Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

by Erik Larson

  She went to the piano and opened the first book she saw, a collection of Gilbert and Sullivan songs. She turned to Patience, one of the rabbi’s favorites.

  Her fingers shook.

  DOWNTOWN NO ONE paid much attention to the storm. As the lunch hour approached, men set out as usual for their favorite restaurants. One of the most popular was Ritter’s Café and Saloon on Mechanic Street, at the heart of the city’s most vibrant commercial quarter. It was a large, high-ceilinged chamber in the ground floor of a building that also housed a second-floor printing shop with several heavy presses. The café was well known even among out-of-town businessmen, who arranged to meet customers and associates at its bright, broad tables.

  Saturday morning, Stanley G. Spencer, a steamship agent who represented the Elder-Dempster and North German Lloyd lines, arranged a lunch meeting with Richard Lord, traffic manager for George H. McFadden and Brother, a cotton exporter. The two met, exchanged greetings, and took a table.

  It was a pleasure to be inside in the warm, dry restaurant. Waiters in white jackets and black pants raced from table to table, bringing cocktails and towering pints of beer and huge platters of oysters and shrimp and steaks the size of bricks. The room contained a cross-section of Galveston’s commercial men, including Charles Kellner, a cotton buyer from England; Henry Dreckschmidt, an agent for the Germania Life Insurance Company; and a young man named Walter M. Dailey, a clerk with Mildenberg’s Wholesale Notions.

  Now and then a powerful gust of wind shook the front windows with enough force to draw the attention of the diners. Each time a customer came through the front door, the wind muscled past and threatened to strip the tablecloths from under every meal. Between gusts, the diners continued talking business with a nonchalance that had to be contrived. They were aware of the storm, and knew it was getting stronger.

  “Hey, Spencer!” one man shouted, from across the room. “I’ve just counted and there are thirteen men in this room.”

  Spencer laughed. Other diners joined in, glad for the relief the laughter provided. “You can’t frighten me,” Spencer shouted. “I’m not superstitious.”

  Moments later a powerful gust of wind tore off the building’s roof. The “blast effect” caused by the wind’s sudden entry into the enclosed space of the second floor apparently bowed the walls to the point where the beams supporting the ceiling of Ritter’s slipped from their moorings. The ceiling collapsed into the dining room, amid a cascade from the second floor of desks, chairs, and the brutally heavy printing presses.

  There must have been warning. A shriek of steel, perhaps, or the pistol-crack of a beam. Some men had time to dive under the big oak bar along one wall of the room.

  Spencer and Lord died instantly. Three others died with them—Kellner, Dreckschmidt, and young Dailey. Five other men were badly hurt. Ritter dispatched a waiter to find a doctor.

  The waiter drowned.

  Word of the collapse spread quickly. No one believed it. Crowds of businessmen converged on Mechanic Street to see for themselves. Isaac came, no doubt—his office was a block and a half away. Witnesses took the story back to their offices. Messenger boys from Western Union carried the news on their rounds. Ritter’s Café was gone. Men were dead.

  It was the thing that at last brought fear to Galveston.

  BOLIVAR POINT

  The Lost Train

  ABOUT NOON ON Saturday, two trains converged on Galveston, one from the north, the other from the east.

  The first train belonged to the Galveston, Houston and Henderson railroad, and had left Houston earlier that morning with the usual crowd of sightseers, businessmen, and returning residents. It arrived at the entrance to one of the three cross-bay trestles more or less on schedule, but the crossing gave its passengers a few anxious moments.

  “When we crossed the bridge over Galveston Bay, going into Galveston, the water had reached an elevation equal to the bottom caps of the pile bents, or two feet below the level of the track,” said A. V. Kellogg, a civil engineer.

  Even in the best weather, the trestles looked fragile. In a storm, with water nearly washing over the track and gusts of wind jostling the cars, they looked deadly.

  The train took it slowly. To the passengers, three miles had never seemed so long, and there was a good deal of relief when the train reached the Galveston side and clattered back onto land, although this relief was tempered by the fact that the bay was now washing over the lowlands adjacent to the railbed.

