“One man would ask another how his family had come out,” said Mr. Menage, “and the answer would be indifferent and hard—almost offish: ‘Oh, all gone.’ ‘All gone’ was the phrase on all sides.
“The night before the disaster, when I reached the hotel, it was blowing rather hard, and the clerk said we were in for a storm, and I asked him if his roof was firmly fixed, and he said, ‘Well, it won’t be quite as bad as that,’ but by the next night at the same time there was three feet of water in the rotunda and the skylight had fallen in and the servants’ annex had been blown to pieces, and the place was crowded with refugees who arrived from all points of the city in boats. Saturday night there was little sleep, yet no one realized the extent of the disaster.
“On Sunday morning one could walk on the higher streets, so quickly had the water gone down. I took a walk along the beach, and the place was one great litter of overturned houses, debris of all kinds and corpses. I met one woman who burst into tears at sight of a small rocker, her property mixed in among the wreckage. She had lost all her family in the flood.
“People were for the most part bereft of their senses from the horror, and a single funeral would have seemed more terrible—more solemn—than a pile of cremated bodies.
“The tales of looting are only too true, and as I passed northward in a sailboat on Tuesday I heard the shots ring out which told some ghoul was paying the penalty. Galveston will rise again on the old site, and without as much difficulty as is at present anticipated. Most of the people will, however, try and live on the mainland. At least 5,000 persons perished.”
THE FLOOD HORRORS DROVE THEM CRAZY.
Three-fourths of the people who applied for relief were mentally dull. The physicians said with proper care most of them might be cured.
A young girl was brought into the general relief station in Galveston on Friday night. The relief corps found her huddled up in an empty freight car, laughing and singing to amuse herself. The doctors said food and care were all she needed to restore her to reason.
It was over a week after the flood before those from the outside really began to find out what the awful calamity was to the people in the desolated city.
The first shock was wearing off, the long lists of dead and missing were getting to be an old story, and the sick and suffering were crawling into places of refuge. Some of them had been sleeping on the open prairies ever since the storm, most of them, in fact, men with broken arms and legs, sick women and ailing children.