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

by Erik Larson

  The scent of putrefaction and human waste was at once sickening and heartbreaking. It made his loss seem more definite and filled him with sorrow. The warehouse was a large chamber with a ceiling supported at intervals by fifteen-foot iron pillars, between which the dead lay in rows that stretched from wall to wall. Men and women moved intently among the rows as if hunting bargains at a public market. Many bodies were uncovered, others lay under sheets and blankets, which survivors peeled back to expose the faces underneath. J. H. Hawley, an agent for the Great Northern Railroad, saw the faces of many friends. Under one he found the body of a Mrs. Wakelee, “with a faint smile on her lips.… her gray hair all matted and streaming in disordered confusion about her shoulders.” He saw his friends Walter Fisher and Richard Swain. Lacerations, bruises, and bloating distorted features and made it hard to tell people apart, even whether a man was black or white. The sun warmed the room, accelerating decomposition. “Odors arise,” Hawley said, “making it most unbearable.”

  A photograph survives. It shows at least fifty bodies. In one row, two boys lie side by side. They could be twins. They wear matching shirts. One lies in the fetal position that young children often adopt when they sleep, but his neck appears to be broken. He looks upward over his right shoulder at an impossible angle. His brother watches with a frown. No one wears shoes; no one seems at peace. Many of the dead have the same expression, as if dreaming the same awful thing. Their brows are furrowed, their mouths perfect circles. They could be gasping.

  Isaac, moving systematically from body to body, saw men and women he knew or at least recognized—perhaps even some of those who had taken shelter in his house. (Of the fifty, he would learn, only eighteen survived.) He looked for his wife and Bornkessell and the Nevilles, and perhaps Dr. Young. He found none.

  There was hope, still, but Isaac was a scientist. Sunday he gave Cora’s name to the Galveston News as one of the dead. The newspaper came out later that day as a one-page handbill the size of a letter, consisting entirely of a list of people believed dead. Her name was there.

  Even Isaac did not yet understand just how lethal the storm had been. For all he knew, the fifty bodies in the morgue represented the majority of those lost. That morning Father James Kirwin, a priest at St. Mary’s Church, took a walk through the city trying to come up with an accurate estimate of the dead, then made his way to the wharf, where a group of men were preparing to set off in Col. William Moody’s steam yacht, the Pherabe, to seek help from the outside world. Kirwin offered the men some advice: “Don’t exaggerate; it is better that we underestimate the loss of life than that we put the figures too high, and find it necessary to reduce them hereafter. If I was in your place I don’t believe I would estimate the loss of life at more than five hundred.”

  FAMILIES TALLIED THEIR losses. Anthony Credo learned he had lost nine members of his family. He found Vivian’s body near the place where the family’s raft had landed, and buried her. But he learned also that his daughter Irene had died along with her new baby and her two-year-old son. His daughter Minnie had disappeared, with her husband and their two boys. So had his eldest son, William, who had spent Saturday at his fiancée’s house. Raymond lay badly injured. Soon after Ruby Credo stepped outside on Sunday morning, she saw her first body: Mrs. Goldman. The woman still wore the clothing Ruby’s mother had given her when she and her son arrived drenched at the family’s house.

  Judson Palmer lay in a nun’s cell within the Ursuline convent, dressed in a shirt and skirt given him by the sisters. The sisters gave refugees whatever dry clothes they could find. Throughout Saturday night, survivors turned gratefully toward a particularly solicitous—and tall—nun, only to find themselves staring into the stubbled face of a man in a nun’s habit.

  Palmer drifted in that sad, empty place where hope and grief intertwine. Later a colleague, Wilber M. Lewis, state secretary of the YMCA, wrote to Palmer’s friends to tell them the tragic news. “Mrs. Palmer’s body was found and recognized the next day.… If Lee’s body was ever found it was beyond recognition.”

  As for Palmer: “He was badly bruised by floating debris, but as far as can be seen was not injured internally. His clothes were torn completely off. His mental condition is the most serious now, but we hope for the best.”

