“But I have changed my mind. I think now it is a conservative figure. I groped my way through the darkness, stumbling over piles of debris, to my boarding place, and after no little difficulty succeeded in reaching my room. Upon lighting a match I found the place denuded of everything; the paper was stripped from the ceiling and was hanging in shreds from the walls. It was damp and cold. My landlady, hearing me, soon came in, and standing there in the darkness she gave me a harrowing account of what they passed through, the details of which the newspapers already have described. All the other people in the house had gone elsewhere, and she, her husband and myself were alone in the house.
“That night I slept in a fairly dry bed in a tolerably dry room, but all the windows in the house had been blown out, and the building was so damp and cold that we were almost afraid to sleep there. Some of the rooms in the lower part of the building were still flooded. There wasn’t a room in the entire house that had not been damaged, and the servants’ house in the yard was almost completely wrecked. The ruins were toppled over and leaning against our next-door neighbor’s house.
“There is scarcely a structure in Houston which escaped the fury of the storm. With the exception of the First Presbyterian, every church lost its steeple, and all were damaged to some extent. The streets for two or three days and even longer afterward were filled with debris—telephone and telegraph poles and wires, huge piles of bricks and timber, tin roofs and all kinds of miscellaneous things, such as furniture, trees, etc.
“At Seabrook, a little seaside resort near here, only two homes were left standing.”
Walter S. Keenan, general passenger agent of the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railroad, arrived in Chicago September 17 from Galveston. He was in the general office, which is connected with the Union station at Galveston, during the great storm and escaped without injury. He said the accounts of the Galveston disaster were in no way exaggerated. The debris, in some of the streets, he declared, was thirty feet high. He went to his office in the station Saturday morning and was compelled to remain there until Sunday afternoon without a bite to eat.
CHAPTER XV.
Total Dead and Missing at Galveston and Vicinity, 8,661—Five Million Dollars in Relief Necessary to Carry the Survivors Through the Fall and Winter to Spring.
It was given out from Galveston on Tuesday, September 20, that so far as could be ascertained on that date, the loss of life in the great catastrophe was as follows: