The 1900 Galveston Hurricane | City of Doom | 3

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0:48American History Tellers:Imagine it's the afternoon of Sunday, September 9th, 1900, somewhere outside of League City, Texas. You and five other men left Galveston on a boat this morning to begin a 50-mile journey to Houston in order to alert the world about yesterday's devastating hurricane. Since reaching the mainland, you've been pumping your way north in a small rail handcart. Your arms are sore from the work, but the repetitive motion is a helpful distraction from your shock and grief. All right, keep going, boys. Just a few more miles. At first, you think the sun is playing tricks on you, but then you see a southbound passenger train rounding a bend ahead.

1:26American History Tellers:You straighten up and wave your arms. Stop! Stop! I can't say stop! The train manages to slow to a halt and you climb off the handcar. The conductor flings open the door. What the hell are you men doing? We're from Galveston. We're heading to Houston to wire the governor and the president about the storm. Galveston, huh? I heard you got some rain. It wasn't just rain. It was a worse storm than anything you can imagine. Please, can we come aboard? After a moment's hesitation, the conductor jerks his head. All right, come on up, but be quick about it. So you'll turn around and take us to Houston?

2:02American History Tellers:Turn around? Absolutely not. We're not going to Houston until I drop these passengers off in Galveston. These people pay to travel south. Oh, sir, you don't understand. Galveston's gone. The city's in ruins. Every bridge, every railroad track on the island has been washed away clean. The mayor deputized us to seek help. Hundreds have died, maybe more. Hundreds. Oh, come on now. It's clear you're worn out, and that's perfectly understandable. But I think things couldn't be that bad. Oh, look, can we come aboard or not? Be my guest. Climb up into a passenger car with the rest of your party. Heads turn immediately.

2:40American History Tellers:Men and women eyeing your soaked, saw-crusted clothes with a mixture of curiosity and alarm. But it doesn't matter. you'll know they'll finally understand when the tracks run out, when they start seeing the bodies.

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4:22American History Tellers:On September 9, 1900, a small group of survivors of the Galveston hurricane set out on an emergency mission to Houston, commandeering a boat and a rail hand car in order to make their way 50 miles north. With Galveston's telephone and telegraph lines down and all bridges onto the island destroyed, they needed to tell the world that their city was in desperate need of relief. Because back in Galveston, only 24 hours had passed since an unprecedented hurricane had struck the city. Days survivors grappled with unimaginable loss. Thousands of homes had been leveled, and the island was littered with mountains of debris, animal carcasses, and corpses that signaled a death toll far beyond what anyone initially realized.

5:05American History Tellers:A thriving, cosmopolitan community had been torn apart, and now the survivors faced the staggering challenge of picking up the pieces of their shattered lives. This is Episode 3 in our three-part series on the 1900 Galveston Hurricane, City of Doom.

5:24American History Tellers:The Sunday of September 9, 1900 dawned on a city in ruins. In less than 24 hours, a vibrant and modern seaport full of homes, businesses, wharves, and warehouses had been reduced to a sodden wasteland. All across Galveston, survivors of the hurricane emerged from their hiding places and took in the desolation. The sky was clear and blue, and the sea was calm and quiet. The flooding had receded, but thousands of homes had disappeared overnight. And in the streets, bloodied men, women, and children stumbled, shocked and confused. Everywhere they looked, there were corpses. Forty-three bodies were lodged in the cross braces of a railroad bridge.

6:07American History Tellers:In a grove of salt cedar trees, one hundred bodies were found in the branches, some with double puncture wounds left by snakes. One witness to the destruction was 18-year-old P.G. Tip, who had left Galveston on a fishing trip four days earlier and came home early Sunday morning aboard a small sailboat. He later recalled the harrowing sights that greeted him as he drifted closer to shore, writing, We kept running into so many dead bodies that I had to go forward with a pike and shove the dead out of the way. Men, women, children, babies, all floating along with the tide. Hundreds of bodies going bump, bump, hitting the boat.

