.
There was a fear of going back to the vicinity of the town. Even the
people whose houses the water did not reach abandoned their homes and
began to think of all of Johnstown as a city buried beneath the water.
But in the houses which were thus able to afford shelter there was not
food enough for all. Many survivors of the flood went hungry until the
first relief supplies arrived from Pittsburgh.

Struggling to Live Again.

From all this fright, destitution and exposure is coming a nervous
shock, culminating in insanity, pneumonia, fever and all the other forms
of disease. When these people came back to Johnstown on the day after
the wreck of the town they had to live in sheds, barns and in houses
which had been but partially ruined. They had to sleep without any
covering, in their wet clothes, and it took the liveliest kind of
skirmishing to get anything to eat. Pretty soon a citizen's committee
was established, and nearly all the male survivors of the flood were
immediately sworn in as deputy sheriffs. They adorned themselves with
tin stars, which they cut out of pieces of the sheets of metal in the
ruins, and pieces of tin with stars cut out of them are now turning up
continually, to the surprise of the Pittsburgh workmen who are
endeavoring to get the town in shape.

The women and children were housed, so far as possible, in the few
houses still standing, and some idea of the extent of the wreck of the
town may be gathered from the fact that of 300 prominent buildings only
16 are uninjured. For the first day or so people were dazed by what had
happened, and for that matter they are dazed still. They went about
helpless, making vague inquiries for their friends, and hardly feeling
the desire to eat anything. Finally the need of creature comforts
overpowered them and they woke up to the fact that they were faint and
sick.

Refugees in Their Own City.

Now this is to some extent changed by the arrival of tents and by the
systematic military care for the suffering. But the daily life of a
Johnstown man who is a refugee in his own city is still aimless and
wandering. His property, his home, in nine cases out of ten, his wife
and children, are gone. The chances are that he has hard work to find
the spot where he and his family once lived and were happy. He meditates
suicide, and even looks on the strangers who have flocked in to help him
and to put him and his town on their feet again with a kind of sullen
ang