  An eerie peace settled over the city. People bore their losses quietly. John W. Harris was seven when the storm struck, but remembered vividly how the mayor himself paid his father, John junior, a visit on Sunday morning at their house on Tremont Street. One of the finest homes in the city, it had weathered the storm so well that the Harrises had no conception of the devastation elsewhere in town. They were eating breakfast when the mayor arrived. “John,” the mayor told the elder Harris, “your whole family is destroyed.”

  Harris had lost his sisters and their families. Eleven men, women, and children. His son saw him cry for the very first time.

  When Clara Barton arrived the next week, she found the silence striking. People moved as if dazed, she said; there was “an unnatural calmness that would astonish those who do not understand it.” People grieved, but without demonstration. “You will hear people talk without emotion of the loss of those nearest to them,” Father Kirwin said. “We are in that condition that we cannot feel.”

  Everyone in Galveston experienced some degree of loss; the lucky ones suffered only material damage. Dr. Young had lost his home, but his family had gotten his message and was safe in San Antonio. The Hopkins family too survived, although at first Mrs. Hopkins seemed not to appreciate her good fortune. When the sun came up, she saw that her house, the family’s main source of income, had been destroyed. The kitchen, dining room, and two upstairs bedrooms had tumbled into the yard next door. Louise Hopkins would never forget the despair in her mother’s voice. “Oh God,” her mother said, “why couldn’t we all have gone with it.”

  THE LOUISIANA SURVIVED the storm with its cargo badly shifted. Captain Halsey docked briefly in Key West so that his crew could reposition the load, then continued the voyage to New York, where the ship was met by reporters anxious to learn of his encounter with the great hurricane. The storm, Halsey told The New York Times, had baffled description.

  ISAAC SEARCHED FOR his wife. A photograph exists of what once was his neighborhood. Taken by someone standing near the Ursuline convent and looking south, it provides a view very much like what Isaac must have seen when he emerged from the house at 28th and P on Sunday morning. The ruins of the Bath Avenue Public School stand to the left. Where his house should be, there is only a plain of lumber.

  At first glance, the wreckage in the foreground seems to be a homogeneous mass of wood reaching all the way to the horizon, where a pale line demarks the Gulf of Mexico. Close examination with a magnifying glass, however, reveals the base of a wooden swivel chair, a wicker seatbottom, a steamer trunk, and a surprise. At the right, about where Isaac and his family came to rest, four men stand amid the wreckage. Three are in shirtsleeves and appear to be digging. The fourth stands nearby, watching closely. This man looks like Isaac. Impossible, of course. But he is Isaac’s height, has Isaac’s small beard. Despite the heat, he wears a suitcoat and hat.

  As Isaac searched, he encountered other men and women hunting for their families and friends. They traded information: a woman found here, a man there, a large collection of corpses down near the beach. It is possible that during his search, Isaac encountered a Houston man named Thomas Muat, who came to Isaac’s neighborhood looking for his own daughter, Anna, eighteen years old. She had arrived in Galveston a week earlier to visit friends and was staying at the home of David McGill, at 26th and Q, one block west of Isaac’s house. McGill was a friend of the Muat family.

  The Muats had expected Anna home on Sunday night, but that afternoon learned that no trains had been able to leave Galveston. After a long, anxious night with no word from his daughter, McGill resolved to go to Galveston first thing Monday morning. He and his brother-in-law and two other men boarded one of the fi
rst trains that tried to reach Galveston, but got only as far as La Marque, near Texas City. They continued on foot to Virginia Point and there got some disconcerting news: Already that day, the men of Virginia Point had buried two hundred bodies that had drifted across the bay from Galveston.

  Muat and his companions used copper wire to lash together three fallen telegraph poles, then hammered a board across the top for a platform. They launched their raft beside one of the railroad causeways and pulled themselves along from piling to piling. Three times the raft capsized. Three times they righted it and moved on, until finally, as daylight faded, they reached the wharf. “What we experienced beggars description,” Muat said. “We had to walk over human bodies, cattle, broken box cars and barbed wire, reaching the city about 8 o’clock.”

  Too exhausted to search, they managed to find a boardinghouse still in operation. Early the next morning, they set out for 26th and Q, and soon found that the McGill house had been “swept out of existence.”

