Journal of the Southern Association for the History of Medicine and Science Volume 3 (no. 1) 2021 https://journals.troy.edu/index.php/JSAHMS/
The Visual Culture of Identification and the 1928 St. Francis Dam Disaster
Vicki Daniel, PhD
SAGES Teaching Fellow, Department of History, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, United States
Email: [email protected]
Abstract
This article analyzes the case study of the 1928 St. Francis Dam Disaster in Southern California in order to understand how disaster victim identification evolved in the United States from the early practice of sight recognition to the paradigm of forensics. Occurring in a transitional moment in the history of disaster victim identification (DVI)—between the advent of forensic identification techniques and their full-scale application in the disaster morgue—this case study reveals how bureaucratic practices originally intended to manage sight recognition evolved into more interventionist practices that extended and enhanced sight recognition. The use of photography and dental identifications allowed Ventura County officials—and specifically, Coroner Oliver Reardon—to create, control, and circulate a new visual culture of identification. Command of this visual culture not only demonstrated the state’s power to overcome the biological problem of decomposition and move identification beyond the traditional boundaries of sight recognition, but also allowed state officials to assert a more central role in the identification process, foreshadowing the expert-driven forensic paradigm that would emerge in the U.S. in the 1940s.
Keywords: disaster victim identification, disaster, forensic odontology, forensic authority, visual culture, California
When a mass fatality event occurs in the United States today, the recovery and identification of the dead is a significant priority, allowing the affected community to honor those killed and return order to their own lives.2 To accomplish this, state or federal authorities will oversee the recovery of the dead to a morgue, where medical examiners and other experts trained in forensic science examine the bodies according to standard disaster victim identification (DVI) protocols. These include a number of external and internal investigations of the body to collect data on the body’s medical history and appearance. The collected data is then compared to antemortem
I’d like to acknowledge the help of anthropologist Ann Stansell, who compiled a rich digital archive of documents related to the St. Francis Dam disaster while completing her MA at Cal State Northridge. Stansell kindly shared many of her materials with me. 2 Caroline Bennett, “Who Knows Who We Are? Questioning DNA Analysis in Disaster Victim Identification,” New Genetics and Society 33, no. 3 (2014): 240. JSAHMS Vol. 3 (no. 1) 2021 medical records for the missing victims.3 Disaster responders generally hail the modern forensic toolbox as an important solution to an old problem: “The identification of the dead has been an issue for forensic services for many years although it is only relatively recently that modern technological advances and major managerial procedures have been applied in an orderly and well- planned manner to this sometimes chaotic logistical problem.”4 Thinking of DVI as a recent development, however, creates the false impression that identification techniques in use before our current forensic paradigm were unscientific, disorganized, or otherwise simplistic in their form and results. It is true that, for much of human history, the only way to identify those killed in a disaster through sight recognition; corpses were displayed to the public and family, friends, or acquaintances viewed the deceased in order to name them. Today, morgue officials may still use sight recognition, but the highly subjective nature of this method has led many forensic practitioners to posit it as a secondary method, inferior to distinctly “scientific” proofs of identity.5 Modern DVI owes a lot to sight recognition. Before the introduction of large-scale forensic systems into the disaster morgue in the 1940s, civic officials responding to disaster intervened in the identification process through bureaucratic means. Their mediations of sight recognition—i.e. organizing the disaster morgue, controlling access to it, burying the unidentified—normalized the state’s active involvement in the identification process. Furthermore, as civic officials claimed this bureaucratic role in DVI in the early twentieth century, they began to offer new technologies that enhanced or prolonged sight recognition, including embalming and photography. These technologies gave civic officials the power to preserve the dead. With this new authority, some coroners and medical examiners began to pursue early forensic practices, such as dental identification or fingerprinting, which constituted a new role for these figures. Rather than merely supporting sight recognition, these death investigators could now locate identification beyond recognition. Yet, the nascent forensic techniques deployed by these experimental coroners shared a visual relationship with sight recognition, focusing on that which could be seen on the body; this suggests that forensic authority was built from sight recognition and not in opposition to it. To better understand this relationship between sight recognition and forensics, this article examines the case study of the 1928 St. Francis Dam Disaster in Southern California. (figure 1) The dam was located in the Sierra Pelona Mountains, about 40 miles northeast of Los Angeles. In March 1928, the dam suffered a fatal collapse, releasing over 12 billion gallons into the San Francisquito Canyon, sweeping through the Santa Clarita Valley and into the Pacific Ocean. The flood wiped out several small towns, orchards, ranches, and worker communities in the valley, killing an estimated 411 people.6 Scholars have previously examined the flood as an engineering
3 A.L. Brough, B. Morgan, and G.N. Rutty, “The Basics of Disaster Victim Identification,” Journal of Forensic Radiology and Imaging 3 (2015): 30. 4 Peter Ellis, “Modern Advances in Disaster Victim Identification,” Forensic Sciences Research 4, n. 4 (2019): 291. Italics added. 5 This language is fairly standard in modern forensic pathology textbooks. Sight recognition, however, is still used in the early stages of recovery after high-fatality disasters, such as the 2005 South Asian tsunami; see Oliver W. Morgan, et al., “Mass Fatality Management Following the South Asian Tsunami Disaster: Case Studies in Thailand, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka,” PLoS Medicine 3, no. 6 (2006): 811. 6 This number is based on the work of anthropologist Ann Stansell, who has performed the most extensive research into the death toll. Her total includes 306 recovered bodies and 105 missing persons. Her count is very similar to Coroner Oliver Reardon’s initial calculations in 1928: 319 recovered bodies and 101 missing. The Santa Clarita Valley History website is an invaluable resource on the disaster and includes her updated list of victims, which also includes the age, community, morgue, and burial location for each. See Ann Stansell, “Roster of St. Francis Dam Victims,” Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society website, http://www.scvhistory.com/scvhistory/annstansell_damvictims022214.htm (accessed December 21, 2020).
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JSAHMS Vol. 3 (no. 1) 2021 failure or as a tragic symbol of the Los Angeles water wars, but the historical and symbolic significance of the victim identifications has not been analyzed.7
Figure 1: St. Francis Dam, February 1928. Photograph taken by H.T. Stearns for the United States Geological Survey. Source: Wiki Commons (public domain).
