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 — John Shaqi
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
CHAPTER XI.
Galveston Calamity One of the Greatest Known to History—Many Thousands
Maimed and Wounded—Few Heeded the Threatening Hurricane—The Doomed City
Turned to Chaos.
Galveston has been the scene of one of the greatest catastrophes in the
world’s history. The story of the great storm of Saturday, Sept. 8,
1900, will never be told. Words are too weak to express the horror, the
awfulness of the storm itself, to even faintly picture the scene of
devastation, wreck and ruin, misery, suffering and grief. Even those who
were miraculously saved after terrible experiences, who were spared to
learn that their families and property had been swept away, and spared
to witness scenes as horrible as the eye of man ever looked upon—even
these can not tell the story.
There are stories of wonderful rescues and escapes, each of which at
another time would be a marvel to the rest of the world, but in a time
like this when a storm so intense in its fury, so prolonged in its work
of destruction, so wide in its scope, and so infinitely terrible in its
consequences has swept an entire city and neighboring towns for miles on
either side, the mind can not comprehend all of the horror, can not
learn or know all of the dreadful particulars.
One stands speechless and powerless to relate even that which he has
felt and knows. Gifted writers have told of storms at sea wrecking of
vessels where hundreds were at stake and lost. That task pales to
insignificance when compared with the task of telling of a storm which
threatened the lives of perhaps sixty thousand people, sent to their
death perhaps six thousand people, and left others wounded, homeless,
and destitute, and still others to cope with grave responsibility, to
relieve the stricken, to grapple with and prevent the anarchist’s reign,
to clear the water-sodden land of putrefying bodies and dead carcasses,
to perform tasks that try men’s souls and sicken their hearts.
The storm at sea is terrible, but there are no such dreadful
consequences as those which have followed the storm on the sea coast and
it is men who passed through the terrors of the storm, who faced death
for hours, men ruined in property and bereft of families, who took up
the herculean and well-nigh impossible task of bringing order out of
chaos, of caring for the living and disposing of the dead before they
made life impossible here.
The storm came not without warning, but the danger which threatened was
not realized, not even when the storm was upon the city. Friday night
the sea was angry. Saturday morning it had grown in fury, and the
wrecking of the beach resorts began. The waters of the Gulf hurried
inland. The wind came at terrific rate from the north. Still men went to
their business and about their work while hundreds went to the beach to
witness the grand spectacle which the raging sea presented.
WATERS CREPT HIGHER AND HIGHER.