Spooky Texas

by S. E. Schlosser

  When I got to the house, I fed him a mush of bread and milk, not sure how his little stomach would take regular food after starving for nearly two days. But from the way he tore into it, it must’ve sat well. After he swallowed the last bite, Henry trotted into the bedroom and leapt up on the blue and gold quilt while I pushed aside the dresser and retrieved the broken chain and Cora’s wedding ring from the splinter of wood behind it.

  I don’t know why some people are given the gift of second sight while others are not. I’m just grateful for the little girl who used her gift to comfort a hurting old man. I rubbed Henry’s golden ears and then picked up the little dog and gave him a hug for my Cora.

  25

  The Letter

  GALVESTON

  My dearest Elizabeth,

  Little granddaughter, as I write this letter to you, I feel death lurking in the corners of my bedchamber. I have lived a long life, and a good one, and I have no regrets. But I feel that there should be at least one person in this world, save myself, who knows the secret that I have kept so long buried in my past. And so I entrust it to you, dear child. Young woman, I should say, for I hear you are engaged to be married. To a worthy fellow, my son writes me, and I believe him. Knowing you as I do, I realize that keeping a secret from your beloved husband-to-be will distress you, and so I give you my permission to share this letter with he who has won your hand.

  You will laugh, I think, when I tell you where it all began. But I am in earnest when I say it started with a man called Jean Laffite. The Gulf Pirate, you will say with a smile, and my answer is yes. Or privateer, as he preferred to be called. You know the story, Elizabeth, of course?

  Jean Lafitte—pirate and privateer—lived much of his life outside the law. Along with his “crew of a thousand men,” he and his older brother Pierre Lafitte established their own “Kingdom of Barataria” in the swamps and bayous near New Orleans. Jean outfitted privateers and arranged the smuggling of stolen goods (the most prized of which were slaves), while Pierre ran the commercial side of their business from his blacksmith shop in New Orleans. At one time, a price of $500 was placed on Jean Lafitte’s head by the Louisiana Governor, William C. C. Claiborne. In response, Jean Lafitte put a $5,000 bounty on the governor!

  But Jean Lafitte showed himself loyal to Louisiana when he provided troops specializing in artillery for the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, greatly assisting Andrew Jackson in repulsing the British attack, and for this he was officially exonerated of wrongdoing. At least for a time.

  But Jean Lafitte returned to his evil ways, and his crimes finally got him run out of New Orleans around 1817. He then relocated to the island of Galveston, Texas, where he established another “kingdom” he named “Campeche.” In Galveston, Lafitte lay claim to a lavishly furnished mansion which he named “Maison Rouge.” The upper level held a cannon that stood guard over Galveston harbor. Lafitte remained in his kingdom until the schooner USS Enterprise was sent to Galveston to remove him from the Gulf after one of the pirate’s captains attacked an American merchant ship. Lafitte agreed to leave the island without a fight, and in 1821 he departed on his flagship, the Pride, burning his fortress and settlements and reportedly taking immense amounts of treasure with him.

  From that point on, Lafitte’s power and influence ebbed, and he became a petty pirate and thief. He established a base on Mugeres Island off the coast of Yucatán, but it was just a small collection of squalid huts. He died of a fever in 1826.

  Such is the official story of Jean Lafitte. But there is an unofficial tale that was passed down in my grandmother’s family for years after the pirate left Galveston. A tale of treasure buried on the island, and a secret map showing its location. According to the story, Lafitte filled two cannons with treasure—one with silver and one with gold—and then sealed the top of each with cement. The two cannons were then buried in a secret location not too far from the place where I grew up, and a map was entrusted to one of his close associates, who married my grandmother a few years after Lafitte’s death. Several attempts were made to retrieve the treasure, but either the map was faulty or the hurricanes had washed the cannons out to sea long before our family tried to claim them.

  Of course, each new generation in the family was shown the map, and each of us had a try at finding the treasure. To no avail. I spent many a summer night digging around the massive roots of an old tree near the shore, to the betterment of my muscles but not of my pocketbook. Still, we were not the first island family to search for Lafitte’s treasure, nor would we be the last.