After the flood, Ventura County coroner Oliver Reardon worked in conjunction with other county officials to identify and document as many victims as possible. He relied on three methods: sight recognition, photography, and dental identification, using the latter for severely decomposed bodies. In his use of all three methods, Reardon took on the traditional role as a mediator sight recognition but also foreshadowed the shift in identification authority that would be a hallmark of the forensic paradigm to come in the 1940s. This is because the St. Francis Dam disaster occurred during a transitional moment in forensic history. American law enforcement had been turning to forensic techniques since the turn of the century, first in the adoption of Alphonse Bertillon’s anthropometry system and then in the use of fingerprinting.8 By 1928, advocates for identification science recognized the potential application of forensics in disaster, but few Americans at this time had the antemortem records needed for comparison in the morgue and there had been little movement in this direction. Therefore, the idea for forensic DVI existed at this time, even if the practice had not yet materialized. Reardon’s work after the dam collapse demonstrates the spirit of forensic DVI as he sought identification beyond the bounds of traditional sight recognition. As such, the St. Francis Dam disaster allows us to see how forensic authority was constructed in the disaster morgue before the presence of what we might consider to be a “true” forensic identification system.9
7 Charles Outland, Man Made Disaster: The Story of the St. Francis Dam (Glendale: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1963); Jon Wilkman, Floodpath: The Deadliest Man-Made Disaster of 20th-Century American and the Making of Modern Los Angeles (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2016); Norris Hundley and Donald C. Jackson, Heavy Ground: William Mulholland and the St. Francis Dam Disaster, Western History Series (Oakland: University of California Press for the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, 2015). 8 See Simon A. Cole, Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). 9 This work is partly inspired by scholarship on the construction of forensic authority in the courtroom; see Tal Golan, Laws of Men and Laws of Nature: The History of Scientific Expert Testimony in England and America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).
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In this case study, forensic authority was less dependent on the successful outcome of Reardon’s identification work and more on his ability to manage, create, and control the visual culture of identification. First, Reardon managed sight recognition at the morgue, supporting it through embalming and performing the inquest to formalize the identifications. Second, county officials had each body photographed and Reardon collected these images into a record book, echoing other photographic practices of the period that sought to “fix” the body with the camera. Finally, Reardon pursued dental identifications by contacting the families of missing victims, interpreting the data provided to identify severely decomposed remains. Collectively, these identification practices demonstrated the state’s power to not only intervene in the DVI process but to conceptualize identification in a new way.
The St. Francis Dam Disaster
On the morning of March 12, 1928, damkeeper Tony Harnischfeger noticed a leak in the west abutment of the St. Francis Dam. Although the dam had experienced a few minor leaks since its completion in 1926, Harnischfeger was concerned by the presence of mud, which indicated that the dam’s foundation was damaged. He telephoned the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), which managed the dam, and its chief engineer William Mulholland departed for the San Francisquito Canyon to investigate. After inspecting the dam for two hours, he determined that there was no cause for alarm and headed back to the city.10 The St. Francis Dam had been a herculean project for Mulholland, who designed the concrete structure—185 ft. tall and 170 ft. wide—to create a back-up water supply for the city of Los Angeles. The dam was a follow-up project to his famous Los Angeles Aqueduct, which carried water over fifty-two miles from the Owens Valley to the city. Mulholland was known for his unscrupulous practices in drawing water from distant valleys to support the city, rarely receiving permission from the valley residents who depended on this water, often generating great resentment from those who felt exploited by the city’s greed for water.11 In the Santa Clarita Valley, which was located in Ventura County, residents were not consulted about the St. Francis Dam’s construction because the structure was to be located in Los Angeles County. This sowed seeds of distrust among the residents, who expressed concerns about the dam’s stability. Residents sometimes cracked jokes about the dam collapsing as rumors occasionally circulated about leaks in the structure.12 Those who outwardly expressed fears about the dam, however, were often ridiculed for being afraid.13 Their fears were justified. A few minutes before midnight on March 12—less than twelve hours after Mulholland’s visit—the St. Francis Dam broke in a sudden and devastating burst, releasing 12.38 billion gallons of water. (figure 2) The flood quickly killed Harnischfeger, his girlfriend, and son. The water then decimated several ranches in the San Francisquito Canyon before hitting the LADWP’s Powerhouse 2, home to several employees and their families. The
10 My narrative is derived from the monographs by Outland, Wilkman, and Hundley and Jackson. See fn. 7. 11 On Mulholland and the history of water in Los Angeles, see Steven P. Erie, Beyond Chinatown: The Metropolitan Water District, Growth, and the Environment in Southern California (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); Norris Hundley, Jr., The Great Thirst: Californians and Water, 1770s-1990s (Oakland: University of California Press, 1992); Catherine Mulholland, William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles (Oakland: University of California Press, 2000); Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (New York: Penguin Books, 1993). 12 Outland, Man Made Disaster, 44. 13 Wilkman, Floodpath, 84.
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JSAHMS Vol. 3 (no. 1) 2021 waters wiped out a road stop at Castaic Junction, where the canyon opens onto the Santa Clarita Valley. From there, water swept north to the town of Castaic and south toward Saugus, killing employees of the Southern California Edison Company substation outside of town. By this time, some individuals were able to escape to higher ground before the water arrived, allowing them to alert towns down the valley. Telephone operators relayed information to one another, and also called officials in Ventura and Los Angeles, where Mulholland was awoken with the news.
Figure 2: St. Francis Dam after the collapse, March 1928. Photograph taken by H.T. Stearns for the United States Geological Survey. Source: Wiki Commons (public domain).
There was no way to reach those at the Edison camp at Kemp Siding, just over the Ventura County line, where 177 men had been living temporarily while working on a new power line. After wiping out the camp, the flood followed the Santa Clara River, taking out ranches around Camulos but sparing the town of Piru. In the meantime, Ventura Sheriff Eddie Hearn headed to the town of Fillmore but was unable to evacuate the residents before the water arrived, taking out the bridge across the river to Bardsdale. News reached the more populous town of Santa Paula, where motorcycle officer Thornton Edwards rode through the streets to warn people, including Spanish- speaking families living along the river. The flood hit Santa Paula and moved onto the town of Saticoy, finally emptying into the Pacific Ocean (and avoiding the cities of Ventura and Oxnard that flanked the river outlet). It took nearly five and a half hours for the waters to travel from the dam to the ocean, by which time approximately 411 people had died—roughly 20% of the valley’s population. Recovering the dead would be a challenge. The floodwaters carried people far from home and dispersed them over the two-mile expanse of the Santa Clarita Valley. Some bodies were swept into gorges and canyons, while others were buried in mud and debris. (figure 3) Some victims likely ended up in the ocean, never to be recovered. As the sun rose on March 13, volunteers from Ventura and Los Angeles counties organized a search for the dead. In addition to local law enforcement, personnel arrived from the L.A. Police Department, the Los Angeles County
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Sheriff’s Office, and the LADWP to assist in the recovery work. Private and public relief organizations, including the American Red Cross, also stepped in to provide food, clothing, and shelter to the survivors. Towns that escaped significant damage provided vehicles to transport the dead to the temporary morgues set up around the valley. Many victims were recovered in the first few days after the disaster, and the official search would conclude in late March. However, another three dozen bodies were recovered between April and August. These bodies would be the most difficult to identify.14
Figure 3: Police Retrieve Bodies from the Rubble after the St. Francis Dam Flood (courtesy of the Ventura County Library).
