CHAPTER XXV
Storms of Great Violence Around Galveston—Wrecked Cities and Vast Destruction of Property—Appalling Sacrifice of Life.
A close observer and correspondent who is familiar with every part of Texas and is capable of sizing up the situation, writes as follows concerning the disaster which has left Galveston a scene of death and ruin:
“At first glance it would seem that the population of Galveston had been endowed by a thoughtlessness which invites the calamities it has suffered. Three times in twenty-five years storms of great violence have swept over the island on which it occupies a position exposed to every energy of the elements, and on the two occasions whose history is complete the survivors rebuilt their city, as they probably will do again, and the storm broke upon it, as most likely it will once more, with death and destruction in its blast.
“Apart from the deep sympathy which one feels for the people the situation may awaken a philosophic inquiry whose consideration is of less importance than the interest the subject awakens and which is reinforced by parallel cases in the history of disaster since the world began, and I propose to show in a few great cases how the citizens of Galveston are only repeating history when, even as they gather their dead, they plan a new city whose foundation shall be enduring and which shall stand defiant and permanent, a triumph of man over antagonistic nature and a civic crown of glory to their efforts. It is no ignoble purpose.
THE DYKES OF HOLLAND.
“The sturdy Dutchmen who threw their dykes across the sea, the Sicilians who terraced Aetna’s lava sides with vineyards, the people of San Francisco who rebuilt their city when it was cast down by earthquakes until at last they found a structural design that would resist the seismic influence that hold the Pacific coast in tremulous expectation; Chicago that has risen twice from ashes to finer and more secure architectural proportions, and Calcutta, whose existence has been marked by three beginnings, are all expressions of the same splendid pertinacity with which the people of Galveston are already animated and from which will certainly appear a new and grander Gulf city offering to the menaces of nature a richer challenge.
A GREAT BREAKWATER.
“It was no accidental selection that caused Galveston to be built as it was upon a low island whose approach from the sea offered no harbor to ships and to whose low, sandy shores the products of the State of which she is the metropolis came only by artificial and difficult channels. The sweeping curves of the Gulf of Mexico reach its northern apex at or near this point, and it is there that the ships seeking the nearest approach to the cotton fields of Texas came, while the bay itself is as nearly as possible the average centre of industrial life in the State. The bay was never a harbor. To those who are familiar with the Jersey coast the situation of Galveston is easily presented.
“Just as part of the land has reached out into the sea and swinging around in different directions the points came in touch and raised a breakwater which, gathering sand and pebbles, became the beach at distances of four to ten miles from the mainland, leaving interior bays, with shallow inlets connecting them with the ocean, Galveston island was formed.
THE SWIRLING TIDES OF THE GULF.
“If the visitor to Barnegat or even to the Inlet end of the island at Atlantic, will recall how a narrow channel of tidal water reaches back to the sedge fringed bays that extend from Sea Girt to Cape May, and quadruple the width of those interior waters, he will have a fair idea of the position and surroundings of Galveston. Across Galveston Bay the railroads make their approach over eight to fifteen miles of tracks supported by piling.
“The waters of the bay are indeed navigable and through its shallows the moderate tides of the gulf swirl out channels, which the small draft boats of Buffalo Bayou paddle and sail just as the wood and oyster schooners and yachts move up Great Little Egg Harbor Bay on the Jersey coast. In fact, the situation of Galveston is not unlike that of Atlantic City, except that the sandy island on which it is built is lower and its front is to the south instead of to the east.
“Of course there is no well or spring water and the potable supply comes from the house roofs, which are carefully built to gather as much rain as possible, to be stored in cemented cisterns for use. As to the harbor itself for sea-going ships there is, in fact, none. Only the open gulf pushed at this point furthest into the shore, but in a sweep so grand that there are no headlands whatever. The water shoals slowly from the sea and ships of the draft of eighteen feet or more come in to take the first parts of their loads in the shallower water from lighters and move out from time to time until, when down to the load line, they are sometimes six or seven miles from land.
