Galveston Hurricane
It was a day of sullen heat and stillness. The sky was colored with iridescent scales. Ships steaming through the Gulf of Mexico rolled on an oily swell, their crews sprawled in the scant shade of bulwarks and ventilator cowls. Smoke hung around the ship's stacks and rained soot on the upper decks. Below decks, the black gangs stoked the boilers, stripped to the waist, their bodies oiled with sweat in heat approaching 120 degrees. It was September 8, 1900.

The swells broke heavily against the beach at Galveston. Through the morning many of the city's residents had gathered to watch the thundering surf. They were like spectators at a stranger's funeral, curious but uninvolved, as the pier crumpled into driftwood. Then the waves climbed the shore, splintering bathhouses and the boardwalk. Several onlookers weren't quick enough to escape the advancing storm surge. They were the first to die in the Galveston hurricane. Within 18 hours the dead would number in excess of 6,000.

The surge was the precursor of the storm. The water advanced relentlessly, rapidly, as much as 2.5 feet per hour, until it stood 15 feet above mean sea level. Galveston was built upon a barrier island with no ground high than 10 feet above the normal sea height. The entire city was soon wave swept.

Surf 10 to 12 feet high pounded against beach front houses whose residents had climbed into attics to escape the flooding. The currents generated by the storm surge scoured the sand from around foundations. Their houses collapsed beneath them. Debris - timbers, beams, entire walls - became battering rams driven by the weight of the storm.

There was no accurate measurement of the wind strength. Measuring devices were carried away by the storm. Dr. Issac Cline, meteorologist for the Army signal Corps stationed at Galveston, estimated the wind in excess of 100 miles per hour. The wind ripped the terra cotta tiles from roofs and fired them into the streets like shrapnel. Victims of the storm driven from collapsing buildings into the streets were raked by wind-driven debris. Many of the dead were afterwards found decapitated.

 
Heavy debris collided with those struggling to stay afloat - to stay alive - in the flooded streets. They were weakened by exposure, injury, the relentless hammering of waves and spume so thick each breath was labored. Through the long hours of the night people lost strength, lost hope, and finally lost their grip on whatever piece of flotsam had kept them alive. Children were torn from their parents' grasp. Wives sank from the view of their husbands. An entire orphanage was drowned. (The bodies of nuns and children were afterwards found still lashed together, a desperate effort to keep the children from harm.) The storm was a force so enormous it was humanly incomprehensible.

In the darkness and the driving rain the lightning illuminated the devastation in fierce and unforgiving detail. Entire blocks of houses were splintered stumps and timbers grinding in the waves. Beneath the caterwauling of the wind was another sound like that of Arctic ice fields breaking in the spring thaw.

After 10 hours the wind began to ease and the storm surge that had been driven inland turned again toward the sea. Thousands of tons of water hurtled like a freight train into buildings already weakened by wind, waves and collision from the opposite direction. It was bitterly ironic. Many of those who had survived the worst of the storm and thought themselves spared died in this final surge of destruction.

More than 6,000 died. Three thousand bodies were found among the wreckage of buildings, 1,000 were scattered in streets and yards, 500 were recovered from the bay shores. It was estimated another 500 were carried out to sea. On the railroad bridge between Galveston and the mainland, 48 corpses were counted, the bodies embedded in the girders like buckshot. Farther down the barrier island another 1,200 were believed killed. Almost 18% of Galveston's population didn't survive the night.

The dead were not only human. Rotting fish littered the streets, drowned rats, dog and cats were piled in windrows. In the following days both the stench and the heat were oppressive. To avoid epidemic disease, disposal of the dead became imperative. A rough militia was formed. Anyone capable of the work, whether willing or not, was pressed into service collecting the dead for mass burial at sea. (There was no place ashore to accommodate so many graves.) The bodies were loaded onto a barge and stacked like cordwood. Many of the corpses had been stripped of clothing by the force of the storm. They were counted but never named.

After the barge had put to sea it was found that there weren't enough links of chain and scrap iron onboard to weight each of the bodies individually. Some 700 were thrown overboard, tied two and three together, and others not weighted at all. The incoming tide washed many of them ashore again.

The grisly work of collecting the dead continued by torchlight. The workers were issued generous rations of bourbon and strong cigars. They breathed through handkerchiefs soaked in bourbon and smoked cigars to mask the smell.

In the sweltering heat that followed the storm, decomposition was rapid. The bodies soon lost the rigidity of rigor mortis and had to be shoveled into carts. At times the fixed bayonets of the militia were all that kept many of the men at their work. Superintendents of the work gangs were finally given permission to torch the wreckage wherever found rather than try to extricate pieces of flesh from the ruins and cart them away.

"It was like living in a battlefield. The fuel-oil smoke hung over the city, day and night, and the heavy air was never free of the smell of carbolic acid, of lime, of putrefaction." (Death from the Sea: The Galveston Hurricane of 1900, Herbert Molloy Mason, Jr.)

Looters found despoiling the dead were summarily executed by the militia - stood against the nearest wall or pile of debris and shot without the hindrance of a trial. The same brutal justice was delivered to amateur photographers. "Word received from Galveston today indicates that Kodak fiends are being shot down like thieves. Two, it is stated, were killed yesterday while taking pictures of nude female bodies." (Dallas News, September 14, 1900.)