Mrs. Fannie B. Ward was placed in charge of a special clothing department. Need I remind thoughtful readers that in a disaster like that, where people of affluence, culture, and position are in a night bereft of all, one of the cruelest features might be to go to the open boxes of a relief station for clothing, such as never before worn, and could not be asked for through the choking tears. In all humanity these cases must be properly, respectfully, and discreetly met, as one lady could meet another in distress.
No more vivid picture of the conditions by which we were surrounded can be imagined than the following extract from Mrs. Ward's report:
"Just seven days after the storm we found ourselves stranded at Texas City, on the mainland opposite Galveston Island, waiting for transportation across the six-mile stretch of water. Bridges had been swept away, and new sand-bars thrown up in the bay; floating roofs and timbers impeded navigation, and the only method of communication between the mainland and Galveston was one poor little ferry-boat, which had to feel her now dangerous way very cautiously, by daylight only. She had also to carry nearly a quarter of her capacity in soldiers to prevent her being swamped by waiting crowds of people, frantic to learn the fate of their friends on the island. Each trip to the mainland, the boat came filled with refugees from the city of doom—the sick, the maimed, the sorrowing—many with fearful bodily injuries inflicted by the storm, and others with deeper wounds of grief;—mothers whose babies had been torn from their arms, children whose parents were missing, fathers whose entire families were lost—a dazed and tearless throng, such as Danté might have met in his passage through Inferno. These were dumped by thousands on the sandy beach at Texas City, and then conveyed by rail to Houston, to be cared for by the good people of that city, who, notwithstanding their own grievous losses, were doing noble work for their stricken neighbors.
"Of Texas City—a flourishing town of four or five thousand houses—nothing remained but heaps of bricks and splintered wood, sodden bales of cotton and bits of household furniture, scattered over the plain; not a standing habitation within miles, nor any shelter for the crowds above-mentioned, except two or three hospital-tents, hastily set up for the sick and wounded, but inadequate for their accommodation. What was our dismay when told that here we must remain at least twenty-four hours, for the return of the boat! However, we were better off, even physically, than most of the waiting crowd, though weariness of the flesh amounted to actual suffering, after more than fifty hours' travel. As a special courtesy to Miss Barton, the railway company left a car to shelter her during the night. Luxurious Pullmans did not abound at Texas City, and this was the shabbiest of day-coaches, equipped with few 'modern conveniences.' But this was no time to think of personal comfort, on the threshold of so much misery; and who could murmur when the head of our little company set such an heroic example of patience. I have seen her in many trying situations, that threatened the fortitude and endurance of the strongest—and have yet to hear the first word of complaint from her lips. She smilingly 'bunked' upon two seats laid together—compared to which, for softness, the penitente's slab of stone would be as 'downy beds of ease'—and encouraged her companions to do the same. Hunger and thirst would also have been our portion, had it not been for a Salvation Army Corps encamped in the vicinity, and the Relief Train of the Philadelphia North American, stranded like ourselves. Thanks to those good Samaritans, we dined and breakfasted on tinned beef, bread and coffee; and what more could good soldiers require?
"That night in Texas City will be long remembered. Sleep was out of the question—stretched on those cross-bars, like St. Lawrence on his gridiron. Soldiers patrolled the beach, not only to prevent a stampede of the boat, but to protect both the quick and the dead from fiends in human guise, who prowled the devastated region, committing atrocities too horrible to name. All night the steady tramp, tramp, of the guard sounded beneath the car-windows, while at either door stood two sentinels, muskets on shoulders. Skies of inky blackness, studded with stars of extraordinary brilliancy, seemed to bend much nearer the earth than at the North; and the Great Dipper hung low on the horizon—for only just across the Gulf it disappears to give place to the Southern Cross. Myriads of big, bright fire-flies, resembling balls of flame, flitted restlessly over the plain, like the disembodied souls whose homes were here one short week before, searching for their scattered treasures. Over on Galveston Island, a long line of flame, mounting to the heavens, marked the burning of ruined homes and corpses; while other fires, in all directions on the mainland, told of similar ghastly cremations. At one time I counted twenty-three of these fires, not including those on the island. Early in the morning a strange odor drew attention to a fresh funeral-pyre, only a few rods away, around the horse-shoe curve of the shore. We were told that thirty bodies, found since daybreak in the immediate vicinity, were being consumed in it. That peculiar smell of burning flesh, so sickening at first, became horribly familiar within the next two months, when we lived in it and breathed it, day after day.
"We found the situation in Galveston infinitely worse than had been described. The most sensational accounts of the yellowest journals fell far short of the truth—simply because its full horror was beyond the power of words to portray. Figures and statistics can give little idea of the results of such an appalling calamity; and to this day, people at a distance have no realization of the unutterable woe which our Red Cross band of less than a dozen, strove to alleviate. We arrived on the eighth day after the tragedy, in which upward of ten thousand lives went suddenly out in storm and darkness; and the survivors were just beginning to realize the extent of their losses.
"At first they seemed stunned to partial insensibility by the very magnitude of their grief—as a man who has been mangled almost unto death in a railroad disaster is said to be oblivious to pain. Dead citizens lay by thousands amid the wreck of their homes, and raving maniacs searched the débris for their loved ones, with the organized gangs of workers. Corpses, dumped by barge-loads into the Gulf, came floating back to menace the living; and the nights were lurid with incinerations of putrefying bodies, piled like cord-wood, black and white together, irrespective of age, sex, or previous condition. At least four thousand dwellings had been swept away, with all their contents, and fully half of the population of the city was without shelter, food, clothes, or any of the necessaries of life. Of these, some were living in tents; others crowded in with friends hardly less unfortunate; many half-crazed, wandering aimlessly about the streets, and the story of their sufferings, mental and physical, is past the telling. Every house that remained was a house of mourning. Of many families every member had been swept away. Even sadder were the numerous cases where one or two were left out of recently happy households; and saddest of all was the heart-breaking suspense of those whose friends were numbered among the 'missing.'
"We find it hard enough to lay away our dead in consecrated ground, with all the care and tenderness that love can suggest, where we may water the sacred spot with our tears and place upon it the flowers they loved in life; but never to know whether their poor bodies were swallowed by the merciless Gulf, or fed to the fishes with those grewsome barge-loads, or left above ground to become an abomination in the nostrils of the living, or burned in indiscriminate heaps with horses and dogs and the mingled ashes scattered to the winds—must indeed have been well-nigh unbearable. No wonder there were lunatics in Galveston, and unnumbered cases of nervous prostration.
"After weeks had passed and two thousand men, aided by several hundred teams, had partially reduced the mountain of wreckage, cremation fires yet burned continuously—fed not only by human bodies, but by thousands of carcasses of domestic animals. By that time, in the hot, moist atmosphere of the latitude, decomposition had so far advanced that the corpses—which at first were decently carried in carts or on stretchers, then shoveled upon boards or blankets—had finally to be scooped up with pitchforks, in the hands of negroes, kept at their awful task by the soldiers' bayonets. And still the 'finds' continued, at the average rate of seventy a day. The once beautiful driving beach was strewn with mounds and trenches, holding unrecognized and uncoffined victims of the flood; and between this improvised cemetery and a ridge of débris, three miles long and in places higher than the houses had been, a line of cremation fires poisoned the air.