The Storm of the Century Read online

  CONTENTS

  Underwater

  PART I: THEY ALL HAD PLANS 1 Looking Forward

  2 The Storm: Africa

  3 A Reasonable Argument

  4 Storm Watcher

  5 The Storm: From Cuba to Texas

  PART II: MAELSTROM 6 Galveston: Thursday, September 6

  7 Friday: The Waves

  8 Saturday Morning: Storm Tide

  9 Saturday Afternoon: “Half the City Underwater”

  10 The Night of Horrors

  PART III: THE WHITE CITY ON THE BEACH 11 Telegraph Silence

  12 The Pile

  13 “I Can Begin Life Again, as I Entered It”

  14 “In Pity’s Name, in America’s Name”

  15 No Tongue Can Tell

  Photo Section

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on Further Reading

  Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  UNDERWATER

  A MAN PINNED UNDER THE WATER STRUGGLES TO FREE HIMSELF. Fifteen feet below the water’s surface and the air he needs so badly, his thrashing body begins to weaken.

  Big timbers, mercilessly heavy—only moments ago, they held up his house—are pressing him down. They hold him deep underwater. He can’t move them. He begins to drown.

  Knowing he has no chance, he stops struggling. The man tries to accept his fate.

  Yet somehow when he comes to himself again, he’s risen from the depths and broken the water’s surface. Bobbing and kicking in a violently churning sea, he gasps for breath in the darkness, pelted by rain in a wind even louder than his gasps.

  Two of the great house timbers that held him down have risen with him. They press him, one from each side. He clings to them.

  He’s alive. It’s the night of September 8, 1900. And this is—or was—Galveston, Texas.

  The man is Isaac Cline. Gripping the timbers that nearly killed him, he surfs and circles randomly through a chaotic scene lit by flashes of lighting. There is no city. There is only this sea, its waves rising and falling as rooftops and treetops collapse into them. Objects of all kinds shoot from the swirling water and through the screaming wind: huge pieces of roof, doors, beds.

  At every lightning flash, Cline scans the water. His pregnant wife and three daughters were with him in their second-story bedroom. He ducks projectiles in the air, dodges debris in the surf, tries with all his strength to stay above the rising water. Desperately seeking any sign of his beloved family, he fears the worst.

  Isaac Cline knows exactly what’s happening. He’s a meteorologist—a weatherman—and one of the country’s best. As he fights the wind, the water, and the flying debris, he understands that what’s taking place tonight is something that he and other meteorologists of the United States Weather Bureau have long been certain could never occur here.

  A hurricane, Cline has reassured the public, can’t hurt Galveston, Texas.

  Now Cline knows that this is a monstrous hurricane, and it has destroyed his city in only a few hours. He has been as wrong as it’s possible to be. All of the systems, all of the miracles enabled by the modern science of meteorology, have failed.

  There’s no going back now. No way to correct the error. Galveston is gone.

  What Isaac Cline can’t know is that, more than a century later, this storm will remain not just the worst hurricane, but the worst natural disaster of any kind, ever to hit the United States: 10,000 or more lives lost in one night; higher winds and lower pressure than any previously recorded; damage estimated at nearly $20 million (more than $700 million in twenty-first-century money); a great city reduced overnight to miles of rubble. Adrift tonight on a surreal ocean of chaos where a city used to be, Cline can only go on scanning the dark maelstrom.

  He can only pray for any glimpse of his wife and children. The best weatherman in America can only wish things had gone differently.

  PART I

  THEY ALL HAD PLANS

  CHAPTER 1

  LOOKING FORWARD

  A SCORCHING END TO A HOT SUMMER: THAT’S WHAT EVERYBODY was saying. It was the first week of September in the grand turn-of-the-century year of 1900, and people in Galveston, Texas, were complaining about the heat.

  That’s one reason little Mary Louise Bristol, seven years old, was looking forward to the weekend. At her mother Cassie Bristol’s boardinghouse, not far from the harbor on Galveston Bay, work went on despite the heat, just as it always did—and just as work went on everywhere else all the time in bustling, steaming Galveston. This island city in the Gulf of Mexico, lying two miles off the Texas mainland, had become the most important port in the state, the foremost cotton-trading center in the world.

