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

by Erik Larson

  SOON AFTER THE storm, Father Gangoite of the Belen Observatory discovered William Stockman’s patronizing remarks about how the poor ignorant natives of the islands had become accustomed to learning of storms “only when they were nearly past.” Gangoite brought them to the attention of the Cuban press. In the wake of the Galveston storm, Gangoite and Cuba’s editors saw the remarks as highly ironic. The Diario de la Marina noted that the Cuban public always gave “greater credence” to Gangoite’s forecasts, and that the facts justified this attitude.

  “An example?” the editors asked. “Here is a recent one. The same day that the Weather Bureau published in the newspapers of Havana that the last hurricane had reached the Atlantic, the Belen Observatory said in the same papers that the center had crossed the eastern portion of the island and that it would undoubtedly reach Texas. A few hours later the first telegraphic announcement of the ravages of the cyclone in Galveston was received.”

  The editorial concluded: “As this occurrence is very recent it affords a most delightful opportunity for the verification of what has just been published in the U.S., that until the establishment of the Weather Bureau in Havana, forecasts relating to hurricanes were unknown by the people of Cuba.”

  Six days after the storm, the War Department, apparently fed up with Stockman and Colonel Dunwoody, revoked the ban on Cuban weather cables. Moore was furious. In a letter to the secretary of agriculture, he fumed, “I know that there have been many secret influences at work to embarrass the Weather Bureau. I regret that the restriction that heretofore has been placed on the transmission of private observations and forecasts over the Government lines has been removed.” He turned petulant. “It is apparent to me and to every ranking officer … in the West Indies that the people do not appreciate our service, that the only thing they want is to kick us and say good-bye.”

  By way of retribution, he asked permission to halt the bureau’s climate and crop service in Cuba and to move the headquarters of the West Indies hurricane network out of Havana. He also wanted authorization “not to issue hurricane warnings to any part of Cuba so long as the War Department permits the transmission over Government lines of irresponsible weather information.”

  28TH AND P

  The Ring

  THERE WAS A point where families knew their missing members were gone for good, although different people reached that point at different times. Children reached it last of all. There were miracles still, like Anna Delz, sixteen years old, who had been washed to the mainland and mourned for dead until a week later she finally made her way back to Galveston. Stories like this were heartening, especially if you concentrated on the joy the newfound survivors brought to their families and friends, but they also were distressing, especially for parents who knew their spouses were dead but whose children saw each new miracle as a sign that their own mothers or fathers might also return.

  Isaac knew Cora was dead. He knew it on a rational, scientific level. Even so, he needed to find her, lest a part of him always wonder where she was, and a very tiny part of him always wonder whether she was even dead. He needed to find her also for the sake of his children. They still believed their mother one day would walk through the door and scoop them into her arms. Little Esther was the most open about it, wondering aloud when her mama would come home. The eldest, Allie May, tried to act adult and maternal, but Isaac knew that on some level she too believed her mother would come back. The children prayed for this. At night he often woke to hear one or another of his daughters crying in her sleep. Sometimes they cried upon wakening. Freud said, “The dreams of young children are pure wish-fulfillments and are for that reason quite uninteresting compared with the dreams of adults. They raise no problems for solution.”

  At the office, things quickly returned to normal. Isaac, Joseph, and John Blagden received commendations; Ernest Kuhnel, the deserter, was dropped from the rolls. New instruments arrived and the men returned to making their routine daily observations. Pyres burned everywhere. Work crews erected scores of new homes. The Rollfings found one and moved in. The scent of fresh-cut lumber diluted the scent of death. Cotton began flowing through the port, no doubt to Houston’s dismay. Squads of men hacked away at the immense spine of debris that had come to a halt on Avenue Q. What was so striking was the quiet. The men did not have jackhammers and chain saws, of course. Only axes, hammers, handsaws, and crowbars. They burned the wreck in segments, after salvaging intact sinks, lamps, stoves, coffeepots, pans, even commodes, figuring someone might need them. The Red Cross gave out food and clothing, but found much of its supply of donated clothing unusable, either too warm for the climate or too shabby, clearly the discards of distant souls who believed survivors were in no position to be picky. Someone donated a case of fancy women’s shoes, but all 144 shoes were for the left foot, samples once carried by a shoe-company traveler. Contributions slowed. Discord rose. Barton was accused of withholding clothing from Galveston’s destitute blacks, and of squandering money in payments to members of the Relief Committee. The Palmetto Post of Port Royal, South Carolina, called her a vulture. None of it fazed her. The same thing occurred at every disaster she attended. “It is,” she wrote, “an unfortunate trait in the human character to assail or asperse others engaged in the performance of humanitarian acts.”