Civic officials in both Los Angeles and Ventura Counties immediately knew financial support would be needed as well. On March 14, the L.A. Board of Water Commissioners authorized $25,000 to assist in the recovery and burials; the City Council also approved a $1 million restoration fund on March 17. However, Los Angeles Mayor George E. Cryer was hesitant to acknowledge the city’s legal liability and City Attorney Jess E. Stephens spoke of investigating the facts before assigning blame.15 These statements made Ventura officials skeptical that its neighbors would make appropriate reparations, so residents formed a Citizens’ Restoration
14 The Ventura County coroner’s records are not consistent in noting the date of recovery for all the bodies. Most of the badly decomposed and skeletonized remains on file began appearing in April and the final recovery date recorded is August 16. Most of the bodies recovered after this date were only bones, making it difficult even to confirm their relationship to the St. Francis Dam disaster. Oliver Reardon, Ventura County Coroner’s Record, Violent Deaths, March 1928, file 347.016, Ventura County Museum and Library. 15 Wilkman, Floodpath, 142-3.
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Committee (CRC), headed by Santa Paula resident Charles C. Teague.16 The committee’s mission was to seek financial restitution for the loss of life and property caused by the flood. The CRC’s Death and Disability Claims subcommittee assisted families in filing death claims against the city of Los Angeles. By July 1929, there were 293 claims filed, which totaled $3,586,774.49.17 This organized effort to seek damages was likely an important motivation for the extensive identification work undertaken by Ventura County Coroner Oliver Reardon and his fellow Ventura County officials. In the end, 306 bodies were identified.
The Mediation of Sight Recognition
The main location for sight recognition was the temporary morgue and several such sites were established after the dam’s collapse. In some of the smaller towns, these morgues were in public spaces that could accommodate the bodies: the Riverside Dance Hall in Piru, the Methodist Church in Bardsdale, and a drugstore in Moorpark. Other towns collected the dead at local undertaking parlors, including the French and Skillin Mortuary in Fillmore, French’s Undertaking Parlor in Santa Paula, Diffenderfer Mortuary in Oxnard, and the Reardon Undertaking Parlor in Ventura.18 All the morgues in Ventura County were under the management Coroner Reardon, while his counterpart in Los Angeles County, Frank A. Nance, had jurisdiction over the bodies at the Hap- a-Lan Dance Hall in Newhall.19 (figure 4) In these spaces, volunteers laid out the bodies, hosed them down with warm water to remove the mud and soften rigor mortis, and wrapped them in white sheets. As one volunteer recalled, “We would arrange the bodies on large pieces of paper like ears of corn in a row so that families could go and identify their deceased.”20 Photographs of the victims also show the bodies atop either paper or sheets on the carpeted floors of a funeral home, or laid out on tables. The temporary morgue was a standard feature in disaster response since the nineteenth century, when railroad accidents, urban fires, and mine collapses became more common. These spaces were improvisational, set up in the wake of mass-fatality events to facilitate identification of the dead. While the ad hoc nature of these spaces meant that great variation could exist in their methods for handling the dead, the presence of the morgue itself suggests the shared social and legal imperatives to identify that existed in this period. The latter half of the nineteenth century saw the evolution of urban death bureaucracy, manifested through urban morgues, death certificates, and mortality schedules that sought to document death, mostly in response to
16 The committee eventually included L.A. City Attorney Jess E. Stephens, who was present to protect the interests of his city and county. On the specific makeup of the committee and the details of its work, see Wilkman, 138-54. 17 Of this total, the settlement amount was $883,665.60 (which is approximately $13.4 million today). Citizens’ Restoration Committee, “Report on Death and Disability Claims,” July 15, 1929, https://scvhistory.com/scvhistory/stfrancis-claims071529.htm (accessed December 19, 2020). 18 Ann Stansell, Memorialization and Memory of Southern California’s St. Francis Dam Disaster of 1928, Master’s Thesis (California State University at Northridge, 2014), 37. 19 At the Los Angeles County inquest, Coroner Nance read the names of sixty-nine victims from Newhall while Stansell lists seventy-three. The discrepancy between these two numbers may be due to the later discovery of the four bodies in Los Angeles County. There is also a brief reference in a local newspaper to four bodies in Bakersfield, which Nance may not have accounted for in his inquest. Fillmore American, March 15, 1928, 4; Ann Stansell, “Roster of St. Francis Dam Victims.” 20 Quoted in John Nichols, The St. Francis Dam Disaster (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2002), 84.
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Figure 4: Bodies Laid Out at the Newhall Morgue (Source: SCV History, https://scvhistory.com/scvhistory/hs9022.htm) epidemics.21 The temporary morgue also reflects this accounting impulse, despite the often very real challenges to identification presented by fires and floods. The state’s bureaucratic desire to identify overlapped with the psychological imperatives of the affected community, leading to public displays of the dead even when the bodies were severely damaged. For example, following an 1867 train wreck near Angola, New York, local residents laid out victims’ bodies even though many of the forty-nine victims were burned beyond recognition.22 As a place for looking at the dead, the temporary morgue was defined by the gaze of recognition. Identification relied almost exclusively on a family member, friend, associate, neighbor, or acquaintance visually examining the face, body, or personal effects of the dead and identifying them based on the recognition of a familiar physical or material marker. Despite the emotional difficulty inherent in viewing the dead, it was often the only way for a decedent’s loved ones to confirm the death. The alternative—to not know the fate of the missing—could be
21 Randy Hanzlick, “Death Registration: History, Methods, and Legal Issues,” Journal of Forensic Science 42, no. 2 (1997): 265. 22 Charity Vogel, The Angola Horror: The 1867 Train Wreck That Shocked the Nation and Transformed American Railroads (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).
