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

by Erik Larson

  The death list took up a full page and a fraction of the next, and included fragments of information that telegraphed to readers larger truths about the disaster. Black victims were identified as colored. The list provided vivid evidence that the storm had crossed all lines of race, profession, and class. It killed steamship agents, mailmen, longshoremen, a prizefighter, a deputy U.S. marshal, and thirteen unidentified inmates of the Home for the Homeless. It killed twenty-two people at the residence of “Francois, a well-known waiter,” and pruned to a stalk the family tree of the Rattiseau clan, killing Mrs. J. C. Rattiseau and her three children; J. B. Rattiseau, his wife, and four children; and C. A. Rattiseau, his wife, and seven children. It drowned Mr. and Mrs. A. Popular and the four Popular children, Agnes, Marnie, Clarence, and Tony. It killed Sanders Costly and Clara Sudden, Herman Tix and H. J. Tickle. It killed John Grief and the entire Grief family.

  The list included a man named Pilford of the Mexican Cable Company and his four children. The place of death, the entry said, was “Twenty-fifth and Q.” Isaac’s corner. Perhaps even his house.

  On Friday the newspaper returned to its practice of running “Personals,” but now these took on a rather different character.

  W. M. R. Clay placed a notice to the attention of Jetta Clay. “I am here,” it said, “2002 L. Come at once.”

  Charles Kennedy placed one seeking Fred Heidenreich. “If alive, come to 24th and Church. Your brother Ben is there.”

  The following Tuesday, a query read: “RYALS—If Myrtle, Wesley, Harry or Mabel are living, please address their mother, Mrs. Ryals, 2024 N.”

  HELP BEGAN ARRIVING. The Army sent soldiers, tents, and food. The train-ferry Charlotte Allen brought a thousand loaves of bread from Houston. The steamer Lawrence brought one hundred thousand gallons of fresh water. The Grand Dictator of the Knights of Honor arrived to look after the needs of his Galveston brethren. Clara Barton arrived to look after everyone, and immediately telegraphed home: “Situation not exaggerated.” She had expected many orphans, but found few. The storm had been hardest on the small. She came with a trainload of carbolic acid and other disinfectants supplied by Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal sent a train too. It left first but arrived last. Which peeved Hearst no end. He dispatched one of his top writers, Winifred Black, his famed “sob sister,” whom he had brought to New York from San Francisco specifically to battle Pulitzer. The storm, she found, had unearthed a Galveston cemetery. The Journal’s headline shrieked: “EVEN THE GRAVES GIVE UP THEIR DEAD.”

  The great hurricane dominated the front pages of newspapers from Miami to Liverpool and generated a tidal wave of contributions, most channeled through the Red Cross. Hearst, in the name of an outfit called the New York Bazaar for Galveston Orphans, gave $50,000, a fortune. In his role as publisher of the Journal, he gave $3,676.02. The Kansas State Insane Asylum sent $12.25. The Colored Eureka Brass Band of Thibodaux, Louisiana, sent $24. The Elgin Milkine Company of Elgin, Illinois, sent seventy-two bottles of its dried-beef tablets and powder. The tablets came in lemon and chocolate. The Fraternal Mystic Circle, Elmwood Ruling, No. 430, of Gainesville, Texas, sent $50. The Ladies of the Maccabees of the World, Sacramento Hive No. 9, sent $329.25. The city of Liverpool gave $13,580, the Cotton Association of Liverpool, $14,550. In the United States, the state of New York sent the most money, $93,695.77. New Hampshire sent the least—a buck—matching the contribution of Moose Jaw, Canada. The Sabbath School of Odell, Illinois, sent $4.10 for the few orphans Barton did find, and got a warm personal letter in return. “It would not surprise me if in its careful expenditure there were not a few playthings,” Barton wrote, “possibly a doll, a wooly dog, an antelope or a little village.”

  Among the contributions that moved her most was $61 from workers at the Cambria Steel Company, Johnstown, Pennsylvania. They made no mention of the ordeal they had gone through eleven years earlier after the failure of a dam at a rich-man’s club high above town.

