The Elk Valley Flood of 1885

In May 1885, Montgomery County experienced a devastating flood following a storm that damaged the Elk and Verdigris valleys. The flood was so severe that it disrupted railroad services and prompted emergency rescue operations. Boats were dispatched to save residents trapped in inundated homes, but tragic accidents occurred, leading to the drowning of a young man and a doctor who endeavored to assist others. Along with crop destruction, the storm’s aftermath included significant property damage across the county. In neighboring Chautauqua County, the storm resulted in greater loss of life and harrowing rescue efforts as residents sought safety from the rising waters.

After the grasshopper plague of 1871–5, probably the worst calamity that has befallen Montgomery County since its settlement was the flood which swept down the valleys of the Elk and Verdigris on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, May 15th, 16th, and 17th, 1885. Perhaps the most comprehensive account of this disaster was the one published by the Star and Kansan, at Independence, on the Friday following; and it is from this account that the facts for this sketch are gleaned.

That fateful Friday was noted at Independence as a day of clouds and showers with heavy banks of cloud along the western horizon. Toward night news came of a great storm in Elk County and that the railroad track had been washed away in the neighborhood of Elk Falls. No more trains were able to get through on the Southern Kansas line of the Santa Fe railroad in either direction, and on Saturday morning a repair train loaded with material for bridge building had gone out to the neighborhood of the bridge over the Elk at Table Mound. About half past ten o’clock a telegram was received from this train stating that lives were in danger and help was needed. All the available boats in the city were taken to the depot, and a little after noon the repair train, which had returned to Independence, started for the scene of danger with about a hundred and fifty men on board. A few minutes’ run brought the train to the locality of the flood, and at the southwest corner of Table Mound the boats were unloaded and started out over the waste of waters on their errand of mercy. Among those who risked their lives in these frail crafts, to rescue those in peril, were Eugene B. White, Milton Gregory, Lewis Bowman, and Elisha Mills.

During the morning the waters had risen so high as to touch the sills of the iron railroad bridge over the Elk, and a gang of men were at work on the bridge dislodging the mass of corn stalks which had lodged against it on the upper side. Beyond the bridge, to the west, the railroad track was out of water as far as the trestle over the slough, and this strip was the only bit of dry land visible in the entire valley from bluff to bluff. On it were gathered a few cattle and hogs which had fled to it for their lives, and to which the waters were bringing the scattered ears of corn they had gathered. To the left of the railroad, chickens were seen roosting in the trees near a deserted house, and still nearer a bunch of them had gathered on the upper ends of a pile of posts which projected a little above the surface of the water; and away to the north of the railroad were a number of horses which had been tied on the highest ground in the vicinity, but were still nearly covered by the waters.

It was not, however, until the writer climbed the slope of Table Mound and stood upon the rocky ledge that marks its outlines that he realized the extent of the calamity which had befallen the residents of these fertile valley lands. Up and down the river basin, as far as the eye could reach, there was water everywhere. Only a small fragment of a single wheat field showed above the flood in this entire rich valley district. Still the waters were dotted with trees and groves, while a fringe of timber marked the windings of the channel of the Elk; and houses and barns could be seen here and there, the highest of them with apparently not less than three feet of water on their first floors, and the lowest submerged to the eaves. Probably the watery area in sight from this point was not less than ten square miles in extent; and at one place the width of the valley is scarcely less than five miles.

In one instance a family refused to leave the house when the rescuing boat appeared, but when a second downpour came later in the afternoon they were fain to seek the shore. Some of the dwellers in the valley were landed on the west shore, having made one portage across the railroad during the trip. There they were warmly welcomed by the neighbors gathered on the opposite mound, who could be seen from our side running across the grassy slope to meet them. And all this while the sullen roar of the angry waters rang in our ears and we had only to close our eyes to imagine we stood on the ocean’s beach listening to its endless refrain. About us were the most lovely of our wild flowers, the graceful, nodding columbines and the crimson-hued verbenas; but above us the heavens were again gathering blackness and the inky pall of cloud along the western horizon was ever and anon illuminated by a vivid flash that left it blacker and more ominous than before; while below, in dozens of swift currents, the thick and noisome waters rushed onward unresting to the sea. Probably no one who gazed in fascinated awe upon those thousands of acres which at dawn had been covered with luxuriant fields of wheat, promising within a month a harvest of golden grain, and which were now buried from five to fifteen feet in depth beneath a swiftly flowing volume of water wider than the Mississippi, will ever forget the scene.

