An Island of Desolation—Crumbling Walls—Faces White With Agony—Tales of
Dismay and Death—Curious Sights.
One of the most graphic and thrilling accounts of the overwhelming
calamity is contained in the following pages. It is from the brilliant
pen of a visitor to the city and eye-witness of the awful ruin:
The story of Galveston’s tragedy can never be written as it is. Since
the cataclysm of Saturday night, a force of faithful men have been
struggling to convey to humanity from time to time some of the
particulars of the tragedy. They have told much, but it was impossible
for them to tell all, and the world, at best, can never know all, for
the thousands of tragedies written by the storm must forever remain
mysteries until eternity shall reveal all. Perhaps it were best that it
should be so, for the horror and anguish of those fatal and fateful
hours were mercifully lost in the screaming tempest and buried forever
beneath the raging billows. Only God knows, and for the rest let it
remain forever in the boundlessness of His omniscience. But in the realm
of finity, the weak and staggered senses of mankind may gather fragments
of the disaster, and may strive with inevitable incompleteness to convey
the merest impression of the saddest story which ever engaged the
efforts of a reporter.
Galveston! The mournful dirges of the breakers which lash the beach can
not in the remaining centuries of the world give expression to the
sorrow and woe which throbs here to-day; and if the sobbing waves and
sighing winds, God’s great funeral choir, fail, how can the weak pen and
appalled imaginations of men perform the task? The human heart can
merely feel what language will never be able to express. And in the case
of Galveston, the heart must break before it can begin to feel.
I struggled all day Tuesday to reach this isle of desolation. With Gen.
McKibben, Gen. Scurry, Gen. Stoddard and several who had relatives here
about whom they were anxious, I spent five hours on the bay in a row
boat, kindly loaned by the captain of the “Kendel Castle,” a British
steamship hopelessly stranded at Texas City, but finally we landed on
the island just as the stars were coming out.
The very atmosphere smelt of death, and we walked through the quiet
streets to the Tremont Hotel. Long before we landed we had seen the
naked forms of men, women and children floating in the bay and were
depressed until the entire party was heartsick.
Men were grouped about the streets talking in quiet tones. Sad and
hopeless women could be seen in dismantled houses, destitute children
were about the streets, and all about them was nothing but wreck and
ruin. Night had drawn a gray pall over the city and for awhile the
autumn moon covered her face with dark clouds to hide the place with
shadows. The town was under martial law, every saloon was closed, and
passers-by were required to give an account of themselves before being
allowed to proceed. The fact, however, that the streets were almost
impassable on account of the debris kept us reminded that we were in the
midst of unprecedented desolation.
REVEALED A SCENE.
Wednesday the sun drew aside the curtains of darkness and revealed a
scene that is impossible of description. I spent hours driving or riding
about the city, and witnessed the saddest spectacles ever seen by human
eyes. What were once Galveston’s splendid business thoroughfares were
wrecked and crumbled. The Strand, known to every business man of the
State, was lined on both sides with crumbling walls and wrenched
buildings, and the street was a mass of debris, such as metal roofs
rolled up like a scroll, splintered timbers, iron pillars, broken stone
and bricks; the same was true of Mechanic, and Market, and Tremont, and
Twenty-first and Twenty-second, and every other street of the great
business heart of Galveston.
The stores were ruined and deserted, and the blight of destruction was
visible as far as the eye could reach. As horrible as all this was, it
was as nothing to the hopeless faces of the miserable men, women and
children in the streets.
I will not undertake to describe them, but as long as I live I will
never forget them. Many I knew personally, and these gave greeting, but
God, it was nothing but a handshake and tears. It seems that everybody I
had ever known here had lost somebody. The tears in their eyes, the
quiver of their voices, the trembling of lips! The brand of agony was
upon their faces and despair was written across their hearts. I would
plunge a dagger through my heart before I would endure this experience
again.
The readers of this must pardon the personal nature of this narrative.
It is impossible to write without becoming a part of the story this
time. I met Elma Everhart, formerly a Dallas boy. I had known him from
childhood, and all his people. Indeed, I had once been an inmate of
their home in Oakcliff. I hardly knew him when he stopped me, he had
grown so much. He said: “Katy and her baby are at Dickinson. That town
was destroyed, but they are alive. I am going there and leave Galveston
forever.”
A TERRIBLE FATE.
I knew he had woe in his heart, and I queried.
“I am the only one left,” he answered. “Papa, mamma, Lena and Guy—they
are all gone.”
I remember the last time I saw this family before they left Dallas. I
remember Lena, one of the most beautiful children I ever saw. I recall
her beautiful eyes and long, dark curls, and I remember when she kissed
me good-bye and joyously told me she was coming to Galveston to live!
