of deaths is small compared with those over the divide. Like Jolinstown. In many ways the crash came like it did at Johnstown. The pent-up waters suddenly descended down a channel whence they could not escape save by tearing everything before them in the rush to the rivers beyond. The basin, in which lies the Pocahontas coal fields, became a fierce ocean in which every billow was a maelstrom and every eddy a chapter of destruction. Two spurs of Indian Ridge inclosed this swirling host of Hoods. Elkhorn creek, which winds its way down this inclesure, liad lost itself among the seething seas that poured into the valley from half a hundred streams’. A series of electrical storms and cloudbursts preceded the deluge. To add to their horror, they attained their greatest violence between midnight and 3 o’clock Sunday morning. Darkness intensified the suddeu terrors of the valley from which, hundreds of the victims fled in vain. Finally, the Elkhorn, fed simultaneously by its mountain brunches, leaped over its banks and rushed down the valley, the crest of its flood waters spreading out until they touched the mountain walls on both sides. Dams collapsed with reports like thun

derclaps. Houses were engulfed and rolled into the torrent like so many pebbles. The rush of debris sped along the valley until the spreading mountain walls permitted the flood to drop its burden along the fringes of adjacent lowlands. Thousands of drenched men, women and children succeeded in making their way out of the watery jumble and fled into the mountains for safety.