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

MISSING ONES SWELL DEATH LIST.

A newspaper writer who got through from Galveston, made the following statement: “The condition at Galveston is heartrending in the extreme for the injured, and it grows worse momentarily. The list of the dead will not be fully known for weeks; the list of the missing will swell rapidly as soon as the people have begun to report their losses to the authorities, and gradually this list of missing will change into the list of dead as the bodies are recovered from the ruins in the city or are picked up on the beach of the mainland, where many of them now lie, it is believed. A meeting was held Sunday morning at the Tremont Hotel, and at this meeting measures were considered for the relief of the stricken.

“The conclusion was quickly reached that the citizens are not equal to the task, notwithstanding their willingness, and an appeal for aid was made to the President and the Governor. The messages have already gone to them, and will probably be made public all over the country by this afternoon. But no tardy aid will suffice. It is present necessity that must be met.”

H. Van Eaton, who travels for a Dallas firm, arrived from Galveston, where he spent the perilous hours during the storm. He reached that city Saturday morning and was unable to cross to the mainland until Sunday afternoon.

“Just after it started to rain,” he said last night, “several of us thought we would walk down to the beach, but on seeing our danger decided to return to the hotel, which we succeeded in doing by wading in water waist deep. Inside of a few minutes the women and children began to come to the hotel for refuge. All were panic stricken. I saw two women, one with a child, trying to get to the hotel. They were drowned within three hundred yards of us.

“After the worst was over in Galveston we went over to Virginia Point, which cost us $15 each. When we got over there we found a caboose and an engine chained together with some twenty-five people in it. While we were in the caboose three bodies, two men and a child, drifted against the car and we tied them to one end to keep them from floating away. We saw fourteen bodies there, all having floated across the channel and all more or less disfigured from coming in contact with so much wreckage. Most of them were women and children.

“We walked six miles from Virginia Point, swimming at intervals, in order to catch the relief train, which could not come in further from washouts. We met people coming and going. A party of twelve persons, including one woman, had built a raft and were intending to cross to Galveston. We saw three launches six miles inland, north of Virginia Point on the bald prairie. Only one of them seemed to have anyone in it. We reached Houston at 3.30 this morning. There are only two houses in anything like perfect condition between Houston and Galveston. From Houston up to Hearne things were badly torn up. The whole east end of Galveston and the entire west end are completely gone.”

CHAPTER XI.
Galveston Calamity One of the Greatest Known to History—Many Thousands Maimed and Wounded—Few Heeded the Threatening Hurricane—The Doomed City Turned to Chaos.

Galveston has been the scene of one of the greatest catastrophes in the world’s history. The story of the great storm of Saturday, Sept. 8, 1900, will never be told. Words are too weak to express the horror, the awfulness of the storm itself, to even faintly picture the scene of devastation, wreck and ruin, misery, suffering and grief. Even those who were miraculously saved after terrible experiences, who were spared to learn that their families and property had been swept away, and spared to witness scenes as horrible as the eye of man ever looked upon—even these can not tell the story.

There are stories of wonderful rescues and escapes, each of which at another time would be a marvel to the rest of the world, but in a time like this when a storm so intense in its fury, so prolonged in its work of destruction, so wide in its scope, and so infinitely terrible in its consequences has swept an entire city and neighboring towns for miles on either side, the mind can not comprehend all of the horror, can not learn or know all of the dreadful particulars.

One stands speechless and powerless to relate even that which he has felt and knows. Gifted writers have told of storms at sea wrecking of vessels where hundreds were at stake and lost. That task pales to insignificance when compared with the task of telling of a storm which threatened the lives of perhaps sixty thousand people, sent to their death perhaps six thousand people, and left others wounded, homeless, and destitute, and still others to cope with grave responsibility, to relieve the stricken, to grapple with and prevent the anarchist’s reign, to clear the water-sodden land of putrefying bodies and dead carcasses, to perform tasks that try men’s souls and sicken their hearts.

The storm at sea is terrible, but there are no such dreadful consequences as those which have followed the storm on the sea coast and it is men who passed through the terrors of the storm, who faced death for hours, men ruined in property and bereft of families, who took up the herculean and well-nigh impossible task of bringing order out of chaos, of caring for the living and disposing of the dead before they made life impossible here.

The storm came not without warning, but the danger which threatened was not realized, not even when the storm was upon the city. Friday night the sea was angry. Saturday morning it had grown in fury, and the wrecking of the beach resorts began. The waters of the Gulf hurried inland. The wind came at terrific rate from the north. Still men went to their business and about their work while hundreds went to the beach to witness the grand spectacle which the raging sea presented.