  The train traveled another two miles, until a signalman stepped out of the gloom and flagged it down. Flooding had washed out a portion of the track.

  Kellogg’s train stood broadside to the wind. Every now and then a strong gust rammed the car with sufficient force to bounce it on its springs. Rain coursed down the windows on the north side of the train; the south windows were nearly dry and provided passengers with a perfect if rather disconcerting view of huge breakers crashing onto the none-too-distant beach.

  The conductor made an announcement: The railroad had cabled to Houston for a relief train, which would arrive on an adjacent set of tracks owned by the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe railroad—but not for at least an hour.

  It was an anxious, uncomfortable wait. The coach was hot and muggy. Passengers opened the south windows a few inches for ventilation. The rain was so loud against the train’s roof and north wall that passengers had to raise their voices to speak. All the while, they watched the water rise.

  By the time the relief train arrived, Kellogg said, the water was over the rails.

  The new train stopped half a mile back, where the track had not yet been submerged. Kellogg’s train backed up to meet it; then he and the other passengers ran across the soggy ground and climbed aboard. The relief cars, packed now with so many freshly drenched bodies, developed a climate even more tropical than that of the original train. But at least this train began to move.

  Eight to ten inches of water now covered the tracks, by Kellogg’s estimate. This water was not stationary, however, like the in situ flooding that might accompany a heavy rain.

  This water raced. When it passed over the rails the turbulence caused the surface of the water to undulate like the back of a fast-moving snake. The water moved, Kellogg said, “in a westward direction at terrific speed.”

  The relief train eased into the water. Its crew put on heavy boots and walked ahead, testing for undermined track and shoving aside pieces of driftwood. The men looked like clam diggers probing the mud flats for dinner.

  Houses soon appeared beside the tracks, but now they looked more like houseboats. Nearly all were on pilings or brick pillars, which held them well above the water, but it was clear to Kellogg that the water had gotten deeper just in the time since the relief train’s arrival.

  The water got so deep it flooded the firebox of the locomotive. A geyser of steam and smoke hissed into the cab, but the engineer, already soaked and windsore, pulled down his goggles and kept the train moving, feeding it the steam left in the locomotive’s boiler.

  The train stopped just shy of the Santa Fe Union depot, its engine a hulk of cold iron. Male passengers disembarked first and formed a human chain in the waist-deep water, and helped the children and women move through the swift current to the station platform.

  Kellogg checked his watch. The time was 1:15. The wind, he guessed, was blowing at a steady thirty-five miles an hour.

  He had cabled ahead to reserve a room at the Tremont Hotel downtown and steeled himself for a long, wet walk—until he saw the Tremont’s horse-drawn bus waiting in front of the station, with fifteen people already seated. The water was up to the seat bottoms. He waded aboard. The bus plowed its way to the hotel.

  Some of the new arrivals resolved to wait out the storm in the station, which seemed to be the sturdiest building around. The first floor was flooded, so they climbed to the second, picking their way carefully up a staircase lighted only by the “eerie” glare of a few railroad lanterns. One elderly man, be
lieved to be some sort of scientist, carried a barometer in his baggage and now propped the device on the floor. “Every few minutes,” according to one account, “he would examine it by the flickering railroad lantern and tell the people that the atmospheric pressure was still falling and that the worst was yet to come.”

  This did not endear him to the other passengers. Later, some would express an interest in dashing the barometer against the floor.

  Another passenger from the Houston train, David Benjamin of the Fred Harvey chain of railroad eating houses, set out from the station to keep a business appointment two blocks away.

  The man he had planned to meet was gone. Benjamin, perhaps thinking the storm soon would subside, made an appointment to return at three o’clock.

  “It was all I could do to get back to the station,” he said, “and it is needless to say that I never kept the appointment.”

  He was not worried about the storm, however. And no one else seemed terribly worried either. Galveston apparently took such things in stride.

  The first “intimation” of the true extent of the disaster, Benjamin recalled, “came when the body of a child floated into the station.”

