AMONG the workers in and about Johnstown, at the time of the disaster and for days afterward, none, perhaps, deserve honorable mention more than the telegraph operators. For them there should be a special chapter of history. The story of the operator at Johnstown, Mrs. Ogle, and her heroic death at the post of duty, has already been told. There were, says a writer in the New York Sun, other operators in the signal towers and small offices further up the valley who did as nobly, although the story of their deeds has not yet been printed further than the mention of their deaths. But the more immediate gratitude of the general public is due to the men who took the places of these old operators and sent out the news of the disaster, for which the people were so hungry during the first ten days after it happened. Telegraphic work was never done under more unfavorable circumstances than those which surrounded the young fellows who went out to Johnstown at the first news of the calamity, and stayed there, working night and day until the rush was over and the office re-established in comfortable quarters. They worked side by side with the newspaper men through the misery and discomfort of the first few days, and they deserve highest credit for the complete and accurate stories of the calamity that were furnished to the public in all parts of the country.

    The flood wiped the telegraph lines out of existence for seven or eight miles through the Conemaugh Valley, and damaged them greatly all the way into Pittsburg. Communication on the night of the disaster was restored over a few wires as far as Sang Hollow, three miles from Johnstown, but nothing like regular service was possible until the next day. Then operators were got as far as the south end of the railroad bridge, and linemen strung a few wires over wrecked poles, trees, and houses to the same place. One of the four or five buildings left standing near that end of the bridge was a small shed, used once for a coal bin, and later for the storage of oil. It was about ten by fifteen feet inside, and high enough for any ordinary man to stand up-right in it. There was a door which would not shut, and a square hole in one side did duty for a window. It was a very dirty, very damp, and very dark hole, but it was the best that could be obtained, and within half an hour after reaching the spot, the operators were at work within it. Boards, set up on barrels and other supports around three sides of the shed, did for desks. Almost anything, from a nail-keg to a piece of scantling set on end, did for a seat. Seven wires were got into this shed by Sunday, and seven men were there to operate them, but it was rarely that over two or three of the wires could be got to work at the same time. The hasty manner in which they had been strung, and the continuous stormy weather kept the wires breaking down as fast as a force of linemen could find the trouble and fix them up.

    When the newspaper men from the East began to arrive on Monday afternoon, the wires were working pretty well, but the operators, who had been on duty for twenty-four hours, constantly sending press matter for Pittsburg and private messages by the hundreds, were completely exhausted. The Sun men were the first to begin to file stuff for the East. The chief operator groaned, and the other operators writhed as they saw the matter begin to pile up, but they didn't beg off nor even miss a tick at the prospect of twenty-four hours of solid work that loomed up before them. The worst that any of them did was to breathe a few heartfelt prayers for the eternal salvation of “those plugs at the other end.” The only grumbling, in fact, that was done during the whole of this long stretch of work was at the poor quality of the operators at the Pittsburg end of the wires, whose incapacity, augmented by the unusually hard work, was something to send a first-class sending operator wild, and was the principal cause of what delay there was in sending press matter from Johnstown.

    As the darkness came on the trials of the operators were doubled. There was no light to be had at first, except from bits of candles set on end; afterward one or two miners' lamps, and finally a real lantern and a naphtha torch were added to the illuminating properties of the office. All together they gave about as much light as two ordinary gas jets. The copy was written on all sorts of paper with all sorts of lead pencils, by all sorts of men, under all sorts of unfavorable conditions. It was a weirdly, variegated, and distressingly illegible lot of manuscript. The operators were so exhausted that they could scarcely retain their seats on their rude benches and stools. They were so blinded by the poor light and the long hours of work that they could scarcely see the manuscript. The wires were heavy, and were grounded frequently by the wind and rain. Everything went to Pittsburg, and the receivers there were a collection of excruciatingly chumpy chumps, speaking from a sending operator's point of view. Yet the stuff was sent off somehow or other, by far the greater part of it in time for use in the next morning's papers, and with an accuracy that, under the circumstances, was fairly wonderful. At five o'clock the next morning the operators were still at work upon some remnants of press stuff and upon the private messages which had been accumulating during the night. They gave out rapidly, however, after that, and by six o'clock wandered off to find sleep in whatever corner they happened to drop down.

