“We found dead bodies all along the track, three and four in a bunch, all women and children with perhaps the single exception of one man. These bodies were strewn from the Point to Texas City and they were there by the hundreds, it seemed to me—bodies of people who had been washed and blown across the bay from Galveston. Some of the people who had made that terrible trip across the bay, driven by the force of the wind and the waves, were yet alive.
“There were all sorts of debris and wreckage piled up and washing along the mainland; furniture of every description, heavy iron, frames of pianos, fine plush-covered furniture—everything was there to be seen. The remains of cattle and horses and chickens were there in heaps and piles, drifting boxcars had been driven three miles from their original positions and turned over and blown about.
GATHERING UP THE DEAD.
“Monday, as soon as it was light enough to see, we started out looking for skiffs—something to take us to Galveston. We did not find a skiff, all had been stove in. At last we found a negro who had a boat. He had been crippled. Three of us, Miss Beach among the number, took passage on his boat, and I took charge of it. The remainder of our party stayed at Virginia Point until the arrival of a sailboat and brought a relief party to Galveston from Houston. A relief train had arrived, from Houston, bringing members of the fire department, the health officer and county officers, with provisions. They saw that there was no way for them to cross and so they remained and began the work of gathering and bringing the dead on the mainland.
“The concrete piers of the county bridge we found washed away in mainland and we saw a big steamer grounded in the West Bay. We saw a fine boat about thirty feet long that had made the trip without sailor or rudder from Galveston. In that boat I was told a drowning family took refuge. When they were nearly over a wave struck it and threw all its occupants out except one man, and he landed in safety. Claude G. Pond, who was with Capt. Plummer’s life boat during the storm, estimates that they saved 200 people in the east end from drowning.
“They began work Saturday afternoon at 2 o’clock and kept it up as long as they could do any good in the east end from First street to St. Mary’s Infirmary. Capt. Plummer waded in water up to his chin, and in places was swimming, directing the movements of the boat, while Mr. Pond and Capt. Plummer’s two sons manned the boat.
CLUNG TO THEIR PROPERTY.
“Several places they extended rescue and the people declined to go expressing the belief that their peril was not so great, and preferring to remain with their property. Sometimes they would make the second trip to such places and sometimes the occupants would be saved and in other instances they had tarried too long. Their plan was to carry people into places where they could wade out and leave them, going back to bring others to shallow water and on the return again carrying them further in.
“In cases where parents had been carried out to wading water and deposited, they would stand there instead of pushing on, looking back for their children, and it sometimes happened that the children and parents both went down while one waited for the other, when, if the parents had pushed on after they had reached wading water, all might have been saved.
“One of the last loads carried out was about to land in front of St. Mary’s Infirmary, when a piece of falling timber struck the boat and capsized it. They had eight or nine people in the boat, and when they succeeded in righting it they could find only two or three.