“About daylight I awakened and found myself in a strange place. I walked to a house some distance from there, and on inquiring, found that I was at Lamarque. Remembering that I had an aunt living at that place, I found her house, which was also almost a ruin. This aunt took me in charge and I stayed there until I heard from my father, and then came back to Galveston.”
CHAPTER XXV
Storms of Great Violence Around Galveston—Wrecked Cities and Vast Destruction of Property—Appalling Sacrifice of Life.
A close observer and correspondent who is familiar with every part of Texas and is capable of sizing up the situation, writes as follows concerning the disaster which has left Galveston a scene of death and ruin:
“At first glance it would seem that the population of Galveston had been endowed by a thoughtlessness which invites the calamities it has suffered. Three times in twenty-five years storms of great violence have swept over the island on which it occupies a position exposed to every energy of the elements, and on the two occasions whose history is complete the survivors rebuilt their city, as they probably will do again, and the storm broke upon it, as most likely it will once more, with death and destruction in its blast.
“Apart from the deep sympathy which one feels for the people the situation may awaken a philosophic inquiry whose consideration is of less importance than the interest the subject awakens and which is reinforced by parallel cases in the history of disaster since the world began, and I propose to show in a few great cases how the citizens of Galveston are only repeating history when, even as they gather their dead, they plan a new city whose foundation shall be enduring and which shall stand defiant and permanent, a triumph of man over antagonistic nature and a civic crown of glory to their efforts. It is no ignoble purpose.
THE DYKES OF HOLLAND.
“The sturdy Dutchmen who threw their dykes across the sea, the Sicilians who terraced Aetna’s lava sides with vineyards, the people of San Francisco who rebuilt their city when it was cast down by earthquakes until at last they found a structural design that would resist the seismic influence that hold the Pacific coast in tremulous expectation; Chicago that has risen twice from ashes to finer and more secure architectural proportions, and Calcutta, whose existence has been marked by three beginnings, are all expressions of the same splendid pertinacity with which the people of Galveston are already animated and from which will certainly appear a new and grander Gulf city offering to the menaces of nature a richer challenge.
A GREAT BREAKWATER.
“It was no accidental selection that caused Galveston to be built as it was upon a low island whose approach from the sea offered no harbor to ships and to whose low, sandy shores the products of the State of which she is the metropolis came only by artificial and difficult channels. The sweeping curves of the Gulf of Mexico reach its northern apex at or near this point, and it is there that the ships seeking the nearest approach to the cotton fields of Texas came, while the bay itself is as nearly as possible the average centre of industrial life in the State. The bay was never a harbor. To those who are familiar with the Jersey coast the situation of Galveston is easily presented.
“Just as part of the land has reached out into the sea and swinging around in different directions the points came in touch and raised a breakwater which, gathering sand and pebbles, became the beach at distances of four to ten miles from the mainland, leaving interior bays, with shallow inlets connecting them with the ocean, Galveston island was formed.