Paul Lester

“ Galveston, soothed and compassed by the tenderness of mankind, is veiled in the folds of heaven’s mercy, and the shrieking tempest is now but a whisper from the sky, the angry wave but the gentle falling of tears from above the stars.
It is so hard to write the story or a chapter of it without feeling the power that appalls human intelligence, just as it is hard to disassociate overwhelming sorrow from that broad sympathy which we do not understand, but which never fails to nestle close to human misery. ”

“ Some of the first to go out in charge of gangs of men clearing away the debris and burying the bodies were the young fellows one meets at cotillions and fashionable functions. To-day their fair skins are cracked and burned with sun and wind, their hands blistered and burned, and their clothes covered with mud and slime. They glory in their young manhood, and are not one bit ashamed to go about with their collarless negligee shirt open at the neck, or their sleeves rolled up. Some of them have not shaved since the storm, and look more like subjects for charity than many who apply for relief. ”

“ We must not for a moment think Galveston is to be abandoned because of one disaster, however horrible that disaster has been. We have our homes here, even if those homes are in ruins, and if we loved Galveston before, how much stronger must that affection be and how much more sacred it must be when we think of our loved ones, whose dust consecrates not only the land but the very waves which lash its shores. ”

“ The people and military officers who are dooming Galveston to eternal ruin would have consigned Lisbon to a lasting chaos after her earthquake and decried and abandoned St. Louis with vacant crumbling houses after the great cyclone. If the citizens of Chicago had listened to their despairing notes, blackened fragments of half-fallen walls and shapeless heaps of brick and stone would still be the fitting monuments to proclaim their broken spirit. ”

“ Ye who know not the horror of those days, who took no part in the saddest spectacle that man ever witnessed, may well shed tears of sympathy for those whose human tenement blazed on the funeral pyre in street or avenue, or whose requiem was sung by the waves that had brought death—but shed tears, too, for the brave men who faced this most gruesome duty with a Spartan courage the world has never known before. ”

“ If the horror of the calamity is to be measured by the loss of life, the same measure should be applied to the pressing necessities of those who have been stripped of everything save life. However much we may deplore the loss of life, the dead are done for. They are beyond and above the crying demands and necessities which press upon those who are left alive.
“In the nature of things, the condition of thousands of those who have been spared is far more pitiable than that of the dead. Their resources have been swept away by wind and tide, and they are desolate in the midst of desolation. ”

“ When the storm was at its height, the debris was flying in all directions, the resistless waters carrying people on to destruction and when he was weak and weary from his exertions, the inmates of the brick building begged him not to attempt the feat again. But still, with a dauntless courage born of devotion, he never faltered in his duty, and every person in the doomed building was taken to a place of safety. Such courage, devotion and heroism deserves a place side by side with that of the greatest heroes who ever lived. ”

“ To graves beneath the blue waters of the Gulf the dead are being consigned as fast as they can be loaded upon barges and towed to sea. There is no other way. The city must be rid of them. No more than a tithe of the bodies can be interred. So soaked is the ground that trenches fill with water as fast as the shovel can lift the earth. ”

“ We climbed over wreckage and picked our way through heaps of rubbish. The terrible, sickening odor almost overcame us, and it was all that I could do to shut my teeth and get through the streets somehow. The soldiers were camping on the wharf front, lying stretched out on the wet sand, the hideous, hideous sand, stained and streaked in the starlight with dark and cruel blotches. They challenged us, but the marshal took us through under his protection. At every street corner there was a guard, and every guard wore a six-shooter strapped around his waist. ”

“ From breaking hearts we must say, ‘Father in heaven, all is well, though faith and form are sundered in the night of fear.’ The lesson of selfhelp which this calamity teaches will not be lost. God intended man to conquer nature, to bind its forces, to ride triumphantly on its seemingly resistless energies. Galveston must not be blotted out. It must rise to newness of life. Like our own Chicago, it must be rebuilt on a higher level. It must rear its structures so that the angriest waves shall not dash them to pieces. ”