And this was her fate.
With all my old fondness for the ocean, recalling how I have lain upon
the sand hour after hour, looking at its distant sails and listening to
its mysterious voices, recalling happy moments too sacred for
expression, when I think of that sweet child as one of its victims, I
shall hate the sea forever.
And yet, what can this grief of mine amount to in the presence of the
agony of the thousands who loved the 5000 souls who took leave of life
amid the wild surging waters and pitiless tempest of last Saturday
night?
After surveying the dismantled business section of the city, a cabman
made his tortuous way through the residence sections. It was a slow
journey, for the streets were jammed with houses, furniture, cooking
utensils, bedding, clothing, carpets, window frames, and everything
imaginable, to say nothing of the numerous carcasses of the poor horses,
cows and other domestic animals.
HOUSES COMPLETELY CAPSIZED.
Some of the houses were completely capsized, some were flat upon the
ground with not one timber remaining upon another, others were unroofed,
some were twisted into the most fantastic shapes, and there were still
others with walls intact, but which had been stripped of everything in
the way of furniture. It is not an uncommon thing for the wind at high
velocity to perform miraculous things, but this blast, which came at the
rate of 120 miles an hour, repeated all the tricks the wind has ever
enacted, and gave countless new manifestations of its mysterious power.
It were idle to undertake to tell the curious things to be seen in the
desolate residence streets; how the trees were uprooted and driven
through houses; how telegraph poles were driven under car tracks; how
pianos were transferred from one house to another.
More ominous than all this were the vast piles of debris, from which
emanated odors which told of dead victims beneath, men, women and
children, whose silent lips will never reveal the agony from which death
alone released them.
More sorrowful still the tear-stained faces of the women, half-clad, who
looked listlessly from the windows, haunted by memories from which they
can never escape—the loss of babies torn from their breasts and hurled
into a maelstrom of destruction, to be seen no more forever.
What were those dismantled homes to the dismantled hearts within? How
can it be described? Will the world ever know the real dimensions of the
disaster which crushed Galveston and left her broken and disconsolate
like a wounded bird fluttering on the white sands of the ocean?
And the beach? That once beautiful beach, with its long stretches of
white sand—what has become of that? Misshapen, distorted, blotched and
drabbled and crimsoned, it spread away to the horizons of the east and
west, its ugly scars rendered more hideous by the glinting rays of the
sun. Part of it had disappeared under the purling waters. Far out here
and there could be seen the piling, where once rested the places of
amusement.
The waves were lashing the lawns which once stretched before palatial
homes. And the pools along the shore were stinking with the remains of
ill-fated dogs, cats, chickens, birds, horses, cows and fish. Shoreward,
as far as the eye could reach, were massive piles of houses and timbers,
all shattered and torn.
A cloud of smoke was noticed, and driving to the scene, we found a large
number of men feeding the flames with the timbers of the wrecked homes
which once gave such a charm to Galveston beach.
BURNING 1000 HUMAN BODIES.
And why the fire? The men were burning 1000 human bodies cast up by the
sea, and the fuel was the timber of the homes which the poor victims
once occupied! And yet this awful spectacle was but a fragment of the
murderous work of the greatest storm which has swept the ocean’s shore
for a century!
There were dozens of piles of sand in every direction along that
mutilated shore. And men were noticed in the distance shoveling these
uncanny mounds.
We saw what they were doing. The bodies brought in by the tide were
being buried deep in the sand. Driving beyond the grave diggers we saw
prostrate on the sand the stark and swollen forms of women and children
and floating farther out in the tide were other bodies soon to be
brought in to be buried. The waves were only the hearses bringing in the
dead to be buried in the sand along the shore. It is the contemplation
of such scenes as these that staggers consciousness and stings the human
soul.
They told me with sad humor that what I had seen was as nothing to what
I could have seen had I been here Sunday and Monday mornings. I am glad,
then, that I did not come sooner, and I am sorry that I ever came at
all. What I have seen has been sufficient to make me miserable to the
longest day of my life, and what I have heard that I could not see and
could not have seen had I been in the storm, will haunt me by day and
night as long as my senses remain.
I am telling an incident repeated to me by one of the most prominent and
distinguished citizens of Galveston. On Monday seven hundred bodies had
been gathered in one house near the bay shore. Recognition of a single
one was impossible. The bodies were swollen and decomposition was
setting in rapidly. Indeed, the odor of death was on the air for blocks.
What disposition should be made of this horrifying mass of human flesh
was an imminent problem.
IMPOSSIBLE TO DISPOSE OF THE DEAD.