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JSAHMS Vol. 3 (no. 1) 2021 profoundly traumatizing.23 However, by 1928, the challenges of sight recognition were well- known by identification experts. In their 1918 book Personal Identification: Methods for the Identification Individuals, Living or Dead, H.H. Wilder and Bert Wentworth explicitly critiqued sight recognition, which they argued did not ensure accurate identification for three reasons: the close physical resemblance between some people; the changeability of appearance over time; and the unreliability of the eyes, memory, and judgment.24 For these reasons, misidentification was a reality after disaster, as seen in the St. Francis Dam disaster. In a March 15 article, the Newhall Signal published “impressions” of the flood: “The frequent difficulty in making identification. The woman on a bier in Santa Paula, of whom a young lady repeatedly said that if it were not for the jewelry worn, she would say that person is her mother… A body was identified Tuesday as Homer Coe. Thursday morning several persons identified another body as Coe.”25 Oliver Reardon could not prevent misidentifications, but he could use his position to manage the identification process. Reardon previously studied mortuary science in Chicago and moved to Ventura in 1911 to open his funeral home; he had served in the elected position of county coroner since 1922.26 As both the county coroner and an undertaker, Reardon used his authority to impose some form of order over the chaos of disaster. He traveled between the morgues, prepared many of the bodies, oversaw the burial of the unidentified, and kept records of the deaths. Reardon ensured that the unidentified were not interred in a potter’s field by making arrangements with the city of Los Angeles to purchase plots at the Santa Paula and Ivy Lawn Cemeteries in order to give the dead a more dignified burial.27 There are eighteen unidentified at Santa Paula and fifty-six at Ivy Lawn.28 He also was able to call on his professional network of undertakers to intervene in instances of misidentification. For example, to rectify the confusion around the remains of Homer Coe, he notified the undertaker at Sawtelle “to hold the body until the mistake can be rectified.”29 Finally, to support sight recognition, Reardon allowed some of the remains to be embalmed. By the evening of March 14, embalmers had arrived in the area from nearby Santa Maria, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, and other towns to assist at the French & Skillin Mortuary in Santa Paula.30 Sight recognition could not only provide comfort for the grieving families but also ensured documentation of the dead for bureaucratic and legal purposes, something the Ventura County
23 Anthropologists and sociologists studying identification in the context of political violence have addressed the effects of such trauma. See Adam Rosenblatt, Digging for the Disappeared: Forensic Science After Atrocity (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 54-6, and Sarah Wagner, To Know Where He Lies: DNA Technology and the Search for Srebrenica’s Missing (Oakland: University of California Press, 2008). 24 Harris Hawthorne Wilder and Bert Wentworth, Personal Identification: Methods for the Identification Individuals, Living or Dead (Boston: R.G. Badger, The Gorham Press, 1918), 40. 25 Newhall Signal, March 15, 1928 in Memories of St. Francis Dam Disaster Vol II. Schools, Churches, Institutions, Clubs, Organizations, eds. Lois Goddard and Catherine Greening, SCVHistory.com, https://scvhistory.com/scvhistory/brunner1940stfrancis2.htm (accessed December 31, 2020). 26 Biographical information on Reardon is difficult to locate and has been compiled from two sources: “Obituary: Joseph P. Reardon,” Ventura County Star, https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/venturacountystar/obituary.aspx?n=joseph-p-reardon&pid=16661011 (accessed December 20, 2020); “Our History,” Joseph P. Reardon Funeral Home & Cremation Service, https://www.reardonfuneral.com/history.html (accessed December 20, 2020). 27 Stansell, Memorialization and Memory, 38. 28 Stansell, 115. 29 Newhall Signal, March 15, 1928 in Goddard and Greening, eds., Memories of St. Francis Dam Disaster Vol II. 30 Fillmore American, March 15, 1928, 4; Leslie White, Me, Detective (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1936), 90. Four men also worked with an undertaker in San Fernando to embalm forty-six decedents. Newhall Signal, March 15, 1928, Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society, http://www.scvhistory.com/scvhistory/brunner1940stfrancis2.htm (accessed December 19, 2021).
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JSAHMS Vol. 3 (no. 1) 2021 inquests required. Such inquests were part of Reardon’s duties to officially declare the cause and manner of death of the victims and to issue death certificates. Such paperwork was required for the death claims process, as each body had to be legally recognized to have died as a direct result of the dam’s collapse. To perform the inquests, Coroner Reardon and District Attorney James Hollingsworth traveled on March 15 to Fillmore, Santa Paula, and Ventura; Deputy Coroner F.H. Diffenderfer and Deputy D.A. Don Holt held inquests at Moorpark and Oxnard on the same day. The inquests had a similar format, with only minor variations: the coroner’s jury viewed the dead; names of the dead were read aloud; a medical doctor stated the cause of death to be drowning; and the jury deliberated to officially affirm these facts.31 The bodies could not be released to the families until the inquests were performed, which means the needs of the state took priority over the needs of the families. Although the inquests clarified the legal record, they also demonstrated the state’s ability to erase the confusions of the disaster and affirm the lives of the dead. For example, at the Moorpark inquest, a local doctor who had examined each of the nine bodies there testified to the names and ages of each.32 At the larger Santa Paula inquest, D.A. Hollingsworth read through the name of every identified decedent, using a photograph of each to connect the body to a name. He then repeated the process for the unidentified, giving general descriptions of each body in lieu of a name. Sheriff Carl Wallace testified to affirm the identities and Hollingsworth invited those in attendance to speak if they had additional information about the decedents. Only occasionally did anyone contribute information, reporting a victim’s place of employment or residence, race or age.33 This process gave greater meaning to sight recognition because, in times of disaster, the act of reading the names functions as a symbolic act to acknowledge the lives lost and sanction the dead in the eyes of the state. Historian Thomas Laqueur has argued that the modern phenomenon of naming of the dead is both a political and cultural one, motivated by bureaucratic developments but also the increasing privileging of the individual.34 This duality existed in the St. Francis Dam inquests, where the reading of each name carried legal and cultural weight. The reading of names acknowledged the individuals and provided what Laqueur describes as a formal denouement to their lives. By providing this denouement, the state affirmed its place in the identification process.
Photographic Extensions of Sight Recognition
Coroner Reardon’s management of the sight recognition process on the ground was only one part of his intervention into the St. Francis Dam identifications. He also employed local photographers to document each body recovered from the flood.35 Bernard Isensee worked at the French & Skillin Mortuary;36 Leslie White, a newspaper photographer who was initially recruited to take images of the region by plane, was recruited by D.A. Hollingsworth to photograph the
31 Coroner’s Inquests, March 15, 1928, Folders WP 19-17-01 to WP 19-17-04, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power Records Center, Water Services (Aqueduct) Historical Records. 32 Coroner’s Inquest—Moorpark, March 15, 1928, Folder WP 19-17-01, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power Records Center, Water Services (Aqueduct) Historical Records, 6. 33 Coroner’s Inquest—Santa Paula, March 15, 1928, Folder WP 19-17-03, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power Records Center, Water Services (Aqueduct) Historical Records, 2-26. 34 Thomas Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 393-98. 35 Out of respect for the victims of the flood, I have opted to not reproduce any postmortem photographs in this article. 36 Coroner’s Inquest – Santa Paula, 17.