6:43American History Tellers:I was sort of in a daze, picking them out of the way. It was the most horrible thing I have ever seen. But the survivors still had no idea how many victims a hurricane had claimed. Early estimates put the death toll at 500. Only much later would they learn that between 6 ,000 and 8 ,000 had lost their lives. To this day, the Galveston hurricane remains the deadliest natural disaster in the history of North America. The storm had carved a large swath of destruction, leveling nearly two-thirds of Galveston structures, amounting to between$17 and$30 million in property losses. Entire neighborhoods had vanished.

7:21American History Tellers:Homes swept up from their foundations and broken apart, joined a battering ram of debris that cleared a 1 ,500-acre stretch of the coastline before coming to rest just south of Broadway, the city's central thoroughfare. There, a 30-foot-high, three-mile-long mound of wreckage concealed bodies and animal carcasses, and slowed the drainage of floodwaters. Making matters worse, telegraph, telephone, and electrical lines were all destroyed, as were the four bridges connecting Galveston to mainland Texas. The city was cut off from the outside world in a moment when it desperately needed aid. So the surviving city leaders knew they needed to tell the world what had happened.

8:01American History Tellers:They enlisted six men to serve as messengers. These men found one of the few boats still intact and set out across the bay to begin a 50-mile trek to Houston. Upon reaching the mainland, they made their way across the flooded plains to the town of Lamarck. There, they found a rail hand car, which they used to crank their way 15 miles north to League City. It was there that they encountered an oncoming train from Houston and climbed aboard. Despite their warning that Galveston was inaccessible, the conductor refused to turn around, so the messengers were forced to retrace their steps south. It was only when the tracks gave out, as the men said would happen, that the first train turned back to Houston.

8:41American History Tellers:While these messengers traveled north that afternoon, Galveston's mayor, Walter C. Jones, a former police chief who was popular among the city's working class, called a meeting at the Trebant Hotel to organize relief. The citizens that gathered there formed what they called the Central Relief Committee, led by the mayor and eight chairmen. To better coordinate relief efforts, they created subcommittees to oversee public safety, hospitals, burials, water, finance, transportation, and correspondence. And they divided Galveston into 12 wards, each with an elected chairman who would manage teams of men tasked with collecting bodies and debris, digging drainage ditches, and disinfecting the streets.

9:21American History Tellers:These were volunteer teams, but there was a warning that any able-bodied men who refused to work would not be fed. And because the first priority was obtaining fresh water, the committee immediately set about recruiting 100 men to begin work on restoring the water system. While this was happening, at 3 a.m. on Monday, September 10, the six messengers sent to Houston finally managed to place phone calls to the Texas governor and U.S. President William McKinley, who pledged to provide Army supplies. Thankfully, the people of Houston had already anticipated the need for relief, and at 4 o 'clock on Monday morning, 250 volunteers set out with a rail car of provisions, followed by a steamer loaded with additional supplies and 100 ,000 gallons of fresh water.

10:05American History Tellers:However, they were forced to travel the last few miles to the edge of Galliston Bay on foot, hauling goods to the shore. From there, a small party rode across the bay, reaching Galliston at 1 o 'clock that afternoon. Over the next few days, rescuers from the mainland continued to arrive on the island in shifts, some to help deliver aid, others to search for lost loved ones. But every one of these rescuers was shocked by what they found. General Chambers McKibben, commander of the Texas Department of the U.S. Army, and a veteran of one of the Civil War's bloodiest battles, wrote, I'm an old soldier.

10:39American History Tellers:I've seen many battlefields. But ever since I helped the man in the boat to steer clear of the floating bodies of dead women and little children, I've not slept one single moment. It was difficult for the rescuers and their survivors to even comprehend the sheer number of lives lost. There were so many bodies that disposal became the Central Relief Committee's prime concern, because with corpses quickly decaying in the relentless heat, they knew that unless the remains were cleared soon, Galveston would face a different kind of catastrophe.

11:14American History Tellers:Imagine it's Monday morning, September 10, 1900, in Galveston, Texas. You're the chief of the local weather bureau, and you press a handkerchief over your mouth and nose as you enter a large warehouse serving as a makeshift morgue. Hundreds of bodies are laid out in rows, stretching wall to wall. A distraught men and women move among them, looking for their lost loved ones. The scent of death and decay is sickening, but you're desperate to find your own loved one, your wife Cora. A volunteer in mud-cake boots hurries by, and you catch his arm. Excuse me, I'm looking for my wife. We lost her on Saturday night.

