The Storm of the Century

by Al Roker

  And even as they fought deadly hits from the sky, this weak family raft, coasting the high waves, was slammed repeatedly by debris surging up from the water. Again and again missiles shot from the wind and sea knocked the brothers from their perch all the way into the surf. Each time they struggled back to the children, hauled themselves onto the raft, and resumed their positions.

  They could never stay securely on one piece of debris. Their makeshift perches kept collapsing into the water, and they all climbed and crawled together to a more solid chunk of wreckage, which in turn became only a temporary refuge. At one point Isaac was slammed in the back by a flying timber and fell forward onto his face on the float. Yet somehow he got up again. Joseph meanwhile tasted salty blood. He put his hand on his face and then on his head. A long gash was running through his scalp: he’d been struck by broken window glass. And yet he felt no pain at all.

  The Cline family could hear, above the roar of the wind and the surf, human screaming. The suffering of dying and injured people, mostly invisible in the darkness, was at times intensely audible.

  Now a lightning flash abruptly revealed a small girl of about four, floating alone on some wreckage. They pulled her onto their own raft and placed her with the children.

  Suddenly, Joseph feel a shock of terror. Even as the Clines were struggling to stay afloat, he saw a monstrous hulk, nearly a whole house, careening toward their modest raft. This huge hazard carried big piles of smaller debris before it. In seconds it would stove the Clines’ raft in, batter them, and dump them all in the surf.

  Joseph and Isaac leaped to their feet. Just as the hulk, bearing down on them at full speed, arrived at the raft, they grabbed its upper edge; they hung on it. Their weight brought the whole thing close to the water line, slowing it down and holding it off.

  Keeping this monster in a strong embrace, the two men pulled its top edge as low as they could. They told the children to climb aboard the hulk. Joseph and Isaac scrambled up with the girls.

  They all climbed to its top. That gigantic, deadly object now became, for a time, their new haven.

  Then came something truly strange. Joseph’s retriever—his favorite hunting dog, the family pet—suddenly came scrabbling out of the swirling water, climbed onto the raft, and shook himself dry.

  Could this be random chance? Had the dog somehow searched for them in all the dark turbulence?

  The retriever ran about the raft, sniffing each person in deliberate fashion. Then he ran to the edge of the raft and looked about urgently. Joseph had the unmistakable impression that his dog knew one person was missing.

  Cora. Joseph thought his dog felt called upon to find her.

  As the dog prepared to leap back into the sea, evidently in search of Cora, Joseph shouted to him to stay. The dog ignored the command. Joseph lunged to stop the animal.

  No use. The dog dodged him, jumped, splashed, and disappeared into the waves.

  Through all of those hours of weird and relentless struggle, the Cline family journeyed an incredible distance. There was no steering. There was nowhere to navigate to, no direction, no orientation. Trying to hold on and avoid further injury, they spun and coasted wherever the wind, the tide, and the waves sent them.

  At one point, they realized they could no longer see any lights at all. That meant they’d been swept far out into the Gulf of Mexico. Much of the wreckage that had once been Galveston had come with them. They might, they knew, be many miles from what had been their city. They might be swept all the way out to sea; they might never get back. The storm raged on as they tried to hold their perch.

  PART III

  THE WHITE CITY ON THE BEACH

  CHAPTER 11

  TELEGRAPH SILENCE

  WINIFRED BLACK WAS DISGUISED AS A BOY. THIS RED-HAIRED reporter for the Hearst newspaper chain and newswire service was thirty-seven, but she was still slightly built, and still undaunted. Winifred had always done whatever it took to get a story. This was starting to look like one of the biggest.

  She had to get into Galveston. No other reporters had been in yet. She had to be the first.

  She had her long red hair tucked up under a workman’s cap. She wore men’s shoes and a linen duster and carried a heavy pick, which she was trying to keep resting securely on her shoulder.

