M. F. Smith, of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad was in Galveston during the hurricane and got home to Dallas yesterday. He said that nothing he could say would convey an adequate idea of the storm. “I was in the Tremont Hotel Saturday when the hurricane began,” he continued. “The water came up into the rotunda and the wind blew with fearful force. Eight hundred or a thousand people took refuge in the hotel. It was a scene of pathos to see the women and children with hardly any clothing, not knowing where relatives or children were scattered about the corridors in deepest distress. It was remarkable that so few of them gave any outward sign or cry. Sunday morning the water was gone out of the rotunda and it was ankle deep in mud. I went out Tremont street to Avenue N ½, where I came to water. People were coming in toward the higher ground sick, wounded and homeless. One hundred men were sworn in by the Mayor Sunday morning as a guard and relief work began at once. I came out Monday morning on the Charlotte M. Allen. From her I saw a barge loaded with corpses going to sea for burial and an other at the dock was being loaded. A passenger on the Allen counted fifty floating bodies in the bay on the way up to Virginia Point. We had to walk to Texas City Junction and I saw Galveston paving blocks on the prairie north of Texas City.”
CAST UP BY THE HEAVY WAVES.
Officers Williams and Curly Smith stated that the body of a woman that had been buried at sea on the east end was washed ashore on the beach near the foot of Tremont street. Attached to the body was a large rock weighing about 200 pounds. The body was carried to a place back from the water’s edge and placed in a grave.
While working with a gang of men clearing the wreckage of a large number of houses on Avenue O and Centre street to-day Mr. John Vincent found a live prairie dog locked in a drawer of a bureau. It was impossible to identify the house or the name of its former occupants, as several houses were piled together in a mass of brick and timber. The bureau was pulled out of the wreckage a few feet from the ground, where it had been buried beneath about ten feet of debris. The little animal seemed not to be worse for his experience of four days locked up in a drawer beneath a mountain of wreckage. It was taken home and fed by Mr. Vincent, who will hold the pet for its owner if the owner survived the storm.
Some idea of the extent of the destructive path of the hurricane can be got from a view of the beach front east of Tremont street. Standing on the high ridge of debris that marks the line of devastation extending from the extreme west end to Tremont street an unobstructed view of the awful wreckage is presented.
Drawing a line on the map of the city from the centre of Tremont street and Avenue P straight to Broadway and Thirteenth street where stands the partly demolished Sacred Heart Church, all the territory south and east of this line is leveled to the ground. The ridge of wreckage of the several hundred buildings that graced this section before the storm marks this line as accurately as if staked out by a surveying instrument. Every building within the large area was razed by the wind or force of the raging waters, or both.
This territory embraces sixty-seven blocks and was a thickly populated district. Not a house withstood the storm and those that might have held together if dependent upon their own construction and foundations were buried beneath the stream of buildings and wreckage that swept like a wild sea from the east to the west, demolishing hundreds of homes and carrying the unfortunate inmates to their death either by drowning or from blows of the flying timbers and wreckage that filled the air.
WIND A HUNDRED MILES AN HOUR.
The strongest wind blew later in the evening, when it shifted to the southeast and attained a velocity of from 110 to 120 miles an hour. The exact velocity was not recorded, owing to the destruction of the wind gauge of the United States Weather Bureau after it had registered a 100–miles-an-hour blow for two minutes. This terrific southeast wind blew the sea of debris inland and piled it up in a hill ranging from ten to twenty feet high and marking the line of the storm’s path along the southeastern edge of the island.
In one place near Tremont street and Avenue P four roofs and remnants of four houses are jammed within a space of about twenty-five feet square. Beneath this long ridge many hundred men, women and children were buried, and cattle, horses and dogs and other animals were piled together in one confused mass. While every house in the city or suburbs suffered more or less from the hurricane and encroachment of the Gulf waters, the above section suffered the most in being swept as clean as a desert. Another area extending east to Thirteenth street and south of Broadway to the Gulf suffered greatly, and few of the buildings withstood the storm, none without being damaged to a more or less extent. From Tremont street and Avenue P½ wind came northward for about two blocks and then cut across westward to the extreme limits of the city; in fact, swept clear on down the island for many miles. The path of the levelled ground west from Avenue P cleared the several blocks, extending south to the beach and west to Twenty-seventh street. It cut diagonally southwest on a straight line within three blocks of the beach and down west on the beach many miles beyond the city limits. This does not mean that the path of the storm was confined to this stretch of territory—not by any means. There were many blocks in the centre of the city almost totally demolished by the fury of the wind and sea, but the above long line of about four miles of the city proper and many miles of country land were swept clean of buildings and all other obstructions.