  Well, I grew up fine, despite the disappointment of a treasure never found, and married a pretty young neighbor of mine in September 1899. We settled in a small house on Second Street in Galveston, right down the road from my parents’ home, and I took a job in the local telegraph office. Galveston was the place to be in those days. It was one of the most important seaports in Texas—more than 70 percent of the country’s cotton crop at the time passed through its port, and some 1,000 ships anchored there each year. Rich folks from all over the United States came to our island to bathe in the warm, therapeutic waters of the Gulf of Mexico, since the shallow waters made it easy for bathers to safely wade several yards offshore.

  Galveston was home to about 37,000 people in those days, and we had many firsts in Texas that might not seem like a big deal now, Elizabeth, but were a very big deal at the time. We had the very first electricity in the state, the first telephones, the first medical college. At that time, there was more money in Galveston than in Newport, Rhode Island, the summer home of some of the nation’s wealthiest families!

  Life was just about as perfect as it could get as my new wife and I approached our one-year anniversary. I bought roses for Mary on the evening of September 5, and we walked along the beach at sunset, enjoying the warm water and cloudless sky. I mentioned to her casually that my buddy from the weather bureau, Cline, had heard that a tropical storm was moving our way from Cuba. We both found it impossible to imagine a storm that beautiful evening, as we stood watching pelicans flying overhead and saw a white egret wading through the grassy swamp near the shore, in search of some dinner.

  But by the afternoon of September 7, large swells from the southeast were observed on the Gulf, and clouds began moving in from the northeast. My buddy Cline was worried, now. A hurricane was approaching, and the Galveston Weather Bureau office raised its double square flags to indicate a warning was in effect. Cline urged me and his other buddies to evacuate the island, but none of us paid much attention. We’d been hit by tropical storms before and lost a few boards from the roof. No big deal.

  I asked Mary if she wanted to leave the city when I got home that night, but she just laughed. I laughed too, but remembered how worried Cline was, and that started to make me uneasy. He kept talking about how the city was too flat—just eight or nine feet above sea level at its highest point. If this hurricane was as bad as predicted, that was not nearly high enough.

  Oh, Elizabeth, how I wish I had listened. How I wish I had taken my little wife and fled the island that night. Instead, we laughed over our fish chowder and walked out to watch the high waves harassing the shoreline. Mary called it exciting as the waves pounded the beach and high fish-scale-shaped clouds moved inland. I couldn’t help noticing that the pelicans were also flying inland as fast as their wings would take them and that all the large wading birds were missing. Even the pesky gulls and grackles were not as prevalent as usual on the evening of September 7.

  I was at the office just after dawn the morning of September 8, and already the water was rising over the low end of the island in spite of north winds that should have been pushing them back. I saw some early-rising children playing in the flood waters, watched by their indulgent mothers as clouds poured across the sky, bringing in the storm.

  Cline dropped into my office to send a telegram to the Weather Bureau in Washington, D.C. “Unusually heavy swells from the southeast. . . . Such high water with opposing winds n
ever observed previously,” he dictated to me, obviously very nervous. The hurricane was going to hit us head on, and he urged me to go home. But how could I? If a bad storm hit Galveston, the telegraph would be needed. Conceding my point, Cline left the office to try to warn others to move to higher ground. Higher ground? The highest point on the island was less than ten feet above sea level!

  At my first break, I ran home to First Street and urged Mary to get my folks and take them over to her parents’ house, since they had a larger, sturdier place over on Seventh Street. Surely the water would never rise that high. Mary laughed at my worry, kissed me, and then waded up the road toward my folks’ house to pound on their door and happily demand that they give her entrance. It was nice to see her handling the emergency with high spirits. That would help keep everyone calm.

