The Storm of the Century

by Al Roker

  Police Chief Ed Ketchum hadn’t left his post at City Hall all night. City Hall was partly in ruins, but after sending his son Henry home late Saturday afternoon—with the terse “it’s going to get rough”—the chief hadn’t seen his family, didn’t yet know whether they’d survived.

  His attitude was that if he was good to others, God would be good to him. The chief left City Hall for the Tremont.

  Religious leaders came too, including the Catholic priest Father Kirwin, rector of St. Mary’s Cathedral. The basilica was one of the buildings to survive the storm. Father Kirwin’s good friend Rabbi Henry Cohen was there. Despite falling plaster, the Rabbi and Mollie and the children had made it through, and Cohen was already thinking of nothing but how to provide relief to his fellow citizens.

  It took some doing for the city’s surviving elite even to get to the Tremont. They had to pick their way through the corpses over sharp mountains of deadly wreckage. But convene they did.

  When the team had gathered in the hotel lobby, Mayor Jones opened the meeting. He noted formally that no department or agency of the city’s government was now functioning. He therefore formally invoked emergency executive powers.

  The mayor created a body he called the Central Relief Committee. He bestowed on this committee unlimited powers to do anything it believed necessary to cope with the crisis. The committee, it was quickly decided, would answer only to a triumvirate: Colonel Hawley, Police Chief Ed Ketchum, and Mayor Jones himself. Under those auspices, it would run Galveston until the emergency could be declared over. With Galveston cut off from the rest of the world, the committee became its new government.

  The mayor also declared martial law.

  Disturbing rumors were already spreading. There was wild drunkenness out in the street, people crazed by the horror of their surroundings. Other stories told of “ghouls”: looters already pillaging corpses for jewelry and other valuables, exploring ruined buildings in search of money and property.

  Also, some storekeepers with supplies that hadn’t been ruined were engaging in another form of looting: price gouging. Bacon, it was said, was up to fifty cents a pound this morning. Bread was sixty cents a loaf. Captains and owners of the few working boats were already meeting to fix prices for trips to the mainland.

  The mayor and the committee decided that the police and the local militia must put an end to all of these practices immediately.

  Local militia: that sounded good. But how to organize an ad hoc military and police force under these impossible conditions? Who should run it?

  Chief Ketchum said he had very few police officers alive and functioning. The difficulty in building a police and militia force to exert some discipline on the city looked overwhelming.

  But another man had shown up at this meeting at the Tremont: one Lloyd R. D. Fayling. Fayling was a veteran soldier and officer. He’d served as a deputy U.S. marshal in Chicago during riots there; he’d led a company of volunteers in the Spanish-American War. Now a civilian employed by a publishing company, Lloyd Fayling was a lover of sharp military discipline.

  He was also evidently fearless. During the horrible night before, Fayling had saved more than forty people from drowning. Wearing only his trademark brightly colored bathing suit—it had made him famous that summer on Galveston’s beaches—he’d helped occupants of a runaway sloop get into the Gill and League Building at Twenty-First and Market Streets, where his office was. Men had literally thrown babies from the boat into Fayling’s arms. Then Fayling had used that same craft to make repeated excursions into the water. He’d rescued many others that way.

  This morning, with the water mostly gone, Fayling had changed out of his bathing suit into something presentable. He’d climbed over piles of sharp glass and brick to get to the Tremont Hotel to offer his talents to the city. It was Fayling who brought in the news that people were wandering crazily in the streets. Some of them, he reported, were soldiers from Fort San Jacinto and Fort Crockett. Garrisons at both forts had suffered much loss of life and terrible damage to armaments.

  The soldiers in the city’s wreckage were nearly naked and profoundly confused, Fayling reported—but they might be made useful in restoring order. Fayling also told the meeting that looting had begun.

  He suggested that Chief Ketchum appoint him a police officer. Ketchum found a wet envelope. On it he scribbled an official commission making Fayling a sergeant. The chief, the mayor, and the committee as a whole assigned him the job of forming a militia.