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JSAHMS Vol. 3 (no. 1) 2021 dead.37 Coroner Reardon’s records contained photographs from six morgue locations in total: Ventura, Oxnard, Santa Paula, Fillmore, Moorpark, and the Baker & McCormick Mortuary. These visual records would allow identifications to continue after burial and the physical disintegration of the bodies; the images could also circulate in ways that the bodies could not. D.A. Hollingsworth declared that the purpose of photographing each victim was to assist with future identification: “We are filing these photographs for future reference, and anyone who desires extra prints can have them if it will aid and assist in future identifications.”38 This was valuable for the families of the dead who lived too far away to view the bodies in person; the photographs allowed county officials to offer an option for identification that could span both time and distance.39 For example, in the weeks after the flood, Ventura County Sheriff Wallace corresponded with a Mrs. Watkins whose two sons, both itinerant workers, were in the region at the time of the flood. A friend reported having seen their bodies at a morgue in Ventura, so Wallace sent her the photographs of the bodies in question, which she identified as her sons.40 Some families also sent photographs to various officials in Ventura and Los Angeles in the hopes of aiding in the identification. There were several letters sent to both Ventura County and the LADWP that contained photographs of missing individuals. A man from Iowa sent a photograph of his runaway son Frank to the LADWP and a woman named Anna Korten sent a photograph of her husband.41 Similarly, Coroner Reardon received a photograph of a man named Mathew Crosby, with his physical description written on the back.42 The only photographs on record that depict known victims of the flood were those of Aaron Ely and his son Roy, who had been living at Powerplant No. 2 (figure 5); although Aaron’s body was never found, Roy was eventually identified. By sending photographs, family members were supplementing one form of sight recognition for another. Though this method helped to overcome distance, it also relied on the coroner to make the visual match. While this was a form of sight recognition, it fundamentally transferred the authority to perform the identification to the coroner, who now based his determination of a comparison of the body with the photograph, rather than on any subjective familiarity with the individuals. It is important to read these photographs as more than simple documentations of the dead, in part because the actual value of these images for identification is murky. From photograph to photograph, there are variations in the distance between the camera and the body, as well as the camera’s angle relative to the body. These differences notably effect on the visibility of the face.
37 White’s autobiography mentions four morgues but does not name them. Leslie White, Me, Detective (Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1936), 90-91. One author states that White traveled to Newhall, Santa Paula, and Piru but provides no evidence. See Richard Rayner, A Bright, Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.’s Scandalous Coming of Age (New York: Doubleday, 2009), 13. 38 Coroner’s Inquest—Santa Paula, 2. 39 On the role of photography to create a new ontology for the corpse, see John Troyer, “Embalmed Vision” in Technologies of the Human Corpse (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2020), 1-29. 40 Letter to Sheriff Carl Wallace from Mrs. J.R. Wilkins, April 13, 1928, Letters Sent to Coroner Reardon Regarding Victims of the St. Francis Dam Disaster, call number 347.016, Ventura County Museum and Library. 41 Letter to Royal E. Tyler from [A.J. Ford], April 24, 1928; Letter to Frank R. Jaffa from Anna Korten, March 23, 1928, and Letter to William Mulholland from Frank Jaffa, September 6, 1928, Folder WP 19-17-15, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power Records Center, Water Services (Aqueduct) Historical Records. 42 Letters Sent to Coroner Reardon Regarding Victims of the St. Francis Dam Disaster. There is no record of Reardon’s response.
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Figure 5: Letter to Coroner Reardon with the photo of Roy Ely (courtesy of The Museum of Ventura County).
The most extreme examples are the photographs of bodies labeled as “Santa Paula 33” and “Santa Paula 34,” which were taken at a great distance from the bodies. The faces are difficult to see, especially because the camera appears to have been positioned below the faces, resulting in a view up the chin and nose of the victims. Nearly all of the victim photographs capture the body from the side (most likely a reflection of the photographers’ difficulty in navigating the camera inside the crowded morgues). These compositional issues suggest the limitations of photographic identification, which could replicate the problems inherent to sight recognition. In fact, Mrs. Watkins’s identification of her sons via photograph turned out to be wrong; she and her husband later located their sons in Washington. She wrote to the sheriff to apologize: “The description tallies with them so well as the pictures [sic].”43 The second indication that the photographs were
43 Letter to Sheriff Carl Wallace from Mr. and Mrs. J.R. Wilkins, April 28, 1928, Letters Sent to Coroner Reardon Regarding Victims of the St. Francis Dam Disaster.
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JSAHMS Vol. 3 (no. 1) 2021 not simply tools of identification is the fact that Coroner Reardon’s records include a large number of images taken of the severely decomposed or skeletonized remains. There are approximately seventy such photographs of bodies well beyond the possibility of sight recognition. The photographs, then, served a function beyond identification; they were bureaucratic and legal tools that demonstrated the state’s power over death. To begin, the photographs were collected in Coroner Reardon’s Record of Violent Deaths, a large bound notebook that was a common item in coroner’s offices of the period. Reardon pasted the photographs into the book, four or six images to a page, and wrote a description of each body next to or underneath the photographs. In several instances, one can trace the identification: the descriptions of the body are written in small, neat lettering, with the victim’s name written in larger script by what may be a different hand. In some cases, handwriting in the margins in a different ink records who performed the identification and where the decedent was interred.44 Like the inquest, the record book is not unique to the St. Francis Dam disaster, but the careful collecting and annotating of the photographs is worth considering, as they represent not only the bureaucratic function of the coroner in general but also the specific construction of an archive of the disaster. In this context, archive does not mean merely a collection of documents, but a bureaucratic structuring of disorder that has its roots in nineteenth-century criminology. Historians have argued that the growth of cities in the late nineteenth century created social anxieties in the United States about identity and social categories. With people arriving to cities from both the rural countryside and from foreign nations, social hierarchies and relationships changed.45 One consequence of this was the rise in crime rates, as it became easier for people to move anonymously through the city, leading to the development of urban police departments that came turned to science to help track criminals. Known as criminology, this scientific approach to the criminal body was rooted in a belief that the state could “master the criminal body by marking it and making its criminal history visible to the state.”46 The bureaucratic expression of this was the criminal file, which often contained data sheets and photographs that “captured” the body’s physical details. These files were the material culture of identification science, which saw identity as embodied and sought to control the criminal body by stabilizing it in the paper record.47 Although he was not dealing with criminals, Coroner Reardon’s record book is similar to the criminal file, which is not surprising given that the coroner is part of the state apparatus. The written descriptions of the bodies include standard physical descriptions; for example, the text for
44 There is some variation to this formula within the records. For some reason, the photographs from the Fillmore morgue are not accompanied by as much descriptive text. Similarly, those individuals identified as workers from the Edison camp have little textual descriptions, most likely because surviving Edison employees were able to make the identifications quickly. Additionally, some of the photographs from Moorpark and Oxnard locations have typewritten descriptions on the surface of the image. Other variations exist throughout the record book, which is not surprising given the logistical complexities around recordkeeping in a disaster. 45 See Ellen Samuels, Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, and Race (New York: New York University Press, 2014); Jane Caplan and John Torpey, eds. Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982). 46 Cole, Suspect Identities, 3. 47 In addition to Cole, see Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (1986): 3-64; Jonathan Matthew Finn, Capturing the Criminal Image: From Mug Shot to Surveillance Society (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Concerns about the relationship between identification science and truth continued into the era of DNA. See Michael Lynch, Simon A. Cole, Ruth McNally, and Kathleen Jordan, eds. Truth Machine: The Contentious History of DNA Fingerprinting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
