“‘It’s awful. Not a complete house in the city. Help urgently needed. Thousands are homeless. Food is being distributed to the destitute, but lots more will be needed.’”
MISSING ONES SWELL DEATH LIST.
A newspaper writer who got through from Galveston, made the following statement: “The condition at Galveston is heartrending in the extreme for the injured, and it grows worse momentarily. The list of the dead will not be fully known for weeks; the list of the missing will swell rapidly as soon as the people have begun to report their losses to the authorities, and gradually this list of missing will change into the list of dead as the bodies are recovered from the ruins in the city or are picked up on the beach of the mainland, where many of them now lie, it is believed. A meeting was held Sunday morning at the Tremont Hotel, and at this meeting measures were considered for the relief of the stricken.
“The conclusion was quickly reached that the citizens are not equal to the task, notwithstanding their willingness, and an appeal for aid was made to the President and the Governor. The messages have already gone to them, and will probably be made public all over the country by this afternoon. But no tardy aid will suffice. It is present necessity that must be met.”
H. Van Eaton, who travels for a Dallas firm, arrived from Galveston, where he spent the perilous hours during the storm. He reached that city Saturday morning and was unable to cross to the mainland until Sunday afternoon.
“Just after it started to rain,” he said last night, “several of us thought we would walk down to the beach, but on seeing our danger decided to return to the hotel, which we succeeded in doing by wading in water waist deep. Inside of a few minutes the women and children began to come to the hotel for refuge. All were panic stricken. I saw two women, one with a child, trying to get to the hotel. They were drowned within three hundred yards of us.
“After the worst was over in Galveston we went over to Virginia Point, which cost us $15 each. When we got over there we found a caboose and an engine chained together with some twenty-five people in it. While we were in the caboose three bodies, two men and a child, drifted against the car and we tied them to one end to keep them from floating away. We saw fourteen bodies there, all having floated across the channel and all more or less disfigured from coming in contact with so much wreckage. Most of them were women and children.
“We walked six miles from Virginia Point, swimming at intervals, in order to catch the relief train, which could not come in further from washouts. We met people coming and going. A party of twelve persons, including one woman, had built a raft and were intending to cross to Galveston. We saw three launches six miles inland, north of Virginia Point on the bald prairie. Only one of them seemed to have anyone in it. We reached Houston at 3.30 this morning. There are only two houses in anything like perfect condition between Houston and Galveston. From Houston up to Hearne things were badly torn up. The whole east end of Galveston and the entire west end are completely gone.”
CHAPTER XI.
Galveston Calamity One of the Greatest Known to History—Many Thousands Maimed and Wounded—Few Heeded the Threatening Hurricane—The Doomed City Turned to Chaos.
Galveston has been the scene of one of the greatest catastrophes in the world’s history. The story of the great storm of Saturday, Sept. 8, 1900, will never be told. Words are too weak to express the horror, the awfulness of the storm itself, to even faintly picture the scene of devastation, wreck and ruin, misery, suffering and grief. Even those who were miraculously saved after terrible experiences, who were spared to learn that their families and property had been swept away, and spared to witness scenes as horrible as the eye of man ever looked upon—even these can not tell the story.