  THE SECOND TRAIN, operated by the Gulf and Interstate line, was coming from Beaumont, Texas, although many of its passengers were from New Orleans and other points in Louisiana. About noon it was rolling slowly along the flooded tracks on the Bolivar Peninsula, a slender finger of the mainland east of Galveston that was separated from the city by the ship channel. The tracks ended at Bolivar Point, near a tall lighthouse operated by keeper H. C. Claiborne and his assistant, who lived in two pretty houses on the lighthouse grounds. The train consisted of one locomotive and two coaches packed with ninety-five passengers, including John H. Poe, a member of the Louisiana State Board of Education. Poe lived in Lake Charles, Louisiana, the town where Louisa Rollfing had first experienced America. Friday night he had caught a Southern Pacific train out of New Orleans for a business trip to Galveston. He had reached Beaumont early Saturday morning, and changed trains for the last leg of the journey.

  At Bolivar Point, the train was to be run aboard a big ferry, the Charlotte M. Allen, for a brief voyage across the ship channel to Galveston.

  Poe watched as the ferry fought its way from Galveston toward Bolivar through swells so high they broke over its bow. Black smoke from the ship’s funnel rocketed south with the wind. Now and then the ship disappeared behind curtains of rain.

  The captain steered the ship well to the north of the Bolivar pier to compensate for the wind, but apparently failed to gauge its true strength. He tried again and again to bring the ferry to the pier. Crewmen stationed along the ship’s rails held tight against the wind and the rocking of the hull.

  The captain gave up.

  To Poe and his fellow passengers, accustomed to the ease and can-do precision of transportation at the turn of the century, the sight of a ferry captain giving up and turning back was astonishing. And troubling.

  The train remained in place a few moments, as if stunned by this act of technological betrayal. Steam exhausted from its cylinder housings gouged the water covering the tracks. The conductor ordered the train back to Beaumont. As the engine pushed the cars slowly backward, water began flowing into the coaches.

  Poe had been watching the lighthouse. Swells broke high against its base and at times cast spray nearly its full height, but it seemed the strongest thing in sight. Except for the lighthouse and the cottages of its keepers and the crown of an occasional live oak, all he saw was water. The rain sounded as if a hundred men with ball peen hammers had stationed themselves along the north side of the coach.

  The train halted.

  The lighthouse was a quarter mile away.

  Eighty-five passengers resolved to stay with the train, believing it heavy enough to withstand the storm. A train, after all, was the biggest, strongest thing most people knew.

  Poe did not trust it. He did not like the way the coach shimmied in the wind. He did not like the way the water seemed to converge from the north and south shores of the peninsula, or the speed at which it rose. Small waves now broke across the open platforms at each end of the car.

  Poe and nine other passengers abandoned the train. Keeping close to one another, they moved slowly across the flooded plain toward the lighthouse. The eighty-five others remained aboard.

  Scores of other storm refugees already were inside the lighthouse. They had gathered first at keeper Claiborne’s house, which stood on a shallow plateau that constituted the only high ground for miles around. But the water had risen too fast. Claiborne rigged a lifeline from his house to the lighthouse door. Men held the rope with one hand, and carried women and children to the door on their backs.

  By the time Poe arrived, nearly two hundred people were inside the lighthouse. The darkness of the shaft was pierced only by the gray light from the doorway and a window high up the lighthouse shaft. When he looked up through the murk, he saw two hundred people staring down from seats they had claimed along the spiral stairway that rose one hundred feet through the core of the lighthouse. He and the other train refugees were the last to enter before the sea blocked the door.

  Just before he stepped inside, Poe looked back at the train. Torrents of rain obscured his view, but he thought the train had begun moving again. Smoke billowed from its stack and tumbled away over the sea.

  Soon the rain and spindrift blocked his view completely. He stepped inside, wondering if he had made the right choice.

  SOMEWHERE DOWN THE track, the train stopped again. Maybe the water drowned its fire, or shoved an obstacle in its path. Maybe a freak gust simply blew it from the tracks.

  By Sunday morning, all eighty-five passengers were dead.