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“Santa Paula 53” reads, “Blk hair, brown eyes, 3 ft. 6 in., 60 lbs., 5 yr., Mex. Male.”48 This language may have been useful for family members seeking a lost child, but it an objective description that is distinct from the intimate, subjective knowledge of the body held by someone familiar with the decedent. Interestingly, there is also a criminological connection to photographer Leslie White, who helped document the dead; he began his career as a deputy sheriff in Ventura County and later contracted with the Ventura police to “handle” their identification work, including photographing arrestees.49 The connection between the coroner’s record book and the criminal file, however, is not only a historical one—it is ideological. The use of photographs reflects the desire to know the body through its appearance. It was not simply enough to record each death from the flood in writing; photography allowed the state to “fix” the bodies as a means of stabilizing something that was fundamentally unstable. In criminology, photography could counter the criminal’s tendency to evade arrest or change his appearance; in the morgue, the photograph froze the body in time before decomposition. The photographs circulated in ways that the body could not. In addition to appearing in Reardon’s record book, duplicates were included in the Ventura County inquest files, the CRC’s Death and Disability Claims report, and the LADWP’s Unidentified Casualties files.50 The circulation of these photographs ensured that the dead were always “present” in the bureaucratic and legalistic follow-ups to the disaster. Their images served as indices of the corpses’ material reality, and gave silent testimony to the suffering of the victims and their families. The decision to reproduce the images for inclusion in these documents again suggests that county officials could use their access to photography to not only speak for the dead, but allow them to play an active role in the accounting—fiscal and moral—of the disaster. Photographing the dead also was important for demonstrating that the state’s intervention into the sight recognition process could benefit the families of the deceased in several ways. The photographs extended the possibility for identification via sight recognition, not only in the morgue but through the mail and long after the bodies had been buried. The creation and circulation of the photographs within various legal arenas also allowed the dead to be “present” as the state acknowledged the social, legal, and financial value of their lives. Although rooted in the practices of criminal identification, the photographs nonetheless allowed the state to metaphorically assert its power over the disorder of sudden and violent catastrophe. Yet, the photographs also hint at a transfer of power in identification because they allowed the coroner - and not the family - to make the final determination of identity, a practice that would also continue in the dental identifications. Nonetheless, families were appreciative of this work; Mrs. Watkins concluded her letter to Sheriff Wallace by “[t]hanking you + all that have aided in the search for us + for others…”51
48 Reardon, Ventura County Coroner’s Record of Violent Deaths, 43. 49 White, 80; 93. 50 The photographs are complete in the inquest files and the CRC’s report; only a portion of the unidentified casualty files include a photograph of the remains. 51 Letter to Sheriff Carl Wallace from Mr. and Mrs. J.R. Wilkins, April 28, 1928, Letters Sent to Coroner Reardon Regarding Victims of the St. Francis Dam Disaster.
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Enhancing Sight Recognition with Dental Identifications
Ventura County officials, and Coroner Reardon in particular, also pursued a nascent form of forensic odontology to push identification beyond its traditional limits. In performing dental identification work, Reardon signaled the growing American confidence in forensic practices. In reality, the work he did was not a strictly scientific process and, in many ways, the comparison between the teeth of the dead and the dental records Reardon acquired was merely an exaggerated form of sight recognition. At the same time, the attempt to use teeth in identification suggests that civic officials and the victims’ families believed in his ability to make accurate, objective analysis of the records to make a true identification. In this way, Reardon’s dental identifications placed him in a position of authority over both the bodies and the facts of their identity in a way that strongly foreshadows the modern forensic paradigm of DVI that was to emerge in the 1940s. Though the records do not state who had the initial idea to pursue dental identification after the St. Francis Dam collapse, the motivation for doing so may have been twofold. First, there were many itinerant laborers working in the Santa Clarita Valley at the time of the flood, many of them working for the Edison Power Company at Kemp Siding. Most of these workers did not have family in the immediate area to perform sight recognition; furthermore, eighty-six men from the camp died, leaving few survivors to identify their co-workers. Of the eighty-six victims, only fifty- two (approximately 60%) were identified; this was significantly lower than the overall total: 306 of 411, or approximately 74%.52 The other reason for using dental identifications is because of the number of severely decomposed or skeletonized remains recovered in the weeks, months, and years after the flood. For example, a skeleton related to the flood was located in 1931; Reardon photographed it, issued a death certificate, and had the body interred at Ivy Lawn Cemetery.53 Still, the decision to use dental identifications is curious because, while this method had been known for centuries, it had not yet fully entered into regular DVI practice in the United States. In the nineteenth century, families sometimes used distinctive dental features to identify a loved one or to clear up potential misidentifications. In one case in 1869, two families who suspected a mix- up of the remains of their daughters examined the teeth of each to clear up the mistake.54 By the end of the century, a small number of dentists invested in the growth of their profession began advocating for the inclusion of teeth in the systems of personal identification embraced by American military and law enforcement agencies because, they argued, the teeth and palate were both durable and distinctive.55 However, the first true demonstration of dental identification in disaster occurred in 1897, at the Bazar de la Charité fire in Paris. Among the 126 victims were several members of the French aristocracy, whose dentists provided antemortem records that were used to identify them.56 Dentist Oscar Amoëdo, in Paris at the time but not involved in the
52 Again, this data is based on the work of Ann Stansell. Ann Stansell, “Roster of the St. Francis Dam Victims.” 53 St. Francis Dam Claims Records, Unidentified Casualties Files, WP 19-18-03, File Ventura No. 62, August- October. Reardon later issued his bill of $70 to the LADWP to cover his services and the cost of the grave; the photograph cost 50 cents. 54 John M’Grath, “Identification of Human Remains by Teeth,” Dental Cosmos 11, no. 2 (February 1869): 77-8. 55 William Trueman, “The Advent of Dental Science in the United States,” Dental Cosmos 38, no. 9 (September 1896): 713-23; Alton Thompson, “Identification by Means of the Teeth,” Dental Cosmos 39, no. 3 (March 1897): 227-32; E.K. Wedelstaedt, “A System of Measurement of Teeth, and Some Ideal Cavities,” Dental Cosmos 39, no. 5 (May 1897): 375-91. 56 Oscar Amoëdo, “The Role of Dentists in the Identification of Victims of the Catastrophe of the Bazar de la Charité, Paris, 4th of May, 1897,” Dental Cosmos 39, no. 11 (November 1897): 905-12; Amoëdo, “Identification of Bodies by the Expert Dentist,” Dental Cosmos 41, no. 5 (May 1899): 444-50.
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JSAHMS Vol. 3 (no. 1) 2021 identifications, took a great interest in the case and ultimately produced the first textbook of forensic odontology in 1898, L’art dentaire en médecine légale. In addition to covering the anatomy and pathology of teeth, he asserted the social and civil importance of dental identifications and celebrated the value of “le dentist-expert.”57 It is unknown whether Coroner Reardon had any knowledge of Amoëdo’s work. Furthermore, the idea to use teeth does not appear to have been an initial part of the recovery work at the St. Francis morgues. In Reardon’s Record of Violent Deaths, the descriptive information for many of the victims does not mention teeth. The effort seems to have started with the bodies in poor condition; fifteen bodies at the Santa Paula morgue and fifty-one at the Ventura morgue, many recovered weeks after the disasters, have dental descriptions of various length inscribed under their photographs. Yet, these descriptions again suggest an improvisational response to the circumstances rather than the more formal systems suggested by nineteenth- century dental advocates like Amoëdo. The terminology reveals a basic understanding of dental nomenclature:
Ventura 25: Teeth – 4 gold teeth on upper right – beginning with the eye tooth + running back to the molar; Two gold crowns back of eye tooth on upper left; second lower left + right molar missing.