While the matter was under discussion, the committee was informed that
there was no time to waste in deliberation, that some of the bodies were
already bursting. It was impossible to bury them, and they could not be
incinerated in that portion of the city without endangering more life
and more property, as there was no water to extinguish a fire once
started. It was decided to load the bodies on a barge, tow it out to sea
and sink them with weights. That was the only thing to be done.
Men were called to perform this awful duty, but they quailed at the
task. And who could blame them? They were told that quick action was
necessary, or a pestilence might come and sweep off the balance of the
living. Still they were immovable. It was no time for dallying.
A company of men with rifles at fixed bayonets were brought to the
scene, and a force of men were compelled, at the point of the bayonet,
to perform this sad, sad duty. One by one the dead were removed to the
barge, everybody as naked as it had come into the world—men, women and
children, black and white, all classes of society and station and
condition, were represented in that putrid mass. The unwilling men who
were performing this awful task were compelled to bind cloths about
their nostrils while they were at work, and occasionally citizens passed
whiskey among them to nerve them to their duty.
Who can conceive of the horror of this?
After awhile the seven hundred dead were piled upon the barge and a tug
pulled them slowly out to sea. Eighteen miles out, where the sea was
rolling high, amid the soughing white caps, with God’s benediction
breathed in the moaning winds, all that was mortal of these seven
hundred was consigned to the mystic caves of the deep.
And yet, this was but another incident of the sad tragedy of which we
write.
STORIES OF SORROW.
George H. Walker, of San Antonio, known well in theatrical circles, was
a member of the party which struggled all day Tuesday to get to
Galveston, and he landed late at night. It was an anxious day for him,
for this was the city of his birth and before the storm he had six
brothers and five sisters living here, in addition to his son, an aunt
and his mother-in-law.
He found his son safe and many other members of his family. They told
him how the boy, Earl, a lad of 15, had at the height of the tempest
placed his grandmother, Mrs. C. S. Johnson, on the roof of the house
after it was floating in the current, and had made a second trip to
bring his aunt to the roof. When the lad returned the grandmother was
gone, finding in the raging current her final peace. The boy and his
aunt, another Mrs. Johnson, clung to the roof throughout and
successfully weathered the gale.
George Walker found later on, however, that his brother Joe, and his
stepbrother, Nick Donley, had been swept away to feed the fury of the
storm.
I met W. R. Knight, of Dallas, who arrived yesterday at noon. He told me
that he had found his mother, two unmarried sisters and a married
sister, Mrs. E. Webster, safe. But he, too, had his sorrow. A sister,
Mrs. Ida Toothaker, and her daughter Etta, were lost, and his
brother-in-law, E. Webster, Sr., and five children, Charley, George,
Kenneth, Julia and Sarah, had joined the other two loved ones on the
bosom of the unresting sea.
How many stories of sorrow like this that remain to be told cannot now
be numbered. The anxious people who have been straggling into Galveston
from a distance have usually found some dear relative or many of them
missing and numbered among the thousands who became in a few brief hours
the victims of the remorseless furies.
It is with reluctance that I relate one case that came under my own
observation. It was so horrible that perhaps it ought not to be told at
all, but only such instances can convey a faint idea of the horror of
the Galveston disaster. While rowing near the Huntington wharves the
naked upturned body of an unfortunate woman was observed floating in the
water, with a half-born infant plainly in view.
MASSACRE OF THE LIVING.
Mr. L. H. Lewis, of Dallas, arrived yesterday looking for his son,
George Cabell Lewis, who was found alive and well. Mr. Lewis said: “I
helped to bury sixteen at Texas City last (Tuesday) night—all Galveston
victims. They buried fifty-eight there Tuesday. Coming down Buffalo
bayou I saw numberless legs and arms, mostly of women and children,
protruding from the muck. I believe there are hundreds of women and
children near the mouth of the bayou. As soon as men can be found to do
the work these poor victims should be looked after. Unquestionably most
of them were from Galveston Island. Among other things I saw were
tombstones with inscriptions in German and rusty caskets which had been
beached by the waves.”
The cruel elements were not content to massacre the living, but had to
invade the silent homes of the unoffending dead.
No man has been busier comforting the grief-stricken people of Galveston
than Dr. R. C. Buckner of the Buckner Orphan Home in Dallas county. He
leaves Thursday morning for his institution with the homeless orphans of
the Galveston Orphans’ Home, which was wrecked by the storm. He has
others besides these, and altogether he will take one hundred home with
him.
