by Al Roker
This one was decisive. And it was bad.
Along with the state-of-the-art instruments at the Levy Building, Galveston had a state-of-the-art mareograph—a tide gauge. As early as the 1850s, coastal U.S. cities had been using self-registering gauges to mark the heights and depths of their tides.
Now, on Saturday morning, the tide gauge told Isaac Cline that something was very wrong.
The gauge was essentially a metal tube with open ends, fixed in the water near the shore to still the effect of waves and splashes. The tube was therefore known as a “stilling well.” A float in the tube rose up with the flow of the tide, down with the ebb.
The float was attached by a wire-and-pulley system to a pen sitting on a paper drum that rotated steadily above the tube via clockwork. Moving in response to the height of the float in the water, the pen etched the water level on the paper on the drum. The result was a graph of highs and lows over time.
This Saturday morning in Galveston, the tide gauge showed the water level at 4.5 feet higher than normal. Which would have made sense—if the wind were coming from the south or southeast, from Cuba, that is, across the gulf itself, thereby pushing water from behind up the beach and into town. That wind direction would easily explain a tide so high.
But the winds this morning were not behind the water. The wind was out of the north. It pushed against the tide. And it was fairly stiff, at 15 to 17 miles per hour.
So the gulf tide was rising to an extraordinary height against the wind. That never happened.
Not that the north wind was failing to suppress the waves and hold back the tide. That was the scary thing. It was holding back the tide. And still the tide was almost five feet above normal.
This was just the phenomenon that had been bugging Dr. Young of the Cotton Exchange. Now Isaac saw it too. High tide, with wildly crashing surf, but driving against the wind, and not pushed by it: this was a storm tide. It meant serious trouble for Galveston.
Meanwhile, gulf water was moving slowly, steadily from the beach into town. It wasn’t only the Clines’ yard that was underwater. In the main part of downtown, on the gulf side, nothing stood between the sand and the first rows of houses—no breakwater, no seawall, no barrier of any kind—and there wasn’t even any real height for the water to climb. It just flowed straight into the streets. The beach was nearly level, and the streets flowed levelly from the beach and into town.
So now gulf water had not only inundated the beach at the bathing pier. It began moving into some deep channels, formerly known as Galveston’s city streets.
And yet just as on the day before, some Galvestonians’ first impression of the arrival of the water that morning was sheer fun and excitement. Despite the steady rain and the rising flood, all Saturday morning people waded and splashed through the water down to the beach to marvel anew at the gigantic, crashing surf and the water flowing in the streets. All morning, and even into the afternoon, as the rain pounded and wind began blowing with supernatural force, and the sea rose, Galvestonians played in the water.
In addition to her love of bicycling, Daisy Thorne was a photography enthusiast, and Saturday morning she was up early to take pictures of the towering surf. She stepped onto the porch of the two-story apartment at Lucas Terrace, which stood conveniently near the broad east-end beach, now going underwater, and pointed her camera at the gulf.
The pneumatic tires on Daisy’s bicycle represented an improvement, so she’d been early to adopt them. By contrast, the new film cameras—such as the point-and-shoot Brownie introduced that year by the Eastman Company—really were meant for snapshots, not a true advancement in photographic quality. Daisy was an artist. She hadn’t adopted film; she stuck with professional-level gelatin dry plates.
After inserting each emulsion-prepared glass plate into the big camera, she waited seconds on each exposure, hoping to capture the drama of the glowering clouds and spraying surf.
People were wading down Broadway, she saw. They were coming to the east beach in the rain to get a look at the astonishing scene and hear the big roars.
By 8:00 that morning, the water nearly surrounded Daisy’s apartment building. By then, Daisy had used up all of her plates. She had some embroidering to do, so by midmorning, she was inside, working on the embroidery—it was a pillow for her fiancé Joe Gilbert’s new doctor’s office—and considering the weather.
This was a wild and flooding storm, Daisy knew. But though built near the sandy beach, the Lucas Terrace building was as solid as a rock. The water kept creeping steadily around it.
