The Storm of the Century

by Al Roker

  This idea suited Clara Barton. Galveston offered her an opportunity to save lives and bring comfort on a massive scale while giving the lie to her critics and competitors.

  In fact, Barton was ill and feeling weak that fall. But she was used to covering up. For all of her achievements and fortitude, she’d often been depressed and sickly. Hiding her frailness, Clara Barton took a special role in the first great national event of the century. She left for Galveston on what would become her final mission for the Red Cross.

  Winifred Black had succeeded in getting her exclusive story to Hearst over the wire. Now the reporter returned to her hotel room in Houston. She intended to bathe thoroughly, sleep for forty-eight hours, and catch a train back home to Denver.

  But no. As she opened the door of her room, she saw piles of telegrams. They’d come from every Hearst paper and wire center throughout the country. The Big Chief had been desperately trying to reach her.

  Every telegram had the same message: relief trains were heading to Houston at Hearst’s behest. They were coming from New York, San Francisco, and Chicago, among other cities. They were full of doctors, nurses, and relief supplies. This influx of personnel into Houston would be huge.

  Would Winifred meet all of those trains on their arrival in Houston? In the meantime, would she get a hospital going for them, right away, in order to treat the Galveston refugees? Would she then oversee the Hearst medical effort in Houston? And still continue to file stories on it?

  One foul cup of coffee later, Winifred was back at work.

  Money was not a problem, at least. The Big Chief had plenty of that. Winifred quickly identified an empty Houston high school that could serve as a hospital. She hired a driver and was carried around Houston in a carriage, at high speed, from store to store. At every store she asked the price of cots. When given a price, she promised a dollar more per cot if they were delivered to the high school within one hour. Merchants hastened to comply.

  By the time the first Hearst train arrived in Houston—it came from Chicago—Winifred Black had a full-scale refugee ward set up at the high school. And she had a new job: running it.

  Refugees from Galveston were pouring into Houston. With boat service partially restored, people were fleeing. During her twenty-four hours inside Galveston, Winifred Black had heard and seen the worst tragedies. She’d smelled the putrefying flesh, seen the homeless children and anguished, bereaved parents. She’d interviewed the gaunt-faced workers who dug steadily through the gruesome wreckage.

  But now in Houston came fallout from all of that. There were women arriving at the makeshift Hearst hospital, actively in the first stages of labor, with nowhere else to go. People showed up with awful injuries. Many were confused and bewildered; many raved in sheer madness.

  There was a problem with the Hearst relief doctors, Winifred quickly discovered. They were volunteers—nobly committing their time and energy to relief. But they held widely differing, even conflicting, theories about medical treatment. There was no standard medical practice in 1900. Some of these doctors practiced homeopathy, still very popular in the late nineteenth century, based on theories about disease rejected by what the homeopaths derided as “allopaths,” practitioners of mainstream techniques that homeopaths believed treated symptoms, not causes. Still other doctors on the scene were eclectic, blending allopathy and homeopathy, each in their own way. They couldn’t stop bickering.

  Too, the doctors hailed from different regions of the country. On that fact alone they argued tooth and nail—whose state or region was better?—when they should have been treating patients.

  Morale threatened to break down still further thanks to the doctor in charge. In a pinch, Winifred had found an older Houston physician and put him in charge of running medical operations in her makeshift ward. The young, modern doctors—of every school of thought—didn’t like him.

  When a group of young doctors came to Winifred to complain about the plodding old-fashioned ways of the boss, she took the blame for the man’s hiring. Then she read the youngsters the riot act. She reminded them of the principles of the Hippocratic oath and sent them back to work.

  After that, the doctors seemed to straighten up. Soon, the thrown-together Hearst hospital in Houston for the Galveston refugees was booming. People were being treated and actually released.

  And even as she ran the ward, Winifred kept filing her heartrending stories. To Annie Laurie and the Big Chief alike, no real distinction existed between reporting the many stories of human suffering and recovery, painful and uplifting alike; treating the damaged victims of the Galveston storm; and raising money for further relief. Driving this unprecedented national relief effort, yellow-press news, big money, and human compassion all played key roles.

