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

GREAT DETERMINATION.

“I have given my attention since coming home to the restoration of the Gulf City compress and other property in which I am interested. We are going right ahead, with greater determination, to increase our business and to build up the city.”

“I am glad to see you alive” is the greeting with which a Galvestonian now meets his fellow-citizen on the rubbish blocked streets of the once proud city by the Texas coast. Those who have not been here can not realize what it is to a man to meet a friend alive, or to find a relative who since Saturday has been missing from the huddled few remaining who are gathered in some desolated, wrecked and wind torn building, which but a week ago was a happy home of happy people.

When a drama has finished, the curtain falls, and as the orchestra plays some popular air the audience makes its way to the street, talking for a few moments of the characters and the scenes, but shutting out from mind, with the falling of the curtain, the happiness and the pain which was depicted by moving characters who but represented a story of man’s imaginative mind. Not so with this.

No curtain can be drawn and the stage remains ever before them. They have it now as a desolate picture to gaze upon, and they will have it forever, wander where they will upon this earth’s surface. No curtain can force it from the mind, and no effort can efface it from the tablets of memory. Many of the actors in this great drama are not here. Some of them yet remain, and their stories are stranger than fiction which Jules Verne or Dumas have written.

Amid the smoke of battle, when men meet men in armed conflict, and thousands fall beneath the leaden hail, there is time taken to make a trench and consign to a resting place the bodies of the fallen thousands, and the chaplain has his moment to ask a merciful God to receive His own. Not so with this. No trench can be made for those people who have been found where the angry waters threw them up, where the falling timbers caught them, or where they are floating on the waters of a waved lashed shore.