The Complete Story of the Galveston Horror

Project Gutenberg's The Complete Story of the Galveston Horror, by Various

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Title: The Complete Story of the Galveston Horror

Author: Various

Editor: John Coulter

Release Date: November 12, 2010 [EBook #34304]

Language: English

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The Complete Story

OF THE

Galveston Horror.

Written by the Survivors.

Incidents of the awful Tornado, Flood and Cyclone Disaster; Personal Experiences of Survivors; Horrible Looting of Dead Bodies and the Robbing of Empty Homes; Pestilence from so many Decaying Bodies Unburied; Barge Captains Compelled by Armed Men to Tow Dead Bodies to Sea; Millions of Dollars raised to aid the Suffering Survivors; President McKinley Orders Army Rations and Army Tents issued to Survivors and orders U. S. Troops to protect the People and Property; Tales of the Survivors from Galveston; Adrift all Night on Rafts; Acts of Valor; United States Soldiers Drowned; Great Heroism; Great Vandalism; Great Horror; A Second Johnstown Flood, but worse: Hundreds of Men, Women and Children Drowned; No way of Escape, only

Death! Death! Everywhere!

Edited by

John Coulter,

Formerly of the N. Y. Herald.

Fully Illustrated with Photographs.

UNITED PUBLISHERS OF AMERICA.

Copyright, 1900, by E. E. Sprague.

PREFACE.

In presenting to the people of this country and the world a chronicle of the frightful visitation of hurricane and flood upon the beautiful and enterprising City of Galveston, which unparalleled calamity occurred on September 8, 1900, the Publishers wish to say that the utmost care has been taken to make the record of the catastrophe complete in every particular.

No expense has been spared to obtain the facts; the illustrations contained in the work are from photographs taken by artists on the spot; the experiences of survivors were obtained from the victims themselves, their language being faithfully reported, while what they wrote is reproduced without a single change being made.

The situation in the stricken City of Galveston is portrayed day by day exactly as it existed, and is not the product of imaginings of writers who put down what the conditions should have been; the storm has been followed from its inception, just south of the island of San Domingo, to Galveston, through Texas and then along its course until it disappeared in the broad Atlantic off the Eastern coast; the horrors of the gale, the cruel killing of thousands by the winds and waters, the wrecking of thousands of buildings and the drowning of helpless men, women and children, are all given in graphic and picturesque language.

The fearful mutilation of the dead by the ghouls and vandals who afterward despoiled the corpses of their valuables and the swift vengeance which followed these unutterable crimes when the troops shot the vampires and harpies by the score, are told in the most vivid way; the disposal of the dead by casting their bodies into the sea, burying them hastily in the sands along the beach or cremating them by burning upon vast funeral pyres erected in the principal streets of the city are painted in the ghastly colors of truth; the wave of insanity which swept over the city and claimed hundreds who had escaped the perils of the deluge and the hurricane is set forth most graphically.

What caused the mighty elemental disturbance, the possibilities of its recurrence and the danger which constantly hangs over other seacoast cities are given in detail; the pestilential conditions set up in Galveston by the catastrophe, the panic-stricken people flying from the scene of death and desolation, the horrible spectacle of hundreds of dead bodies floating in Galveston bay and the Gulf of Mexico, the generous response of the people of the United States to the appeal for help—these are pictured with minuteness.

Nothing is wanting to make this work reliable and correct; it contains a full list of the identified dead, which is a feature no other publication has been able to do; in short, it is the story, well and accurately told, of a disaster which has not its like since the world began.

The Publishers are confident this volume will meet the approval of the country.