  They searched further and located McGill’s wife at a house a dozen blocks away. The last she saw of Anna, she told Thomas, was after the house had broken apart. Her husband and Anna had wound up on one segment of roof, Mrs. McGill on another. Anna had cried for help, but Mrs. McGill could do nothing. She had not seen them since.

  “The only hope we have,” Muat said, at the time, “is that my daughter may have been picked up here and is not yet in a condition to tell.”

  In the absence of a body, there was always hope. Isaac continued his search. But as conditions worsened—as fears of disease grew and as more and more corpses turned up (among them Anna Muat’s)—the hunt for miracles and bodies became more complicated. Hope receded, and simple emptiness took its place.

  DAILY JOURNAL

  Tuesday, September 11

  I. M. Cline, Local Forecast Official, still unable for duty.

  GALVESTON

  “Not Dead”

  EVERY DAY, THE editors of the Galveston News removed a few people from the list of the dead and placed them on a much shorter list titled “Not Dead.” Misreporting had become a problem. The Tribune ran a short item under the headline “Be Careful,” which urged anyone reporting a death to make certain the victim really had expired. “Several names were turned in as dead and the parties were very much alive.”

  The list of the dead grew longer and longer. There were so many bodies that disposal became the top priority of the city’s Relief Committee, which now governed the city and had appointed subcomittees to manage burial, finance, hospitals, and other tasks. On Monday the burial committee resolved to begin burying the bodies at sea. All day long, fire wagons, hearses, and cargo drays hauled stacks of bodies to the city’s wharf, where crews loaded them onto an open barge. The city’s racial harmony began to erode. Soldiers rounded up fifty black men at gunpoint and forced them onto the barge, promising whiskey to help make the task of loading, weighting, and dumping the bodies more tolerable.

  The day was hot. The barge was moored near the Pensacola, whose crewmen stood at the rail and watched intently despite the grotesque images and smells. Workers threw the bodies into the hold with little regard for modesty, until the bodies formed a tangle of swollen buttocks and rigid limbs. One body stood out. It was long and slender and wrapped ever so carefully in white linen. Someone had laid it on a portion of the deck that kept it raised above the other corpses, where it gleamed in the bright sun like a statue of white marble.

  By late afternoon, the barge contained seven hundred corpses. A steam tugboat towed the barge to the designated burial ground eighteen miles out in the Gulf, but it arrived well after nightfall and the darkness made it impossible for the crew to work. They spent the night among arms and legs brought back to life by the gentle rocking of the sea. Dead hands clawed for the moon.

  At dawn the men began attaching weights to the bodies—anything that would sink. Portions of rail. Sash weights from windows. They worked quickly. Too quickly, apparently, for by the end of the day bodies began returning to Galveston. The sea drove scores of them back onto the city’s beaches. Some had weights attached; some did not.

  The burial committee found its choices limited. The morgues were already full, burial at sea clearly had not worked, and decomposition was making the bodies hard to handle. The whole business of carting corpses through the streets of the city was itself taking a toll. “It was realized,” wrote Clarence Ousley, of the Tribune, “that health, even the sanity of people in the streets, forbade the ghostly parade of carts to the wharf, and the only course was to bury or burn on the spot.”

  The fires began almost at once and for Isaac and thousands of other survivors the quest to find the bodies of loved ones became nearly impossible. The scent of burning hair and flesh, the latter like burnt sugar, suffused the air. Phillip Gordie Tipp’s crew, managing a pyre at 25th and Avenue O½, burned five hundred corpses. The city’s lifesaving squad, led by Capt. William A. Hutchings, superintendent of the Eighth U.S. Life-Saving District, found and buried 181 bodies, and stumbled across an occupied coffin that had been shipped to the Levy livery company from New Orleans the day of the storm. They buried it too.

  The dead gangs worked thirty-minute shifts, and in between were allowed all the whiskey they needed to keep going. “The stench from dead people and animals was so great that they couldn’t work longer,” one witness said. They worked in long sleeves and jackets and mohair pants, but did not let their discomfort show. They left their noses exposed.

