Lest We Forget: Chicago's Awful Theater Horror

CHAPTER II.

FIRST AID TO THE INJURED AND CARE FOR THE DEAD

On the heels of the firemen came the police, intent on the work of rescue. Chief O'Neill and Assistant Chief Schuettler ordered captains from a dozen stations to bring their men, and then they rushed to the theater and led the police up the stairs to the landing outside the east entrance to the first balcony.

The firemen, rushing blindly up the stairs in the dense pall of smoke, had found their path suddenly blocked by a wall of dead eight or ten feet high. They discovered many persons alive and carried them to safety. Other firemen crawled over the mass of dead and dragged their hose into the theater to fight back the flames that seemed to be crawling nearer to turn the fatal landing into a funeral pyre.

O'Neill and Schuettler immediately began carrying the dead from the balcony, while other policemen went to the gallery to begin the work there.

In the great mass of dead at the entrance to the first balcony the bodies were so terribly interwoven that it was impossible at first to take any one out.

"Look out for the living!" shouted the chief to his men. "Try to find those who are alive."

From somewhere came a faint moaning cry.

"Some one alive there, boys," came the cry. "Lively, now!"

The firemen and police long struggled in vain to move the bodies.

The raging tide of humanity pouring out of the east entrance of the balcony during the panic had met the fighting, struggling crowd coming down the stairs from the third balcony at right angles. The two streams formed a whirlpool which ceased its onward progress and remained there on the landing where people stamped each other under foot in that mad circle of death.

In a short time the blockade in the fatal angle must have been complete. Then into this awful heap still plunged the contrary tides of humanity from each direction. Many tried to crawl over the top of the heap, but were drawn down to the grinding mill of death underneath. The smoke was heavy at the fatal angle, for the majority of those taken out at that point bore no marks of bruises.

Many, and especially the children, were trampled to death, but others were held as in a vise until the smoke had choked the life from their bodies.

It was toward this that the firemen directed O'Neill and Schuettler as they rushed into the theater. The smoke was still heavy and the great gilded marble foyer of the "handsomest theater in America" was somber and dark and still as a tomb, except for the whistling of the engines outside and now and then the shouting of the firemen. Water was dripping everywhere and stood inches deep on the floor and stairs.

Two flickering lanterns shed the only light by which the policemen worked, and this very fact, perhaps, made their task more horrible and gruesome, if such a thing were possible.

All through the gallery the bodies were found. Some were those of persons who had decided to stay in their seats and not to join in the mad rush for the doors and run the risk of being trampled to death. Many of them no doubt had trusted to the cries, "There is no danger; keep your seats!"

They had stuck to their seats until, choked by the heavy smoke, they had been unable to move.

Some bodies were in a sitting position, while others had fallen forward, with the head resting on the seat in front, as though in prayer. Almost all were terribly burned.

In the aisles lay women and children who had staid in their seats until they finally were convinced that the danger was real. Then they had attempted to get to the door.

The smoke was so heavy the firemen worked with difficulty, but finally it cleared and workmen who were hastily sent by the Edison company equipped forty arc lights, which shone bravely through the smoke. With this help the firemen searched to better effect, and found bodies that in the blackness they had missed.

"Give that girl to some one else and get back there," shouted Chief Musham to a fireman. The fireman never answered but kept on with his burden.

"Hand that girl to some one else," shouted the battalion chief.

The fireman looked up. Even in the flickering light of the lantern the chief carried one could see the tears coming from the red eyes and falling down the man's blackened cheeks.

"Chief," said the fireman, "I've got a girl like this at home. I want to carry this one out."

"Go ahead," said the chief. The little group working at the head of the stairs broke apart while the fireman, holding the body tightly, made his way slowly down the stairs.

One by one the dead were taken from the pile in the angle. The majority of them were women. On some faces was an expression of terrible agony, but on others was a look of calmness and serenity, and firemen sometimes found it hard to believe they were dead. Three firemen carried the body of a young woman down the stairs in a rubber blanket. She appeared alive. Her hands were clasped and held flowers. Her eyes were closed and she seemed almost to smile. She looked as though she was asleep, but it was the sleep of death.

In the dark and smoke, with the dripping water and the dead piled in heaps everywhere, the Iroquois theater had been turned into a tomb by the time the rescue parties had begun their work.