  Throughout September, bodies emerged from the wreckage at a rate of over one hundred per day. Two hundred seventy-three bodies came forth on September 19. The next day’s News speculated, “It is possible, but highly improbable, that the list of storm victims will aggregate 6000 souls.” As the days passed, identification became impossible, unless the dead happened to wear some clearly distinctive piece of jewelry or clothing.

  Toward evening on September 30 a demolition gang assigned to help dismantle the spine of wreckage that still stretched from one end of the city to the other began working in the vicinity of 28th and Avenue P. They took on only a small portion at a time. To think in terms of the whole was simply too disheartening. They saw the world not in acres, but in cubic yards.

  As they dug through the rubble the now-familiar scent of decomposition became stronger. None was surprised by this. The spine had proven from the start to be a rich seam of corpses.

  The wall of a house had come to rest here. They disassembled it and stacked the reusable lumber and siding in a great pile. Underneath they found a dress tangled in the debris, and within the clothing, the remains of a woman. The woman wore a wedding ring, and a diamond engagement ring.

  What happened next is unclear. It is possible something in the debris signaled to the men that the house had belonged to Dr. I. M. Cline, the weatherman, and that the men then dispatched someone to bring him to the scene. It is also possible Isaac was already there, waiting, having long ago considered the possibility that his wife’s body might have come to rest near where he and the children had floated to safety. By then Isaac would have established a routine that he followed every day, a scientific approach to the search that began with the News, and ended each evening with a tour of likely places where his wife might have lain. He probably justified it as good exercise.

  Isaac recognized the ring. Something closed in his heart and a kind of peace rose within him, like a flush of embarrassment. “Even in death,” he wrote, years later, “she had traveled with us and near us through the storm.”

  The work crew did not burn her body—further evidence that Isaac was present during or soon after its discovery. The body was transported to the city’s Lakeview Cemetery. On October 4, 1900, as the weather began to cool, Isaac and his daughters, and Joseph, gathered on the cemetery’s grounds, at Block 47, Lot E, ½ of 3, and watched as a coffin bearing Cora May Bellew Cline was lowered slowly into the earth.

  Isaac kept the ring, had it enlarged, and wore it himself. It was this ring that gleamed like a beacon from his photographic portrait. He wore it also on December 31, 1900, when Galveston prepared to enter the twentieth century. The city looked new. Its streets were clear, the py
res gone. The civilized smoke of steamships now drifted over the city. And the glad scents were back, of coffee and fresh wood, and horses. Music rang from the restored Garten Verein, and from the banquet hall of the Tremont Hotel, and the dance parlor of the Artillery Club. Sad men made love that day in the house across the alley. Beer flowed everywhere, and there was laughter. Children ran along the beach as their parents followed, anxious as always about the sea. And then the rockets came, arcing over the black water of the Gulf in bursts of yellow, red, and gold. Isaac was there with his baby and Allie and Rosemary. Joseph was gone, in Puerto Rico. There was Judson Palmer, alone but among friends. There was Louisa, with August senior and junior and Helen and little Lanta. There was Mrs. Hopkins and her children, and Anthony Credo and his children, Raymond alive, Pearl’s arm nicely healed. Voices came next, Isaac’s tenor merging with August’s and a thousand other voices over the soft whisper of the sea, filling cups of kindness for old times past. And then the ghosts came. They gathered silently on the beach. Cora Cline. Vivian Credo and her sisters Irene and Minnie and her brother William. Little Lee Palmer and his mother, and of course, Youno. Lost families remembered. Tix, Popular, Grief.