  Observers within the Weather Bureau contributed to a fund for the relief of their Galveston colleagues, earmarking $200.76 for Isaac, $150 for Joseph, and $50 for John Blagden. Isaac sent his deepest thanks. A rather unctuous letter went to Willis Moore from an observer in the West Indies Service, William H. Alexander. Alexander did not contribute to the Galveston relief fund, but professed to feel deeply for the station and for the state of Texas. “So, feeling thus and fearing lest my silence be attributed to indifference, I felt that in justice to myself I should state that I sent to Galveston to a needy friend as soon after the storm as possible the sum of $11.00 which was every cent that I felt able to contribute.”

  There is no record of any contribution from his Indies superiors, William Stockman and Col. H. H. C. Dunwoody.

  ISAAC RETURNED TO work on Monday, September 17. What he had done during his eight days away from the office is unclear. One local historian believed he was in the hospital recovering from his injuries, but this seems unlikely. Isaac was not seriously injured, at least not physically. He continued to file telegrams to Washington. Most likely he spent this time struggling with the hunt for his wife, the care of his children, and his own grief. There was much for him to do. He needed to find a permanent home for his children and a woman to care for them. He put Joseph in charge of the office, although it must have pained him to do so. Joseph reveled in his new command, and in his brother’s absence. Telegrams from the bureau became more dramatic. At 11:30 A.M., Tuesday, September 11, Joseph fired off a breathless telegram to Moore, in which he reported that Bornkessell was still missing, Isaac had been injured but “not seriously,” and “nearly half the city” had been washed away. “I am badly injured. Two thousand dead found burying at sea.”

  Exactly three minutes later, a more businesslike telegram entered the wires, this composed by Isaac. “All mail communication cut off since noon Saturday. Can get no material on which to base crop reports. All messages sent by boat to Houston. Instruments erected temporarily by Blagden. J. L. Cline still on duty but unable to do much.”

  These were hard days for Isaac. He believed in work and in filling his day to the limit with productive effort, but in so doing, he had put love and family in a box that he had allowed himself to open only rarely. A mistake, he saw now. He had lost his wife and nearly lost a daughter. How completely Cora had held his world together now became apparent to him. His children needed food, warmth, a dry place, and most of all they needed him. As the city had fallen, so had the neat compartments of his life.

  His house had disappeared, along with everything that described his past—all his photographs, letters, his beloved Bible, and the manuscript of his nearly finished book on climate and health, the second time the book had been destroyed. His station was in disarray. Kuhnel had deserted. Baldwin, on mandatory furlough, had gotten safely away just a week before the storm.

  And Bornkessell was surely dead. He had just built a home in the city’s West End, but searchers found only empty ground. Neighbors apparently had sought shelter in his house, placing in him the same faith others had placed in Isaac. On the morning Isaac returned to work, he read in the Galveston News a query from a Houston man named Harry M. Perry. “I wish to report to you as among the missing and undoubtedly lost my wife and son Clayton, aged 7. They were visiting Mr. and Mrs. Theodore C. Bornkessell, who resided in their new cottage on the north side of the shell road, about a mile west of the Denver Resurvey. I reached Galveston on the first trip of the steamer Lawrence and searched the ground carefully from the site of the house to the bay, but could find no trace of them. Everything out there went straight into the bay, as there was nothing to stop it. The house is entirely gone, but some of its wreckage is lodged in trees a mile northwest. My wife was about 5 feet 5 inches tall, wavy, medium length black hair, 30 years old, looking younger, but hair had many gray ones in it.… Should any record of such persons have been made by any one it is needless to say I will appreciate all possible information. Mr. an
d Mrs. Bornkessell were undoubtedly lost with them.”

  As far as the station was concerned, things could have been worse. Joseph was indeed injured, but not as badly as he seemed to think. He had never dealt well with injury or illness. Blagden, luckily, was well and full of energy. The Levy Building was still sound.