The moan that the frantic workers heard as they struggled to untangle the mass of bodies gave the police hope that many in the heap might be alive.

"We can't do it, chief," shouted one of the policemen. "We can't untangle them."

"We must take these bodies out of the way to get down to those who are alive," replied the chief. "This man here is dead; lay hold, now, boys, and pull him out."

Two big firemen caught the body by the shoulders and struggled and pulled until they had it free. Then another body was taken out, and then again the workers seemed unable to unloose the dead. Again came that terrible moan through the mass.

"For God's sake, get down to that one who's alive," implored O'Neill, almost in despair.

The policemen pulled off their heavy overcoats and worked frantically at the heap. Often a body could not be moved except when the firemen and police dragged with a "yo, heave," like sailors hauling on a rope. As fast as the bodies were freed one policeman, or sometimes two or three, would stagger down the stairs with their burdens.

Over the heap of bodies crawled a fireman carrying something in his arms.

"Out of the way, men, let me out! The kid's alive."

The workers fell back and the fireman crawled over the heap and was helped out. He ran down the stairs three steps at a time to get the child to a place where help might be given before it was too late. Then other firemen from inside the theater passed out more bodies, which were handed from one policeman to another until some on the outside of the heap could take the dead and carry them downstairs.

Suddenly a policeman pulling at the heap gave a shout.

"I've got her, chief!" he said. "She's alive, all right!"

"Easy there, men, easy," cried Schuettler; "but hurry and get that woman to a doctor!"

A girl, apparently 18 years old, was moaning faintly. The policeman released her from the tangled heap, and a big fireman, lifting her tenderly in his arms, hurried with her to the outside of the building.

"There must be more alive," said the chief. "Work hard, boys."

There was hardly any need to ask the men to work harder, for they were pulling and hauling as though their own lives depended on their efforts. Everybody worked.

The reporters, the only ones in the theater besides the police and firemen, laid aside their pencils and note books and struggled down the wet, slippery stairs, carrying the dead. Newspaper artists threw their sketch books on the floor to jump forward and pick up the feet or head of a body that a fireman or policeman found too heavy to carry alone. Constantly now a stream of workers was passing slowly down the stairs. Usually two men supported each body, but often some giant policeman or fireman strode along with a body swung over his shoulders. Coming down the stairs was a fireman with a girl of 16 clasped in his arms.

"Isn't that girl alive?" asked the chief.

"No," shouted two or three men, who had jumped to see. "She's dead, poor thing, rest her soul," said the fireman reverently, and then he picked his way down the stairs. Half-way down the marble steps two arms suddenly clasped the fireman's neck.

He started so he missed his footing and would have fallen had not a policeman steadied him.

"She's alive, she's alive!" shouted the fireman. "Git out of the way, there, out of the way, men," and he went dashing headlong out into the open air and through the crowd to a drug store.

One child after another was taken from the heap and passed out to be carried downstairs. Some were little boys in new suits, sadly torn, and with their poor little faces wreathed in agony. On their foreheads was the seal of death.

A big fireman came crawling from the heavy smoke of the inner balcony. He carried a girl of 10 years in his arms. Her long, flaxen hair half covered the pure white face.

A gray haired man with a gash on his head apparently had fallen down the stairs. A woman's face bore the mark of a boot heel. A woman with a little boy clasped tight in her arms was wedged into a corner. Her clothes were almost torn from her, and her face was bruised. The child was unmarked, as she had thrown her own body over his to protect him.

Out of the mass of bodies when the police began their work protruded one slender little white hand, clinching a pair of pearl opera glasses, which the little owner had tried to save, in spite of the fact that her own life was being crushed out of her. Watches, pocketbooks and chatelaine bags were scattered all through the pile. One man was detailed to make a bag out of a rubber coat and take care of the property that was handed to him.

While the police were working so desperately at the fatal angle, another detail of police and firemen were working on the third floor. At the main entrance of the gallery lay another heap of bodies, and there was still another at the angle of the head of the stairs leading to the floor below. Here the sight was even worse than the terrible scene presented at the landing of the first balcony.

The bodies on the landing were not burned. A jam had come there, and many had been stamped under foot and either killed outright or left to suffocate. Many of the bodies were almost stripped of clothing and bore the marks of remorseless heels.

After these had been carried out, the firemen returned again and again from the pitchy blackness of the smoke-filled galleries, dragging bodies, burned sometimes beyond recognition.

