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

CAST UP BY THE HEAVY WAVES.

Officers Williams and Curly Smith stated that the body of a woman that had been buried at sea on the east end was washed ashore on the beach near the foot of Tremont street. Attached to the body was a large rock weighing about 200 pounds. The body was carried to a place back from the water’s edge and placed in a grave.

While working with a gang of men clearing the wreckage of a large number of houses on Avenue O and Centre street to-day Mr. John Vincent found a live prairie dog locked in a drawer of a bureau. It was impossible to identify the house or the name of its former occupants, as several houses were piled together in a mass of brick and timber. The bureau was pulled out of the wreckage a few feet from the ground, where it had been buried beneath about ten feet of debris. The little animal seemed not to be worse for his experience of four days locked up in a drawer beneath a mountain of wreckage. It was taken home and fed by Mr. Vincent, who will hold the pet for its owner if the owner survived the storm.

Some idea of the extent of the destructive path of the hurricane can be got from a view of the beach front east of Tremont street. Standing on the high ridge of debris that marks the line of devastation extending from the extreme west end to Tremont street an unobstructed view of the awful wreckage is presented.

Drawing a line on the map of the city from the centre of Tremont street and Avenue P straight to Broadway and Thirteenth street where stands the partly demolished Sacred Heart Church, all the territory south and east of this line is leveled to the ground. The ridge of wreckage of the several hundred buildings that graced this section before the storm marks this line as accurately as if staked out by a surveying instrument. Every building within the large area was razed by the wind or force of the raging waters, or both.

This territory embraces sixty-seven blocks and was a thickly populated district. Not a house withstood the storm and those that might have held together if dependent upon their own construction and foundations were buried beneath the stream of buildings and wreckage that swept like a wild sea from the east to the west, demolishing hundreds of homes and carrying the unfortunate inmates to their death either by drowning or from blows of the flying timbers and wreckage that filled the air.