Annie Laurie
San Francisco Examiner/September 16, 1900
Region Likely to Become a Prey to Plague Unless Heroic Work Is Immediately Done By Charitable People
As I look out of my window, I can see the blood-red flames leaping with fantastic gestures against the sky. There is no wire into Galveston, and I will have to send this message out by the first boat.
For the present, the two things needed are money and disinfectants. More nurses and doctors are needed. Galveston wants help—quick, ready, willing help. Don’t waste a minute to send it. If it does not come soon, this whole region will be prey to a plague such as has never been known in America. Quicklime, disinfectants and money and clothes—all these things Galveston must have, and have at once. The people of Galveston are making a brave and gallant fight for life. The citizens have organized under efficient and willing management. Gangs of men are at work everywhere removing the wreckage. The city is districted according to wards, and in every ward, there is a relief station. They give out food at the relief stations. Such food as they have will not last long.
I sat in one relief station for half an hour this morning and saw several people who had come asking for medicine and disinfectants, and a few rags of clothing to cover their pitiful nakedness turned away. The people of the State of Texas have risen to the occasion nobly. They have done everything that human beings, staggering and dazed under such a terrific blow, could possibly do, but they are only human. This is no ordinary catastrophe. One who has not been here to see with his own eyes the awful havoc wrought by the storm can’t realize the tenth part of the misery these people are suffering.
I asked a prominent member of the Citizens’ Committee this morning where I should go to see the worst work which the storm had done. He smiled at me a little pitifully. His house, every dollar he has in the world and his children were swept away from him last Saturday night.
“Go,” said he, “why anywhere, within two blocks of the very heart of the city you will see misery enough in half an hour to keep you awake for a week of sleepless nights.”
I went toward the heart of the city. I did not know what the names of the streets were or where I was going. I simply picked my way through masses of slime and rubbish which scarred the beautiful wide streets of the once beautiful city. They won’t bear looking at, those piles of rubbish. There are things there that gripe the heart to see—a baby’s shoe, for instance, a little red shoe, with a jaunty tasseled lace, a bit of a woman’s dress, and letters. Oh, yes, I saw these things myself, and the letter was wet and grimed with the marks of the cruel sea, but there were a few lines legible in it. “Oh, my dear,” it read, “the time seems so long. When can we expect you back?” Whose hand had written or whose had received no one will ever know.
The stench from these piles of rubbish is almost overpowering. Down in the very heart of the city most of the dead bodies have been removed, but it will not do to walk far out.
Today I came upon a group of people in a by-street—a man and two women, colored. The man was big and muscular, one of the women was old and one was young. They were digging in a heap of rubbish, and when they heard my footsteps, the man turned an evil, glowering face upon me and the young woman hid something in the folds of her dress. Human ghouls, these, prowling in search of prey.
A moment later there was noise and excitement in the little narrow street, and I looked back and saw the negro running, with a crowd at his heels. The crowd caught him, and would have killed him, but a policeman came up. They tied his hands and took him through the streets with a whooping rabble at his heels. It goes hard with a man in Galveston caught looting the dead in these days.
A young man well known in the city shot and killed a negro who was cutting the ears from a living woman’s head to get her earrings out. The negro lay in the street like a dead dog, and not even the members of his own race would give him the tribute of a kindly look.
The abomination of desolation reigns on every side. The big houses are dismantled, their roofs gone, windows broken, and the high-water mark showing inconceivable on the paint. The little houses are gone—either completely gone as if they had been made of cards and a giant hand which was tired of playing with them had swept them all off the board and put them away, or they are lying in heaps of kindling wood, covering no one knows what horrors beneath.