  Some warned him that the soldiers out in the wreckage weren’t likely to take orders from a civilian, but Fayling was nothing if not confident. Damp commission in hand, he went out into the ruined streets in search of his new army.

  The next thing the committee determined it had to do, right away on Sunday morning, was get word out to the mainland, to the state capital at Austin, and to Washington, D.C.

  The city owned a twenty-foot steamer with a draft shallow enough to handle the bay. A small group volunteered to go to the ruined wharves, determine whether that boat was functioning, and try taking it across the bay and then make their way to Houston.

  On Sunday, the group did make it across the bay on that small, badly damaged steam launch. The first official delegation to get out of Galveston, they arrived on the coast at Texas City on Sunday afternoon.

  As these men began wading across the flooded plain, they saw how far the devastation had reached. They passed dead bodies and debris. At last they found some functioning railroad tracks.

  On the tracks was a handcar. They climbed on. Pumping the handle up and down, they rode the rails toward Houston to bring the awful news and ask for help.

  About four blocks from the Tremont, Lloyd Fayling, newly minted police sergeant with extraordinary emergency powers, came across four artillery soldiers. They were barefoot. They seemed bewildered and lost.

  “ ’ten-SHUN!” Fayling snapped. As if automatically, the men responded. They came to attention and awaited orders. Fayling had the impression that they were relieved to have a leader.

  They were now policemen, Fayling informed these four men. He would swear them in later, if he had time, but for now they were to fall in and follow him in the task of locating clothes, guns, and ammunition.

  When two of the men began complaining and asking questions, Fayling barked, “Silence in the ranks!”

  The men became quiet. Now Fayling saw an army captain he knew and respected, standing on a ruined corner, wearing pajamas. Fayling verbally commissioned this captain an officer of the new police force.

  With the pajama’d captain’s help, he led his recruits slowly through the wreckage in search of shoes, guns, clubs, and food for the small company. On every corner, they found new soldiers and tried to outfit them as well.

  Then they found a bugler militiaman who had brought his instrument out into the wreckage. Fayling ordered him to blow the call for militia assembly.

  The bugler blew as loud as he could. And amazingly, the Galveston militia began to assemble. Climbing over wreckage from every direction emerged men ready to serve. Many had even changed into their militia uniforms. Fayling began to think there was hope for civic order after all.

  Only two hours after he’d been appointed a police sergeant by Chief Ketchum at the Tremont, Lloyd Fayling had armed men standing guard duty all over the former downtown. Pleased, he went back to the Tremont.

  He wanted to report to the committee. And he wanted more power.

  To dispose of the thousands of corpses, the committee first had to dig out and find the bodies before infestation set in. That meant cleaning up the wreckage, starting right away.

  The committee had given itself extraordinary powers, and it had declared martial law. Now it used that authority.

  The committee established a makeshift morgue in a cavernous warehouse still standing on the Strand between Twenty-First and Twenty-Second Streets. The dead bodies were to be brought there and laid out in long rows. Distraught families so
on began arriving in hopes of identifying loved ones.

  But as the day went on, the warehouse got hot and began to stink. There were only about fifty bodies in the warehouse morgue so far. There were untold others on and under the pile.

  This morgue idea was dwarfed by the gigantic scope of the grotesque problem the survivors were facing. It wouldn’t work.

  Sergeant Lloyd Fayling arrived back at the Tremont Hotel late Sunday morning. He reported to the committee on the new emergency force he’d begun building out of the shards of the army and the militia. Mayor Jones and Chief Ketchum, deeply involved in planning, quickly gave Fayling what he’d come for: a new commission.

  Now he was Major Fayling—commander in chief of all military and police in Galveston. He had power, granted by the committee, to draft any men he met to serve under him and to requisition any property he deemed useful.

  He was subordinate only to the chairman of the committee, the mayor, and the police chief. Armed with these new powers, Major Fayling went back out into the ruined streets.