What a grand old man Dr. Buckner is! I will take off my hat to him any
day in the week. I have known him for years and there is not a nobler
character alive. I saw him at Sherman when that city was ravished by a
cyclone several years ago. He was there looking for orphans, and I know
that he has always been quick to reach the scene of disaster and death.
He got here Tuesday afternoon and lost no time in reaching his part of
the work, and heaven knows there was none more important than that to
which he assigned himself.
RESCUING DESTITUTE CHILDREN.
But the people of Texas ought to know what he has done. They have always
loved the Buckner home. They know what it has done in the way of
rescuing destitute children. They know that hundreds of good men and
women of the State have come from that institution—men and women who
have become successful in life and who honor the State and the home by
their useful and upright lives. But Texas will have greater cause than
ever to love and revere Dr. Buckner and his institution when it is known
that he has added to his family a hundred hapless victims of the
Galveston storm, making in all 400 in his entire family. The heart of
this State is throbbing here now, and whoever renders a good service to
Galveston will be honored by the State.
If the people of the State and the outside world can not grasp the full
measure of the Galveston horror, neither can the people of Galveston
themselves. The town is dazed, and self-contained people are hard to
find. There is a well-organized Citizens’ Committee at work in a
consecutive and business manner, but the work before it is beyond the
ability or power of any committee.
It will be some time before thousands will know the real nature of the
disaster which has overtaken them, and the world will never know it all.
Men and women walk the streets and tell each other experiences and weep
together as gradually the stories of loss come out. They are hysterical,
half crazy, paralyzed and utterly dejected. There has been so such death
and so much ruin that they don’t know which way to turn or what to do.
There has been much complaint on the part of visitors that the men don’t
go to work and help clear the debris from the streets. This job alone
would give three thousand men a month’s hard work. But a man can’t work
when he has before him the vision of his loved ones hurled to death in
an instant and thinks of what has happened.
A man who lost a wife and children, no matter how strong he may be,
can’t get his mind on the necessities of this town when he thinks of his
family among the seven hundred sunk in the sea last Monday or the
thousand burned in trenches on the beach yesterday. If he does not
become a maniac or does not commit suicide it is a wonder, if one will
stop to think of it for a minute.
SHATTERED LIVES.
They will come around after a while and will do their part. Thousands of
them have not slept since last Friday night and may not sleep for a week
to come. Pity them, for God knows their shattered lives are enough to
drive almost any of us insane if we should stop to think.
J. W. Maxwell, general superintendent of the Missouri, Kansas and Texas
Railway; J. W. Allen, general freight manager of the same road, and
Major G. W. Foster, of the Southwestern Telegraph and Telephone Company,
got in yesterday from Texas City. Coming across the bay, Mr. Maxwell
said, not less than 300 bodies were seen floating in the water, and many
more were being buried on the mainland shore. This proves what many have
contended from the first, that the casualties from the beginning have
been understated. Under the debris of wrecked houses all over the city
there is every reason to believe there are hundreds of bodies, and these
must be disposed of as early as possible. In the rafts of the bay there
are yet many bodies which must be looked for.
It will never be possible to get the names of all who are lost, but
every day makes the list more definite. It will never be possible to get
an accurate estimate of victims. It is safe to say that more than 3000
bodies have been seen so far, and the Gulf and bay and the debris of the
city will unquestionably bring many more to view. If Mr. Lewis, of
Dallas, has not overestimated the number he observed in Buffalo bayou,
that stream may largely swell the total. How many have been buried
beneath the shifting sand of the beach, will probably remain a secret
forever.
It is touching to witness the sympathy of the nation with Galveston. As
the means of communication are improved, the people here are getting a
definite idea of what it means to stir the sympathies of mankind. It
seems that the country has for the time forgotten its politics and its
curious interest in the broad affairs of the world to weep over this
stricken city. It is said a touch of pity makes the world akin, and
Galveston is compassed about by the throbbing heart of mankind.
HAS REACHED A CRISIS.
It is well that it so, for this town has reached a crisis in its life
when this sustaining influence is needed. It is not surprising that many
surviving victims of the storm are about to succumb to despair. God
knows the burden of anguish which oppresses every heart here is
calculated to breed despair. The duty of the hour, however, is too plain
to be disregarded. This island must be restored to its former beauty and
greatness in all the arts and industries of civilization, and it is
fortunate that some of the citizens here realize this. They are going to
encourage the others and there is no reason to believe that there will
be failure.
It required more than half a century to build up what the storm
destroyed in twelve hours, but it will not require but a fraction of
that period to restore the city. As Chicago rallied from the great fire,
so Galveston must and will arise from the ruins of this hour. The
wharves, which are the foundation of the city’s commercial
establishment, will be rebuilt and the traffic will come as of yore.