  Isaac could not help it, but now and then a thought whispered through his mind that he should have come to the Levy Building with his family, instead of trying to weather the storm at home. Why had he chosen that course? Was it pride? For the sake of appearances?

  Joseph, underneath his demonstrations of sympathy, seemed all too aware that he had called it right and Isaac had not.

  There were dreams. Isaac fell asleep easily each night and dreamed of happy times, only to wake to gloom and grief. He dreamed that he had saved her. He dreamed of the lost baby. “A dream,” Freud wrote, in 1900, in his Interpretation of Dreams, “is the fulfillment of a wish.”

  During the week he worked on his official report on the storm. Psychically, it was a difficult task. His wife was still missing. The air stank of rotting flesh and burned hair. Always in the past he had been able to separate himself from the meteorological events he described. Hot winds. Paralyzed fish. He was the observer looking upon these phenomena through glass. But this storm had dragged him to its heart and changed his life forever. As he sat down opposite his typewriter, human ash dusted each fresh sheet of paper.

  He began: “The hurricane which visited Galveston Island on Saturday, September 8, 1900, was no doubt one of the most important meteorological events in the world’s history.”

  There was so much he wanted to say, but could not—how headquarters and the West Indies Service had failed to recognize the storm as a hurricane, how even he had not understood the signs of warning until too late. That was the most difficult part. He could not describe these conjoined failures, for to do so would have been to damage the bureau in its struggle for credibility.

  Instead, he wrote: “Storm warnings were timely and received a wide distribution not only in Galveston but throughout the coast region.”

  He left out the specific character of these warnings, and the fact that none mentioned a hurricane.

  As he wrote, a question consumed him: Why did so many people die? No previous storm on the U.S. mainland had come even close to causing such loss. Why this one? Was he, Isaac, partly to blame?

  As if to address the question, he described how on Saturday morning he began warning the public to seek a safe place to spend the night. “As a result thousands of people who lived near the beach or in small houses moved their families into the center of the city and were thus saved.” In later years, the number of people he claimed to have warned increased to twelve thousand.

  Isaac struggled also with how to tell the story in a dispassionate, scientific way, and bleach it of his personal experience. He found this impossible. This was his storm. What he knew of it came from living through it.

  In a few austere paragraphs, he described the collapse of his house and his night on the wreckage. He devoted a single line to Cora’s apparent death: “Among the lost was my wife, who never rose above the water after the wreck of the building.”

  His account was spare, nothing like the florid writing so common in his time. For him, however, it was new. He had never written an official document in the first person before, only in the passive voice of a bureaucrat; certainly he had never mentioned his family. It was risky. He was violating an unwritten tenet of bureau culture as it had evolved under Willis Moore: Do not ever let your own star shine more brightly than the chief’s.

  But there was no other way to tell the story. Isaac sent it to Moore with a cover letter in which he wrote, “My personal experience was so interwoven with the progress of the storm that it appears that I should include it in the report. If it should not be embodied in the report please omit that portion.

  “Very respectfully,

  “Your obediant servant,

  “I. M. Cline.”

  WASHINGTON

  A Letter from Moore

  ON FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, as hundreds of fires still burned in the city, Isaac Cline read the Houston Post and there saw an angry letter from Willis Moore defending the Weather Bureau’s performance in forecasting the hurricane. The letter troubled Isaac. Moore’s account veered from reality; why was he changing the story?

  Moore had written to the Post in response to an editorial that accused the bureau of having failed to predict and track the storm. The editorial stated: “The practical inutility of the national weather bureau, for certain sections of the country, at least, was never so conspicuously shown as on Friday and Saturday last when South Texas was left without any warning of the coming storm, or at least its severity.” The editorial then quoted the forecasts for Texas that had been wired from the bureau’s Central Office just before the storm. “With the weather bureau saying that Saturday would be ‘fair; fresh, possibly brisk, northerly winds on the coast’ of East Texas, who would have looked for the most destructive hurricane of modern times on that coast on that date?”