TRYING TO MAKE A HAVEN.
“Great efforts have been made to give Galveston a harbor commensurate with her commercial enterprise, and in some ways success has attended these efforts. Long spurs of breakwater were built out on the principles of the Boca harbor at Buenos Ayres, with a view to enclosing an artificial haven for ships, but the prevalent southerly winds, the currents which they engender and the ceaseless tides have made this work one of great difficulty. A further obstacle has been the shifting, sandy bottom, whose permeable formation reaches down many feet before it rests upon clay or rock.
“The city itself is built chiefly of wood and on the lines of architecture adopted for coolness in tropical climates. That is to say, with vast doorways and windows, cutting out as much of the framework as possible and yet leave enough of support for a roof. This structural form permits the whole house to be opened for the passage of every breeze, but at the cost of stability.
“At intervals and particularly when the spring or high tides prevail, and when the southerly winds bank up the waters of the northern gulf, the streets of the city are flooded, the sewers deliver themselves the wrong way and the uncertain foundations of the city are weakened and prepared for the fall which follows close upon the weather conditions when they are intensified.
THE CITY A PREY TO THE STORM.
“We have now the situation of Galveston fairly before us, and can understand how it easily succumbed to the violence of the late storm. It is true that the cyclone was of a potentiality which might have razed a more firmly built city, but probably in no other city in this country could it have caused such complete devastation.
“In twenty-five years the city of Galveston and the coast line of Texas have had three visitations of tropical hurricanes, bearing death and destruction in their blasts. Every year about the equinoctial season storms of greater or less fury occur and never, on account of the fragile materials and loose methods of building, have they failed of doing damage, but these three occupy thrones of mark above all others. In September, 1875, the coast of Texas, from the mouth of the Rio Grande to the Sabine Pass, was swept by a cyclone that followed with its central zone the curve of the coast, the wind varying at different times in its journey to southeast to southwest.
“The town of Indianola was blotted out of the world in an hour. Not half a dozen of its 1,200 inhabitants escaped, and the sea swept away the island on which it stood, and its site has no other mark than that which the waves rolling over it can offer. There were not enough of people to ask for help. And as there was no longer a place to rebuild, the little remnant moved elsewhere. The storm swept over Galveston, raising a tidal wave that changed in its impetuous flow the whole shape of the island. From the western end nearly two miles of land was cut off and carried around to the north side. The city was unroofed, houses toppled and fell, the water flowed in resistless currents along the levees, floating off to sea thousands of bales of cotton and destroying in its wild swirls the contents of stores and houses and many lives. The number never will be known but estimates place it at 800. For a week telegraphic communication was cut off.
SPILES WRENCHED FROM THEIR PLACES.
“It was my fortune to be in Texas as a correspondent at the time and on the day of the storm at Houston, some sixty miles away, built at the head of Buffalo Bayou, and I was ordered to the wrecked city. At that time there was only one railroad, the Houston and Galveston, and it was utterly destroyed for over thirty miles of its length. The top structure on the spiling across Galveston Bay was, of course, swept away, but it was a remarkable fact as showing the violence of the storm that about one of every three of the great spiles, 50 to 55 feet long and driven down 25 to 30 feet in the sand, was wrenched from its place and swept away.
“Others had resisted, but were twisted and split by the fury of wind and waves. Two small boats, stern wheelers, drawing from 28 to 30 inches of water, built on the Mississippi steamboat model of ancient times, with a cabin over the cargo and engine deck, a Texas or officers’ cabin on top of that, and a glass wheel house on top of that—more fragile things you could not imagine—were moored at the mouth of the bayou, where the sluggish stream enters the bay.