  Hiding among a yelling, rowdy gang of men—they’d been recruited in Houston for the relief of Galveston—she hoped to board a boat and cross Galveston Bay. Night had fallen. As the crew shuffled toward the gangway, Winifred stayed between two huge men. She hoped she wouldn’t be noticed. Her heart was pounding with fear and excitement. Police and soldiers were patrolling the mainland gangways. Guards stood at the bottom of this very one, looking people over as they boarded the boat.

  The bay was off limits. Nobody could travel to the island without an official purpose. News reporting was most certainly not an official purpose. But as a reporter, Winifred Black had often drawn upon her talent for dress-up, make-believe, and dramatic gesture. Her trip to Galveston would be no exception, and yet on this assignment, she would find herself doing far more than reporting.

  Clara Barton was meanwhile leaving Washington, D.C., on a train, riding in what was called a “palace-car.” Miss Barton, as she was always known, was seventy-eight now; the venerable founder of the Red Cross was traveling the way the great industrialists and magnates did. A far cry from the spartan, dirty long-distance sleeper cars that ordinary passengers had to endure, palace cars were ornate, plush, and clean, fitted out with elegant comforts and staffed with servants.

  And that’s how Joseph Pulitzer—William Randolph Hearst’s rival in the newspaper game—wanted Miss Barton traveling to Galveston. She would bring relief, as paid for by his own paper, the New York World.

  If Hearst had Winifred Black, Pulitzer had Clara Barton. Among the entourage were not only about a dozen members of the Red Cross but also Robert Adamson, one of Pulitzer’s top reporters. The train hauled cargo, too: medical supplies, mass quantities of disinfectant, and money to buy food, water, and further supplies.

  Clara Barton had been witness to—really, up to her neck in—the most tragic scenes of destruction of the second half of the nineteenth century. The Battle of Antietam in the American Civil War, the Johnstown Flood in Pennsylvania, the Armenian massacres in Turkey: she’d built her organization by maintaining a fearless commitment to facing disaster head-on. She was tireless. She and her people worked until relief was achieved.

  Now Miss Barton was rolling toward a scene in Galveston that she would later call more horrifying than anything she’d seen anywhere else, ever before.

  By the time both Winifred Black and Clara Barton were making their separate ways—in their distinctly separate styles, each at the behest of a rival newspaper publisher—toward Galveston Island, much had happened both on the island and off to challenge people’s imaginations. The horrors of the night of Saturday, September 8, 1900, were already matched by an ongoing nightmare on the island. It was beyond anything that could have been predicted. Both Winifred Black and Clara Barton were about to play important roles in an effort at relief and recovery that looked, at first, overwhelmingly impossible.

  Sunday, the ninth of September, began, for those outside Galveston, with a terrifying mystery. In Washington, D.C., Weather Bureau Director Willis Moore spent that morning anxiously awaiting any news at all from his Galveston station.

  He’d received reports from elsewhere on the Gulf Coast.

  The storm was a hurricane. Moore knew that now.

  But he hadn’t heard from Galveston, and now he feared the worst. The last cable he’d received from the bureau office there—the one sent midafternoon on Saturday, against such great odds, by Joseph Cline—had told Moore that half the city was underwater. Dictated over the phone to the Houston Western Union office, that cable had predicted great loss of life; it had asked for immediate relief. And then, moments after the Houston operator wrote the message down, all phone and telegraph communicati
on between Houston and Galveston had been lost.

  Since then: nothing.

  Moore had been able, however, to make contact with the bureau office in Houston. That city had been rocked hard by the edges of the hurricane, but it still had power and communications; it was standing. Houston’s weathermen reported to Moore that they, too, could not establish contact with the island city.

  So now Moore sent a telegraph directly to the manager of the Western Union office in Houston. It read simply, “Do you hear anything about Galveston?”

  The answer was no. All telegraph lines south of Houston were out, but even more dismaying, the telegraph office in Tampico, Mexico—well to the southwest of the island and therefore not involved in the storm—reported that it too had no communication with Galveston.

