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

by Erik Larson

  Isaac and his baby drifted. There was more lightning. He coughed water through his nose and mouth. In the next flare, he saw three figures hanging tight to floating wreckage. Isaac swam Esther toward them against the wind.

  He heard a shout.

  Joseph Cline said: “My heart suddenly leaped with uncontrollable joy. In two figures that clung to the drift about one hundred feet to leeward, I discovered my brother and his youngest child.”

  Isaac: “We placed the children in front of us, turned our backs to the winds and held planks, taken from the floating wreckage, to our backs to distribute and lighten the blows which the wind driven debris was showering upon us continually.”

  Joseph: “Our little group now numbered five. We remained close together, climbing and crawling from one piece of wreckage to another, with each of the latter in turn sinking under our weight. At one time it seemed as though we were indeed lost. A weather-battered hulk that had once been a house came bearing down upon us, one side upreared at an angle of about forty-five degrees, at a height from six to eight feet higher than our drift. I was conscious of being direly frightened, but I retained sufficient presence of mind to leap as the monster reached us, and to get a grip with my hands on the highest edge of the wreck. My weight was enough to drag it perceptibly lower in the water, and I called my brother, who added his weight to my own.”

  Isaac: “Sometimes the blows of debris were so strong that we would be knocked several feet into the surging waters, when we would fight our way back to the children and continue the struggle to survive.”

  Joseph: “At one point, two other castaways, a man and a woman, joined us on the wreckage that, at that time, was serving us as a lifeboat. The strangers remained with us for some little time, until the man crawled up to where I sat, pulled the two children away, and tried to shelter himself behind my body. I pushed him indignantly away and drew the children back. He repeated the unspeakable performance. This time I drew out a knife that I carried, and threatened him with it.”

  THEY DRIFTED FOR hours aboard a large raft of wreckage, first traveling well out to sea, then, when the wind shifted to come from the southeast and south, back into the city. For the first time they heard cries for help, these coming from a large two-story house directly in their path. Their raft bulldozed the house into the sea. The cries stopped.

  A rocket of timber struck Isaac and knocked him down, but only dazed him. Joseph saw a small girl struggling in the sea and assumed that somehow Esther had fallen from Isaac’s grasp. He plucked her from the water and gathered her close to the other girls. Allie May, the eldest, cried out, “Papa! Papa! Uncle Joe is neglecting Rosemary and me for this strange child!”

  Stunned, Joseph took a close look at the girl. It was not Esther at all. He looked over his shoulder and saw Isaac bent over his baby, shielding her from the flying debris. This girl was a stranger.

  Their raft ran aground at 28th and Avenue P, four blocks from where they once had lived. They saw a house with a light in the window, and climbed inside. Safe—although one daughter had injuries that Joseph considered life-threatening.

  A miracle had occurred, Isaac knew. Nothing else could explain why he and his three daughters were still alive. Yet the enormity of what he did lose now came home to him. His children wept for their mother, but soon, out of sheer exhaustion, they fell asleep. Isaac lay awake for a time, hoping his wife somehow had survived, but knowing heart-deep that she had not.

  She had been very close, as it happens. Later it would seem to Isaac as if she had been watching over her family during the entire voyage, guiding them in their passage through the night until they were safely back home.

  AND THERE WAS this: In the midst of the Clines’ voyage, a beautiful retriever climbed aboard their raft. It was Joseph’s dog. Somehow in the storm it had sensed them and swum after them. The dog was delighted to see Joseph and Isaac and the children, but sensed too that someone was missing. He went one by one to each of them, as if marking a checklist. One scent was absent. The dog raced to the edge of the raft and peered into the water. Joseph called him back. The dog stood scrabbling at the edge, obviously torn by conflicting needs. But it was clear where his passion lay. The dog ignored Joseph and prepared to jump. Joseph lunged for him, but the dog entered the sea, and soon he too was gone.

  PART V

  Strange News

  TELEGRAM

  Houston, Texas

  11:25 P.M.

