“I am just from the city, having been commissioned by the Mayor and Citizens’ Committee to get in touch with the outside world and appeal for help. Houston was the nearest point at which working telegraph instruments could be found, the wires, as well as nearly all the buildings, between here and the Gulf of Mexico being wrecked.
“When I left Galveston, shortly before noon yesterday, the people were organizing for the prompt burial of the dead, the distribution of food and all necessary work after a period of disaster.
“The wreck of Galveston was brought about by a tempest so terrible that no words can adequately describe its intensity, and by a flood which turned the city into a raging sea. The Weather Bureau records show that the wind attained a velocity of eighty-four miles an hour, when the measuring instruments blew away, so it is impossible to tell what was the maximum.
“The storm began at 2 o’clock Saturday morning. Previous to that a great storm had been raging in the gulf, and the tide was very high. The wind at first came from the north and was in direct opposition to the force from the gulf. While the storm in the gulf piled the water upon the beach side of the city, the north wind piled the water from the bay onto the bay part of the city.
“About noon it became evident that the city was going to be visited with disaster. Hundreds of residences along the beach front were hurriedly abandoned, the families fleeing to dwellings in higher portions of the city. Every home was opened to the refugees, black or white. The winds were rising constantly, and it rained in torrents. The wind was so fierce that the rain cut like a knife.
“By 5 o’clock the waters of the gulf and bay met, and by dark the entire city was submerged. The flooding of the electric light plant and the gas plants left the city in darkness. To go upon the streets was to court death. The wind was then at cyclonic velocity. Roofs, cisterns, portions of buildings, telegraph poles and walls were falling, and the noise of the wind and the crashing of the buildings were terrifying in the extreme.
“The wind and waters rose steadily from dark until 1:45 o’clock Sunday morning. During all this time the people of Galveston were like rats in traps. The highest portion of the city was four to five feet under water, while in the great majority of cases the streets were submerged to a depth of ten feet. To leave a house was to drown. To remain was to court death in the wreckage. Such a night of agony has seldom been equaled.
“Without apparent reason, the waters suddenly began to subside at 1:45 a. m. Within twenty minutes they had gone down two feet, and before daylight the streets were practically freed of the flood waters. In the meantime the wind had veered to the southeast.
“Very few if any buildings escaped injury. There is hardly a habitable dry house in the city. When the people who had escaped death went out at daylight to view the work of the tempest and the floods they saw the most horrible sights imaginable.
“In the three blocks from Avenue N to Avenue P, in Tremont street, I saw eight bodies. Four corpses were in one yard. The whole of the business front for three blocks in from the gulf was stripped of every vestige of habitation, the dwellings, the great bathing establishments, the Olympia and every structure having been either carried out to sea or its ruins piled in a pyramid far into the town, according to the vagaries of the tempest.