“Strange to say these escaped with the loss of their smokestacks, and were available to send aid, which was not lacking, to the desolate city. It was impossible to transport the quantities of food and clothing that poured in from the North, and more rotted and was lost on the levee at Houston than reached the distressed inhabitants of Galveston.
“That part of the city which was not blown down was imbedded in sand. The Strand, a street in Galveston, whose name is now familiar to the world by reason of the awful scenes that so recently have been witnessed there, was four feet deep in sand, and the Tremont, Cosmopolitan and Great Southern Hotels were filled with sand and hotel was kept on their second floors.
AROSE LIKE A PHOENIX.
“But the city, although cast down, was not discouraged. It began to rebuild itself, and by Christmas of that year almost every trace of the awful calamity had disappeared. The question naturally arises why a population which had received such an awful warning of its exposed condition should not abandon what in a military term would be called an untenable position. The answer is obvious. They had something left there. Even the island, although distorted and out of shape, was still there and theirs, and they had nothing elsewhere, nor means to go to another place.
“So, with hopeful philosophy they rebuilt their city, restored its commerce and, encouraged with such empty precepts as ‘Better luck next time,’ ‘Lightning never strikes twice in the same place,’ went forward to meet their next blow, in 1893, when another hurricane visited them. It was not so terrible in its effect, but differed only in degree. The late severe storm gives further emphatic warning, more terrible and heart-breaking in its losses of life and vaster in its destruction of property. But they will, of course, rebuild their city and seek to establish protective barriers of breakwaters and seawalls to maintain it in existence. In all likelihood they will succeed, for the history of these efforts is of final security after trial and loss, and the firm resolution of man rises over every obstacle.
ASLEEP OVER A VOLCANO.
“Perhaps the persistency of the people who dwell on the slopes at the foot of Mount Vesuvius offers the most striking illustration of disregard of danger against which no human provision can be made. With a volcano boiling on the verge of eruptions that are forever imminent they pasture their flocks and press their grapes, careless of the menace which familiarity has taught them to despise. The whole kingdom of Naples is marked by the same disregard of natural and uncontrollable danger. The statement is accepted by the encyclopedias that in seventy-five years—from 1783 to 1857—the kingdom lost 111,000 inhabitants by the effects of earthquakes. About 1,500 a year in a population of less than 5,000,000.
“The city of Lisbon sits smiling and prosperous on the north bank of the Tagus, and its inhabitants still point with pride to scarred earth dating from the earthquake in which 40,000 lives were lost. Charleston, S. C., is rebuilt. Johnstown, Pa., is restored to its prosperous industry. The Japanese still go their flowery way in Jeddo, where in one great shock 200,000 lives are said to have been lost—which figure is even approximately the greatest disaster the world has ever known. St. Thomas, in the West Indies; Port Royal, Jamaica; Cape Haytien, in Santo Domingo, with a tribute of 45,000 lives within the memory of men yet living, and the spice island of Krakatoa, are still peopled despite the black danger signal of the death which constantly waves over them.
MYRIAD LIVES LOST IN GREAT DISASTERS.
“If you will refer to the statistical sources of information you will find that in one hundred and fifty years, a mere moment in the life of this world and its races, and add up the round thousands only and leave out the hundreds of lives which are charged to lesser lists the sum will reach 1,563,000 souls in the thirty-seven most important earthquake, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes and inundations that have visited the earth. It is, of course, impossible to give any sort of guess as to the accuracy of the estimates of the loss of life.
“Even in Johnstown it is not certainly known to this day within 2,000 persons how many were lost. The identified dead numbered 2,228. The best informed and conservative estimates place the figure at 3,500, and others reach 5,000, while published reports, which ought to be authoritative, calmly name the death list at 9,000. It is the same at Galveston, where the number is so variously stated that no reliance can be placed upon any numerical report beyond the fact that anywhere between 1,000 and 3,000 lives have been lost. If this, then, is the waywardness of figures in cases where not only the population is known, but in communities where the associations of commerce and social life has been such that the survivors can count the missing and recognize such of the dead as may be found, how wild must be the estimate placed upon such cataclysms as that in Southeastern Bengal and the Niegen Islands, where on October 31, 1876, in a cyclone, 215,000 people are said to have perished.