The Cline brothers must have already been horribly aware on Saturday morning that it was probably too late to avoid an awful disaster in Galveston. Their subsequent memories would by no means agree perfectly—yet in later years, both brothers recalled making strenuous efforts that Saturday to give warnings and save lives.
Isaac Cline had long believed in two dovetailed theories. One was that hurricanes could not travel from Cuba to Texas. The other was that, when bad gulf storms did make landfall on Galveston, the bay allowed release for all that destructive energy, ushering it onto the low marshes of the Texas mainland and leaving the island unharmed.
So it’s hard to know exactly how Isaac read the situation in Galveston as early as Saturday morning. He seems to have been struck by a responsibility to warn as many people as possible of the likely force of the coming storm. According to his later recollection, Isaac began driving his two-wheel wagon among the beachfront houses. He personally advised people vacationing there to leave the island right away, as quickly as they could.
He spoke to people living farther back from the beach, three blocks or so from the water. Their houses’ foundations, Isaac told them, could be knocked around by a strong ebb and flow of tide. The tides might bring their houses down. He advised people to seek the high ground.
The “high ground”: despite Galveston’s sandbar-like position between the gulf and the bay, that term did have some meaning. People knew from long storm and flood experience where the high ground lay.
A spine runs through the island on the east-west axis. It tapers down to sea level at the east end; well out of town to the west, it breaks up into bayous, along with the rest of the island.
In the main part of Galveston in 1900, the high ground was maybe eight feet above sea level. Land sloped downward from the flattish top of the spine: southerly, toward the water of the gulf, and northerly, toward the water of the bay. The spine was called Avenue J—otherwise known as Broadway.
There, where the astonishing mansions of the Gilded Age millionaires lined the wide avenue parallel to the gulf beach and the bay harbor, lay the city’s highest ground. It didn’t run through the exact middle of town; it lay closer to the bay than to the gulf. Whenever the low streets on the gulf side had gone underwater, in living memory Broadway had always remained dry.
So it’s not surprising that the Broadway area is where Isaac Cline would have sent sea-level citizens on both of the water-exposed sides of town to seek shelter. In this storm, however, the high ground on Broadway would soon cause a condition that neither Cline nor anyone else in Galveston could have foreseen. High ground would offer no help, putting it mildly, in withstanding this hurricane.
Just outside the family rooming house, Louise Bristol was playing in the water with her friend Martha. The weekend had finally come, with relief from the excitement and nervousness of that first week of school. And the weekend was turning out even better than Louise could have imagined.
There was crashing surf, and relief from the heat, and now the curious delight of brown water filling the deep streets. The water slowly changed the landscape before their eyes into a magical place the children had never seen before.
Louise was thrilled in particular by this idea: she didn’t have to go to the beach. The beach was coming to her.
Her mother, Cassie, by contrast, was not having fun. But it wasn’t the water in the streets—that didn’t concern Cassie much. She
was just busy today, like every other day. As the landlady coped with the impact on her household of the imminent return of medical students who roomed at the Bristols’ home, Cassie couldn’t be bothered with worrying about rain and wet streets.
So Louise and Martha splashed, jumped, and swam. They played in what had once been their street and was now a deep, strongly flowing river of salt water.
Arnold Wolfram was getting ready to go to work, and members of his family were not among the cavalier Galvestonians. They pleaded with Wolfram to stay home, safe from the raging storm.
The grocery salesman had a past in the wild Texas West. He’d hung out with Texas Rangers and famous badmen. He reassured his family: all would be well.
As soon as things got bad, he promised, he’d head home. They weren’t reassured, but Arnold went off to work anyway.
By late morning, people were still cavorting in the gulf breakers. Drenching rain slammed gawkers’ backs as they gazed southward on the beach at the gulf. But the wind was blowing so powerfully out of the north, against the tide, that their fronts stayed dry as they watched the towering surf and the crazy people playing in it. Even as people watched, the midway shops and stands near the bathing pier started collapsing into the wind and water.