Meanwhile the panorama was not without an exciting and, what threatened to be, a tragic interlude. One of the boats — Bowman’s it was said — ventured into the swift current setting under the trestle west of the iron railroad bridge. In a flash it was sucked under and upset, one of its occupants clutching the timbers of the trestle and being drawn out from above, while the other appeared on the bottom of the upturned boat as it drifted down stream. Fortunately he reached the fringing grove of the river channel unharmed, and was able to halt the boat there until another came to its rescue.

During the afternoon, the iron wagon bridge, two and a half miles north of Independence on the Neosho road, was swept downstream and, shortly after, the one on the Radical City road, a couple of miles farther west, went to keep it company. Sunday morning the flood was at its height in the Verdigris in the neighborhood of Independence, and the water to the northeast of the city had backed up as far as Pennsylvania Avenue, just south of the railroad trestle. Rock Creek on the south was also full and almost impassable, while the entire valley from the bluff at the east side of the city to the hills a mile away to the northeast, was one vast sheet of water. The railroad was washed away at a small trestle near the east side of the valley, and that afternoon the passengers coming in from the north were ferried over to the city by boat, among them being some returning visitors from the New Orleans Exposition.

Until Sunday no loss of life had been reported in the county, but during the forenoon came the melancholy tidings of a pathetic fatality at the mouth of Card Creek in Rutland Township. Saturday morning Dr. I. H. McCoy, of that neighborhood, who had recently been engaged in business in Independence, with Mr. Greer, a neighbor, had hastily constructed a square box boat which could have been little more than a raft, as the work on it is said to have taken them but forty minutes. With this they rescued the family of a Mr. Wallace, living in the path of the flood, in whose house the water had risen to the ceiling of the first story, and brought them safely to land. Finding no more people in danger in their neighborhood, they next ferried a cow out of the flood, one of them holding her by the horns while the other paddled. About noon John E. Rice, an unmarried young man 28 years of age, took Mr. Greer’s place, but Dr. McCoy, though a man of family, refused to permit anyone to become a substitute for him. Manned by McCoy and Rice, the boat put off to a knoll lying a little to the west of the mouth of Card Creek and south of the river, where a number of people were to be seen. Here were found Mrs. Eliza Woods, a widow who had resided in the county from the date of its first settlement, and several other people, among whom were John McCarty and Maurice and George Heritage. The two latter were at work upon an old and heavy boat with which they had been engaged during the morning in rescuing those who were in danger, but which had sprung a leak. The story of the fatal accident which followed is as told the writer by Maurice Heritage. When he went to the widow Woods’ residence to take her away, he found her nearly beside herself with fright and excitement, and engaged in constructing a raft with which to start for the shore. When McCoy came to the knoll, she eagerly assented to his proposal to take her to the mainland, though the water had already fallen a foot and a half and all danger was past.

With her youngest child, Tommy, a boy six or seven years of age, and another little boy about the same age, the son of Ira VanDuzen, a neighbor, Mrs. Woods got into the box boat with McCoy and Rice. It was only sixty rods to the shore, but they had not gone more than three before they were in a strong current, and their boat, which was evidently overloaded, became unmanageable and was sucked through an opening in a hedge where this current was setting most strongly. Seeing their peril Mr. Heritage and Mr. McCarty rushed toward them, thinking they could make a sort of living chain of themselves, and while one of them held to the hedge, the other holding fast to the first could reach the boat and swing it out of the current and into safety. By the time Heritage had got within twenty-five feet of the boat it went under and he was sucked in after it just where the boat had disappeared, the water being eight or nine feet deep. Here Heritage says he lost consciousness, until when he came to the surface ten yards away, he was recalled to a knowledge of his peril by McCarty calling to him, and swam out of the current.

Mr. Rice, though an expert swimmer, did not arise again, and it is thought that he was stunned by a blow across the bridge of the nose which left a bruise perceptible when the body was recovered. The boat was afterward seen floating downstream with McCoy and Mrs. Woods both clinging to it, but it kept rolling over in the waves so that they soon lost their hold. As McCoy was also a good swimmer, it is inferred that but for an attempt to rescue Mrs. Woods he would have saved himself. The boat did not upset until its occupants attempted to jump from it as it was going down; it simply foundered from overloading. The bodies were found about seven o’clock the next morning, from seventy-five to a hundred yards from where they disappeared, having lodged in a hedge, at right angles to the one through which they were passing when the boat sank.

