miles into a vast charnel-house.

Johnstown is located on the Pennsylvania Railroad, seventy-eight miles
southeast of Pittsburg, and was at the time mentioned a city of about
28,000 inhabitants. It was the most important of the chain of boroughs
annihilated; and as such has given the popular title by which the
disaster is known. The Conemaugh valley has long been famous for the
beauty of its scenery. Lying on the lower western slope of the
Alleghany mountains, the valley, enclosed between lofty hills,
resembles in a general way an open curved hook, running from South
Fork, where the inundation first made itself felt, in a southwesterly
direction to Johnstown, and thence sixteen miles northwest to New
Florence, where the more terrible effects of the flood ended, though
its devastation did not entirely cease at that point.

A lateral valley extends about six miles from South Fork in a
southeasterly direction, at the head of which was located the
Conemaugh Lake reservoir, owned and used as a summer resort by the
South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club of Pittsburg. In altitude this
lake was about 275 feet above the Johnstown level, and it was about
two and one-half miles long and one and one-half miles in its greatest
width. In many places it was 100 feet deep, and it held a larger
volume of water than any other reservoir in the United States. The dam
that restrained the waters was nearly 1,000 feet in length, 110 feet
in height, ninety feet thick at the base, and twenty-five feet wide at
the top, which was used as a driveway. For ten years or more this dam
was believed to be a standing menace to the Conemaugh valley in times
of freshet, though fully equal to all ordinary emergencies. With a
dam which was admitted to be structurally weak and with insufficient
means of discharging a surplus volume, it was feared that it was only
a matter of time before such a reservoir, situated in a region
notorious for its freshets, would yield to the enormous pressure and
send down its resistless waters like an avalanche to devastate the
valley.

This is precisely what it did do. A break came at three o'clock in the
afternoon of May 31, caused by protracted rains, which raised the
level of the lake. Men were at once put to work to open a sluice-way
to ease the pressure, but all attempts were in vain. Two hours before
the break came, the threatened danger had been reported in Johnstown,
but little attention was paid to it, on the ground t