  Sept. 9, 1900

  To: Willis Moore,

  Chief, U.S. Weather Bureau

  First news from Galveston just received by train which could get no closer to the bay shore than six miles, where Prairie was strewn with debris and dead bodies. About two hundred corpses counted from train. Large Steamship stranded two miles inland. Nothing could be seen of Galveston. Loss of life and property undoubtedly most appalling. Weather clear and bright here with gentle southeast wind.

  G. L. Vaughan

  Manager,

  Western Union, Houston

  GULF OF MEXICO

  First Glimpse

  THE PENSACOLA DRIFTED in the old seas of the storm throughout Saturday and Saturday night. About dawn, the remains of the anchor caught something in the seabed, and again the ship swung, again her beams and plates began to bind and flex. But the barometer showed a steady rise in pressure. The storm had passed.

  Captain Simmons ordered the crew to haul in the stern hawser and the anchor chain-cable, and to restart the engines. He ordered another sounding and found the ship in only eighty feet of water. Given the slope of the seabed, he estimated through dead reckoning that Galveston was now about fifty-five miles to the northwest. The ship had drifted over fifty miles. He set a course back to the city.

  About noon on Sunday, Simmons spotted the coast and followed it west, looking for landmarks, but found his view blocked by squalls.

  In the afternoon, the clouds began to break and the sea to gleam a rich royal blue. Simmons spotted the Galveston grain elevator, and turned toward it, but as the ship entered the Bolivar channel he and his guests fell silent.

  They entered a changed world. Nothing was as it had been when the ship left. “We found a line of breakers where the jetties were, but everything on them washed away, beacons, bay lights, lightship, buoys here and there out of position,” Menard said. “We discovered steamers ashore, the forts and barracks, torpedo casemate all gone, and as we entered we began to see the terrible destruction to the city, and we knew not what news to expect when we landed of our loved ones at home.”

  Where buildings had stood they saw great mounds of timber. Whole neighborhoods seemed to have disappeared, and the immense bathhouses were simply gone. Now and then a peculiar scent drifted to the ship from the city, and some aboard recognized it immediately as the odor of putrefaction. But to smell it at this distance—what did that mean?

  No one worried much about the loss of physical property, Menard said, “but our anxiety about the loss of life was terrible.”

  It was about five o’clock, the evening a lovely summer amber, when Simmons docked the ship at the foot of 23rd Street. Menard and Carroll thanked the captain for his great skill in getting them through the storm, then set off in search of family and friends.

  The scent of putrefaction was overpowering.

  GALVESTON

  Silence

  THE TRAIN LEFT Houston at dawn and for the first few miles made easy progress. The grass on the lowlands had been blown flat, the few visible trees stripped of all leaves, but otherwise Col. William Sterett saw little of note. The sky was a pretty mix of clouds and vivid blue, with that washed quality that so often came after a storm. Big dragonflies patrolled the grass.

  Sterett, a writer for the Dallas News, had been in the newspaper’s office on Saturday when its telegrapher reported losing all contact with Galveston. That in itself was not surprising. Telegraph lines were always being blown down, but the telegraph companies were adept at fixing breaks quickly and routing tele
grams through alternate pathways. Even minor storms caused communication to suffer. What made the silence at Galveston so troubling was its duration. The last telegram had come on Saturday afternoon. Now it was Tuesday morning and the lines were still down.

  Wild stories had filled the silence. There was talk, clearly exaggerated, that the storm had submerged the entire city under a dozen feet of water at a cost of a thousand lives. Saturday evening someone in Galveston managed to cable a report via Mexico to a resident of San Antonio, notifying him that the storm had drowned his brother. On Sunday a small party of exhausted men from Galveston had arrived in Houston estimating five hundred dead, surely another exaggeration. At a fundamental level, however, all the rumors and reports agreed on one thing: A powerful storm had struck Galveston without warning and done the city great damage.