While now and then some one had been found alive in the other fatal angle, no one was rescued by searchers in the top gallery. The bodies had to be laid along the hall until the merchants in State street began sending over blankets. Men from the streets came rushing up the stairs, bending under the weight of the blankets they carried on their shoulders. Soon they went back to the street again, this time carrying their blankets weighed down with a charred body.

The scenes in John R. Thompson's restaurant in Randolph street, adjoining the theater, were ghastly beyond words.

Few half hours in battle bring more of horror than the half hour that turned the cafe into a charnel house, with its tumbled heaps of corpses, its shrieks of agony from the dying, and the confusion of doctors and nurses working madly over bodies all about as they strove to bring back the spark of life.

Bodies were everywhere – piled along the walls, laid across tables, and flung down here and there – some charred beyond recognition, some only scorched, and others black from suffocation; some crushed in the rush of the panic, others but the poor, broken remains of those who leaped into death. And most of them – almost all of them – were the forms of women and children. It is estimated that more than 150 bodies were accounted for in Thompson's alone.

The continuous tramp of the detachments of police bearing in more bodies, the efforts of the doctors to restore life, and the madness of those who surged in through the police lines to ransack piles of bodies for relatives and friends, made up a scene of pandemonium of which it is hard to form a conception. There was organization of the fifty physicians and nurses who fought back death in the dying; there was organization of the police and firemen; but still the restaurant was a chaos that left the head bewildered and the heart sick.

The work was too much for even the big force of doctors that had flocked there to volunteer their services. Everybody in which there was the slightest semblance of life was given over to the physicians, who with oxygen tanks and resuscitative movements sought to revive the heart beats. As soon as death was certain the body was drawn from the table and laid beneath, to give place to another. But systematic as was this effort, heaps of bodies remained which the doctors had not touched.

In a dozen instances, even when the end of the work was in sight, a hand or foot was seen to move in this or that heap. Instantly three or four doctors were bending over rolling away the dead bodies to drag forth one still warm with life. In a thrice the body was on a table and the oxygen turned on while the doctors worked with might and main to force respiration. Almost always it was in vain – life went out. Two or three were resuscitated, though it is uncertain with what chances of ultimate recovery. One of these was a Mrs. Harbaugh, who had been brought in for dead and her body tossed among the lifeless forms that ranged the walls.

When the first rush of people from the theater gave notice of the fire to persons in the street there were less than a score of patrons in the restaurant. These rushed into the street, too, while a panic spread among the waitresses and kitchen force. By this time fire company 13 was on the ground in the alley side of the theater and the police were at the front attempting to lead the audience from its peril with some semblance of order. In another minute women and children with blistered faces were dashing screaming into the street, taking refuge in the first doorways at hand.

Another minute, and every policeman knew in his heart the horror that was at hand. A patrolman dashed into Thompson's and ordered the tables cleared and arranged to care for the injured. Captain Gibbons dispatched another policeman to issue a general call for physicians and a detachment to take charge of the restaurant and the first aid to be administered there. Within five minutes the first of the injured were being laid on the marble topped dining tables where the police ambulance corps were getting at work.

These steps scarcely had been taken when word came from the burning theater that the fire was under control, but that the loss of life would be appalling. Chief O'Neill hurried to the scene, sending back word as he ran that Secretary James Markham should summon doctors and ambulances from every place available. The west side district of the medical schools and hospitals was called upon to send all the volunteers possible, together with hospital equipment. One hundred students from Rush Medical College were soon on their way by street car and patrol wagon to the scene.

It was only fifteen minutes after the first tongue of flame shot out from behind the scenes that a lull came in the awful drama of death within the theater. The firemen had quenched the fire and all the living had escaped. All that remained were dead. But now the scenes within the improvised hospital and morgue rose to the height of their horror.

But for a narrow lane the length of the cafe the floor was covered with bodies or the tumbled bundles of clothing that told where a body was concealed. And over the scene of the dead rose the groans of the tortured beings who writhed upon the tables in the throes of their passing. And over the cries of the suffering rose the shouts of command of the Red Cross corps – now the directions of Dr. Lydston as to attempts at resuscitation, now the megaphone shouts of Senator Clark ordering the disposition of bodies and the organization of the constantly arriving volunteer nurses.

