"As for merchants, who were all on the verge of failure, but making heroic efforts to keep afloat—Heaven knows we did them injury enough every day of our stay in Galveston, to be thankful for the privilege of occasionally becoming their patrons. Not only had they suffered immense losses by the storm, their stocks being practically ruined and customers gone—but who would buy, so long as the Red Cross had food and clothes to give away, without money and without price? Though ours is a noble and necessary work, it is never to the advantage of the local merchants, as a little reflection will show.
"Another case was that of a young woman, who, with an aged relative, was keeping a hotel in a near-by village, when the floods lifted their house from its foundations and ruined everything in it. Its four walls stood, however, and furnished shelter for all the houseless neighbors, who flocked in, naked and hungry, and with whom the generous girl divided her last garment and bit of food. Death also entered the family, twice within a few weeks—the last time leaving a sister's four half-grown children for this young woman to maintain. Take them she must, because they had nowhere else to go. Finding her in terrible straits, without even clothes to wear to her sister's funeral, were we not justified in buying the heroic young woman a decent suit of black, besides sending her a box of food supplies? Why were we there, if not to exercise judgment in the matter of relief? If merely to distribute second-hand articles, without discrimination, we might have saved ourselves much peril and hardship by remaining at home, and sending the boxes down to take care of themselves.
"None of us will ever forget the grandniece of an ex-President of the United States—a handsome and imposing woman of middle age, traveled, educated, and evidently accustomed to the best society. She called one day at headquarters, and although she did not ask for aid, the truth came out in a heart-to-heart talk with Miss Barton that she had lost all in the storm and had not where to lay her head, nor food for the morrow; even the clothes she wore were not her own. Nobody living could put this lady on the pauper list, and none with a spark of human feeling could wish to wound her pride. Our honored President, who reads hearts as others do open books, clasped this unfortunate sister's hand—and left in it a bank-note—I do not know of what denomination, but let us hope it was not a small one. The look of surprise and gratitude that flashed over that woman's face was worth going far to see, as, speechless with emotion, the tears streaming down her cheeks, she turned away.
"One might go on multiplying incidents by the hour, did time permit. There were teachers to be fitted out with suitable clothes before the opening of the schools; boys and girls needing school-books and shoes, caps, and jackets; new-born babes to be provided, whose wardrobes, prepared in advance, had been swept away; mothers of families, destitute of the commonest conveniences of life, to whom the gift of a pan or kettle was a godsend; aged people, whose declining years must be comforted; invalids to be cheered with little luxuries. My greatest regret is that we had not hundreds of dollars to use for every one that was expended in these directions."
My stenographer, Miss Agnes Coombs, found her post by me, and sixty to eighty letters a day, taken from dictation, made up the clerical round of the office of the president. This duty fell in between attending the daily meetings of the relief committee and receiving constant calls both in and out of the city.
Our men made up their living-room at the warehouse. The few women remained at the hotel, the only suitable place in the town.
Later on arrived a shipload of supplies from the business people of New York, which were stored with the Galveston committee, and we were asked to aid in the distribution of these supplies, and to a certain extent we did, but succeeded in organizing a committee of citizens, ladies and gentlemen, to carry out and complete this distribution.
From lack of knowledge of the real conditions of the disaster and its geographical extent, this munificent donation had been assigned to the "Relief of Galveston," and thus, technically, Galveston had no authority to administer a pound or a dollar to any communities or persons outside of the precincts of the city proper. This left at least twenty counties on the mainland on the other side of the Gulf, some of which were as badly wrecked and ruined as Galveston itself, without a possibility of the slightest benefit from this great, generous gift.
Seeing this pitiful and innocently unjust condition of affairs, the result of ignorance of relief work, undertaken with much zeal but scant knowledge and no experience, we sought a way to atone for the mistake, so far as we might be able.
Immediately closing our relief rooms in Galveston I had all Red Cross supplies shipped to Houston, and relief for the mainland opened there. These were farming districts, and I directed intelligent inquiry to be made as to what was most needed by the devastated farm lands and their owners. All was swept away—sometimes as far as forty miles back into the level country; often the soil itself was washed away, the home and all smaller animals destroyed, and no feed for the larger ones to subsist on. The poor farmers walked their desolated fields and wrung their hands.