CARELESS ABOUT ALL DANGER.
“But even there, where such a loss would imply the sacrifice of one in every four persons inhabiting the territory so awfully stricken, the people still pursue their daily avocations, toil and rest, love, hate, mourn and die with the composure and ease of mind that prevail in Philadelphia or New York, where no shadow of storm is known to hover and where no devastating earthquake or fiery volcano lurks for victims. But, of course, these awful figures have very little relation to the actual losses. In the storm in Bengal Sir Richard Temple, who had charge of the crown relief, did not find that 20,000 lives were lost and that probably not more than 10,000 died of the famine which the loss of the crops insured. In the potato famine in Ireland, in 1846 and 1847, the loss of life was named at 120,000 by those who charged the whole business to English misrule and was named at from 8,000 to 20,000 by the royal commissioners entrusted with the distribution of the £10,000,000 of Parliamentary grant for the relief of the famished land.
LAWS REGULATING STORMS.
“So the loss in battles always begins to be told in numbers that occasionally would require more than the combined forces of the two armies to supply. The first reports of Shiloh or Pittsburg Landing, in the early days of the Civil War, is a case in point. Had we fought on at the rate given then the country would not have had a male person in its population a year before the date of Appomattox. So that we can hope every day will reduce the number, although it cannot lessen the horror otherwise, of the visitation the death angel has made in the Lone Star State.
“It is interesting to study the law of storms which take on such a rhythmical obedience as it would seem to appear at given places and times. In this case the weather bureau was accurately alert to the approaching disturbance. Four days before its arrival on the coast its formation in the Caribbean Sea was noted and its probable course northward chartered and proclaimed as a danger to the Atlantic States. The meteorological phenomenon was correctly defined and watched in its development until on Thursday night it reached the Florida coast and struck a rude blow at Tampa. Up to this moment the weather office had made no mistake and its predictions lifted its utterance to the domain of verified prophecy.
FREAKS OF THE HURRICANE.
“Then the behavior of the storm with reference to its movements becomes almost fantastic. It was as if its controlling spirit had received a notice of the warning that had preceded it and the preparations of commerce to defend itself from its attacks. Therefore it made a feint demonstration upon the Atlantic Ocean, and suddenly turning fairly about in its course flew westward out of barometric supervision to seek a more vulnerable spot. Galveston was open to it, and sweeping across the gulf, from which no herald of warning could hasten in advance, it struck the Texas coast on Saturday and went howling with demoniac fury over the Mississippi plateau, across the lakes and down the St. Lawrence Valley out to sea again, to be chilled to death in the frigid air currents of the polar seas.
“When the West India Islands and the ports of Mexico are equipped with weather observing stations from which prompt and frequent reports shall be made, no storm can draw nigh on shores to effect a surprise. Commerce can in a measure protect itself, but ill-built cities and crops must at intervals suffer. The lesson of the last one is of warning, but how to profit by it outruns prevision that seeks absolute security. There can be no such thing, ‘for as the pestilence walketh in darkness and destruction wasteth at noon still a thousand shall fall and ten thousand at thy right hand, for the hand of man cannot stay the tempest.’ This is according to all human experience.”
To have saved and then to have lost is if anything harder to hear than to have lost at first. It was thus with Mr. William H. Irvin, who succeeded in saving his wife and all but one of his children from the death which the elements were so anxious to administer, but afterwards lost his wife, who succumbed to the injuries she received that night.
The story of Irvin and his family’s escape is like those of others who succeeded in getting out alive. It is simply marvelous, and their coming out with their lives can only be credited to that supreme power which is even mightier than the winds and sea. While he did all that any human could in saving his loved ones, yet his efforts were naught in that mighty battle of the elements.