  In America’s name, as Annie Laurie put it, the nation’s citizens kept responding. It wasn’t only the Journal and the World and magnates like Andrew Carnegie who sent money and supplies. Church after church and charity after charity, in town after town across the country, heard and read about Galveston and the relief effort and quickly raised funds and supplies. Those funds and supplies went to the Red Cross, to the Salvation Army, and to the Central Relief Committee itself in Galveston.

  And at the impromptu Hearst hospital in Houston, telegrams began arriving from all over the country offering to adopt the orphaned children of Galveston. As she kept filing her moving stories as Annie Laurie, Winifred Black was overseeing an improvised national rescue effort. Its scale seemed almost to match that of the hurricane itself.

  Meanwhile, in Galveston, Chief Ketchum had begun worrying about the extent of Major Lloyd Fayling’s authority. The chief thought that under the necessary condition of martial law, the major was wielding too much power with too little accountability. The adjutant general of Texas, Thomas Scurry, had arrived on the island that first Tuesday with a number of militia companies. With General Scurry’s administration now fully deployed, Ketchum and others on the committee determined it proper to adjust from an ad hoc emergency basis—the flamboyant civilian Lloyd Fayling, with paramilitary command of raw recruits—to a more stable procedure: a regular, experienced soldiery keeping order. That meant shifting command from Fayling to Scurry.

  But Fayling had grown used to running his own organization, and running it his own way. Giving up power wasn’t easy. Chief Ketchum, sensing Fayling’s resistance, played it cool at first. When he met with Fayling, he began by agreeing that it was really thanks to Fayling’s great efforts that the city was in such good order now. It no longer needed such a large force.

  But Ketchum followed up by asserting his own authority in no uncertain terms: Bring all your men in, Ketchum told Fayling, from all parts of the city. Assemble them at the armory for inspection.

  Fayling considered this a very bad idea. But he had no choice. He knew his own authority was fully subject to the committee that had created it, and to Chief Ketchum. And he remained a stickler for discipline and hierarchy. He assembled his troops.

  Chief Ketchum ordered an inspection drill outside the Tremont Hotel. About 7:00 P.M., Fayling marched his troops, in military order, from the armory down to the hotel and formed them in a hollow square outside. Then followed a wait of many hours. Fayling was sure that his men, loyal to him, were growing restive, and angry with the chief. The men refrained from outright mutiny against Ketchum, according to Fayling, only because he personally reminded them of their duty to obey the orders of the civilian authority.

  At last Ketchum emerged from the hotel. He ordered Fayling to return to his men and to put them through a drill, and Fayling again had no choice but to obey. Then Chief Ketchum took charge, reviewing the troops personally by giving them a series of commands; Fayling stood aside, at attention.

  His men responded poorly to Ketchum’s order. Fayling, steaming at attention, was forced to watch his men bumble through the drill. He was sure their errors resulted from Ketchum’s reading the orders out of an outdated Civil War drill manual.

/>   Chief Ketchum, for his part, concluded the review simply by ordering the men to ground arms and go home. As the recruits dispersed, Ketchum told Fayling to report to General Scurry in the hotel.

  Fayling could read the writing on the wall. As he entered Scurry’s office, he knew he was about to be relieved of command.

  So Fayling tried to turn the tables. Before Scurry could relieve him, he took the initiative. He asked the general for relief. Just for twenty-four hours, Fayling hastened to reassure the general, just in order to get some rest. This, he calculated, would make being relieved of duty his own choice and keep it temporary.

  The general thanked Major Fayling for his services. He called those services “most worthy.” He relieved Fayling of duty. Making no mention of any twenty-four-hour rest, he sent Fayling out of town on a mission to escort some prominent Galvestonians to Austin to take collection of $50,000 in relief funds from the governor. General Scurry took over Galveston’s security.

