wires as well as nearly all the buildings between here and the Gulf of Mexico being wrecked.
“When I left Galveston the people were organizing for the prompt burial of the dead, distribution of food and all necessary work after a period of disaster.
CITY TURNED INTO A RAGING SEA.
“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 instrument 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. Where the storm in the Gulf piled the water up on 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 3 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 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 a trap. 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 BUILDINGS ESCAPED.
“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 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. The first hurried glance over the city showed that the largest structures, supposed to be the most substantially built, suffered the greatest.
“The Orphans’ Home, Twenty-first street and Avenue M, fell like a house of cards. How many dead children and refugees are in the ruins could not be ascertained. Of the sick in St. Mary’s Infirmary, together with the attendants, only eight are understood to have been saved. The Old Woman’s Home, on Roosenburg avenue, collapsed, and the Roosenburg School-house is a mass of wreckage. The Ball High School is but an empty shell, crushed and broken. Every church in the city, with possibly one or two exceptions, is in ruins.
“At the forts nearly all the soldiers are reported dead, they having been in temporary quarters, which gave them no protection against the tempest or flood. No report has been received from the Catholic Orphan Asylum down the island, but it seems impossible that it could have withstood the hurricane. If it fell, all the inmates were, no doubt, lost, for there was no aid within a mile.
“The bay front from end to end is in ruins. Nothing but piling and the wreck of great warehouses remain. The elevators lost all their super-works, and their stocks are damaged by water. The life-saving station at Fort Point was carried away, the crew being swept across the bay fourteen miles to Texas City. I saw Captain Haynes, and he told me that his wife and one of his crew were drowned.
WRECKAGE SWEPT ACROSS THE BAY.
“The shore at Texas City contains enough wreckage to rebuild a city. Eight persons who were swept across the bay during the storm were picked up there alive. Five corpses were also picked up. There were three fatalities in Texas City. In addition to the living and the dead which the storm cast up at Texas City, caskets and coffins from one of the cemeteries at Galveston were being fished out of the water there yesterday. In the business portion of the city two large brick buildings, one occupied by Knapp Brothers and the other by the Cotton Exchange saloon, collapsed. In the Cotton Exchange saloon there were about fifteen persons. Most of them escaped.
“The cotton mills, the bagging factory, the gas works, the electric light works and nearly all the industrial establishments of the city are either wrecked or crippled. The flood left a slime about one inch deep over the whole city, and unless fast progress is made in burying corpses and carcasses of animals there is danger of pestilence. Some of the stories of the escapes are miraculous. William Nisbett, a cotton man, was buried in the ruins of the Cotton Exchange saloon, and when dug out in the morning had no further injury than a few bruised fingers.
“Dr. S. O. Young, Secretary of the Cotton Exchange, was knocked senseless when his house collapsed, but was revived by the water, and was carried ten blocks by the hurricane. A woman who had just given birth to a child was carried from her home to a house a block distant, the men who were carrying her having to hold her high above heads, as the water was five feet deep when she was moved.
“Many stories were current of houses falling and inmates escaping. Clarence N. Ousley, editor of the Evening Tribune, had his family and the families of two neighbors in his house when the lower half crumbled and the upper part slipped down into the water. No one in the house was hurt.
“The Mistrot House, in the West End, was turned into a hospital. All of the regular hospitals of the city were unavailable. Of the new Southern Pacific Works little remains but the piling. Half a million feet of lumber was carried away, and Engineer Boschke says, as far as the company is concerned, it might as well start over again.
EIGHT OCEAN STEAMERS STRANDED.
“Eight ocean steamers were torn from their moorings and stranded in the bay. The Kendall Castle was carried over the flats at Thirty-third street wharf to Texas City, and lies in the wreckage of the Inman pier. The Norwegian steamer Gyller is stranded between Texas City and Virginia Point. An ocean liner was swirled around through the west bay, crashed through the bay bridges, and is now lying in a few feet of water near the wreckage of the railroad bridges.
“The steamship Taunton was carried across Pelican Point and is stranded about ten miles up the east bay. The Mallory steamer Alamo was torn from her wharf and dashed upon Pelican flats, and against the bow of the British steamer Red Cross, which had previously been hurled there. The stern of the Alamo is stove in and the bow of the Red Cross is crushed. Down the channel to the jetties two