  The Dallas insurance man Thomas Monagan had spent a horrible night anchored on the bay amid the stench. On Monday morning, he had the schooner’s captain weigh anchor. They sailed over to what remained of the wharf.

  There they left the boat. They entered the ruined city—the first official civilian relief delegation to Galveston.

  U.S. General McKibben and his men had preceded them in the small steamer, along with Texas General Scurry, as the first relief delegation of the U.S. and Texas military. McKibben’s trip across the bay had shaken the military man as hard as Monagan’s trip had shaken the insurance man. After steering around the floating bodies of women and children, “I have not slept a single moment,” McKibben told people days later.

  And yet these first outside relief teams also found that the people of Galveston hadn’t been waiting helplessly and hopelessly cowering until relief arrived. Anything but. It was only Monday morning—the beginning of the second day after the storm—when Thomas Monagan and his crew entered the city. To their surprise, they found a form of officialdom in action.

  The committee had taken charge. A stunned people and a group of overwhelmed civic leaders had already started responding to this nightmarish scene. Thomas Monagan felt an unexpected sense of the city’s resilience and vitality in the midst of awful tragedy.

  Much of what Monagan found to admire in the ruined city reflected the energy of Major Lloyd Fayling. His first exertion of martial law on Sunday morning had been the closing of all saloons, under orders of Chief Ketchum. Given his powers, there was little practical resistance. Fayling ordered his men to tell all saloonkeepers to close up shop. If they encountered any complaints, they were to make a show of arms. If anyone reopened, they would arrest him.

  The other big issue was looting. Fayling gave orders: any looter was to be shot on sight, no questions asked. Next he would turn his attention to price gouging.

  But it was becoming clear to Fayling that his force needed to be bigger. Much bigger. Putting out a call for volunteers, he also began using his powers to impress troops at gunpoint.

  Fayling soon had three companies of infantry. These were named A, B, and C—with the A Company made up of regular soldiers, and the B and C Companies formed by mixing militia with impressed and volunteer civilians.

  Then Fayling got a cavalry troop. In the first two days after the storm, having stationed infantrymen at key points, he’d been patrolling the entire city on foot with his personal squad. They ranged widely, in part to extend patrols into outlying areas, in part to supervise the many squads of infantry stationed throughout the area.

  But the piles of wreckage were sharp, with broken glass and tile, nails, and pointed lumber. Fayling and his men were ruining their shoes and slicing up their feet. At the armory in the mornings, the men had to bathe their feet in cold water just to get into their battered shoes. They walked for miles when, Fayling knew, they really should have been in a hospital.

  A solution lay in yet another weird, post-hurricane phenomenon. All over town wandered surviving domestic animals and livestock: cows, dogs, cats, and horses. They’d been abandoned. And the horses, in particular, eagerly sought out human company.

  These were Texas horses. Some were adept at galloping and jumping under tough riders—they’d been bred to that life. Many others were not: they were work animals, dray horses.

  But Fayling’s men were Texas riders. They knew how to train horses. Very soon, Fayling and his mounted troops were flying about town at full gallop. The horses were leaping the deadly wreckage, clearing piles five feet high that were otherwise impossible to pass.

  With this cavalry division, Fayling now seemed to be everywhere. He was going through horses the way he’d gone through shoes: he wore out two a day. His plan was to never stop moving. He didn’t sleep. He ate sandwiches in the saddle.

  Nobody on sentry duty could relax for a moment: Major Fayling could seemingly materialize out of thin air in any part of town at any time. Indeed, he made sure the men believed that he would summarily shoot anyone caught sleeping on guard duty. He wouldn’t have done it, he said later. But he wanted the men to think he would, and they did. He never caught any sentinel napping.

  Fayling also requisitioned every firearm he could find in Galveston. (He personally carried two six-shooters and a saber, which he used for making arrests.) Mayor Jones issued an order under martial law putting the citizenry on notice that all arms must be turned over to the military. All citizens were forbidden to carry arms without written permission from Mayor Jones, Chief Ketchum, or Major Fayling.