THE PUBLISHERS.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

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THE GALVESTON STORM RAGING

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SISTERS OF MERCY FOUND TIED TO THE LITTLE CHILDREN WHOM THEY TRIED TO SAVE

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BLOWN OUT INTO THE GULF

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WHEN THE WATERS REACHED THE ORPHAN ASYLUM

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A RACE WITH THE WIND AND TIDE AT GALVESTON

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SOME WERE SAVED IN THE GALVESTON DISASTER BY FLOATING ON BOX CARS

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VANDALS ROBBING THE DEAD

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GATHERING THE KILLED AND INJURED AFTER THE STORM

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DROWNING OF GALVESTON SUFFERERS BY THE TIDAL WAVE

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DEATH ON THE GALVESTON SHORE AFTER THE STORM

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THE STORM DEALING DEATH AND DESTRUCTION IN ITS PATH

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FURY OF THE STORM AND DESPERATE PREDICAMENT OF RESIDENTS

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AT DEATH’S DOOR IN THE GALVESTON STORM

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SURVIVORS, NEARLY STARVED, RANSACKING A GROCERY STORE FOR FOOD

THE GALVESTON HORROR.

CHAPTER I.

West Indian Hurricane Descends Upon Galveston, Causing Immense Losses of Life and Property—Catastrophe Unparalleled in the History of the World—A Night of Horrors and Suffering.

The frightful West Indian hurricane which descended upon the beautiful, prosperous and progressive, but ill-fated, city of Galveston, on Saturday, September 8, 1900, causing the loss of many thousands of lives and the destruction of millions of dollars’ worth of property, and then ravaged Central and Western Texas, killing several hundred people and inflicting damage which cost millions to repair, has had no parallel in history.

When the gale approached the island upon which Galveston it situated, it lashed the waves of the Gulf of Mexico into a tremendous fury, causing them to rise to all but mountain height, and then it was that, combining their forces, the wind and water pounced upon their prey.

In the short space of four hours the entire site of the city was covered by angry waters, while the gale blew at the rate of one hundred miles an hour; business houses, public buildings, churches, residences, charitable institutions, and all other structures gave way before the pressure of the wind and the fierce onslaught of the raging flood, and those which did not crumble altogether were so injured, in the majority of cases, that they were torn down.

Such a night of horror as the unfortunate inhabitants were compelled to pass has fallen to the lot of few since the records of history were first opened. In the early evening, when the water first began to invade Galveston Island, the people residing along the beach and near it fled in fear from their homes and sought the highest points in the city as places of refuge, taking nothing but the smaller articles in their houses with them. On and on crawled the flood, until darkness had set in, and then, as though possessed of a fiendish vindictiveness, hastened its speed and poured over the surface of the town, completely submerging it—covering the most elevated ground to a depth of five feet and the lower portions ten and twelve feet.

The hurricane was equally malignant, if not more fiendish and cruel, and tore great buildings and beautiful homes to pieces with evident delight, scattering the debris far and wide; telegraph and telephone lines were thrown down, railway tracks and bridges—the latter connecting the island and city with the mainland—torn up, and the mighty, tangled mass of wires, bricks, sections of roofs, sidewalks, fences and other things hurled into the main thoroughfares and cross streets, rendering it impossible for pedestrians to make their way along for many days after the waters and gale had subsided.

Forty thousand people—men, women and children—cowered in terror for eight long hours, the intense blackness of the night, the swishing and lapping of the waves, the demoniac howling and shrieking of the wind and the indescribable and awful crashing, tearing and rending as the houses, hundreds at a time, were wrecked and shattered, ever sounding in their ears. Often, too, the friendly shelter where families had taken refuge would be swept away, plunging scores and scores of helpless ones into the mad current which flowed through every street of the town, and fathers and mothers were compelled to undergo the agony of seeing their children drown, with no possibility of rescue; husbands lost their wives and wives their husbands, and the elements were only merciful when they destroyed an entire family at once.

All during that fearful night of Saturday until the gray and gloomy dawn of Sunday broke upon the sorrow-stricken city, the entire population of Galveston stood face to face with grim death in its most horrible shapes; they could not hope for anything more than the vengeance of the hurricane, and as they realized that with every passing moment souls were being hurried into eternity, is it at all wonderful that, after the strain was over and all danger gone, reason should finally be unseated and men and women break into the unmeaning gayety of the maniac?