  So it was that Clara Barton’s entourage, arriving in Houston after a long delay in New Orleans, was met personally by Major Fayling on behalf of the Galveston committee. Having escorted the contingent of Galvestonians to Austin, Fayling had continued to insist he was only on a brief rest but instead was told to provide Clara Barton’s entourage with any assistance it might need.

  Fayling took that as an instruction to create a military honor guard, with himself in command, to welcome and assist the great humanitarian. He hustled around and “borrowed,” as he put it, a Houston militia corporal’s troops. He marched that guard over to the Hutchins House, the city’s finest hotel. There, backed by soldiers, he persuaded the proprietor to boot out a bunch of peddlers and salesmen—“mostly Hebrew,” Fayling sniffed—who had rooms on the parlor floor. The best part of the hotel was commandeered by Fayling for the use of Miss Barton and her entourage.

  On September 17, when she arrived at last at the station in Houston, Clara Barton was confronted by a surprise cadre of soldiers standing at “present arms.” Major Fayling greeted her with great formality and then escorted her and the Red Cross entourage, with martial ceremony, to the Hutchins House.

  There seemed to be a prevailing idea that Miss Barton would inspect relief efforts on the ground in Houston, at the volunteer hospitals set up by people like Winifred Black. But no, Miss Barton said: that was not why she had come. She wanted to get into Galveston itself as quickly as possible. She wanted to relieve the many afflicted there.

  The next day, however, all travel arrangements broke down. After riding the restored tracks to Texas City, the Red Cross entourage found no boat to take them across the bay. They had to spend the entire night sitting up in day-coach cars on the harbor.

  Fayling consoled himself for this glitch by keeping in mind that none of it could be considered his fault. That morning, the mayor pro-tem of Houston—the “fleshy Hebrew gentleman” of Fayling’s description—had relieved him of duty in arranging Miss Barton’s transportation. Fayling would later recall Miss Barton’s praising him for her grand reception in Houston. It was a far better reception, he reported her saying, than what she’d experienced on arriving at Johnstown in relief of that flood. She also asked him, Fayling said, to become her military aide during this mission.

  Miss Barton’s mind was evidently on other things. In her memoir of traveling to Galveston, she never once mentioned Lloyd Fayling. His glory days as a high official were over. Finally crossing the bay on the morning of September 15, 1900, Clara Barton and her Red Cross workers entered the disaster scene and got right to work.

  CHAPTER 15

  NO TONGUE CAN TELL

  “FIND DAISY AND MARRY HER.” THAT WAS DR. JOE GILBERT’S plan when he rode toward Texas City after the hurricane. And that’s just what he did.

  On Thursday, September 13, Galveston saw its first wedding since the storm. They’d had a long engagement, and now Daisy Thorne and Dr. Joe, joyfully reunited, would not extend that wait by even one day. They were joined in marriage while standing on a thick slab of mud in the aisle of Grace Episcopal Church.

  Daisy’s wedding attire was hastily improvised: a new black skirt, a borrowed white shirtwaist, and a white hat that had been soaked in the storm; something pink had faded into it.

  She didn’t mind. Having experienced all of a hurricane’s fury, and having survived it, she felt strongly that she’d been given a marvelous blessing.

  “To have been brought so close to the infinite,” is how she put it, “and to see how small finite things are.”

  Dr. Joe was a man of science, but he liked to say that it was Daisy’s red hair—a bringer of luck—that had saved her from death, saved all the people in her room. One of those people had a contrasting theory, however. He called Daisy the bravest person he had ever known.

  Arrangements for the Gilberts’ first night as a married couple were as impromptu as the wedding itself. Joe and Daisy stayed with Daisy’s uncle, and because that’s where the entire Thorne family were staying, along with other refugees, the house was too crowded for anything like a classic wedding night.

  The family offered Joe and Daisy a room of their own. The couple refused to put anyone out. That night, they slept separately. And the next morning, Daisy Gilbert left Galveston with Dr. Joe Gilbert to begin her new life in a new century.

