One hundred and four years ago this evening, a deadly wall of water and debris rushed down Fountain Creek toward the city of Pueblo, Colorado, where the Green family—Jesse & Marion (Baer) Green and their two children, 6-year-old Virginia (grandma) and 2-year-old Jesse Jr.—had stopped for the night.
Grandma had told me (and probably you, too) what she witnessed that day. In June 1921, her family was traveling from San Antonio, New Mexico, to Eagle, Colorado, to visit her grandparents. When they arrived in Pueblo, her mother was feeling ill—a piercing migraine—so rather than continue on, they departed for a nearby hotel.
Rain was already falling when grandma’s parents put her and Jesse to bed. When she woke up the next day, they all were in another room . . . on a higher floor! Grandma looked out the window to see that the city was flooded, and saw railroad cars among the debris. What had happened?
It wasn’t entirely a surprise—the city had a few hours’ warning. Rain had been falling for some time, but after dark it intensified. Estimates say it came down at a rate of 10 inches per hour, north and west of town, and word came that the river was cresting. Phone operators called as many local numbers as they could, telling residents to head for higher ground. Warning sirens blared throughout the city.
But not everyone listened. Passengers aboard the Rio Grande trains #3 and #14—the Greens had been on train #3—used the opportunity to party-in-place as they waited for the storm to clear. At the same time, many citizens made their way to the downtown levee to rubberneck from what they thought would be a safe location. It was not.
According to Pueblo’s Flood in Pictures by Willis H. Parker, a booklet produced to document the tragedy, the floodwaters breached the levee upriver:
Then there was a scurry for safety as the waters came in between the spectators on the river bank and their refuge on higher ground. Those who had automobiles opened throttles wide and sped from the danger zone. Suddenly the magnitude of the danger appeared and many who thought themselves safe on their vantage viewpoints were hurled into the seething cauldron and were carried with other human freight to their doom.
The waters continued to rise, they swept over the levees, broke through the south banks and a region a mile wide was buried under a swishing, swirling mass of muddy water, averaging twelve feet in depth.
Then the lights all over the city went out, water had reached the huge generators at the power plant that not only supplied the city but served a territory 70 miles long to the east and 56 miles to the west. The shrieking siren was silenced—water had reached the boilers. Its silence was ominous.
For a while only the lightning flashes showed the fugitives their way. Then suddenly, and almost simultaneously over several parts of the city, a dull red glow was cast on the low-hanging clouds. The glow grew in intensity, then the yellow and red of crackling flames mounted upward as if seeking a vantage point in the sky where they might vie with the lightning for a place of horrible supremacy. Fire engines with gongs clanging sped toward the conflagrations but could not reach them, for the floodwaters were many feet deep around the burning structures. Even had they been able to approach within hose length of the flames, the fire-fighting equipment would have been useless—the city water supply was cut by the merciless enemy. The entire city seemed doomed, for what the water was not able to destroy, it appeared that the fire would finish. . . .
Through this maelstrom rode burning piles of timbers from a blazing lumberyard. They lodged momentarily against frame houses and set them afire; then swirled down the stream to ignite other materials until it seemed that oil had been poured on the water and the whole seething mass was converted into a roaring Hades that, mocking the works of puny man, threatened to take the entire city and many who escaped the flood fled to spots they thought safe from fire and water. By the light of the blazing ocean one could see hear an arm clutching the air above the surface of the water; over there a leg; further off, maybe a human head. No way to save them; they must go to their watery graves with scores of others whose bodies may never be recovered.
Back at the Union Depot, the Rio Grande passenger trains rose with the water, floated away from the station, and tipped over into the swirling, muddy torrent.
Parker’s history continued:
Telephone and telegraph communication with the outside world was out. Railroad lines were broken. No word of the situation could be sent outside and the world could only guess from the contents of a few brief messages that went out over the press wires before they too went down, what had happened here.
In Eagle, the Baers and Greens waited three long days for news about their children and grandchildren. Then the July 10, 1921, issue of the Eagle Valley Enterprise reported:
Mr. and Mrs. Jos. Green and Henry Baer and wife were relieved of a great anxiety about ten o’clock Monday morning [June 6] on receiving a telegram from their son and daughter, Jesse Green and wife, stating that they had come through the Pueblo disaster in safety and were being cared for in a private home in the city. Mr. Green is a railroad station agent at San Antonio, N.M., and he and his family were en route to Eagle on their summer vacation and for a visit with their parents. They were aboard the ill-fated Rio Grande train No. 3, which had just pulled into the Pueblo Union Depot when the crest of the flood struck that city, and of which so many passengers lost their lives. They were fortunately among those who escaped.
Estimates vary, but the final death toll was between 150 and 250—the worst flood in Colorado history. Rocky Mountain Public Television produced a documentary for the 100th anniversary of the Great Pueblo Flood—it even has film footage from the disaster in progress:
The Greens eventually made it to Eagle, where on July 25 grandma celebrated her 7th birthday. Lucky kid! Lucky family! And, lucky us—had our great grandmother Marion not had that migraine, we might not be here to read this!
One final note: Daniel Pohlen, Jim & Teresa’s third son, is currently working as a civil engineer on the revitalization of Pueblo’s riverfront. He told me that work crews are constantly finding remnants and rubble from the flood.
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