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

MR. GRAY’S STORY.

Mr. Gray’s story is interesting. His house fell and he fought his way out with a wife who was just out of a sick bed. He managed to get to the next house with her. This was the home of Ed. Hunter. That house went between 6.30 and 7, and the Hunter family was lost. Mr. Gray caught a transom, put the arm of his wife through it, and soon found that the transom belonged to the side of the house, about 20×20 feet in size. It was nothing but the side of the house made of ordinary siding and studding. He swung onto this and even now does not understand how it stood up under them.

All the time he kept telling his wife to hold onto him, and this she did. Along in the night the raft struck a tree and was swept from under them. Gray caught a limb with his wife still clinging to him. By this time he was almost completely exhausted but he managed by a hundred successive efforts to get his wife into the tree.

A little later a colored man was seen coming through the water. Gray called to him to take to the lower limbs and not come higher, for he was afraid the tree with three people on it would be made top-heavy. When daylight came he took his wife in his arms and told the negro to go ahead for a house they saw in the distance, for had there been any holes he wanted to be advised of it before he went into them with his wife, for it was all he could do to push through the water in his exhausted condition.

After walking until 10 o’clock he reached the high land in the Denver resurvey and eventually got to town. Not until yesterday had he sufficiently recovered from his exhaustion to come onto the streets. He is cut and bruised in a dozen places. He says the water in Kinkead addition was ten feet deep.

Robert Park and a party of men came in from Hitchcock Sunday, arriving that evening. They started in a skiff, and finally reached a prairie, over which they carried the boat. Finally they reached water again, and along about noon went alongside the British steamer “Roma,” which was dragged from her moorings in the roads between the jetties, about seven miles up the channel and landed in the draw of the county bridge. They report the steamer in good condition. They got water and food there and came on across.