11:50American History Tellers:We hoped we might find her alive, but it's been two days. She has dark brown hair, wearing a blue dress. Volunteer takes a long drink from a flask, his hands trembling as he puts the cap back on. I'm sorry, mister. I can't say I've seen her. There's just too many to keep track. She had a diamond ring on her left hand. I hope for your sake she's still wearing it. What do you mean? Has there been looting? We caught a group of boys stealing a gold watch just this morning. You steady yourself against a support beam. The volunteer puts his hand on your shoulder. Look, I'm sorry. I don't think I've seen your wife, but that doesn't mean she isn't here.

12:28American History Tellers:Best thing you can do is look for yourself. You nod and force yourself to start moving down the row, peeling back sheets and blankets to expose the faces underneath. You pull back the edge of a tattered quilt and stumble backwards as you recognize your longtime friend Henry. His face is bruised and bloated, but there's no mistaking it's him. Oh, sir, I know this man. His name's Henry Carter. The volunteer returns to your side and scribbles on a clipboard. All right, that's good. We know one more, thank you. As you stare down at Henry's distorted face, all you can think of is his wife and his sons, who are the same age as your eldest daughters.

13:11American History Tellers:You wonder if they've survived, or if their bodies are laid out somewhere here, too. You suddenly realize that you can't stay a moment longer. So you run out of the warehouse and into the blinding morning sun and gasp for air. But the scent outside is almost as sour. You know that you and your daughters won't find peace until you find Korra, but you're not sure you have enough strength for the search.

13:37American History Tellers:In the days after the hurricane, Galveston's burial committee organized gangs of men to round up hundreds of bodies, sending them out in 30-minute shifts and fortifying them with whiskey to steady their nerves. They then laid the corpses out in makeshift morgues to await identification. Meteorologist Isaac Klein was one of the thousands of survivors desperate to find a lost loved one. He searched for his wife Cora among the dead, but she was nowhere to be found. But there was the opposite problem, too. Volunteers discovered that many of the dead victims had no surviving family members left to claim their bodies.

14:12American History Tellers:The death toll was simply overwhelming, and it soon became clear that the ground was too soaked for burials. But with the bodies rapidly decaying, there was no time to waste. Fearing the spread of disease, the committee decided that burial at sea was their only option. So on Monday, September 10th, workmen loaded roughly 700 bodies onto three waiting barges while deputized white citizens rounded up 50 black men at gunpoint and forced them to board the barges and handle the task of disposal. That night, the crews traveled 18 miles offshore, only to find that the darkness made it impossible to do the work, leaving the men to spend the night at sea surrounded by the dead.

14:52American History Tellers:Finally, at dawn on September 11th, the workmen began attaching weights to the bodies to help them sink. They worked quickly, anxious to complete this grim task. But to everyone's horror, later that afternoon, scores of bodies washed ashore, some with the weights still attached. By then, decomposition had made the bodies hard to handle. So despite the fact that cremation was relatively unusual in America in 1900 and sacrilegious to many, the burial committee concluded that the only option left was to burn the bodies. Crews began the work of building funeral pyres on the beaches spaced a few hundred feet apart.

15:30American History Tellers:And for the next two months, the stench of burning bodies would permeate the city. It was so strong that sailors could smell it 50 miles out at sea. 18-year-old P.G. Tip, who led a crew of eight workers, later recalled, I had done so much burning and so much work that I just gave out. I was sick for a long time. I can still smell the dead and the burning bodies like burnt sugar. The devastation proved too much for many, and in the days immediately following the hurricane, several survivors decided that rather than stay and face the horrors around them, they would escape the island altogether. Grief, shock, fear of disease, and food and housing shortages led some 6 ,000 people, mostly women and children, to flee Galveston by boat.

16:15American History Tellers:A relief worker in Texas City, just across the bay from Galveston, wrote, The boat came filled with refugees from the city of Doom. Mothers whose babies had been torn from their arms. Children whose parents were missing. Fathers whose entire families were lost. A dazed and tearless throng. Between the deaths and this mass exodus, Galveston lost one-third of its population. But for those who remained, security soon became a major concern, too, as reports of looting emerged. When the chief of police insisted that he needed more manpower than his 70 officers, Mayor Jones deputized white union workers, and on September 13th, the mayor called in the Texas militia, led by Brigadier General Thomas Scurry, who declared martial law.