  Even more amazing than the wedding of Daisy and Joe: Galveston was beginning a new life too.

  Only three weeks after that unimaginable Saturday night, help had arrived on a massive scale from every quarter. For one thing, Clara Barton had brought the American Red Cross team—with medical supplies, tubs of carbolic acid and quicklime for disinfectant, reserves of human commitment, and deep expertise.

  And Miss Barton brought more than that. From a four-story warehouse borrowed from John Sealy, she began her own appeals to the nation to send clothing, food, and money. She made specific requests: now disinfectant, now light clothing, now heavier clothing, now construction material. The confidence ordinary people placed in Clara Barton and the Red Cross clarified the disaster’s seriousness and inspired a public desire to give. Like Hearst’s and Pulitzer’s, Barton’s operation became a magnet for donations.

  And Miss Barton took on the Central Relief Committee that was running Galveston. That body was all male, of course, and all white, and she was used to dealing with such groups. She startled the committee by deploying local women in administrative relief positions that she intended to long outlast her own stay in Galveston. She bucked the committee’s original plan to rely long-term on temporary shelters for the thousands of homeless people on the island; she demanded that the committee instead earmark funds for low-cost permanent houses quickly.

  And she broke Texas codes going back to before the Civil War. She demanded that such housing be apportioned equally to people in need, without regard for race.

  The committee complied with all of her demands. By the time Clara Barton left the island, on November 15, 1900, not only had the sick and injured been treated, the hungry fed, the homeless housed, the orphans adopted, and the infected cleaned, but new ideas about equality for women and African Americans had also come to Galveston. They would grow in the years to come.

  Winifred Black was meanwhile running the full-fledged Galveston-refugee hospital in Houston, busy with doctors, nurses, and aides. Hearst’s and Pulitzer’s two big newspapers, along with American magnates and industrialists of every kind, kept raising awesome sums of money. They kept using money, power, and connections to get both cash and supplies to the island quickly. The White House, the U.S. Army, and the Texas state government were cooperating fully too. They provided both public funding and trained manpower, not only for security but also for rebuilding infrastructure, like bridges. The telephone and telegraph companies hastened to restore verbal communication; the rail companies started repairing track; electric companies worked on light and power. The U.S. Postal Service resumed mail service as early as September 12.

  And thanks to both the
papers and the Red Cross, ordinary people throughout the country dug deeply into their pockets. They contributed amounts that, while modest in themselves, added up to millions. Black churches in Georgia sent money, as did labor organizations in the Midwest. Galveston fundraising events were thrown from coast to coast: organ recitals, baseball games, galas. Fire companies, Sunday school classes, and every other kind of organization pitched in. People in Canada, Mexico, France, Germany, and other countries sent money too. The whole country—even much of the world—came together to bring life back to Galveston, Texas.

  All of that outside help powerfully amplified the extraordinary effort that the shattered Galvestonians themselves had begun making as early as that awful first Sunday morning. Nobody looking at the island’s grotesque situation in the anguished, nightmarish days following the destruction could have had any confidence in achieving even the most fundamental and urgent of tasks: removing thousands of corpses, treating the ill and injured, ensuring food and water supplies, housing the homeless. That grim prospect redefined the very concept of an overwhelming disaster.

  For the scale of destruction didn’t just seem unprecedented. It really was. This was truly the worst natural disaster Americans had ever seen. While death tolls would always be imperfect, it’s fair to say that around 10,000 people perished in one night. And yet within about three weeks of that awful day, thanks to the ceaseless persistence of both Galveston itself and all of turn-of-the-century America, miracles of human compassion and technical prowess were being accomplished on the island.

  The Galveston Daily News no longer amounted to a list of dead and not-dead people. The paper quickly began accepting advertising and reporting news on the city’s progress toward recovery. Telegraph lines were soon humming; new telephone lines carried voices. With the repair of the central electric dynamo came trolley service. A key aspect of martial law was eased when the saloons reopened.