In the narrow lane of the dead surged the policemen, bringing ever more and more forms to cord up beneath the tables. Then came the press of people, who, frantic with anxiety, had beaten back the police guard to look for loved ones in the charnel house. There was Louis Wolff, Jr., searching for two nephews and his sister. There was Postmaster Coyne, who had hurried from a meeting of the crime committee to lend his aid. There were Aldermen Minwegen and Alderman Badenoch, and besides them scores of men and women anxiously looking and looking, and nerving themselves to fear the worst.

"Have you found Miss Helen McCaughan?" shrieked a hysterical woman. "She's from the Yale apartments, and – "

"I'm looking for a Miss Errett – she's a nurse," cried another.

"My little boy – Charles Hennings – have you found him, doctor?" came from another.

From every side came the heartrending appeals, while the din was so great that no single plaint rose above the volume of sounds. And all the time the doorway was a place of frightful sights.

"O, please go back for my little girl," gasped a woman whose face and hands were a blister and whose clothing was burned to the skin. She staggered across the threshold and fell prone. Her last breath had gone out of her when two policemen snatched up the body and bore it to an operating table.

"O, where's my Annie?" screamed another woman, horribly burned, whom two policemen supported between them into the restaurant. But at the word she collapsed, and, though three physicians worked over her for ten minutes, she never breathed again.

Of a sudden Dr. E. E. Vaughan saw a finger move in a mass of the dead against the far wall of the restaurant.

"Men, there's a live one in there," he cried, and, while others came running, the physician flung aside the bodies till he had uncovered a woman of middle age, terribly burned about the face, and with her outer garments a mass of charred shreds.

In a second the woman was undergoing resuscitative treatment on a table, while the oxygen streamed into her lungs. Two doctors worked her arms like pumps, while a nurse manipulated the region of the heart. At length there was a flutter of a respiration, while a doctor bending over with his stethoscope announced a heart beat just perceptible. Another minute passed and the eyelids moved, while a groan escaped the lips.

"She lives!" simply said Dr. Vaughan, as he ordered the oxygen tube removed and brandy forced between the lips. In five minutes the woman was saved from immediate death, at least, though suffering terribly from burns. She was just able to murmur that her name was Mrs. Harbaugh, but that was all that could be learned of her identity before she was taken away to a hospital.

Over a narrow, ice covered bridge made of scaffold planks, more than 100 feet above the ground the police carried more than 100 bodies from the rear stage and balcony exits of the Iroquois theater to the Northwestern University building, formerly the Tremont house. The planks rested on the fire escape of the theater and on the ledge of a window in the Tremont building.

Two men who first ventured on this dangerous passageway in their efforts to reach safety, blinded by the fire and smoke, lost their footing and fell to the alley below. They were dead when picked up.

The bridge led directly into the dental school of the university, and at one time there were more than a score of charred bodies lying under blankets in the room. The dead were carried from the pile of bodies at the theater exits faster than the police could take them away in the ambulances and patrol wagons.

As soon as the police began to take the injured into the university building the classrooms were drawn upon for physicians, and in a few minutes professors and dental students gathered in the offices and stores to lend their assistance. Wounds were dressed, and in cases of less serious injury the unfortunates were sent to their homes. In other cases they were sent to hospitals.

When the smoke had cleared away the rescuers first realized the extent of the horror. From the bridge could be seen the rows of balcony and gallery seats, many occupied by a human form. Incited by the sight, the police redoubled their efforts, and heedless of the dangers of the narrow, slippery bridge, pressed close to each other as they worked.

While a dozen policemen were removing the dead from the theater, twice as many were engaged in carrying them to the patrol wagons and ambulances at the doors of the university building. All the afternoon the elevators carried down police in twos and fours carrying their burdens of dead in blankets. So fast were they carried down that many of the patrol wagons held five and more bodies when they were driven away.

Behind the lines of police that guarded the passage of the dead, hundreds of anxious men and women crowded with eager questions. The rotunda of the building between 3 and 7 p. m. was thronged by those seeking knowledge of friend or relative who had been in the play. Some made their way to the third floor and looked hopelessly at the charred bodies lying there. In one corner lay the bodies of husband and wife, clasped in each other's arms. From under one sheltering blanket protruded the dainty high heeled shoes of some woman, and from the next blanket the rubber boots of a newsboy.

A Roman Catholic priest made his way into the room. He was looking for a little girl, the daughter of a parishioner.