Not one inhabitant of Galveston old enough to realize the situation had any idea other than that death was to be the fate of all before another day appeared, and when this long and weary suspense, to which was added the chill of the night and the growing pangs of hunger, was at last broken by the first gleams of the light of the Sabbath morn, the latter was not entirely welcome, for the face of the sun was hidden by morose and ugly clouds, from which dripped, at dreary intervals, cold and gusty showers.

Thousands were swallowed up during the darkness and their bodies either mangled and mutilated by the wreckage which had been tossed everywhere, left to decompose in the slimy ooze deposited by the flood or forced to follow the waves in their sullen retirement to the waters of the gulf.

Dejection and despondency succeeded fright; the majority of the business men of the city had suffered such losses that they were overcome by apathy; nearly all the homes of the people were in ruins; the streets were impassable, and the dead lay thickly on every side; all telegraph and telephone wires were down, and as miles and miles of railroad track had disappeared and the bridges carried away, there was absolutely no means of communication with the outer world, except by boat. The strange spectacle was then presented of the richest city of its size in the richest country in the world lying prostrate, helpless and hopeless, a prey to ghouls, vultures, harpies, thieves, thugs and outlaws of every sort; its people starving, and the putrid bodies of its dead breeding pestilence.

SKETCH OF THE CITY OF GALVESTON.

The City of Galveston is situated on the extreme east end of the Island of Galveston. It is six square miles in area, its present limits being the limits of the original corporation and the boundaries of the land purchased from the Republic of Texas by Colonel Menard in 1838 for the sum of $50,000. Colonel Menard associated with himself several others, who formed a town site company with a capital of $1,000,000. The City of Galveston was platted on April 20, 1838, and seven days later the lots were put on the market. The streets of Galveston are numbered from one to fifty-seven across the island from north to south, and the avenues are known by the letters of the alphabet, extending east and west lengthwise of the island.

The founders of the city donated to the public every tenth block through the center of the city from east to west for public parks. They also gave three sites for public markets and set aside one entire block for a college, three blocks for a girls’ seminary, and gave to every Christian denomination a valuable site for a church.

The growth of the city in population was slow until after the war of the rebellion. It is a remarkable fact that for the population Galveston does double the amount of business of any city in America. The population in 1890 was 30,000, showing an increase of over 400 per cent in thirty years. At the time of the disaster the population was estimated at 40,000.

Galveston has over two miles of completed wharfs along the bay front and others under construction, all of which are equipped with modern appliances. The Galveston Wharf Company, which owns practically all the wharfage, has expended millions during the last five years for improvements in the way of elevators and facilities for handling grain and cotton. During the cotton season, Sept. 1 to March 31 inclusive, large ocean-going craft line the wharves, often thirty or more steamers and as many large sailing vessels being accommodated at one time, besides the numerous smaller vessels and sailing craft doing a coastwise trade.

Manufacturing is one of the chief supports of the city. In this branch of industry Galveston leads any city in the State of Texas by 50 per cent in number and more than 100 per cent in capital employed and product turned out. Of factories the city has 306, employing a capital aggregating $10,886,900, with an output of $12,000,000 a year.

The jetty construction forms one of the chief features of its commercial advantages. The construction began in 1885, progressing slowly for five years, when the desire of the citizens for a first-class harbor led to the formation of a permanent committee, which succeeded in getting a bill through Congress authorizing an expenditure of $6,200,000 on the harbor. The bill provided that there should be two parallel stone jetties extending nearly six miles out into the gulf, one from the east point of Galveston Island, the other from the west point of Bolivar Peninsula. The jetties are fifty feet wide at the bottom

and slope gradually to five feet above mean low tide, and are thirty-five feet wide at the top, with a railroad track running their entire length, which railroad is the property of the Federal Government. The immediate effect of early construction of the jetties was to remove the inner bar, which formerly had thirteen feet of water over it, and which now has over twenty-one feet of water.