In this county no other fatalities were reported, though the losses in the destruction of growing crops were almost beyond computation. On Sunday W. H. Linton’s flouring mill, three miles southwest of Liberty, fell into the river, entailing a loss of $13,000. McTaggart’s mill, northwest of Liberty, and near the site of the original town of that name, was flooded to a depth of thirty-three inches, which was sixteen more than had been observed there since its erection in the pioneer days. At Elk City the water was three feet deep in the depot, and many residences were damaged by the flood, but the business quarter was not inundated. The railroad was overflowed three miles north of Coffeyville at Kalloch station, and during the first of the week that city was cut off from mail communication with the outside world, except by hack to Independence.

The “cloudburst” which caused this flood originated in Chautauqua County, and in that county the loss of life was greater than in Montgomery, no less than eleven fatalities being reported. Two bodies were recovered at Matanzas and three in the neighborhood of Caney; while six deaths occurred in the vicinity of Sedan. The following vivid and striking story of the storm and its work in that county is from the columns of the Sedan Graphic of the next week:

“Last Friday commenced like a balmy spring morning, with southerly winds, and it bade fair to be the most pleasant day of the week; but before noon dark clouds had begun to rise in the north, and by half past eleven the northern part of the county was the center of one of the most disastrous rainstorms ever recorded in the annals of the state. The rain and hail, accompanied at times by winds of a cyclonic nature, fell for eight consecutive hours. The water stood on the level prairie at times nearly two feet deep. The clouds from this place looked as if they were rising and moving off, when other clouds, if anything of a more fearful character, would revolve around and take the place of the one which had just spent its fury. The northern sky all the afternoon was a dark mass of revolving clouds. The clouds would appear in the northeast, and following the circle, disappear in the northwest with terrible regularity.

At about five o’clock in the evening the first approach of the storm was announced here by the dark circling clouds overhead, accompanied by a deluge of rain, which converted our streets and waterways into boiling torrents. A few minutes after the rain had commenced to fall it was reported that the river was out of its banks, and in less than half an hour from the time of the first indications of the rise, the river was fifteen feet higher than it had ever been before since the first settlement of the county, and our people, for the first time, began to realize that those farmers living in the low river bottoms had either escaped by marvelous exertion or been carried to destruction. Horses, cattle, hogs, wagons and farming implements were driven past by the mad torrents at a frightful rate. The water came down in walls four feet high, crushing and carrying away everything that opposed its forces; fences and farm improvements disappeared in an instant, and great trees that had stood the test of ages were uprooted and leveled to the earth; while the roar and swish of the waters made the bravest stand back and shudder as he contemplated the awful consequences that must inevitably follow. People began to move out of the lower part of town to the high points. Night coming on and the rain still falling, nothing could be done till morning to relieve the sufferers on the bottoms.

“Next morning the cries of the sufferers in tree tops were heard, and rafts and boats were speedily constructed to render assistance. One raft was made out of the side of a house and set afloat by William Harbert and others, and rescued Ben Adams, his wife and two children out of the tree tops, where they had taken refuge the night before. Their house started off about six o’clock. The woman caught in a tree top and lifted her two children on to the same limb, her husband going still farther and catching to another tree. The plucky little woman sheltering her children all night and fighting the driftwood and everything, to keep from being dragged off their only hope of safety. Just above them, and four miles from Sedan, Mr. Witt, his wife and one child, also Mr. Green, seeing the flood coming, tried to make their escape to the highlands in their wagon, but were carried down with the flood. Mr. Witt making his escape, and the child, woman, and Mr. Green being drowned. Their bodies have all been recovered. Ed. Chadburn, a freighter from this city, was on the road to Moline, and was drowned in a small rivulet north of town. His body was discovered early Saturday morning, and was brought home and interred Sunday evening. Two children of Mr. Rogers, on North Caney, east of Sedan, were drowned; their bodies were recovered. Mr. and Mrs. Rogers escaped after a perilous swim of a mile.”

The next great flood in the Verdigris came in September, 1895, but was unaccompanied by loss of life, and while it ruined most of the corn fields in the valley only injured wheat in the stack.

In the latter part of May, 1900, the highest water since the settlement of the county swept through both the Elk and Verdigris valleys, and at midnight on Friday, May 22nd, it reached its maximum at Independence, three feet above the high water mark of 1895. The wheat crop in all of the valley lands of the county was ruined by this flood, but the only loss of life reported was in the upper part of Sycamore Valley, where J. W. Burke was drowned by the upsetting of his buggy in the rapidly flowing stream, which was not more than three feet deep at the ford where he attempted to cross. His wife, who was in the carriage with him, was rescued. He was a pioneer and a well-known citizen and had been prominent for years in the councils of the Populist party.