  That night, New Year’s Eve 1900, a piece of very strange news flashed over the submarine cables from England. A wind had risen so freakishly strong it had toppled one of the great pillars of Stonehenge that no wind had budged for ten thousand years. The twentieth century had begun.

  PART VI

  Haunted

  ISAAC

  Haunted

  The Storm

  ON MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, Willis Moore telegraphed the New York Evening World with a report on the hurricane’s travels after it left Galveston. The cyclone, he wrote, “had lost its distinctive character as a destructive storm, and its future energy will more likely be expended in general rains over the western country rather than in high winds.”

  Once again Moore had let the expected obscure the real. Somewhere in the heavens over Oklahoma, the storm’s lingering vortex entered the great low-pressure system then moving eastward across the country. It rapidly regained power and roared north, much to the dismay of A. I. Root, president of a Medina, Ohio, company that sold beekeeping supplies. As early as Monday he watched his personal barometer begin to drop “in a very unusual way,” yet all he saw from the Weather Bureau were telegrams forecasting fair skies for Monday and Tuesday, partly cloudy conditions on Wednesday. Instead he got a destructive windstorm that tore his company apart. He wrote to Moore, “Now wasn’t it a mistake that there wasn’t anything said about the big blow?”

  The Central Office countered that it was not bureau policy to send wind forecasts to inland locations.

  The storm brought hurricane-force winds to Chicago and Buffalo, this even after crossing America’s vast midriff. It killed six loggers trying to make their way across the Eau Claire River and nearly sank a Lake Michigan steamship. It downed so many telegraph lines that communication throughout the Midwest and the northern tier of the nation came to a halt. On Wednesday night, the storm savaged Prince Edward Island, then burst into the North Atlantic. Manhattan, half a continent south, received winds of sixty-five miles per hour.

  As thousands of men moved into the countryside to replant telegraph poles and string fallen cable, reports began to emerge of shipwrecks in the Atlantic. The storm sank six vessels off Saint-Pierre, six more in Placentia Bay, four at Renews Harbor, and drove forty-two fishing boats aground in the Strait of Belle Isle between Newfoundland and mainland Canada. The storm raced in a cold and lethal arc across the top of the world until it fell at last into Siberia and disappeared from human observation.

  America cooled. The Cascades grayed under frost. Snow fell on the Wasatch Front east of Salt Lake City. At Sherman, Wyoming, snow accumulated to a depth of thirteen inches. From Chattanooga to Brooklyn, men and women greeted the day with a feeling not unlike love.

  Galveston

  GALVESTON COUNTED ITS dead. The city conducted a census and in October reported a tally of 3,406 confirmed deaths. Eight of the city’s twelve wards had lost 10 percent or more of their residents. The storm killed 21 percent of the Twelfth Ward, 19 percent of the Tenth. The Galveston News published its final death roster on October 7, and listed 4,263 names. Early in 1901, the Morrison and Fourmy Company, which published the city directory, conducted its own canvass and found an overall loss in population of 8,124. Two thousand of these had simply moved from the city, the company believed. That left 6,000 dead. Informal estimates placed the toll at 8,000, even 10,000, not including the several thousand deaths that occurred in low-lying towns on the mainland. No one knew how many bodies still rested in the sea. “Many people,” one survivor noted, “would not eat fish, shrimp, or crabs for several years.”

  The city fathers vowed to rebuild. They created an elaborate exhibit for the World’s Fair of 1904 to tell the world of the city’s great plans to build a seawall and behind it a shining new Galveston. The Galveston Flood concession quickly became one of the most popular exhibits at the fair. An artificial wave machine threw a tidal wave across a tableau of Galveston. The sun rose upon a ruined city. Night fell. The new day saw the ruin replaced by a great gleaming metropolis protected from the sea by a giant wall.