The principal business street of Galveston is the Strand, which is of made land 150 feet from the water of the bay, in the extreme northern end of the city. Besides being the principal port of Texas, Galveston is the financial center of the State, and some of the largest business houses in Texas have their offices in the Strand. Among the business houses on this street are the following:

Sealy, Hutchins & Co., bankers; most modern banking building in Texas; four-story structure, in which is also located the office of the Mallory steamship line, and also the offices of Congressman R. B. Hawley, one of the Republican leaders in the State.

H. Kempner, cotton broker; four-story brick building.

First National Bank, J. Runge, President. Mr. Runge is also President of the Cotton Exchange, President of the Galveston Cotton mills, and President of the City Railway Company.

W. L. Moody & Co., bankers and cotton factors; four-story brick. Mr. Moody is an intimate friend of W. J. Bryan and periodically entertains him at Lake Surprise, a duck hunting ground fifteen miles inland from Galveston; a famous hunting ground.

General offices Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway and the Galveston, Henderson and Houston Railway, which is the gulf terminus of the International and Great Northern Railway.

Adoue & Lobit, bankers; four-story brick.

Island City Savings Bank and Gulf City Trust Company, M. Lasker, President; four-story brick.

Texas Loan and Trust Company and Flint & Rogers, cotton factors; four-story brick building.

Mensing Bros., wholesale grocers; four-story brick.

Western Union Telegraph Company and Mexican Cable Company; four-story brick building.

Galveston Dry Goods Company; four-story brick.

Hullman, Owen & Co., wholesale grocers; four-story brick building.

Wallace, Landis & Co., wholesale grocers; five-story brick.

L. W. Levy & Co., wholesale liquor dealers; four-story brick.

Schneider Bros., wholesale liquor dealers; four-story brick.

Beers, Kennison & Co., general insurance agents in Texas for several large companies; four-story brick.

Concisely put and with no waste of words, the following facts comprise the history of the unfortunate city:

1. It is the richest city of its size in the United States.

2. Is the largest and most extensively commercial city of Texas.

3. Is the gateway of an enormous trade, situated as it is between the great West granaries and Europe.

4. Lies two miles from the northeast corner of the Island of Galveston.

5. Is a port of entry and the principal seaport of the State.

6. Its harbor is the best, not only on the coast line of Texas, but also on the entire gulf coast from the mouth of the Mississippi to the Rio Grande.

7. Is the nearest and most accessible first-class seaport for the States of Texas, Kansas, New Mexico and Colorado, the Indian Territory and the Territory of Arizona and parts of the States and Territories adjoining those just mentioned.

8. Is to-day the gulf terminus of most of the great railway systems entering Texas.

9. Ranks third among the cotton ports of the United States.

10. Its port charges are as low as or lower than any other port in the United States.

11. Is the only seaport on the gulf coast west of the Mississippi into which a vessel drawing more than 10 feet of water can enter.

12. Has steamship lines to Liverpool, New York, New Orleans and the ports of Texas as far as the Mexican boundary.

13. Has harbor area of 24 feet depth and over 1,300 acres; of 30 feet depth and over 463 acres (the next largest harbor on the Texas coast has only 100 acres of 24 feet depth of water).

14. Has the lowest maximum temperature of any city in Texas.

15. Has the finest beach in America and is a famous summer and winter resort.

16. Has public free school system unexcelled in the United States.

17. Has never been visited by any epidemic disease since the yellow fever scourge of 1867.

18. Has forty miles of street railways in operation.

19. Has electric lights throughout the city (plant owned by city).

20. It has millions invested in docks, warehouses, grain elevators, flouring mills, marine ways, manufactories and mercantile houses.

THE MOST PROMISING TOWN IN THE SOUTH.

Galveston was the most promising town in the South, so far as shipping is concerned, said Thomas B. Bryan, the founder of North Galveston, the day after the disaster occurred. "There has been persistent opposition to it on the part of a railroad that wished the transportation of cotton and other produce farther east, but finally the geographical position of Galveston triumphed. Even Collis P. Huntington, the railroad magnate, succumbed, and later he inaugurated improvements in Galveston on the most colossal scale, involving an expenditure of many millions of dollars. One of the last announcements Mr. Huntington made before his death was that Galveston would become the greatest shipping port in America if money could accomplish it. At the time I was in Galveston, a few weeks ago, there was an army of workmen employed by the Southern Pacific Railroad constructing great docks and wharves, which were to eclipse any on the globe.