  THE LETTER

  I hurried back to the telegraph office, fighting against the rain and rising wind. The water was already creeping up Second Street, and it looked to rise higher. I wondered if I shouldn’t have told Mary to go further inland. At that moment, a board was ripped off the building beside me, and I ducked just in time to avoid decapitation. Lord! That wind was strong. I didn’t feel safe until I was back in the office, away from the wind and the rain and the rising water. When I got inside, my boss informed me that one of the bridges to the mainland had been destroyed by the storm surge, and that a steamship had broken free of its moorings and destroyed the other three—there was no way to get off the island.

  By this time, waves raged inland from both the gulf and the bay, and one of Cline’s assistants measured wind speeds of a hundred miles per hour, just before the anemometer was blown away. Word came in that St. Mary’s Orphanage, home to ninety-three children and ten Catholic nuns, which stood near the beach, had been blown away by the storm. The only survivors were three boys who managed to cling to an uprooted tree as it was tossed around by the rising waters. Then the telegraph lines went down, and we were cut off completely from the mainland. My employer sent all of us home to take our families to safety, and we went gladly.

  The storm surge was right at our feet, and we waded through rapidly deepening water as the roofs of the houses and miscellaneous timbers went flying through the streets as though they were paper. It would be suicidal to attempt a journey through the flying debris all the way to my in-laws’ house, so I took refuge with several other men in a nearby mansion that looked sturdy enough to withstand a volcano blast. One of the families sheltering there lived down the block from me. The father told me sadly that my little cottage had already been smashed to driftwood by the huge rolling waves.

  By three o’clock, the entire city was underwater. Looking out the upper windows of the mansion, I saw house after house collapse into the raging waters as the surge pushed the houses off their foundations and the waves beat them into a mass of debris. Those still standing were like little islands among a rising, roaring sea. I stood there praying over and over that my wife and parents were all right. Then one fellow came running into the mansion, shouting that he had a rowboat and was looking for volunteers to help rescue those who were stranded. I volunteered at once and spent the remaining daylight hours helping people off rooftops, down from trees, and pulling them off logs and driftwood. As soon as the rowboat was full, we’d battle the surf, bumping sometimes into the sides of buildings, trying to avoid the worst of the currents as we rowed back to the mansion to drop off the ones we had rescued so we could go and save some more.

  We had to abandon our rescue efforts when it grew too dark to see. So we huddled together in the “palace,” listening as the storm raged and the house was battered again and again by fifteen-and-a-half-foot waves. The mansion was pummeled by the debris of broken-up houses, and I was afraid that it might collapse. A huge shudder passed through the mansion once during the night, caused, we later discovered, by a wall of debris at least two stories high that sideswiped the house. The wall of debris had pushed across the island, destroying nearly everything in its path.

  The storm gradually died away during the night. At dawn, we stumbled outside into a perfect morning—sunny, balmy, and with a lovely breeze. Our eyes were met by a scene of total and complete destruction. The area from First Street to Eighth Street and from the beach to the harbor was destroyed, as was the area west of 45th Street to the end of the city. Between those two areas, the destruction stretched at an angle from Ninth Street to 45th Street. Houses were bulldozed flat for up to fifteen blocks from the beach. The streets—what was left of them—were bare. No people. No animals. No trees. Piles of debris had buried entire families underneath what remained of their homes.

  I went rushing toward my in-laws’ home in Seventh Street, hoping to find my wife, my parents, my in-laws—anyone. But Seventh Street was gone. As I ran in horror through the wreckage, I bumped into my buddy Cline, who grabbed me by the shoulder, his face twisted with pain. I stopped abruptly and stared at him. And then I knew. They were gone. All of them. He told me quickly. He’d found my Mary and my parents wading through the water toward her parents’ place and took them up in his buggy. They’d picked up my in-laws and everyone had taken refuge in Cline’s large house near the sea.

  At first it looked like everything would be fine. Then a trolley trestle was washed against the house and battered the walls over and over in the heavy surf until the house collapsed. Only eighteen of the fifty people who had sought refuge there survived. Cline’s wife never rose above the water after the wreck of the building, and neither had mine. Cline and his boy had been thrown into the surf and had survived by clinging to debris. His brother Joseph had grabbed the other two Cline children, and the two men and three children had stayed afloat on the wreckage as best they could until the storm passed.

