URGED TO HURRY A TRAIN.
The boats could neither go on to Texas City nor return to Galveston. None of them had more than a meagre supply of water and no food, as the trip ordinarily does not require above an hour. Great suffering resulted. All afternoon they were becalmed, and, a slight breeze arising in the evening, at 9 o’clock at night the sailing craft which had left Galveston at noon began to dump their passengers upon the beach at Texas City. This place is now among the things that once were. There are no houses, no tents, no accommodations of any kind save a few passenger coaches standing upon the railroad track. These were speedily filled, and the rest of the women and children, all hungry and the latter crying for food, were compelled to remain on the beach.
An urgent message was sent to the railway people at Houston, saying that women and children were suffering, and asking them to hurry a train to Texas City for the purpose of conveying the refugees to Houston. No reply was received, and when a train, whose crew knew nothing of the existing conditions at Texas City, finally appeared, the announcement was made that it would not go before morning. The crowd at Texas City was more than enough to fill the train to the limit, but, notwithstanding, determined to allow the “Lawrence” to attempt once more the perils of the mud and await another consignment of refugees.
It was fully twenty hours after their start from Galveston that the people who left there yesterday noon were able to move out from Texas City, which is only eight miles away, and by the time the train had made a start for Houston, every woman in the crowd was ill through lack of food, exposure and insufficient sleep.
NO RED TAPE TO STAND IN THE WAY.
Washington, Sept. 14—General Spaulding, Acting Secretary of the Treasury, took further measures to-day for the relief of the distressed citizens of Galveston by arranging for their transportation by foreign vessels to New Orleans or other gulf ports. The law provides that American vessels only can carry passengers between American ports, but during the present conditions the Treasury Department will remit the penalties to which foreign vessels would be liable, for the relief of Galveston.
The Rev. J. F. McCarthy, of Newark, N. J., assistant pastor of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, to-day received a special despatch from Galveston to the effect that all of the twenty-four Newark nuns at the Catholic Convent of the Sacred Heart at that place had been saved from the general destruction of life and property by the terrible cyclone of Saturday. Father McCarthy at once despatched a special message to the homes of the nuns’ relatives with this information. They were reported lost in an account contained in a preceding chapter of this volume.
A prominent newspaper called attention to the necessities of the situation as follows:
“As later news is received from Texas the full extent of the destruction of life and property is revealed. No such visitation of nature’s force has ever before descended upon a community in this country. There is no longer any doubt that the death list will run into the thousands. It will probably never be known accurately how many perished in the track of last Sunday’s storm. Many bodies have been washed out to sea, and of the hundreds of corpses that lay exposed in the streets and buried under fallen buildings only a fraction will be identified.
“For the sanitary protection of the living it has been found necessary to deny the dead an ordinary burial. A great city full of prosperous people has been suddenly left without food, water, clothing and all the daily necessaries of life. Worst of all, the survivors are absolutely without means of recuperation from the awful disaster that has overtaken them. They are totally dependent upon the outside world for assistance.