Ventura 32: Full set of even teeth. Only a skeleton.
Ventura 47: Teeth – upper front teeth short and even, lower front long and crooked – 2nd bicuspid and first upper right molar in a double crown. All other upper right molars are missing; beginning with the second upper left all molars are missing; on the lower right the first bicuspid and last molar are missing. Missing teeth were probably knocked out in the flood.
Santa Paula 65: 11 teeth gone.
Santa Paula 70: False teeth between bicuspid and first upper right molar. One upper left molar is a solid gold crown.58
Generally, the descriptions in the record book include information about missing teeth, gold or amalgam fillings, dentures, crowns, and bridges. On occasion, a few bodies are described in the records as having “full” or “natural” teeth. This language reveals not only the absence of specialized knowledge in forensic odontology, but also that these dental identifications drew from what was visible to the naked eye. In other words, these observations bear a strong resemblance to sight recognition. The usefulness of these descriptions depended entirely on Reardon acquiring dental information about the dead. To do so, he sent out a form letter asking for whatever dental information he could get:
Bodies from the St. Francis Dam disaster are still being recovered in the Santa Clara River Channel. Identifications are becoming more difficult as time goes on. The teeth are now practically the only means of identification. Please consult your dentist, giving full details of any and all work that has been on the teeth of [individual’s name] and any further information or description you may have. Many bodies are recovered already that we are unable to identify for lack of proper descriptions. Any further details would be greatly appreciated.59
57 Oscar Amoëdo, L’art dentaire en médecine légale (Paris: Masson, 1898), 417-19. 58 Reardon, Ventura County Coroner’s Record of Violent Deaths. 59 Letter to the family of Lucy Jones from Coroner Oliver Reardon, Letters Sent to Coroner Reardon Regarding Victims of the St. Francis Dam Disaster. Italics in the original. While there are no records of exactly how many of
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Records include responses for sixteen individuals, but it is unlikely that this represents the entirety of Reardon’s dental identifications. Anthropologist Ann Stansell notes that at least eight victims from the Edison camp were identified by dental records.60 Furthermore, of the existing sixteen records on file, thirteen of the victims are listed as missing; one individual was later located alive; and two were successfully identified through a very complicated series of steps, perhaps explaining why Reardon kept these files.61 Of the sixteen responses, Reardon’s file includes ten dental charts, some accompanied by letters from the relative, acquaintance, or dentist providing the information. The other six victim files include only letters without a dental chart. Most of the charts were similar in format: a printed diagram of the teeth, lines for recording the patient’s information, and a chart for recording the date, type, location, and cost of work done. (figure 6) Because seven of the ten charts on file are identical, it is likely that Reardon provided these charts with his letter. The remaining three dental charts—for Lucy Jones, Waldo Janeway, and Charles Schmidt—are filled in with dated information about treatments, suggesting these were their actual patient charts. For most of the charts, the patient’s dental information was communicated in two ways. The first was through the tooth diagram, which the informants shaded to indicate the location and shape of fillings, as on the card for Fred Burnett. (figure 7) Bridges were more difficult to show; for instance, Charles Schmidt’s dentist outlined the bridged teeth and drew a line between them; someone simply wrote “tooth bridge” over the teeth on the card for Paul Best.62 Some charts also contain narratives about the patient’s teeth, as exemplified on the card for Helen Neilson:
Mrs. Neilson had no gold work of any kind in her mouth. She had porcelain fillings in her upper front teeth and laterals overlapping upper centrals quite a bit. A [sic] amalgam filling partly broken off on lower left bicuspid + tooth next to it missing, which would be first lower left bicuspid. Also had a few other amalgam fillings.63
As this description reveals, the descriptions often emphasized visible treatments or anomalies in the teeth.
these letters Reardon sent, it is likely that he sent them to the families of those who had been reported missing. He may have consulted the list of missing individuals compiled by American Red Cross volunteers at the Newhall morgue. Although this morgue was technically in Los Angeles County, Reardon may have taken charge of all the unidentified regardless of their jurisdiction. Some of the names in his files were residents of the San Francisquito Canyon and Castaic, both of which are in Los Angeles County. St. Francis Dam Disaster, March 13, 1928, List of Unidentified – Descriptions, Folder WP 19-17-25: St. Francis Claims Records, Unidentified, Missing, Dead Victims, March 1928-June 1928, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power Records Center, Water Services (Aqueduct) Historical Records; Letters Sent to Coroner Reardon Regarding Victims of the St. Francis Dam Disaster. 60 Stansell, Memorization and Memory, 119. 61 Stansell, “Roster of the St. Francis Dam Victims.” Given the volume of archival materials on the flood that still exist, it seems unlikely that all the dental records would have disappeared, but further research in the California archives is not possible at the current time. 62 Paul Best has two cards; the first only shows markings on the tooth diagram, including the note about the bridge, and the second has few markings on the diagram but a complete narrative written over the treatment chart at the bottom of the card. Letters Sent to Coroner Reardon Regarding Victims of the St. Francis Dam Disaster. 63 Dental card for Helen A. Neilson, Letters Sent to Coroner Reardon Regarding Victims of the St. Francis Dam Disaster. Stansell’s roster gives her name as Ellen Neilson.
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Figure 6: Dental chart for victim Fred Burnette (courtesy of The Museum of Ventura County).
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Figure 7: Dental chart for victim M.S. McCawley (courtesy of The Museum of Ventura County).
The successful identifications within these existing records provide some insight into how Reardon used this information in comparison to the bodies in his morgue. The first case is that of the Frame brothers. John Harold, Vernon, and Leslie Frame worked at the Edison camp and were listed among the missing. Their mother Maggie Frame came to the valley in March to look for them, without success. Later, after reading a news story about the recent discovery of five bodies, Mrs. Frame wrote to Coroner Reardon about a victim “that had teeth work that might identify them,” and expressed hope that the same could be true for her three boys. She provided Reardon with detailed information for each. In mid-April, Mrs. Frame returned to Ventura to view a body at Reardon’s mortuary but left the area again without having made an identification. She continued to send information to Reardon through June. Eventually both Vernon and Leslie were identified. The records do not indicate when Leslie was found, but he was not formally identified until March 1929; Vernon was found July 9, 1928 and identified by a brother. Photographs indicate that both bodies were badly decomposed, but Leslie and Vernon both had distinctive dental work. The former had one missing tooth and two filled molars, while the latter had four bridged teeth in the front and a partial gold filling.64 It is likely that Reardon used the descriptive information provided to make a visual assessment of the teeth, but records do not provide details as to how the final determination was made.