  Burning did not seem much of an improvement over the parade of corpse-filled wagons. The idea of burning the bodies of men, women, and children—especially children—was jarring. It seemed like sacrilege. Cremation as a routine mortuarial service was itself a brand-new idea in America. In Galveston the fires were everywhere. Emma Beal was ten at the time of the storm, but watched a dead gang burn bodies at 37th and Avenue P, right near her house. As one body entered the fire, an arm shot up as if pointing into the sky. Emma screamed, but kept watching, and paid for it with nightmares that left her writhing in the dark.

  Isaac Cline moved through an increasingly hellish realm. He could not escape the pyres. There was Phillip Gordie Tipp’s fire at 25th and O½, another at the foot of Tremont Street opposite the wharf, where several hundred bodies stacked four and five feet deep were burned at once. Fires burned along the beach at intervals of three hundred feet. At night the fires lit the horizon in all directions, as if four suns were about to rise. The men tending the fires soon lost any sense that they were doing something extraordinary. One survivor said the fires became “such a usual spectacle as to create no comment.”

  Rumor and apocrypha supercharged the night. There was talk that a second huge storm soon would arrive. Isaac’s bureau quashed it. On Sunday night, September 16, an immense fire destroyed the Merchants and Planters Cotton Oil Mill in Houston, lighting the sky to the north. In Galveston, where local flames already rimmed the night, it seemed as if the end of the world had come. And for William Marsh Rice, the elderly New York millionaire who owned the plant, it was indeed the end—the hurricane and fire prompted him to begin preparations for transferring a large amount of cash to Houston to begin reconstruction, which in turn caused his valet and an unscrupulous lawyer to accelerate their ongoing plot to poison him.

  Black men were said to have begun looting bodies, chewing off fingers to gain access to diamond rings, then stuffing the fingers in their pockets. The nation’s press took these stories as truth, then pumped them full of even more lurid details. On Thursday, September 13, the Mobile, Alabama, Daily Register told its readers that fifty Negroes had been shot to death in Galveston. “The ghouls,” the newspaper reported, “were holding an orgie over the dead.”

  Nothing of the sort happened, although it is likely that some theft by whites and blacks alike did occur. A reporter for the Galveston News reported a rumor that seventy-five looters had been shot in the back, but he was skeptical. “Diligent inquiry discloses the incorrectness of thi
s report.” He hedged, however. If any had been killed, he wrote, certainly the total could not have exceeded half a dozen. John Blagden, who survived the storm without injury, heard a rumor that four men had been shot on September 10. “I do not know how true it is,” he said, “for all kinds of rumors are afloat and many of them false.”

  A fog of putrefaction and human ash hung over the city. The steamer Comal arrived on Monday and berthed at Pier 26, but her captain was so repulsed by the stench, he moved the ship down the wharf. The weather was clear and bright, and hot. “Fearful hot,” one man said. He estimated the temperatures at close to 100.

  “Every day the stench from rotting bodies got worse,” Ruby Credo said. “I could barely keep from retching, it was so bad.”

  ISAAC READ THE News closely. Everyone did. In the days after the storm it became the city’s main source of information about friends and relatives. On Thursday, it looked like a real newspaper again. It was back to full size and gave readers its first big narrative of the storm, along with a drizzle of little stories, including a report that someone’s pet prairie dog had been rescued alive from a dresser drawer. The paper also ran a list of telegrams that had accumulated at the Western Union office on the Strand, undelivered because so many recipients and messenger boys were dead, and because 3,600 homes had disappeared. The list of telegrams had five hundred names.

  On Friday the News ran its first advertising since the storm. Companies reassured customers they would not jack up prices to take advantage of the disaster. A store called The Peoples offered goods at manufacturers’ cost. Friday’s death list wrapped around an ad for the Collier Packet Company, which offered coffeepots, cups, clotheslines, brooms, rakes, shovels, nails, lanterns, lamps, and soap, and promised, “Positively no advance in prices.” An ad for H. Mosle and Company offered Tidal Wave Flour at one dollar a sack.