  I spent most of the day looking for my wife, parents, and in-laws. I found my parents and my in-laws underneath a pile of debris nearly a mile from the site of Cline’s old home. Of Mary, there was no sign. I kept checking the piles of corpses retrieved by the firemen that first day, but Mary wasn’t there, either.

  I joined in the clean-up efforts, hoping to find my wife. Debris piles stood several stories high, and the stench of decaying bodies and fish and other animals rotting in the streets was nearly unbearable. No one knew what to do with all the bodies. On the first day, the firemen started bringing in corpses by the wagon load—a dozen at a time—to be identified. But there were hundreds and then thousands of bodies to cope with. And they decomposed rapidly in the heat.

  In order to avoid disease, disposal of the dead became imperative. The relief workers were forced to pile the bodies into boats and take them far out to sea to be dumped. But that didn’t work out too well, because in short order the bodies began washing up in the surf. By this time relief workers were pouring in from all over the United States, and we received orders to bury the dead wherever they were found. Still there were too many bodies to cope with, so finally they ordered the workers to burn the corpses along with the debris.

  It was horrible work, but it had to be done, and so I did it. My chances of finding my sweet bride were nil by now. She would have been burned as soon as she was found to prevent disease from spreading to the survivors. What with the wreckage and debris and dead bodies, I didn’t know where I was when I saw the muzzle of a cannon sticking out from under a shattered roof. I stepped closer and realized that the muzzle was filled with cement. My heart started pounding as I remembered all the family stories about Lafitte and his treasure. Surely not now? After so much personal loss, the treasure didn’t seem important any more. But if it truly was Lafitte’s treasure, the money could help me start over.

  At that moment, I realized that there was a human hand lying across the top of the cannon’s muzzle. It was a woman’s hand. I ran forward, pulled the debris aside, and found my wife’s body draped across the old crustacean-encrusted black cannon, which had obviously been swept up from the seabed by the storm. Ignoring the terrible stink of decay, I gathered my wife up in my arms
and wept. A sympathetic fireman pulled me away after a moment, not wishing me to be sickened by poor Mary’s rotting flesh. He helped me carry my bride to the funeral pyre. After her body was consigned to the flames, the fireman sent me to one of the temporary shelters to wash up and rest. He hadn’t looked twice at the old cannon.

  I slept restlessly on my cot and awoke after dark. Finding Mary with the cannon seemed like a sign. Here is the treasure, she seemed to be saying. Use it to rebuild your life. I found a pick axe among the equipment brought to the island by the relief crews and went back to the old cannon where I had found Mary. I dug out the cement—found, to my wonder, the treasure—and then filled several burlap sacks with gold and jewels. Then I headed for the nearest boat and by dawn the next day had sailed away from Galveston. My only possessions were the clothes on my back and the sacks full of treasure I had taken from Lafitte’s cannon. Everything else I had was gone.

  I heard later that one person in six died in Galveston that day. They estimate that over six thousand people died, all told, though the exact number will never be known.

  You know the rest of the tale, dear Elizabeth. I bought a large ranch, started running cattle, and then they discovered oil on my property. I met your grandma, swept her off her feet, and married her within ten days of our first meeting. We were happily wed for forty-odd years, and I don’t regret a one of them. The only secret I ever kept from her, and from our kids, was where I got the money to buy the ranch. And that secret is now yours. There is a safe deposit box in which resides the last of the gold. I didn’t need it once they found oil on the ranch, but I kept it anyway for Mary’s sake. Over the years, I gave all the jewels to your grandma, and some of them have already passed down to you. When I die, the gold is yours. I want you to keep it in memory of my first wife, who brought me treasure out of the sea so I could start again after the storm. As it turned out, Lafitte’s treasure helped me find the real treasure in my life, which was your grandma, and your Pa, and you. Use it wisely. Use it well.