The Great Galveston Disaster. Paul Lester
to investigate the conditions there, returned to Austin and made his report. He said:
“I am convinced that the city is practically wrecked for all time to come. Fully seventy-five per cent. of the business portion of the town is irreparably wrecked, and the same per cent. of damage is to be found in the residence district.
“Along the wharf front great ocean steamships have bodily bumped themselves on to the big piers and lie there, great masses of iron and wood that even fire cannot totally destroy.
“The great warehouses along the water front are smashed in on one side, unroofed and shattered throughout their length, the contents either piled in heaps on the wharves or on the streets. Small tugs and sailboats have jammed themselves half into buildings, where they were landed by the incoming waves and left by the receding waters. Houses are packed and jammed in great confusing masses in all of the streets.
BODIES PILED IN THE STREETS.
“Great piles of human bodies, dead animals, rotting vegetation, household furniture and fragments of the houses themselves are piled in confused heaps right in the main streets of the city. Along the Gulf front human bodies are floating around like cordwood. Intermingled with them are to be found the carcasses of horses, chickens, dogs and rotting vegetable matter.
“Along the Strand, adjacent to the Gulf front, where are located all the big wholesale warehouses and stores, the situation almost defies description. Great stores of fresh vegetation have been invaded by the incoming waters and are now turned into garbage piles of most defouling odors. The Gulf waters, while on the land, played at will with everything, smashing in doors of stores, depositing bodies of human beings and animals where they pleased and then receded, leaving the wreckage to tell its own tale of how the work had been done. As a result the great houses are tombs wherein are to be found the bodies of human beings and carcasses almost defying the efforts of relief parties.
“In the piles of debris along the street, in the water and scattered throughout the residence portion of the city, are masses of wreckage, and in these great piles are to be found more human bodies and household furniture of every description.
“The waters of the Gulf and the winds spared no one who was exposed. Whirling houses around in its grasp the wind piled their shattered frames high in confusing masses and dumped their contents on top. Men and women were thrown around like so many logs of wood.
ALL SUFFERED INJURY.
“I believe that with the very best exertions of the men it will require weeks to obtain some semblance of physical order in the city, and it is doubtful if even then all the debris will be disposed of.
“There is hardly a family on the island whose household has not lost a member or more, and in some instances entire families have been washed away or killed.
“Hundreds who escaped from the waves did so only to become the victims of a worse death, being crushed by falling buildings.
“Down in the business section of the city the foundations of great buildings have given way, carrying towering structures to their ruin. These ruins, falling across the streets, formed barricades on which gathered all the floating debris and many human bodies. Many of these bodies were stripped of their clothing.
“Some of the most conservative men on the island place the loss of human beings at not less than 7500 and possibly 10,000. The live stock on the island has been completely annihilated.
“I consider that every interest on the island has suffered. Not one has escaped. From the great dock company to the humblest individual the loss has been felt and in many instances it is irreparable. In cases where houses have been left standing the contents are more or less damaged, but in the large majority of cases the houses themselves did not escape injury.”
At fifteen minutes to four o’clock in the afternoon of Thursday the 13th, for the first time since Saturday afternoon at twenty-six minutes after four o’clock, Galveston was in telegraphic communication with the outside world, although not open for business completely.
The cable left Chicago on Sunday morning and was laid across the bay, and several thousand telegraph poles on the mainland were straightened up by a force of 250 men under the supervision of superintendents of the Western Union.
Concerning the great calamity, the destruction of life and property, the view expressed by a prominent citizen was very generally approved. He said:
“The people and military officers who are dooming Galveston to eternal ruin would have consigned Lisbon to a lasting chaos after her earthquake and decried and abandoned St. Louis with vacant crumbling houses after the great cyclone. If the citizens of Chicago had listened to their despairing notes, blackened fragments of half-fallen walls and shapeless heaps of brick and stone would still be the fitting monuments to proclaim their broken spirit.
BLESSINGS IN DISGUISE.
“But all the reserves of human energy are summoned forth by the very worst disasters, and courage should be written on the heart of Galveston. It is the time to lift up the hands of her strong men, to give them a word of cheer, for they are bound to the spot and must make the best of their fate. A chorus of evil predictions simply multiplies their difficulties and is a cruelty to them, whether it is intended to be so or not.
“Let the dismal prophets reflect a moment. Though buildings have been destroyed there is not a foot of land on the island that does not represent savings. Though railroad communications have been cut off, the currents of commerce by the land and by the sea are merely waiting to resume their courses. There is a capital in trade connections which is not necessarily wrecked along with wrecked stores, offices and houses.”
C. J. Sealey, a young man of Galveston, Texas, who was in La Junta, Colorado, received a telegram from the Mayor of Galveston informing him of the death of twenty-one of his relatives, among whom were his mother, two sisters and three brothers. The young man said he did not believe he had a relative on earth.
An eye-witness of the desolation described the scene as follows:
“Galveston is beginning slowly to recover from the stunning blow of last week, and though the city appears to-night to be pitilessly desolated, the authorities and the commercial and industrial interests are setting their forces to work, and a start has at least been made toward the resumption of business on a moderate scale.
“The presence of the troops has had a beneficial effect upon the criminal classes, and the apprehension of a brief but desperate reign of anarchy no longer exists. The liquor saloons have at least temporarily gone out of business, and every strong-limbed man who has not his own humble abode to look after is being pressed into service, so that, first of all, the water service may be resumed, the gutters flushed and the streets lighted.
BODIES CONSTANTLY COMING TO LIGHT.
“The further the ruins are dug into the greater becomes the increase in the list of those who perished as their houses tumbled about their heads. On the lower beach a searching party found a score of corpses within a small area, going to show that the bulwark of debris that lies straight across the island conceals more bodies than have been accounted for.
“Volunteer gangs continue their work of hurried burial of the corpses they find on the shores of Galveston