    By six o'clock there was only one wire working, and the only man left able for duty was the Chief, Jack Edwards, a little fellow with red hair, a red moustache, a freckled face, and a gritty eye. He may be pretty under the ordinary circumstances of civilized life, but that morning, after forty-eight hours of work in that hole, with his clothes dirty and disheveled, several days' beard on his face, and his eyes bleared with weariness and from the poor light, he was a pretty hard-looking customer. The only thing that was beautiful about him was his grit, and that was exceedingly fair to behold. In spite of all the conditions under which he labored, he had got out of that old oil-shed during the forty-eight preceding hours more matter, probably, than had ever before been sent in the same time by any seven operators in the employ of the Western Union Company. No man ever got more service out of the same number of wires than he got, during these forty-eight hours, out of the wires from Johnstown to Pittsburg, and no man ever had poorer wires to work with, at that. Every moment, almost, the breaking down of a wire would necessitate a new combination of instruments and wires to keep things moving, and as fast as one combination was fixed up, down would go another wire. The mere keeping of the wires straight would have been a tough job, but, besides this, Edwards was for most of the time receiving-clerk, cashier, superintendent of the delivery service, battery man, and chief lineman, as well as wire-chief and chief operator. When not otherwise engaged, he also worked a key himself, to take the place of an exhausted operator. The way in which he kept his head through all these manifold duties was marvelous. It was all in his head, for there were no other facilities to help him. There were not even hooks to hang messages on. Press-stuff, as fast as received, was filed in the left pocket of his sack-coat; private messages went into the right pocket. Nine-tenths of the press-stuff was being filed a few pages at a time; from two to half a dozen men were filing stuff for each paper. To keep each paper's stuff together, and to avoid mixing the stuff of different men addressed to the same paper, was alone a task worthy of an expert in handwriting and human nature, for it takes extensive knowledge of human nature to enable a chief operator to tell when a frenzied individual thrusts half a dozen pages of loose manuscript into his hand, ejaculates: “Here's some more of that; get it off as soon as you can,” and rushes away, just at what point in a pocket stuffed with manuscript those particular half-dozen sheets are to be inserted. Clear grit and a cool head, however, carried Chief Operator Edwards and the acres of columns of special matter, and hundreds of private telegrams, safely through those first forty-eight hours and that they did so was a mighty good thing for the press of the country, and for the people who patronized the press. If he had ever got rattled, and mixed things, the manner in which that pocketful of specials, always being drawn from, but continually kept as full as Fortunatus's purse, would have got into the various newspaper offices, would have horrified the editors and have shocked the public, if the public had ever got a chance to read it, though the chances are that its condition would have been so appalling that no attempt would have been made to print it.

    More operators arrived the next day, and things were a little easier for the men, but they still had to work at least twelve hours a day, to eat whatever they could pick up from the relief stores, and to sleep wherever they could find a place to lie down. Most of them hired a room in a small frame house near, and, by lying close together, sardine fashion, seven or eight of them could sleep on the floor at once. As soon as the night men got up the day men took their places. That was the best bed any of them had for ten days after the flood. The office for that time remained in the oil shed without any improvement in the facilities. The Pittsburg managers of the Western Union seemed to have been completely paralyzed by the extent of the damage done to their wires by the flood. There was no reason why a decent office and comfortable quarters should not have been provided in Johnstown within three days, while they could almost have built a new line from Pittsburg in the time they took to fix up the old one. Higher officials from the company from Chicago and other cities finally arrived and took charge of matters. The lines were then quickly extended across the river and into a room that was cleaned out in the office building of the Cambria Iron Company. The oil shed was then abandoned, and the operators installed in comfortable chairs at real desks.

    After the first couple of days Manager Munson, an old Western Union man, had charge of things in Johnstown during the day, but the bulk of the work, so far as press matter was concerned, continued to fall on Chief Edwards and his night gang, which was made up most of the time of Robert McChesney, assistant chief, and M. J. Hamley, George S. Fairman, N. F. Hunter, W. E. Record, William Buckholdt, Samuel Deering, and R. J. Koons.