Not everybody was so relaxed. Annie McCullough had her rosebushes safely in tubs. Yet overnight she’d felt the winds pick up, and now the rain was falling hard. The beach was underwater, and Annie’s street was becoming invisible, one with the gulf. It wasn’t just the roses that seemed vulnerable now.
Annie and Ed decided it was time to go. They were ready to evacuate their house, so close to the beach; they would seek shelter up on the Broadway high ground until the storm passed.
Annie didn’t feel frightened. She was just being sensible. Ed hitched his mule to his dray, the low delivery wagon with no sides and two big wheels. He and Annie and young cousin Henry drove the mule through the water to pick up Annie’s mother, who lived nearby. Annie’s father, the government customs man Fleming Smizer, was off doing his job at Point Bolivar on the mainland. They expected to see him soon.
Annie’s mother clambered up on the dray, as did a number of other relatives, young and old, and Ed hoisted up a trunk full of clothes that Annie’s mother had brought. The plan was to head to the big, strong, brick-and-stone school building near Broadway, on Eleventh Street.
Just seven blocks uptown from the McCulloughs’ house, the school building took up the entire block between G and H Streets. The building was only twelve years old, with the chateau-like spires typical of a certain grand style of 1880s public architecture. It had three gigantic main floors, plus high attics, and everybody knew that the Broadway area offered the highest ground in Galveston: that street had never flooded. The school looked like the safest convenient place to wait out what was starting to feel like an unusually powerful storm.
The dray was crowded, so Annie said she’d walk the few blocks. Ed snapped the reins and the rest of the family rode uptown toward Broadway.
Rabbi Cohen had just finished leading Saturday services at the ornate, Gothic-revival synagogue of Temple B’nai Israel, a few blocks from Broadway toward the gulf side of town. He was heading for his house on Broadway in the rain on foot—not on his Cleveland bicycle, as this was the Sabbath—and that’s when he saw all the people moving uptown through the storm.
Scores of them. All races, all ethnicities. Just like the McCullough and Smizer families, they were moving to the higher ground around Broadway
Whether in response to warnings by the Clines to people living along the gulf side, or simply realizing it would be smarter to get moving, a long line of people was flowing up Broadway from the east end of town—reversing the flow Daisy Thorne had seen earlier, when people had been drawn down Broadway to the east beach to goggle at the surf. The people were carrying suitcases, trunks, boxes, and household items, even lamps, even photographs.
These residents were serious about getting out of the way of the storm. Rabbi Cohen also detected a holiday mood. As the crowd slogged uptown through the driving rain, boys ran ahead to take long slides in the mud of Broadway’s median esplanade.
It was characteristic of Cohen to start figuring out how he could help these refugees. Some of the people told him something they’d seen down at the water. The trolley trestle that ran over the water just off the beach was underwater now. It would soon collapse. The entire bathing pier and its midway shops and stalls were wrecked, they told Cohen. The striped tentlike bathhouses were going into the water.
Cohen ran into his Broadway house, rustled up umbrellas and blankets, brought them back outside, and began handing them out to the people on the moving line. His wife, Mollie, came out into the driving rain with a bushel of apples, and as the people passed them, the Cohens handed out the apples too. Soon the rabbi was drenched. Mollie finally got him to come inside and change his clothes.
When the Cohen family sat down to lunch, wind was howling around the house. It was dark. Mollie and the rabbi began trying to reassure their children. They lit candles, and Mollie recalled the storm of 1886.
Her father’s Market Street store had been flooded in that storm. But water had never come all the way up to Broadway.
Just then the entire house rocked once. Plaster fell from the ceiling and crashed to the floor. “Just a little blow,” Mollie reassured the children.
