Harlan Babcock was a reporter for the Chicago Herald. He witnessed the pandemonium of the Eastland Disaster and wrote a very visceral account of what he beheld. He wrote:
“Never to my dying day shall I forget the supreme horror of
that moment. Men, women, and children, who a moment before had been laughing and shouting messages to one another on board the Eastland and to friends on shore, were hurled by the hundreds into the Chicago River. As the top-heavy vessel careened on its side, screams and wails, sobs and pitiful prayers came from those on the upper deck. They were hurled off like so many ants being brushed from a table.”
Of the work performed by the first repsonders - the firemen and policemen - he reported: “That silently sad procession of policemen and firemen and others bearing in fours, each a body on a dripping stretcher – mute evidence of the terrible toll of the waters. Solemnly, the stretcher bearers walked down the hull of the steamer onto the dock with their inanimate burdens of humanity that a brief half hour or hour before had scurried laughing to the death craft.”