  Moore, in a five-page letter, protested that on Friday morning storm signals were raised in Galveston and “a few hours later” were changed to hurricane signals. He called Isaac “one of the heroic spirits of that awful hour,” and offered a dramatic, but incorrect, account of Isaac’s day. “When the last means of communication with the outer world had failed he, instead of going to the relief of his own family, braved the furies of the storm and the surging waters and, reaching a certain telephone station at the end of a bridge, succeeded in sending out from the doomed city the last message that was received until after the passage of the storm.… After performing this service for the benefit of the whole people he returned to his own home, to find it destroyed and his wife and one child lost.”

  Isaac, at this point, still considered Moore a personal friend. It hurt him, no doubt, that Moore had distorted the story of his experience in the storm. Isaac had lost his wife and home, and had nearly lost a daughter, but Moore could not be bothered with the actual details. What troubled Isaac most was Moore’s statement that an order to raise hurricane warnings had been sent to Galveston and that hurricane flags had been raised as early as Friday. It simply wasn’t true.

  Isaac clipped Moore’s letter and an accompanying blurb in which the Post’s editors stated they had gladly printed Moore’s response because they had no desire “to captiously find fault” with the bureau, adding archly, “We would all rather believe that the weather service was valuable than that it was of no use to the public.” Isaac mailed the clippings to Moore that day, with a cover letter that was defensive but also obliquely critical of Moore. Isaac insisted he had done all he could on Saturday. In fact, he told Moore, he had just spoken with an editor of the Galveston News who had assured him that his station’s warnings had saved “more than 5,000 people.”

  Isaac ignored Moore’s distortion of his personal ordeal, but quietly disputed his claim that the Central Office had ordered hurricane signals raised. “Regarding the warnings received at Galveston I desire to say that the hurricane warning never reached us,” Isaac wrote. The last storm advisory received from Washington, he said, was an order that arrived at 10:30 A.M. Saturday specifying only a change in wind direction of an existing storm warning. Always the good soldier, Isaac gave Moore an escape. “I presume,” he wrote, “the hurricane warning which followed a few hours later did not reach Houston until after the wires had gone down.”

  There was more he wanted to say, but did not. Years later, in a personal memoir, he wrote that the only warning given the people of Galveston came from him and his station, in defiance of Moore’s “strict orders” against unauthorized storm warnings. “If I had taken the time on the morning of the 8th to ask for approval from the forecaster in Washington and waited for his reply the people could not have been warned of the disaster.” Loss of life, he wrote, “would have been twice as great.”

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p; But he conceded he too had underestimated the storm. “I did not foresee the magnitude of the damage it would do.”

  MOORE CONTINUED TO portray the bureau as having expertly forecast and tracked the hurricane, and credited in particular the West Indies Service. In an article in the October issue of Collier’s Weekly, one of the most influential magazines of the day, he wrote, “It is a remarkable testimonial to the foresight of the present Secretary of Agriculture, Honorable James Wilson, that the meteorological service inaugurated by him during the Spanish-American war as a protection to the American fleet was, by the last Congress, permanently adopted as a part of our National Weather Bureau, on account of its beneficent application to the peaceful ways of trade and commerce. Without the reporting stations of the new service the Weather Bureau would have been unable to detect the inception of the Galveston hurricane when it was only a harmless storm, and, when it reached the intensity of a hurricane, to issue timely warnings in advance of its coming.” He repeated his distorted account of Isaac’s ordeal.

  Most U.S. newspapers, unaware of the nuances of the bureau’s performance and inclined in those days to be more accepting of official dogma, adopted Moore’s view. The Boston Herald applauded the bureau for its “excellent service.” The Buffalo, New York, Courier said the bureau’s forecasts testified to its “advanced efficiency.” The Inter-Ocean of Chicago, Illinois, wrote, “Simple justice demands public recognition of the efficiency of the Chief of the Meteorological Bureau and his staff.”

  Few asked the obvious question: If the bureau had done such a great job, why did so many people die? More people perished in Galveston than in any previous U.S. natural disaster—at least three times as many as in the Johnstown Flood.