The main streets of the city are pitiful. Here and there a shop of some sort is left standing. Every street corner has its story, its story of misery and human agony bravely endured. The eyewitnesses of a hundred deaths have talked to me and told me their heart-rending stories, and not one of them has told of a cowardly death. The women met their fate as did the men, bravely and for the most part with astonishing calmness. A woman told me that she and her husband went into the kitchen and climbed upon the kitchen table to get away from the waves, and that she knelt there and prayed. As she knelt there the storm came in and carried the whole house away, and her husband with it, and yesterday she went out to the place where her husband had been, and there was nothing there but a little hole in the ground.
Her husband’s body was found twisted in the branches of a tree half a mile from the place where she last saw him. She recognized him by a locket he had around his neck—the locket she gave him before they were married. It had her picture and a lock of the baby’s hair in it. The woman told me all this without a tear or a trace of emotion. No one cries here. They will stand and tell the most hideous stories, stories that would turn the blood in the veins of a human machine cold with horror, without the quiver of an eyelid. A man sat in the telegraph office and told me how he had lost two Jersey cows and some chickens. He went into minute particulars, told how his house was built and what it cost, and how it was strengthened and made firm against the weather. He told me how the storm had come and swept it all away, and how he had climbed over a mass of wabbling roofs and found a friend lying in the curve of a big roof, in the stoutest part of the tide, and how they two had grasped each other, and what they said. He told me just how much his cows cost and why he was so fond of them, and how hard he had tried to save them, but I said: “You have saved yourself and your family; you ought not to complain.”
The man stared at me with blank, unseeing eyes. “Why, I did not save my family,” he said. “They were all drowned. I thought you knew that. I don’t talk very much about it.”
The hideous horror of the whole thing has benumbed everyone who saw it. No one tells the same story of the way the storm arose, or how it went. No man tells the story of his rescue quite alike. I have just heard of a little boy who was picked up floating on a plank. His mother and father and brothers and sisters were all lost in the storm. He tells a dozen different stories of his rescue on the night of the storm.
But the city is gradually getting back to a normal understanding of the situation, just as one comes out of a long fainting fit and says: “Where am I?” The Mayor is doing everything in his power to straighten matters out. Martial law is to be strictly enforced.
The Chief of Police is busy, very busy. I caught him in the hotel rotunda this morning.
There were five or six men around him, all trying to get permits. He would not listen to one of them. He transfixed me with a stony stare when I asked him for some information. He did not have time to bother with me. He was too busy feeding the hungry and comforting the destitute and taking care of thieves to care whether the outside world knew anything about him or his opinion or not.
He is Chief of Police, head of the committee, and chairman of the organization for the burial of the dead. He always takes the middle of the street, and there is usually a train of petitioners streaming along behind him, to whom he pays not the least particle of attention.
I ran along in his tracks for three or four blocks this morning and heard him refuse licenses for carts and passes to at least a dozen men within a breath. He threatened a large and healthy-looking colored man with instant death if he did not stop begging and get to work and help clean up the city. He clutched up three or four men and five or six women and made them race along the street with him to a relief bureau, wrote them orders for food, and would not listen to a word of thanks or explanation. I like the Chief of Police of Galveston. He knows his business.
The little parks are full of homeless people. The prairies around Galveston are dotted with little campfires, where the homeless and destitute are trying to gather their scattered families together and find out who among them are dead and who are living. There are thousands and thousands of families in Galveston today without food or property, or a place to lay their heads.
But oh, in pity’s name! In America’s name! do not delay help one single instant.
Send help quickly, or it will be too late, I spent part of last night with the “Journal” Relief Bureau. I had no business there. The nurses and doctors had done all there was to do. They have worked like great big-spirited Trojans. The babies were all abed and asleep. The women were fed and the homeless and destitute men who had wandered in for shelter had been tucked away in the gallery and made as comfortable as possible. The gas was out in the great theatre and a few candles shed a flickering light as a nurse or doctor tiptoed down the ward. The great doors of the immense auditorium were flung wide open and the cool breeze from the prairies swept through the wide room like a breath from heaven. It was quiet and peaceful there, as if there had never been a storm or a heart-break or human misery. But I could not go. My boy was talking in his sleep. He is a boy who was brought in yesterday, fainting and exhausted. He had not tasted food for two days. He lost everyone on earth he loved and who loved him, in the flood.