16:59American History Tellers:Troops guarded warehouses and commissaries, and set up tents for homeless women and children. But despite the presence of this militia, sensationalist stories of looting continued to spread, with racist newspaper accounts adding fuel to the fire. Several reports accused Black men of mutilating corpses to steal jewelry. On September 13, an Alabama newspaper alleged that 50 Black looters had been shot to death in Galveston, declaring the ghouls were holding an orgy over the dead, though there was no evidence that these incidents occurred. But even as officials worked to improve sanitation and security on the island, food shortages emerged as the most pressing challenge.

17:38American History Tellers:And beyond rations, survivors also desperately needed clothing, bedding, furniture, and stoves. Because although the weather was still warm, soon cooler temperatures would arrive, making the housing shortage even more urgent. Galveston's needs were far beyond what the disaster-stricken city could handle, and supplies were fast running out.

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19:57American History Tellers:On Monday, September 10, 1900, news of the hurricane in Galliston had reached Clara Barton, the 78-year-old founder and president of the American Red Cross, who was known as the Angel of the Battlefield for her efforts tending the wounded during the Civil War. The Red Cross had led relief operations in the wake of other major natural disasters, including the 1889 flood that killed more than 2 ,000 people in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. and despite suffering from a lingering illness, Barton was determined to lend her expertise to Galveston too. So on September 13th, she set out from Washington, D.C.

20:32American History Tellers:with a team of Red Cross workers. Four days later, they reached Galveston by boat. Upon arrival, Mayor Walter Jones welcomed them and set them up at the Tremont Hotel. And although Barton was used to scenes of death and destruction, the scale of devastation in Galveston shocked even her. She wrote, It was one of those monstrosities of nature which defied exaggeration. She was especially struck by the way the survivors moved around in a daze, writing, There was an unnatural calmness that would astonish those who do not understand it. But once Barton and the Red Cross were on the ground, they immediately partnered with a local central relief committee, aiming to support rather than replace local leadership.

21:13American History Tellers:And drawing on prior experience, the organization implemented a two-phase plan. For the first two weeks, they would focus on emergency relief, providing food, clothing, and household goods to families based on need. The second phase was rehabilitation, which meant assessing what needed to be done to reestablish homes and livelihoods. To assist in these efforts, a wealthy local resident donated a four-story warehouse to serve as Red Cross headquarters, where staff tracked donations, corresponded with donors, managed supply distribution, ran an orphanage, and operated a kitchen to feed the hungry.

21:47American History Tellers:Because Barton was a trusted national figure, her presence in Galveston not only generated publicity, but also reassured donors across the country that their gifts would be used appropriately. She issued press statements confirming the devastation had not been exaggerated and urged Americans to donate what they could. She also actively leveraged her networks, issuing appeals, wiring other relief organizations, and communicating with President William McKinley himself to secure much-needed supplies and funds. Soon, household goods, disinfectants, clothing, and money poured in from individuals and businesses from across America and around the world.

22:26American History Tellers:Barton made a special plea for cash donations so that relief workers could buy supplies from local merchants to help the city's suffering economy. She also formed a Red Cross Auxiliary for women, who undertook the daunting task of sorting and distributing supplies. Women canvassed their wards to document losses, then allocated clothing, food, and other materials to those in need. But soon, troubling reports of discrimination began to surface, deepening the wounds the storm had already opened.

22:59American History Tellers:Imagine it's mid-September 1900 in Galveston, Texas. You and your two young boys have been lined up at your neighborhood relief station for two hours, waiting in the heat to pick out some new clothes. At last, you step to the front of the line, where a white woman sits behind a makeshift table made of warped planks laid across two barrels. She taps a wooden crate with the tip of her pencil. Here, look through these. The smell of old sweat and damp wool hits you as you peer inside and find a jumbled pile of clothes. You pick up a shirt with a stained collar. Beneath it sits a pair of trousers with a hole in the knee.