The death roster in and around Galveston was fully 8,000; at Johnstown the known number of victims was a score less than 2,300. Many died at Johnstown of whom nothing was ever heard, and there were possibly 2,500 persons engulfed in the stream which all but destroyed the town, but at the same time the probabilities are that 10,000 people died at Galveston and in the immediate vicinity. Bodies were washed up and thrown upon the shore by hundreds for days after the disaster; how many were burned upon the many funeral pyres no accurate record was kept.
In one respect the two calamities were alike—the destruction of millions of dollars’ worth of property, but the losses were not so great at Johnstown during those fearful two minutes as those occasioned by the beating of the winds and waves which for hours had Galveston at their mercy.
Johnstown was a city of 30,000, teeming with the industry of a manufacturing town. With not even a warning shout to apprise the inhabitants the dam of a lake high above the town broke and the flood sweeping down the Conemagh Valley engulfed the city and its inhabitants before they even knew of the danger. The whole place was a mass of debris and dead when the deluge subsided.
Galveston was a city of nearly 40,000 people, and had within its gates hundreds of strangers, and the fact that telegrams of inquiry from all parts of the United States poured into the mayor’s office in a perfect stream for days after the flood indicated that scores were killed of whom the searchers knew nothing.
But Johnstown was not alone in its misery. In the southwest a tragedy was enacted a few years later which claimed hundreds of victims.
A tornado, immeasurable in its force and fury, blotted out a section of St. Louis late in the afternoon of May 22, 1896. Nearly a thousand lives and tens of millions in property were sacrificed.
Until the disaster at Galveston the St. Louis catastrophe was the second greatest disaster of its kind in the history of the nation.
The tornado destroyed dozens of the finest buildings in the city. It leveled massive structures to the ground. It tossed railroad locomotives about and crushed the eastern span of the Eads bridge, one of the strongest structures in the world.
It made St. Louis a city of mourning for weeks and impoverished numberless families.
Yet Galveston surpassed these cities in the frightful nature of its calamity. Hundreds of insane people are being cared for, their reason having been overthrown by their great sufferings. This was one of the saddest features of the shocking visitation. These poor creatures, first bereft of home, family and property, are now living legacies of the most stupendous catastrophe this country has ever known.