GREAT DARING SHOWN.
In point of detail his story corresponds with the many others that are told of that night, but it is one of great daring also, one in which quick action and a trust in Divine Providence played an important part. Irvin was living with his happy family in a little story and a half cottage near the corner of Nineteenth street and Avenue O ½ before the storm, but now all of that happy home is gone, and two of that happy family are no more.
It was early in the afternoon that the water began rising out there, but it was not until later, when all chance of getting out and coming to town to a place of safety was gone, did they become frightened. The house, though small was strongly built, and it was this that caused several of the neighbors who were living in frail houses to come to the Irvin home for refuge. They were Mrs. Crowley, two sons and a daughter, and Miss Aldridge. Along in the afternoon they became thoroughly frightened by the waters, which were rapidly rising, and the wind which was increasing in velocity every minute.
And well they might, for at that time the house was beginning to groan under the fierce onslaughts of the wind and the water. They stayed downstairs until the water had creeped up into the house, coming up and up until it drove them to the stairs. Then it drove them up step by step. They were frightened, yes, but never did the dreadful picture of what did happen present itself to even their terror-stricken minds. No imagination was then able to make a picture like the one in reality.
They were thus driven up into the attic by the waters and terrorized by the wind until after dark. Then, as if to follow out the idea that whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad, the wind added to their fright and almost crazed them by carrying before it to their ears the frantic appeals for help from those who were already in the storm’s clutches and were soon to become its victims. The houses around them went, nothing being able to stand against the mighty force of the wind and waves. Then it was that their house began to creak and groan louder than ever, until at last Irvin and his fellows in distress felt that it was going the next minute, and if they did not get out then they never would.
EIGHT CHILDREN THROWN OUT OF WINDOW.
So, having no time for a second thought, he picked up one of those eight children, whose life was part of his and who made his life worth living, and with a prayer tossed him out of the window, to alight on what he did not know, if to alight on anything. But he thought, and wisely, as circumstances proved, that they would have a better chance in the open than in a falling house. He risked their falling into that turbulent sea and sinking, never to come up, to leaving them in the building to be maimed by flying timbers and killed by the falling house.
Thus he threw out all of the eight, then came his wife, then the others who had come to him for refuge. He did not know what the fate of each of the former was when he threw out another, but trusted to Divine Providence, and not in vain. For as he threw the first out a shed in the rear of the house, as if with heroic instinct, washed against the building directly under the window, and there it stayed for a few seconds, catching each member of the family as he or she fell, even waiting for him.
The rest of Irvin’s story is that of a continual fight to keep his family from being blown and washed off of the raft that Providence had given him. This fight lasted for hours and their perilous position was made even greater by the flying timbers and pieces of slate which the wind would seem to take such delight in hurling at them. It was a battle between providence and the elements to see which should claim the family for its own, and not until nearly three o’clock did the wind and water cease in their efforts to add the Irvin family to their long list of victims. The elements were recompensed by taking one of the eight children and injuring the wife so that she would later become one of their dead.
At about three o’clock the next morning Irvin found himself and family, except the little one who had been lost, several blocks from where he had formerly lived, and mixed up in the debris. At daylight he succeeded in getting his wife and children out and brought them to the business part of the town.
THE MOST REMARKABLE EXPERIENCE.
As soon as possible he sent the children to relatives in Houston. In the meantime his wife had been taken to the Sealy hospital suffering from the injuries she had received during the storm. At this time he realized that he was hurt also and went to the temporary hospital at the Custom House, where he stayed for several days under treatment. It was while he was there that the last sad chapter was added to his story. While there confined to his bed, his wife died in the Sealy hospital, and he had to lie at the Custom House without getting a last look at the woman whom he loved, while strangers were burying her body. Of his neighbors who took refuge with him all were saved except the little daughter of Mr. Crowley.