He swam two miles and over with his little brother on his back, and then saw his brother killed after they had reached dry land and what he supposed was safety. He is sixteen years old, this boy of mine, tall and strong in every way, and when he had dug a shallow grave for his little brother he went up and down the prairies, and buried those he found. Alone in the declining sun, without food or water, impelled by some vague instinct to do something for someone, this boy did this, and yesterday they found him fainting in a field and brought him in to us. We put him to bed, made him take bowl of soup and gave him a bath. He seemed perfectly amazed at the idea that anyone should want to do anything for him.
We got his story out of him only by persistent and earnest questioning. He said there was none to tell. Last night he was talking in his sleep.
“That’s all right,” he said over and over again. “Brother won’t let you get hurt. Don’t you be scared. Charley, I will save you,” and he threw his arms out and about as if he was swimming. Hour after hour he swam, and hour after hour he comforted his little brother, and when I laid my hand on his forehead and he woke and remembered where he was, he smiled up into my face as a tired child would smile into the face of one he loved, and went asleep and began to swim through the black and troubled waters with Charley on his strong young shoulders again.
He is utterly alone in the world now. The doctors are a little afraid of brain fever for him, but I believe we can stave it off, and if we can, we are going to keep him in the relief corps and give him work and something to do and love for as long as we are here. If anyone wants to befriend this boy, telegraph to the “Journal” Relief Bureau at Houston and we will attend to it. There was a new party late last night from Galveston. About fifty came in after 10 o’clock, hungry, half-clad and worn to the very edge of human endurance. They stood timidly at the door and one of them begged for shelter as if she thought she would be refused.
Most of our cots with mattresses in them were taken, but that did not make any difference. Dr. Bloch of Chicago and Dr. O’Brien of New York got their heads together and in less than half an hour every one at those fifty people had some sort of a bed to sleep on, and in three-quarters of an hour they were all fed.
We engaged two cooks, a man and a woman, yesterday, but neither of them came. That did not make the slightest particle of difference. Whoever was hungry was fed at the relief station, and whoever was naked was clothed, and whoever was sick was attended. Nobody knew or cared how long they had been working or whether they themselves had time to get a morsel of food. Everybody did everything. I saw Dr. O’Brien down on his knees taking off a pair of soaked shoes for a woman who was so tired she could not lift her hand to her head. I saw Dr. Bloch come up to wash his temperature thermometer with a troop of children at his heels who wanted water, and he gave it to them, too.
We are sending out today for 100 more cots and mattresses and pillows. We are going to put them in the gallery. We are arranging a place on the stage for cases which need special attention. We are getting things systematized so our commissary department will be running like clockwork by today. Yesterday we ran out and borrowed chair and pillows and spoons, and any things, we happened to need from people in the neighborhood, and neighbors, came in and helped us and offered us anything in their houses from the door mat on the front porch to the porcelain vases which grandmother had for a wedding present. We took everything we could get and were glad to get it. The citizens’ committee is working splendidly with us. They are sending us all the people that nobody else will take, and we are taking them all. Old, hungry, sick and well, surgical cases and medical cases. We will take care of them somehow, and if you could see those doctors, and nurses at work you would know that it does not matter how.
There are 8,000 persons to be fed and clothed in the district of Alvin alone.
The next time I hear people talk about poor, weak human nature, I am going to rise and enter protest. Human nature is just about the best thing I know anything about these days. I have seen it at work down here. These people who came down in our train are working day and night, going without food and sleep or rest. The citizens of Houston have put their own losses and miseries behind them and started in to work for others as though they had not lost a dollar or a friend, and yet if the Galveston horror had not been, the news of Houston’s terrible disaster would have been cabled around the world.
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