The Great Galveston Disaster / Containing a Full and Thrilling Account of the Most Appalling Calamity of Modern Times Including Vivid Descriptions of the Hurricane and Terrible Rush of Waters; Immense Destruction of Dwellings, Business Houses, Churches, and Loss of Thousands of Human Lives; Thrilling Tales of Heroic Deeds; Panic-Stricken Multitudes and Heart-Rending Scenes of Agony; Frantic Efforts to Escape a Horrible Fate; Separation of Loved Ones, etc., etc.; Narrow Escapes from the Jaws of Death; Terrible Sufferings of the Survivors; Vandals Plundering Bodies of the Dead; Wonderful Exhibitions of Popular Sympathy; Millions of Dollars Sent for the Relief of the Stricken Sufferers

by Paul Lester

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.