  That meant the problem wasn’t between Galveston and Houston because of downed cable lines on the Gulf Coast. Galveston was cut off from everywhere else too.

  On the official U.S. morning weather map, on the morning of September 9, 1900, the bureau had no choice but to mark Galveston, Texas, “missing.”

  With Galveston blacked out, the weathermen watched the hurricane move on. That’s what hurricanes do.

  Having made landfall on Galveston Island at the height of its fury, the storm roared on its northwest path straight for the west side of Houston. For miles the mingled gulf and bay tides flooded the flat, wide, long coastal plain of Texas.

  In small towns, houses and phone and telegraph wires succumbed quickly to the wind and sea. Most of the people there, however, managed to make narrow escapes.

  Houston itself, far enough inland to avoid the awful tidal flooding, got battered by wind and rain all night on September 8 and into September 9. But damage there was largely limited to property: a big factory and a big oil refinery became wrecked hulks; almost every church steeple suffered. Many Houston businesses lost at least their roofs.

  Houston remained in communication with Washington. And despite the impossible weather and the property damage, Houston officials kept trying to reach Galveston by telegraph. But it was no good.

  And still the storm moved on. In the ensuing days, this systematically cycling system of elemental violence, which had begun off the savannahs of West Africa, seemingly so far from North America, would make itself felt throughout much of the United States.

  To Americans, there was a new sense of sheer bigness to their recently unified, muscle-flexing nation. The United States filled much of the continental map now, from coast to coast, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes. By human standards, the country was gigantic—but those distances meant nothing to the hurricane of 1900.

  Starkly different American climates made no difference, from seacoast to farmland to bayou to mountain prairie. Nor did the people’s different accents, from Down East Maine to the Chicago streets to the deep South. Nor the range of architectural styles, from big office buildings to Frank Lloyd Wright’s radically modern homes to bungalows to tarpaper shacks to farmhouses.

  None of the classic American differences, the long American distances, or the political bonds that connected disparate people and places meant a thing to the hurricane. It dwarfed huge regions. What to Americans seemed a vast and sprawling land—this nation so recently sure of its size, power, and strength—served the hurricane of 1900 only as a playpen. Real size, real power, and real strength belonged, as always, to nature.

  So when the hurricane traveled into Texas, it was slowed only slightly by its confrontation with the island of Galveston and the plain south of Houston. It kept going. Soon it drenched Oklahoma. Keeping up its cycling motion, with winds diminished only to about half of what they’d been at their height in Galveston—still tropical force—that hurricane brought driving rains to the upper Midwest as far north as Wisconsin. Lake Michigan, like the gulf before it, reacted to those winds with high, damaging waves.

  Turning eastward at last, the storm swept all the way into New York City, raising hell along its path. In Manhattan, people couldn’t walk the avenues in the winds. Signs blew off tall buildings. One New Yorker was killed by a flying pole. Waves crashed higher against the Battery than anyone could remember. Ships trying to enter New York Harbor lost course. Over in Brooklyn, trees were torn up and thrown down. And at Bath Beach, not far from Coney Island—a famous seaside pleasure park, at another corner of the country from Galveston’s—a bathing pavilion collapsed into the raging sea.

  So by the time this hurricane did finally move back out to sea—off Nova Scotia, having swamped New England fishing fleets along the way—many Americans had received at least a small taste of the enormity that had arrived in Galveston on that terrifying day and throughout that long, horrible night of September 8.

  Yet nobody, in Texas or anywhere throughout the country, could have imagined the effect that force had on Galveston. Until they saw it, nobody could believe it.

  Well up the Mississippi from the Gulf Coast, the Western Union headquarters in St. Louis was overwhelmed on September 9 with panicked inquiries about Galveston. Western Union quickly organized teams of linemen and operators and sent them by train into stormy Houston. The hope was to get the workers from Houston to Galveston to begin restoring the island’s communications and get information.

