For fourteen years the city has had to contend with the fears of the incomer. The growth between 1890 and 1900 shows that these fears had been allayed in great measure, following the destruction in 1886. But years will not wipe out the black record of the last week. Hundreds will leave the island as a place of residence; thousands have been killed there and cremated in the sands or buried in the treacherous sea. A death rate of 200 in a population of 1,000 drove Indianola from the map of Texas. Five thousand or more deaths of the 35,000 population of Galveston must have its influence upon the living.
For with the assurances of the United States Weather Bureau, it is recognized that in natural phenomena there are cycle periods in which extremes are repeated from nature’s great laboratory. Observation has put this period of repetition at twenty years. According to this, in the case of hurricanes, the range of maximum and minimum will be within such a period. Without question Galveston is in the track of a certain abnormal but not infrequent West Indian hurricane which fails to be deflected from the Georgia and Florida coasts. It keeps to its northwestward course and strikes the Louisiana, Texas or Mexico coasts, according to its impulse. In the Galveston storm a new maximum seems to have been established, yet its repetition may be looked for within the next twenty-year period. As a matter of fact, indeed, the average period between the recurrence of these maximum storms has been less than fifteen years.
Lyman E. Cooley, one of the original engineers in marking the route of the drainage canal, is an observer of periodic natural phenomena, and his theory holds in great measure with the observations of the United States weather service.
“It is a general proposition,” said Mr. Cooley. “It means just this much: Suppose that Chicago has a snow storm on June 15. Within a twenty-year period we may expect another phenomenon of the kind in the same calendar month. It may not snow in Chicago itself; the storm may be ten, twenty or thirty miles away, on any side of it. But in the same general territory, about the same time of the phenomenon, it will be repeated.
“Suppose a terrible rain or wind storm develops, its repetition may be looked for in the same period. So with extremes of temperature, influences on lake levels, and all the other phenomena of nature’s forces. They have their cycles, and the twenty-year period covers most of them.”
But in the case of Galveston, one of its great hurricanes was experienced in 1875, another in 1886, and the last only fourteen years later. These historic facts tend to confirm Mr. Cooley’s observations.
Galveston’s destruction and that of other towns similarly situated had been predicted. Writing in the Arena in 1890, Professor Joseph Rodes Buchanan said:
“Every seaboard city south of New England that is not more than fifty feet above the sea level of the Atlantic coast is destined to a destructive convulsion. Galveston, New Orleans, Mobile, St. Augustine, Savannah and Charleston are doomed. Richmond, Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia, Newark, Jersey City and New York will suffer in various degrees in proportion as they approximate the sea level. Brooklyn will suffer less, but the destruction at New York and Jersey City will be the grandest horror.
“The convulsion will probably begin on the Pacific coast, and perhaps extend in the Pacific toward the Sandwich Islands. The shock will be terrible, with great loss of life, extending from British Columbia down along the coast of Mexico, but the conformation of the Pacific coast will make its grand tidal wave far less destructive than on the Atlantic shore. Nevertheless, it will be calamitous. Lower California will suffer severely along the coast. San Diego and Coronado will suffer severely, especially the latter.
“It may seem rash to anticipate the limits of the destructive force of a foreseen earthquake, but there is no harm in testing the prophetic power of science in the complex relations of nature and man.