His troubles were not over, though. There were hundreds of terrible scenes to photograph; at every turn there was a graphic picture; but the people of Galveston, crazed with grief as they were, seemed to think it a desecration that he was there, and that views of their wrecked town and their dead should be thus recorded by the camera. They muttered and they threatened.
The photographer moved from one place to another. He hid himself and only took a snapshot when he knew he was safe from the scrutiny of the men and women who thought his work was a mockery of their grief. To show the real mind of the people it will only be necessary to state that many newspaper men who have visited all parts of the world as special correspondents, who have had ingress to courts and Parliament, who have traveled everywhere there has been news to find, found it impossible to get into Galveston.
GETTING OUT OF GALVESTON.
Getting out of Galveston, however, is comparatively easy. It was Wednesday morning when the photographer finally reached Houston, exhausted and nervous to a degree that made working a torture. He managed to develop his pictures, and that evening that man rushed forward the first photographs of actual storm scenes to leave the city.
One hundred and thirty bodies of storm victims were recovered and cremated to-day (September 17), nine days after the hurricane, and still there are hundreds more to be found. They lie for the most part under the twisted heaps of debris that line the city for miles along its southern side.
The problem of clearing away the wreckage in this part of the city, where it is thickest, is still a very troublesome one despite all the work that has been done. The quickest and best way would doubtless be by fire, but the very mention of fire has a terror for Galvestonians now. The city is practically without protection from fire, and if the flames once get a good start, a holocaust might be the result, which would be only second in horror to the hurricane.
The problem is all the more serious because the danger of an epidemic caused by the many dead bodies of men and animals is still great. Sickness of a malarial type is already prevalent. The debris and garbage is being removed with the aid of 250 wagons to places where it can safely be burned, but that is a very slow process. Men are still being impressed for the work under the oversight of the soldiers, but hereafter all the laborers will be paid $1.50 a day out of the relief funds.
ABOUT 17,000 PEOPLE RECEIVING RELIEF.
Health Officer Wilkinson stated that 40 per cent. of the debris of every description had been removed from the streets; that 95 per cent. of the dead bodies had been disposed of, and that 95 per cent. of the carcasses of animals had been removed from the city.
Among the bodies found was that of Major W. T. Levy, United States emigrant inspector for Galveston. His wife and three children perished, but their bodies have not been recovered. In one place the body of a mother was found with a babe of a few months tightly clasped to her breast.