Some conception of Galveston can be formed by supposing the business district of Chicago—say from Lake to Twenty-second street—were to extend out into the lake on a pier for a distance of three miles and at a height above the water varying from three to seven, and possibly, in some places, nine feet. My own observation of Galveston induced my taking hold of the nearest eligible elevated locality for residences, which is North Galveston, sixteen miles from the city proper. It has an elevation above the water of fifteen to twenty feet more than Galveston, and is free from inundation. No news has reached me from North Galveston, and, though damage may have been done by wind, I am confident none can be done by water or waves.

HOW THE HURRICANE ORIGINATED.

Storms which move with the velocity of that which swept Galveston and which are common to the southern and southeastern coasts of the United States invariably originate, according to Weather Forecaster H. J. Cox, of the United States Weather Bureau at Chicago, in the doldrums, or that region in the ocean where calms abound. In this particular instance the place was south of the West Indies and north of the equator. The region of the doldrums varies in breadth from sixty to several hundred miles, and at different seasons shifts its extreme limits between 5 degrees south and 15 degrees north. It is always overhung by a belt of clouds which is gathered by opposing currents of the trade winds.

The storm which swept Galveston and the surrounding country, I should say, originated at a considerable distance south of the West Indies, in this belt of calms, said Forecaster Cox the Monday night following the catastrophe.

"It was caused by two strong currents meeting at an angle, and this caused the whirling motion which finally spent its force on the coast of Texas. It is seldom that a storm originating in the doldrums moves so far inland as did this one, but it is not, however, unprecedented. The reason this storm reached so far as Galveston was that the northwesterly wind moved about twice as fast as it usually does before reaching land. Usually the force of these winds are spent on the coast of Florida and sometimes they reach as far north as North Carolina. When they strike the land at these points they are given a northeasterly direction.

This storm missed the eastern coast of the United States, and consequently was deflected to the west. Thunderstorms are prevailing in Kansas and all of the district just north of the course of the storm, which is the natural result after such commotion of the elements. The conditions of the land are such about Galveston that when the storm reached that far it had no possible means of escape, and hence the dire results. If there had been a chance for the wind to move further west along the coast it would in all probability have passed Galveston, giving the place no more than a severe shaking up. In this event the worst effect would in all probability have been felt on the eastern coast of Mexico.

It was an absolute impossibility for anyone to form an idea of the extent and magnitude of the disaster within a week of its occurrence. The morning of Sunday, when the wind and the waves had subsided, the streets of the city were found clogged with debris of all sorts. The people of Galveston could not realize for several days what had happened. Four thousand houses had been entirely demolished and hardly a building in the city was fit for habitation.

The people were apathetic; they wandered around the streets in an aimless sort of way, unable to do anything or make preparations to repair the great damage done. The Monday following the catastrophe, Galveston was practically in the hands of thieves, thugs, ghouls, vampires, and bandits, some of them women, who robbed the dead, mutilated the corpses which were lying everywhere, ransacked business houses and residences and created a reign of terror, which lasted until the officers in command of the force of regulars stationed at the beach barracks sent a company of men to patrol the streets. The governor of the state ordered out all the regiments of the National Guard and various associations of business men also supplied men, who assisted the soldiers in doing patrol duty in the city and suburbs.

The depredations of the lawless element were of an inconceivably brutal character. Unprotected women, whether found upon the streets or in their houses, were subjected to outrage or assault and robbed of their clothing and jewelry. Pedestrians were held up on the public thoroughfare in broad daylight and compelled to give up all valuables in their possession. The bodies of the dead were despoiled of everything and in their haste to secure valuables the ghouls would mutilate the corpses, cutting off fingers to obtain the rings