  OVER THE DIN of the storm, Poe and the others heard what sounded like an artillery bombardment. They soon realized the soldiers at Fort San Jacinto on Galveston Island, just across the channel, had begun firing the fort’s heavy guns. The guns boomed well into the night. Marie Berryman Lang, daughter of the assistant lighthouse keeper, remembered it all so clearly: the waves that slammed against the lighthouse as the water rose within its base and drove the two hundred refugees ever higher up its spiral shaft; the heat and desperate humidity that caused the children to cry for water; and all the while, beyond the chaos, that lonesome booming of the guns, like the drumbeat of an Army cortege.

  “It was the poor soldiers,” she learned the next morning, “crying for help.”

  25TH AND Q

  A Gathering of Toads

  AS THE DAY progressed, Isaac Cline grew increasingly concerned about the storm. He only had to look out his office window to see that the strong north wind had pushed the waters of Galveston Bay over the wharf and into the streets of the city. By afternoon, the Gulf and the bay seemed about to converge. Clearly something extraordinary was happening—and yet there had been so little clear warning. Friday night the barometer had actually risen, and he had seen nothing of the brick-red sky that was thought to herald a hurricane. The only true sign of danger lay in the great swells, which in the few hours since his dawn visit to the beach had grown to even greater size.

  Now the telephone at the station rang incessantly. He heard fear in the voices of the men and women at the other end. They told him fantastic stories about water up to their necks, waves striking their front doors, the collapse of the big bathhouses along the beach, and a strange inundation of tiny frogs—thousands of them. And he had seen the remains of Ritter’s with his own eyes.

  “The storm swells were increasing in magnitude and frequency and were building up a storm tide which told me as plainly as though it was a written message that great danger was approaching,” he wrote later. He drove, he claimed, from one end of the beach to the other, shouting a warning to everyone he saw. “I warned the people that great danger threatened them, and advised some 6,000 persons, from the interior of the State, who were summering along the beach to go home immediately. I warned persons
residing within three blocks of the beach to move to the higher portions of the city, that their houses would be undermined by the ebb and flow of the increasing storm tide and would be washed away. Summer visitors went home, and residents moved out in accordance with the advice given them. Some 6,000 lives were saved by my advice and warnings.”

  His story, however, does not mesh well with other accounts of the day. Of the hundreds of reminiscences in the archives of Galveston’s Rosenberg Library, none mentions Isaac Cline aboard his sulky sounding the alarm. And there simply were not enough locomotives or coaches to accommodate the crush of refugees that, if his account were correct, would have sought to flee the city throughout the morning. The last train to arrive was Kellogg’s GH&H train from Houston, at 1:15 P.M.; it could not have survived the journey back to the mainland. R. Wilbur Goodman took the last trolley of the day toward the beach and heard no talk of the storm among his fellow passengers. Many people did eventually leave their homes, but only after water began flowing over the wood planks of their galleries and under their front doors. By 2:30 P.M., Galveston time—the time Isaac says he recognized “that an awful disaster was upon us”—the streets within three blocks of the beach were already impassable.

  Isaac’s and Joseph’s accounts diverged in subtle ways that seemed to shed light on their later estrangement.

  Isaac reported that at 2:30 P.M. he sat down to write an urgent cable to Willis Moore, “advising him of the terrible situation, and stat[ing] that the city was fast going under water, that great loss of life must result, and stress[ing] the need for relief.” He gave this to “my assistant,” Joseph L. Cline, to carry to the telegraph office. “Having been on duty since 5 a.m. [four o’clock Galveston time], after giving this message to the observer, I went home to lunch.”

  Joseph gave himself a less passive role. “At 3:30 p.m. [2:30 Galveston time] I took a special observation to be wired to the Chief at Washington. The message indicated that the hurricane’s intensity was going to be more severe than was at first anticipated. About this time, my brother paused in his warnings long enough to telephone from the beach the following fact, which I added to the message: ‘Gulf rising rapidly; half the city now under water.’ Had I known the whole picture, I could have altered the message at the time of its filing to read, ‘Entire city under water.’ ”