  Soon Sterett would see for himself. He was riding in a crowded passenger coach attached to a Great Northern relief train bound for Virginia Point, the last railroad stop on the mainland. As one of the region’s best-known newsmen, and a Civil War veteran, Sterett had experienced no difficulty gaining permission to board the train, nor had his friend, Tom L. Monagan, dispatched by an insurance company to assess the damage to its interests in Galveston. In Houston, Monagan had volunteered to help prepare the train for departure and was assigned the task of making sure that everyone on the train had an official pass. Relief officials did not want any sightseers sneaking aboard. The train carried soldiers and two commanders: Brig. Gen. Thomas Scurry, adjutant general of the Texas Volunteer Guard, and Gen. Chambers McKibben, commander of the Texas Department of the U.S. Army. It also carried ordinary citizens, and Sterett knew just by the look in their eyes that they had families in Galveston.

  At first Sterett and the other passengers joked and talked of minor things, but soon dread filled the car. The wounds in the landscape became more evident. Here and there a house rose from the grass at a cockeyed angle, its curtains blowing free through jaws of fractured glass. The swollen bodies of drowned cattle lay in the pampas like huge black balloons. As more and more debris appeared along the right-of-way, the passengers grew quieter and quieter. In places water covered the tracks. The train slowed until it seemed to make no noise at all. The slowness amplified the dread. For Sterett it brought to mind a funeral cortege.

  Masses of lumber appeared along the railbed. Sterett saw fragments of houses, lace curtains, armoirs, bedposts, sheets and blankets. He saw boats, and in the distance, a large ship aground on the prairie. A child’s rocking horse stood by itself on a low rise, no house in sight. “And so help me,” Sterett said, “I would rather have seen all the vessels of the earth stranded high and dry than to have seen this child’s toy standing right out on the prairie, masterless.”

  Debris and flooding forced the engineer to stop the train just north of Texas City, well shy of Virginia Point. The passengers set out on foot. Sterett and Monagan took off their shoes and rolled up their pants, exposing legs so pale as to be nearly translucent.

  Now they saw things they had missed from the train. Intimate debris. Stockings, letters, photographs. Their first corpses. What was so striking about the dead was their battered condition. Their bodies had been stripped naked.

  At Texas City, the generals seized a lifeboat from the Kendal Castle, a British ship blown ten miles from its Galveston pier. They loaded it with soldiers and supplies and began at once to row across the bay, leaving Sterett and the other passengers behind.

  Sterett and Monagan spotted a sailboat making slow progress toward the city in a calm that had made the bay “as gentle as a country pond.” While waiting, Sterett roamed the bay shore. Where the water met the prairie he saw bloated horses and cows, chickens, cats, dogs, and rats. “Everything, it seemed, that breathed, was there, dead and swollen and making the air nauseous. And by their sides were people.”

  Groups of men moved along the bay shore hauling bodies from the water and burying them in shallow graves. They buried fifty-eight that day. Sterett found a letter and read the first line, “My Darling Little Wife,” then closed it and dropped it back in place.

  The sailboat proved to be a large schooner. Monagan, using his authority as an officer of the train, commandeered it and invited one hundred passengers aboard, many of them Galveston residents trying to get back home. It was late Tuesday afternoon by the time the schooner set sail for Galveston. The lack of wind made the journey slow and hot, and all the while the craft moved through a macabre floe of debris. Bodies bumped against the hull. “It must have taken us from four to four-and-a-half hours to get within a half-mile of the city,” Monagan said. “It was dark then, pitch dark.” They saw only one light on shore.

  The generals in the Kendal Castle’s lifeboat found the going just as slow, just as bleak. “I am an old soldier,” General McKibben said later. “I have seen many battlefields, but let me tell you that since I rode across the bay the other night and helped the man at the boat to steer to keep clear of the floating bodies of dead women and little children, I have not slept one single moment.”

  As the schooner approached Galveston, the scent of death became overpowering. At one point Sterett looked over the side and saw a dead woman staring back, her face lit by the moon. Some passengers climbed ashore, the rest, including Sterett and Monagan, decided to spend the night aboard the schooner. The captain sailed 150 yards back into the bay and anchored. It was a night, Monagan remembered, “of horrible sounds.”

