It is this terrible besom of the Southern seas that so nearly has taken Galveston off the map. The great storm of 1875 frightened the city. The fate of Indianola in 1886 and the loss of ten lives and $200,000 worth of property on Galveston Island has kept Galveston uneasy ever since. To-day, for it to suggest rebuilding, will meet with the disapprobation of many of the sympathizing Americans who are giving freely to the stricken people.
But the abandonment of Galveston could not be without a struggle. For fourteen years its old citizens had been admitting that twice in their memory the sea had come in on the island, causing death and destruction, but as sturdily as their conservatism prompted they had insisted that it never could do so again. They gave no consistent reason for their belief. The island was no higher; the force of the sea was as boundless as before; the doldrums of the West Indies still hung over the archipelago in storm-brooding calm. But their belief spread and the island city grew and developed as the old settler never had hoped to see it grow when he squatted there in the sand more than sixty years ago.
This settler stock of Galveston Island was of queer characteristics. The island settlement was of a sort of Captain Streeter origin. The only variation was that the Colonel Menard who founded it bought the island and established a town-site company to attract immigration. The mainland, as flat and desolate almost as the island, was three miles away. But deep water was there and to the north was an agricultural country that one day would have cotton to export. So the settlers waited. They held to their sand lots and traded with the “mosquito fleet” which sailed up and down the coast from Corpus Christi to New Orleans. This mosquito fleet was the only means for bringing outside traders to the town. As it grew it developed that the city’s export trade was all it had. It did a wholesale business that was to its retail business in the proportion of 100 to 1!
In this way Galveston developed in-growing propensities. It scoffed at the mainland for years after the gulf shore began to be peopled. It was satisfied with its railroad “bridges,” which were mere trestlework mounted on piling driven into the shallow water of the bay. If the mainland wished to reach the city let it row out or sail out; the city would not go to the expense of a wagon bridge.
As a result, Galveston was the most somnolent city in Texas, save on the wharves where tramp and coastwise ships and steamers loaded. When the market house closed by law at 10 o’clock in the morning, and when Galveston’s own local population had laid in its supplies for a midday dinner and for supper and breakfast, Strand street took a nap.
In the ’80s, however, a new element had been attracted, which was dissatisfied with the mossback order of things. It was not satisfied to make change with a stranger and give or take bits of yellow pasteboard, representing street car rides, in lieu of nickels.
But these young immigrants were frowned upon by Galveston conservatism. They were a disturbing element. They kept the staid, mossback citizen awake in the afternoons and he did not like it. They were clamoring for sewers and artesian water in mains, whereas the conservative was content to build his rain water cistern above ground out of doors and strain the baby mosquitoes out of the water through a cloth.
When a new waterworks and standpipe had been completed in 1889, and when some new mills had been established under difficulties, affairs had come to a pass when the new Galvestonian and the old found a great gap between. The visiting stranger was the confidant of both sides.
“This town isn’t what it used to be,” sighed the conservative.
“As a matter of fact,” the young business man would say, “Galveston needs to bury about 150 of its ‘old citizens’ before it can get awake.”