“ When Galveston’s chapter of horrors had reached its crisis, when the people were dazed, leaderless and almost helpless, so that they went about bewildered and did little more than gather a few hundred of the bodies which were in their way, a longshoreman became the hero of the hour. It was not until Monday that the brave leaders, who are usually not discovered in a community until some great emergency arises, began to forge in front. They were not men from one rank in point of wealth or intelligence. ”

“ No work was ever beset by such difficulties as the work of restoring the tracks on the island and the mainland and the building of the bridge. The men on the track had to bury dead humans and animals, strewn by the hundreds over the prairies. They toiled in mud and water under a blazing sun. They had to remove hundreds of wrecked cars and twisted and tangled steel rails. They worked in the stench of dead flesh and the horrible odor of rotting grain and other wreckage. They built the track over a wreck-strewn prairie torn by the angry sea. ”

“ Last Sunday, gloom, desolation and black despair prevailed. This storm-tossed city was filled with desolation. The sorrow of the survivors for the dead was unspeakable, the destruction of property indescribable, the people were palsied, and in the gloom of devastation and death there was no silver lining to the pall that darkly overshadowed them. To-day hope and determination buoy up the people. ”

“ Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary. The dark and dreary days were crowded into Galveston’s life with horror unspeakable. It is an inexorable law of nature that after the storm comes the radiance of a glorious sunshine. ”

“ At Galveston on that fatal Saturday night there were deaths far more horrible than any of which even a Sienkiewicz could conceive. Mothers and babes, fathers and husbands, were hurled headlong into the world beyond without a chance to make peace with their Maker, with a farewell kiss or a last fond embrace. Upon every hand the dead were piled up like driftwood cast up by the sea, even as they were at Waterloo and Gettysburg and behind Kitchener in the Soudan. ”

“ 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. ”

“ At first glance it would seem that the population of Galveston had been endowed by a thoughtlessness which invites the calamities it has suffered. Three times in twenty-five years storms of great violence have swept over the island on which it occupies a position exposed to every energy of the elements, and on the two occasions whose history is complete the survivors rebuilt their city, as they probably will do again, and the storm broke upon it, as most likely it will once more, with death and destruction in its blast. ”

“ Hope has by no means departed. In a brief time the sound of the locomotive will be heard upon the island, freight will be pouring up to the ship’s side, and the mechanic and artisan will find remunerative employment for years to come. Out of the destruction of the greatest wind and tide force that ever played upon the American continent, there has arisen already a feeling that what a week ago was regarded as an irretrievable disaster, will yet prove the starting point of a remodelled and reinvigorated Galveston. The whole world is behind us in generous sympathy and noble beneficence. ”

“ Night came and the lamp in the tower, as though defying the hellish work of the raging elements, cast its mellow rays of light upon the scene of devastation and death which Night had just covered with its mantle. That human hands should dare to illuminate the appalling scene of tragedy must have enraged the murderous elements, and the storm batteries were turned on the tower. ”

“ In three or four years, or less, Galveston will be as great, if indeed not greater, than she was before the storm, if the people are true to themselves. It is surprising what can be done where willing and cheerful hearts go to work and work in the right way. Galveston citizens are not only hopeful but determined that the city shall be resurrected, as it were, and when that spirit animates us enough is said. ”

“ They have always loved the Buckner home. They know what it has done in the way of rescuing destitute children. They know that hundreds of good men and women of the State have come from that institution—men and women who have become successful in life and who honor the State and the home by their useful and upright lives. But Texas will have greater cause than ever to love and revere Dr. Buckner and his institution when it is known that he has added to his family a hundred hapless victims of the Galveston storm, making in all 400 in his entire family. ”

“ The most intense and anxious time was between 8.30 and 9 o’clock, with raging seas rolling around them, with a wind so terrific that none could hope to escape its fury, with roofs beginning to roll away and buildings crashing all around them, men, women and children were huddled in buildings, caught like rats, expecting to be crushed to death or drowned in the sea, yet cut off from escape. ”

“ CARELESS ABOUT ALL DANGER. “But even there, where such a loss would imply the sacrifice of one in every four persons inhabiting the territory so awfully stricken, the people still pursue their daily avocations, toil and rest, love, hate, mourn and die with the composure and ease of mind that prevail in Philadelphia or New York, where no shadow of storm is known to hover and where no devastating earthquake or fiery volcano lurks for victims. ”