  At daybreak, the schooner sailed to the foot of 23rd Street, three blocks due north of Isaac Cline’s office. Sterett and Monagan believed themselves to be among the first outsiders to enter the city. They stopped a man hurrying by who told them thousands of people had been killed, so many that disposal crews known as dead gangs had begun burning bodies where they found them.

  Sterett refused to believe it. “Surely the man must be mistaken,” he told Monagan. “It is always the rule to exaggerate these calamities and he is only repeating what some one has told him.”

  The two men moved on into the city.

  28TH AND P

  Searching

  ISAAC STEPPED OUTSIDE into a gorgeous dawn, the sky like shattered china. A fast breeze blew the clouds north and brought him the scent of the sea. The morning was cool and bright, bordered to the east by a cantaloupe sky. It was, he said, “a most beautiful day.”

  In the new light, he saw that the house in which he and his daughters had found shelter was one of the few still standing. A sea of wreckage spread in every direction. Houses had disintegrated. He looked for landmarks and at first saw none, but as his mind adjusted to this new landscape he began to pick out the ruins of familiar structures. The big Bath Avenue Public School, which his children had attended, stood three blocks east, one wing crushed and exposing a large classroom whose floor now hung over the street at a forty-five-degree angle, with thirty-eight desks still anchored in place.

  He guessed that the house was located at 28th and P, which put it about three blocks northwest of where his own home had stood, at 25th and Q. When he looked toward his neighborhood, he saw nothing. The pretty Neville house was gone. So was Dr. Young’s. His own lot had been scraped clean. And beyond that, where Murdoch’s and the Pagoda had stood, he saw only open sky.

  Behind him, the bells of the Ursuline convent rang out to summon parishioners to mass. He climbed a mound of debris. The convent, three blocks north, was still standing, but now it looked huge and strange, a feudal castle over a moor of broken wood. The bells were reassuring. With so few houses to absorb the sound, they rang with far greater clarity.

  In the wreckage, he saw striped dresses, black suits, black hats, straw boaters. He looked more closely. Some of the clothing covered battered limbs. The dead lay camouflaged under bruises, mud, and shredded cloth, but having spotted one corpse, he now saw many.

  Throughout Galveston, men and women stepped from their homes to find corpses at their doorsteps. Bodies lay everywhere. Parents ordered their children to stay
inside. One hundred corpses hung from a grove of salt cedars at Heard’s Lane. Some had double-puncture wounds left by snakes. Forty-three bodies were lodged in the cross braces of a railroad bridge. “There were so many dead,” said Phillip Gordie Tipp, eighteen at the time, “you would sink into the silt onto a body at every other step.” He had reached Galveston Sunday morning aboard a small sailboat. “We kept running into so many dead bodies that I had to go forward with a pike and shove the dead out of the way. There was never such a sight. Men, women, children, babies, all floating along with the tide. Hundreds of bodies, going bump-bump, hitting the boat.”

  Isaac first secured temporary care for his children—perhaps through a friend, or through his church—then made his way to the Levy Building. Blagden was gone. Isaac assessed the damage. Every window had been blown out. Debris was strewn throughout the office. Rain had warped the wood planks of the floor. He climbed to the roof and found it stripped clean of instruments. He surveyed the city. Paving blocks littered the streets. The wharf front was a tangle of masts and rigging, although the big grain elevator seemed little damaged. Steamships once tightly married to the wharf had disappeared. Far down the coast, where Isaac should have been able to see the barest outline of the St. Mary’s Orphanage, there was now just a long white arc of beach.

  Wagons passed below, headed north. Limbs protruded from under canvas tarpaulins.

  Isaac checked the city’s hospitals to see if they had survived, and whether anyone inside had seen his wife. The hospitals had weathered the storm well. He may have returned with his injured daughter. At the hospital he heard that a temporary morgue had been established on the north side of the Strand, between 21st and 22nd. He went there next.