  Prices, meanwhile, were set by the committee and enforced by Fayling. Soon bacon was down to fifteen cents a pound, bread to ten cents a loaf. And a trip across the bay to the mainland—they were beginning to happen—was $1.50 per passenger.

  And yet even before the first relief teams arrived from Houston, Austin, and Washington, and despite their own staunch early efforts to improve a disastrous situation, the committee and all the people of Galveston had quickly come to realize that the horrible smell of decay could only get worse. Many people seemed to have entered a state of deadly calm and total focus. A normal approach to burying the dead—identifying loved ones and giving them decent rites—was clearly out of the question now.

  As early as Monday morning, the committee had therefore arrived at a new solution. These bodies must be thrown into the sea. Right away. Stop laying bodies out for a decent burial that could never take place: mass consignment to a watery grave was to be indiscriminate, total. There was no choice.

  And so the loading began. All day Monday, every possible conveyance was pressed into service for hauling bodies: carts, drays, wagons, and fire trucks.

  Fleming Smizer, father of the newlywed Annie McCullough, worked at the Custom House at Sabine Pass across the bay on the mainland, and now he was crazy with worry. He’d weathered the storm but still had no news of his wife and daughter.

  He didn’t know they’d sought shelter in the school on the high ground of Broadway. He couldn’t know whether any building where they might have sheltered had withstood the storm. He only knew there might be thousands dead in Galveston.

  Smizer couldn’t get across the bay without a tugboat, so he was forced to wait as his tension increased. Finally he did board a tug for Galveston.

  On the island at last, Smizer found the school at Broadway and Tenth nothing but a pile of wreckage. There Annie and Ed and their families had fled for safety, along with so many others. Broadway was the high ground, the thinking went; the waters would not reach it. But that high levee of timber and other objects shoved relentlessly from the gulf beach against the high ground on Broadway had brought about the ruin of the school, seemingly the sturdiest of buildings. In the end, it went down.

  Smizer learned that homeless people were gathered now at the county courthouse—basically camping. He hurried there, and he was overjoyed to find his daughter, his wife, and his son-in
-law among the crowd in the large building. They were unhurt.

  And it was amazing that they were unhurt. At the school, Annie McCullough had seen fifteen people killed in one shot when lightning knocked a chimney down on top of them, right where she’d just been sitting. There had been a little boy—a white child—hanging onto Annie, begging her and Ed to look out the window and see if his house was still standing. The boy’s father had gone back to find his wife. The man had never returned. With most of the school building wrecked, people inside had begun to face the fact that the last rooms must soon go too.

  But then, around 9:00 P.M., Annie saw the moon. She could tell the waters were receding at last.

  “Come,” Ed told her. “Let’s go down to the courthouse.” He believed that building would still be standing, and he was right. He and Annie knew that not only Annie’s roses, so carefully placed in tubs, but also their entire house, would be gone now.

  So the couple and their families left the ruined building. Moonlight revealed the devastation. They picked their way through the slime and sharp edges of a horribly fallen city.

  Annie, Ed, and the other Smizers and McCulloughs moved into the courthouse. There was nothing else to do. When Annie’s father found them there, the whole extended family was reunited. Yet many of their friends had died. Annie and Ed themselves had no home and nothing left. With their parents and aunts and cousins, these newlyweds were now trying to live in a courthouse.

  There was a white man at the courthouse where Annie and Ed and the McCullough and Smizer families were sheltering, and he kept breaking down in tears at the plight of the homeless people there. “If your house is gone,” the man told Ed McCullough, “you bring your family. Come live with us.”

  Curious, Ed went over to the man’s house. He found the place a muddy mess, but it was still standing. The man’s wife was down on her knees, trying to scrape up mud. The man told her to turn the house over to the McCulloughs. Ed went back to the courthouse and retrieved his relatives.