There were many wonderful incidents of the great storm. In the infirmary at Houston was a boy whose name is Rutter. He was found on Monday morning lying beside a truck on the land near the town of Hitchcock, which is twenty miles to the northward of Galveston. This boy is only 12 years old. His story is that his father, mother and two children remained in the house. There was a crash and the house went to pieces. The boy says that he caught hold of a trunk when he found himself in the water and floated off with it. He thinks the others were drowned. With the trunk the boy floated. He had no idea of where it took him, but when daylight came he was across the bay and out upon the still partially submerged mainland.
When their home went to pieces the Stubbs family, husband, wife and two children, climbed upon the roof of a house floating by. They felt tolerably secure, when, without warning, the roof parted in two places. Mr. and Mrs. Stubbs were separated and each carried a child. The parts of the raft went different ways in the darkness. One of the children fell off and disappeared, and not until some time Sunday was the family reunited. Even the child was saved, having caught a table and clung to it until it reached a place of safety.
One of the most remarkable escapes recorded during the flood was reported to-day when news came that a United States battery man on duty at the forts last week had been picked up on Morgan’s Point, injured but alive. He had buffeted the waves for five days and lived through a terrible experience. Morgan’s Point is thirty miles from Galveston.
Galveston, Tex., Sept. 14.—The local Board of Health through Dr. H. A. West, its secretary, has made a demand that the work of clearing up the dwelling houses be turned over to physicians. This work has been under the direction of Adjutant General Scurry, and he has proved himself so capable that the Relief Committee declined to make any division of responsibility.
Notwithstanding the fact that the number of boats carrying passengers between Texas City and Galveston has been largely increased, it was impossible yesterday to leave the city after the early morning hours. Yesterday the “Lawrence,” after jamming her nose into the mud, remained aground all day. Her passengers were taken off in small sailboats, and by noon a dozen of them heavily loaded started from Galveston to Texas City.
INTENSE SUFFERING ON THE WATER.
The wind died away utterly and the boats could neither go on to Texas City nor return to Galveston. None of them had more than a meager supply of water, which was soon exhausted; the sun beat down with a merciless severity. In a short time babies and young children became ill and in many instances their mothers were also prostrated. There was absolutely no relief to be had, as the tugs of Galveston Bay, which might have given the sloops tow, are all made for deep sea work and draw too much water to allow of their crossing the shallow channel.
Hour after hour the people on the boats, all of which were densely packed, were compelled to broil in the torturing and blinding sun. A slight breeze arising in the evening at 9 o’clock, the sailing craft which had left Galveston at noon began to dump their passengers upon the beach at Texas City. Owing to a delay in Houston trains it was fully twenty hours after their start from Galveston that the people who left there yesterday noon were able to move out from Texas City, which is only eight miles away, and by the time the train had made a start for Houston every woman in the crowd was ill through lack of food, exposure and insufficient sleep.
In the long list of the dead of Galveston the family name of Labett appears several times. Only a year or two ago five generations of the Labetts were living at one time in Galveston.
The family nearly suffered the destruction of the family name in the storm. A young man connected with one of the railroads was down town and escaped. When the parties of searchers were organized and proceeded to various parts of the city one of them came across this young Labett near the ruins of his home all alone. He had made his way there and had found the bodies of father and mother and other relatives. He had carried the dead to a drift of sand, and there without a tool, with his bare hands and a piece of board he was trying to scrape out gravel to bury the bodies.