  This time Galveston built the wall. It rose seventeen feet above the beach, and stood behind an advance barrier of granite boulders twenty-seven feet in width. McClure’s Magazine called it “one of the greatest engineering works of modern times.” But the city’s engineers, among them Colonel Robert, knew a seawall alone was not enough. They raised the altitude of the entire city. In a monumental effort, legions of workmen using manual screw jacks lifted two thousand buildings, even a cathedral, then filled the resulting canyon with eleven million pounds of fill. The task, completed in 1910, had an unintended benefit: It ensured that all corpses still buried within the city remained well interred.

  There were moments of brightness. The city built a grand new opera house to replace the one destroyed in the storm. Al Jolson came. So did Sarah Bernhardt and Anna Pavlova. To signal the city’s faith in itself, several of its leading citizens built an immense new hotel, the Galvez, right inside the seawall, as if taunting the Gulf with the city’s new resolve. Galveston’s Relief Committee evolved into a new form of city government, in which the mayor became, in effect, chairman of a board of elected commissioners who each managed a different city function. Reformers saw it as a way of defeating Tammany-style politics, which tended to concentrate power in the hands of a single boss. Hundreds of cities across the country adopted the form. It caused Harvard’s president, Charles Eliot, to proclaim the dawn of “a brighter day” for America. “We have got down very low in regard to our municipal governments, and we have got dark days here now, but we can see a light breaking, and one of the lights broke in Galveston.”

  But the great hurricane—call it Isaac’s Storm—had struck with abysmal bad timing. Just four months later, an event occurred nearby that changed the history of the nation, arguably the world. The ranchers of Beaumont, Texas, had long heard how gas and greasy water sometimes bubbled to the surface of a strange knoll in the prairie outside town. A few men hunted oil there and gave up, but others followed, drawn by the stories. On January 10, 1901, a crew working for an Italian immigrant named Antonio Francisco Lucich, self-named Tony Lucas, ran for their lives as thunder roared from their drill tower. Oil had already made a few fortunes in America, but this was different. The place was Spindletop. Lucas had punctured a vast underground basin of oil. The rig spouted America’s new gold—but showered the wealth on Houston, not Galveston.

  As Galveston grieved and struggled to regain the world’s confidence, Houston dredged Buffalo Bayou. Houston was inland, therefore safer, and it was closer to the big cross-country rail corridors. Oil eclipsed cotton. Great ships in black, red, and white glided quietly past Galveston, bound for the wharves of Buffalo Bayou.

  A silence settled over Galveston. Its population stopped gr
owing. It acquired all the sorrows of modern urban life, but none of the density and vibrance. It became a beach town for Houston.

  Joseph

  SOON AFTER THE storm, Willis Moore promoted Joseph to section director, with an increase in salary to $1,500 a year from $1,200, and ordered him to Puerto Rico to take over the island’s weather station. Joseph dreaded the assignment, claiming his health was not good enough for a tropical climate. On November 3, 1900, two days before Joseph was scheduled to leave Galveston, Isaac notified Moore that Joseph “is unable to leave his room. He has been under medical treatment since the hurricane and has at last been compelled to take to his bed.”

  A month later, Joseph, in a letter that dripped reluctance, wrote to Moore that he was now ready to go. “I believe that I have fully recovered from injuries of glands and blood vessels in [my] left leg, and as it is the wishes of the Bureau that I proceed on to Porto Rico, I will do so with pleasure.” He asked Moore, however, to reconsider his transfer if “the climate there proves adverse.”

  Joseph did go to Puerto Rico, and in the August 1901 issue of the Monthly Weather Review, wrote, “The climate is not so oppressive as one might expect in the Tropics. A cool, very pleasant, and most welcome breeze generally blows across the island, particularly in the afternoon and at night, which adds much to the comfort of the inhabitants.”

  By then, however, he was already back in the United States. He had been back for months. In the spring of 1901, Moore at last had acknowledged Joseph’s concerns and on April 5 wrote to the secretary of agriculture recommending that Joseph be returned to the United States on account of his “feeble” health. Moore demoted Joseph to his old rank of observer and cut his salary by $200 a year.