  People in Houston with relatives in Galveston were meanwhile beginning to panic. Rumors flew. The city might be half destroyed. There might even be hundreds of dead. To sober minds, these rumors seemed wildly and irresponsibly exaggerated.

  Still, Houston prepared quickly to go to help Galveston. With communication impossible by phone and cable, the only thing to do that Sunday was to travel to Galveston by train and see what was going on. A group immediately formed with hopes of getting into Galveston. Despite the damage the storm had brought to their own city, the citizens and officials of Houston were determined to send help southward.

  That very afternoon, a relief train left Houston on the Santa Fe Railroad tracks, loaded with supplies and men. The train’s immediate destination was Virginia Point, the site of the entrance to the rail bridge that spanned the bay to the island.

  As the train chugged down the track, the day cleared up. It became bright and sunny, with a pleasantly gentle breeze.

  But soon the relief train slowed to a halt. The tracks were gone. This was still well inland, more than six miles from the point where the bridge began. The team couldn’t yet see anything of Galveston, of course. What they could view, here on the coastal prairie, was shocking enough.

  The plain was strewn with dead bodies.

  Along with those corpses, huge pieces of lumber were littered about the flat ground as far as the eye could see. Roofs. Packing trunks. Pianos.

  From the stopped train, the relief team saw a whole steamship. It was wrecked—all the way up here on land. They stared, amazed. The ship seemed to have been tossed out of the bay.

  As they observed this bizarre and horrifying sight, the relief team on the halted train was further startled. Two men were hailing them.

  Exhausted and bedraggled, the men climbed aboard—refugees from Galveston. They’d been swept off the island, they told the Houston team, and had been swept all the way across the bay.

  The team welcomed them onto the train, and as this first, failed effort to reach the island city began riding back up the track toward Houston, the men from Galveston began telling a shocking story.

  The relief team listened, astounded, to this first report on the night of horror. The survivors estimated that there might be as many as 500 dead in the city. The Houstonians were sympathetic, but they took that to be exaggeration—understandable enough, given what these poor men had been through.

  Back in Houston, the men were taken to the Western Union station to begin the process of reporting the disaster to the nation. Another exhausted survivor reached Houston, also on the ninth. He reported an even higher likely death toll, maybe a few thousand.

  That seemed even more unlikely. Still, people in Houston were beginni
ng to get the idea that something truly awful had happened in Galveston.

  In the Houston Western Union office, the manager, G. L. Vaughan, got busy. After taking reports from the Galveston survivors, Vaughan cabled the news to Governor Joseph Sayres in Austin. Next he cabled President McKinley in Washington.

  Those two executives responded quickly. Governor Sayres issued a dispatch citing the most horrifying number yet: maybe 3,000 lives, Sayres announced, had been lost in Galveston.

  President McKinley, in turn, cabled his sympathy to Sayres and offered immediate federal support. “Have directed the Secretary of War to supply rations and tents upon your request,” the president told the governor.

  Vaughan, the Western Union manager, meanwhile cabled an anxious Director Willis Moore at the Weather Bureau in Washington. He wanted to get Moore the latest information as quickly as possible.

  “Loss of life and property,” Vaughan said, “undoubtedly most appalling.” Now Moore had at least some idea of what had happened to Galveston.

  That message to Moore was sent late at night on September 9. So far, nobody had been able to get to the island. Nobody who hadn’t been through that storm had seen what it had done.

  Also on September 9, a group of men arrived in Houston from Dallas. These were representatives of the Phoenix Assurance Company, which held policies on much of Galveston’s properties. Having read in the national morning weather report that the island was listed as “missing,” the company wanted to know the extent of its losses there.

  These adjusters were led by their boss, Thomas Monagan. He was persistent, resourceful, and well-organized, and he had company funds to spread around. Monagan was intent on getting into Galveston.