Meanwhile, out where the Gulf of Mexico meets Galveston Bay, off the northeast end of the island, in the passage between the island and the Bolivar Peninsula, any difference between bay water and gulf water was becoming meaningless. The rising, crashing water of the gulf began pouring quickly through that channel into the bay. The bay was rising too, and it was being attacked by wind.
Ships were moored in that channel. Their captains began trying to cope with the churning water that rocked their boats. Captains of steamships fired up their boilers. Having some control over their crafts might help them withstand the growing chaos.
In the Weather Bureau office in the Levy Building, phones kept jangling. People were calling for information—they simply dialed 214 on a rotary phone—and the office was even more jammed now with worried people than it had been the day before.
Not everybody was splashing about and having a party. Not every Galvestonian was cavalier about weather. Many were getting nervous.
In the later memories of some citizens, they were given no real warnings by the Weather Bureau office of how bad things were about to get. Some would later recall having their fears pooh-poohed.
In Joseph Cline’s future recollections, he and Blagden, coping with the pandemonium in the office, advised people to move to the high ground. They advised vacationers to take trains off the island. Soon they’d have to stop giving that advice; soon trains would stop running.
At 11:00 A.M., Joseph took readings. The barometer was falling fast. Winds were thirty miles per hour—still out of the north. Joseph sent that news via telegraph to Director Moore in Washington.
On Twelfth Street, a riderless horse came cantering through the wild rain, spooked by the storm.
A front gate had been left open by people going down to stare at the water on the beach. The horse turned at that open gate and entered the yard.
The horse climbed the porch steps. The front door was open too. The horse nosed its way into the house. It went straight up the staircase to the second floor.
Out on the east end, Daisy Thorne and her mother found themselves welcoming refugee neighbors. Many were fleeing their fragile wooden homes. The Lucas Terrace apartment building seemed far more solid.
The beach, viewed from the Thornes’ windows, wasn’t a beach any more. It was gulf.
On their wood stove, Daisy’s mother made coffee. She and Daisy started cooking biscuits for the visitors. By midmorning, Lucas Terrace was standing in the water. The gulf surrounded it on all sides, and rain whipped the windows. Daisy and Mrs. Thorne kept welcoming guests. The place was getting crowded.
Early that morning, Sister Elizabeth Ryan had left the orphanage to buy supplies at the markets in town. By 10:00 A.M., the water was three feet deep on all sides of the building, and Sister Elizabeth hadn’t returned. All morning, as the weather had grown more violent, Mother Camillus Tracy had grown more worried. Finally, she’d sent two of the orphanage’s maintenance men to town to track down Sister Elizabeth.
Now it was midday. The water surrounding the building was higher still. None of the three had yet returned.
Louise and her friend Martha had been enjoying splashing in the deep water in the streets. There were tiny toads leaping out of the water—even some snakes going by.
But now they were surprised. Boxes were floating quickly by them on the water. Then some clothes. Some loose boards. Some toys.
These objects were bewildering. The fun seemed to be ending. The girls said good-bye and splashed homeward.
Only minutes later, Louise was watching from a chair in the rooming house kitchen as brown water flooded straight across her mother’s carefully tended gardens.
Police Chief Ketchum, working at his desk at City Hall, was having as busy a morning as the Cline brothers and their assistants. While Joseph Cline manned the Weather Bureau office in the Levy Building, Chief Ketchum was trying to cope with the rising anxiety of dozens of Galvestonians.
His phone rang steadily, and by late morning, he wasn’t hearing only from people with questions and concerns about the storm. Now he was being asked to make rescues.
Galveston had a horse-drawn police patrol wagon. Ketchum started sending it out to help people who had been stranded in their homes by the rising water.
One of the first patrol-wagon missions went to Daisy Thorne’s building, Lucas Terrace. The chief had a call from a man whose mother-in-law lived in one of the apartments there—on the third floor, just upstairs from Daisy and her family. The mother-in-law was stranded, the man said. People in the building had been calling on the phone for hacks—horse-drawn taxis—but no cabby was willing to fight the storm to go that far east. The building was already surrounded by water.