64 Correspondence between Coroner Oliver Reardon and Margaret Frame, March-June 1928, Letters Sent to Coroner Reardon Regarding Victims of the St. Francis Dam Disaster.
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While the Frame brother identifications were dependent on the information provided by their mother, the case of David Stephens shows that dental expertise could play the occasional role in the identifications. Stephens’s body was discovered on June 19 and buried as an unidentified victim shortly thereafter. His son Wade contacted his father’s dentist, a Dr. Reithmuller, who had performed extractions on Dave Stephens in 1927. After bringing an X-ray of his father’s teeth to Ventura, Wade had the body exhumed and a local dentist, a Dr. Neville, compared the x-ray with the corpse’s teeth, which he confirmed as a match. Knowing that his father’s teeth had a distinctive root structure, Wade also had seven teeth extracted from the corpse and brought to his father’s dentist, who also confirmed the identification.65 In the Stephens case, the reliance on a local dentist suggests that this may have been part of Reardon’s identification process; if Reardon called on dentists for each of his cases, then the dental identifications were in fact an amalgamation of sight recognition and professional expertise. However, the Stephens case also involved the technological intervention of the X-ray, which now moved the identification away from more traditional sight recognition toward a specific reading of the body’s invisible features, which may explain the involvement of dentists in his identification. The Stephens case also hints at possible doubts about the value of X-ray identifications over sight recognition. In the files of the LADWP are written confirmations of the identification from both Dr. Reithmuller and Dr. Neville, as well as an interview with David Stephens’s daughter Annie. Dr. Reithmuller’s letter repeatedly emphasizes the accuracy of the identification:
Although fairly indubitable identification had been made by means of the X-ray in the writer’s possession, this identification was corroborated beyond any shadow of a doubt, after the victim’s body had been disinterred, & the seven lower front teeth remaining in the mandible of the cadaver extracted and compared with the X-ray by the writer. The teeth in question, judging from their shapes, cavities, defects, curves of roots and number, were undoubtedly those of the late Mr. D.S. Stephens.66
In her interview, Annie Stephens confirmed her father’s history of dental work and the “peculiarity” of his root structure. When asked by the interviewer if she doubted the identification, she asserted, “No—I know it is him.”67 The multiple verifications of the Stephens identification suggest the novelty of such methods at the time of the St. Francis Dam disaster. Indeed, as these records suggest, Reardon’s attempt to perform dental identifications faced several challenges. First, knowledge of dental work from family and friends of the missing was not reliable. An acquaintance of one individual wrote to Reardon, “I can not [sic] give you any information on his teeth as I never paid much attention to peculiarities of same.”68 Similarly, a relative of victim Ira Swanger reported, “I am not aware of
65 Memo to A.J. Ford, September 3, 1928, St. Francis Dam Claims Records, Folder WP 19-18-06: Unidentified Casualties, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power Records Center, Water Services (Aqueduct) Historical Records. 66 Letter from Dr. Richard M. Reuthmuller to the Los Angeles Department of Power and Water, September 18, 1928, St. Francis Dam Claims Records, Folder WP 19-18-06: Unidentified Casualties, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power Records Center, Water Services (Aqueduct) Historical Records. Italics added. 67 Memo to Porter, September 18, 1928, St. Francis Dam Claims Records, Folder WP 19-18-06: Unidentified Casualties, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power Records Center, Water Services (Aqueduct) Historical Records. 68 Letter to Coroner Oliver Reardon from Charles Faulhaber, June 2, 1928. Letters Sent to Coroner Reardon Regarding Victims of the St. Francis Dam Disaster.
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JSAHMS Vol. 3 (no. 1) 2021 any dentist work. He supported himself for many year[;] if he did we do not know.”69 Reardon might hope to receive more accurate information from the victims’ dentists, but regular dental care was not a feature of American health in this period.70 Finally, as the case of the Frame brothers and David Stephens shows, distinctive dental work helped create a more unique profile for the individual, which likely facilitated identification. Reardon’s work was primarily characterized by the search for anomalies, so “perfect” or “natural” teeth may have made identification more difficult for some bodies. Despite these limitations, the dental identifications after the St. Francis Dam disaster foreshadow the forensic paradigm in idea, if not fully in practice. Since the late nineteenth century, the coroner’s job after a mass-fatality event had been to hold an inquest into the cause of death and to manage the sight recognition process occurring in the morgues. In his forays into dental identification, Coroner Reardon took on a corroborating role, moving between information sent by mail from family, friends, and dentists and the bodies he had before him. He helped make identifications based on this professional assessment of the bodies, looking for observable matches between bodies and paper, ultimately making the final determination on behalf of the family. Through this, he was positioned to push sight recognition beyond the limitations of decomposition and incorporate new forms of visual assessment into the DVI process.
Conclusion
The St. Francis Dam disaster is hard to characterize within the history of DVI. It was not a major turning point that fundamentally changed the way that later identifications were performed. After the flood, Coroner Reardon returned to his regular duties as both county coroner and local undertaker, and did not publish his work in scientific journals or popular magazines to share the lessons he had learned. Yet, it is precisely because of the irregular nature of the St. Francis Dam identifications that this event is an intriguing moment in DVI history. Much of DVI history is filled with improvisation, experimentation, and ad hoc measures in response to necessity. As disaster responders today note, each disaster has its own identity: officials and experts must be attuned to the nuances of disaster type, location, culture, and condition of the remains. In Ventura County in 1928, Coroner Reardon and those he worked alongside managed the chaos of mass death as best they could under the physical conditions of the flood. As such, it is likely that many of the decisions were made by instinct, with little record remaining today about exactly how and why they did what they did. Yet, the stated imperatives to identify as many victims as possible and to see financial remuneration from Los Angeles County ultimately left behind a rich visual archive of the dead. Through the creation, collection, management, and circulation of the visual materials of identification after the flood, Reardon’s work became a marker of the state’s power to reimagine identification beyond sight recognition. This impulse indicates a very modern understanding of identification as more than a social practice, but a bureaucratic and legal one as well. It was this understanding of identification that foreshadowed the change to come to the disaster morgue in the 1940s, when scientific experts fully inserted themselves in the DVI process through the imposition of large-scale forensic identification systems onto victim remains. As this article
69 Letter to Coroner Oliver Reardon from W.F. Cavness, n.d. Letters Sent to Coroner Reardon Regarding Victims of the St. Francis Dam Disaster. 70 See Alyssa Picard, Making the American Mouth: Dentists and Public Health in the Twentieth Century (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009).
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JSAHMS Vol. 3 (no. 1) 2021 suggests, this would not have been possible without these earlier interventions, which demonstrated the state’s power to intervene and manage identification, and push sight recognition beyond its previous limitations.
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