“The concrete piers of the county bridge we found washed away in mainland and we saw a big steamer grounded in the West Bay. We saw a fine boat about thirty feet long that had made the trip without sailor or rudder from Galveston. In that boat I was told a drowning family took refuge. When they were nearly over a wave struck it and threw all its occupants out except one man, and he landed in safety. Claude G. Pond, who was with Capt. Plummer’s life boat during the storm, estimates that they saved 200 people in the east end from drowning. “They began work Saturday afternoon at 2 o’clock and kept it up as long as they could do any good in the east end from First street to St. Mary’s Infirmary. Capt. Plummer waded in water up to his chin, and in places was swimming, directing the movements of the boat, while Mr. Pond and Capt. Plummer’s two sons manned the boat. CLUNG TO THEIR PROPERTY. “Several places they extended rescue and the people declined to go expressing the belief that their peril was not so great, and preferring to remain with their property. Sometimes they would make the second trip to such places and sometimes the occupants would be saved and in other instances they had tarried too long. Their plan was to carry people into places where they could wade out and leave them, going back to bring others to shallow water and on the return again carrying them further in. “In cases where parents had been carried out to wading water and deposited, they would stand there instead of pushing on, looking back for their children, and it sometimes happened that the children and parents both went down while one waited for the other, when, if the parents had pushed on after they had reached wading water, all might have been saved. “One of the last loads carried out was about to land in front of St. Mary’s Infirmary, when a piece of falling timber struck the boat and capsized it. They had eight or nine people in the boat, and when they succeeded in righting it they could find only two or three. “Mr. Mennis and a party of about forty people took refuge in a two-story grocery store at Forty-fifth street and Broadway. When the roof went over and the building went to pieces, Mr. Mennis and six others caught on drift. They were driven toward the beach into the gulf, and when the wind veered to the southeast and later south, they were driven across the bay and landed on the mainland near Texas City. Of the seven who made this terrible voyage two died in the course of a day. Mr. Mennis lost his mother and two brothers. “In the vicinity of Texas City sixty bodies supposed to be from Galveston have been buried. Nearly all were women. There was no means of identification, except possibly by jewelry, which was found on about one-half of the bodies.”