The Great Galveston Disaster: Containing a Full and Thrilling Account of the Most Appalling Calamity of Modern Times Including Vivid Descriptions of the Hurricane and Terrible Rush of Waters; Immense Destruction of Dwellings, Business Houses, Churches, and Loss of Thousands of Human Lives; Thrilling Tales of Heroic Deeds; Panic-Stricken Multitudes and Heart-Rending Scenes of Agony; Frantic Efforts to Escape a Horrible Fate; Separation of Loved Ones, etc., etc.; Narrow Escapes from the Jaws of De
John Stuart Mill · en
F. B. Campbell, who was in Galveston when the floods swept upon it, was
one of the first refugees to reach the North. He passed through
Pittsburg, six days after the disaster, on his way to Springfield,
Mass., which is his home. Mr. Campbell had his right arm fractured.
William E. Frear, a Philadelphia commercial traveller, who was with
Campbell in Galveston, accompanied him as far north as Cincinnati, and
went home on the express. Frear’s right ankle was sprained.
Campbell was a cotton broker and was overwhelmed at his boarding house
while at dinner. He reached a heap of wreckage by swimming through an
alley. Of the scene when he left, Campbell said:
“The last I saw of Galveston was a row of submerged buildings where a
thriving city stood. A waste of water spread in all directions. In the
sea were piles of wreckage and the carcasses of animals and the bodies
of hundreds of human beings. The salt marshes presented an indescribable
sight. Nude forms of human beings, that had been swept across the bay
were scattered everywhere. No man could count them without going insane.
It looked like a graveyard, where all the tenants of the tombs had been
exhumed and the corpses thrown to the winds.”
SOME WONDERFUL ESCAPES.
There were many wonderful incidents of the great storm. In the infirmary
at Houston was a boy whose name is Rutter. He was found on Monday
morning lying beside a truck on the land near the town of Hitchcock,
which is twenty miles to the northward of Galveston. This boy is only 12
years old. His story is that his father, mother and two children
remained in the house. There was a crash and the house went to pieces.
The boy says that he caught hold of a trunk when he found himself in the
water and floated off with it. He thinks the others were drowned. With
the trunk the boy floated. He had no idea of where it took him, but when
daylight came he was across the bay and out upon the still partially
submerged mainland.
When their home went to pieces the Stubbs family, husband, wife and two
children, climbed upon the roof of a house floating by. They felt
tolerably secure, when, without warning, the roof parted in two places.
Mr. and Mrs. Stubbs were separated and each carried a child. The parts
of the raft went different ways in the darkness. One of the children
fell off and disappeared, and not until some time Sunday was the family
reunited. Even the child was saved, having caught a table and clung to
it until it reached a place of safety.
One of the most remarkable escapes recorded during the flood was
reported to-day when news came that a United States battery man on duty
at the forts last week had been picked up on Morgan’s Point, injured but
alive. He had buffeted the waves for five days and lived through a
terrible experience. Morgan’s Point is thirty miles from Galveston.