  Gangs of hustling longshoremen, black, white, and Mexican, loaded and unloaded ships on the wharves on the bay. Bankers and lawyers made deals in their offices above the broad sidewalks of Avenue B, known as the Strand. Cassie Bristol, a widowed mother of four, ran her boardinghouse near the harbor in hopes of feeding and bettering her family. Along with nearly 40,000 others, they all played their parts in a booming city’s busy life.

  Mary Louise Bristol, known as Louise, was Cassie’s youngest. And Louise was the only member of her family who had any time for play. Sometimes she played alone. Sometimes she played with her friend Martha, who lived across the street.

  But everybody else in the Bristol family was always busy with work. The girl knew her house wasn’t only a home but also a living, and she knew her mother was a smart woman. Louise’s father, a seaman, had died at sea when Louise was just a baby, and Cassie, left alone with four children, rolled up her sleeves, took out a mortgage on the house, added a second floor, and started renting rooms. Cassie had a goal: keep her children from falling into poverty and disgrace while teaching them the ways of a genteel life.

  That ambition made Cassie’s life a struggle. But it was a battle she was winning, thanks to constant work. Louise’s brothers were old enough to have jobs and to bring home their pay. Her sister Lois, fifteen, helped their mother at the boardinghouse.

  And the Bristol place was especially busy this week. School was back in session after the summer—Louise had just nervously started first grade on Monday—and every September, the house began filling to the brim with students of the University of Texas Medical School here in Galveston. Those young men were among Cassie’s most reliable customers. Soon they’d be swarming over the place, their trunks hauled in by horse-drawn wagon and humped inside by porters, their rooms assigned, their questions answered, their beds made, their food served. Louise’s mother was spending this week getting the place ready: cleaning and airing and washing and drying. Cooking and canning and stocking up on stores.

  What the little girl most looked forward to—as the endless work went on at home, and the heat of early September remained so oppressive—was the weekend. Hoping to forget about school, hoping for a change in the weather, Louise was looking forward to Saturday, when she could play.

  Saturday, of course, would come. When it did, on the eighth of September, Louise, her mother, and the rest of the Bristol family would find themselves fighting gigantic volumes of ocean and wind beyond anything they could ever have imagined. Saturday would plunge them all, with all of their fellow Galvestonians, into a dark world of sheer horror.

  Arnold Wolfram too was wilting out the end of summer with his fellow citizens in that first week of September. Wolfram would have seemed a staid enough, ordinary enough Galvestonian—a member of the thriving German American community in that polyglot gulf town. At forty-three, Wolfram worked in a fruit and produce store, where he made sales and took inventory. He was marrie
d to the former Mary Schmidt. They had six children, with four still living at home.

  There was nothing out of the ordinary about Arnold. And yet while many of Galveston’s German Americans had come directly from Germany, Arnold hailed from another, even older German community: that of Philadelphia. Arnold and his brother Henry had grown up bilingual, attending Philadelphia’s German-speaking schools. In young adulthood, Arnold had taken a factory job in his hometown, working for a hat company.

  But Arnold and Henry found themselves drawn to the American West. Many young men born in the nineteenth century fantasized about seeking their fortunes there. Many found the idea impractical in the end or simply lacked the courage to make the move.

  Not so the Wolfram brothers. In 1876, with the Civil War well over (they’d both been too young to serve), Arnold and Henry left Philadelphia and headed for the wide-open spaces of Texas.

  The great cattle drives were peaking when the Wolfram boys arrived, and Texas ranches needed hands; the brothers found work quickly. Signing on at a ranch near Corpus Christi, Arnold Wolfram, the young German American romantic, was finally living the cowboy life. And it was at the fandangos—ranch parties held by cowboys and hands—that he met the famous Texas outlaws. They would drop in to drink and carouse. They were treated like ordinary partygoers. Arnold got to rub shoulders with them.

  So now, almost twenty-five years later, this ordinary city groceryman Arnold Wolfram had something of a past. He’d once been a bit of a rambler, a rover, and a rider. It was said he’d even traveled with the fabled Texas Rangers. Brother Henry, more of a name-dropper than Arnold, claimed he’d met that most famous of Texas outlaws, John Wesley Hardin, that he’d been pals with celebrity Texas Rangers like Jack Helm and Sergeant Rudds.

  Arnold himself remained more reticent about giving his former associates’ names. But he did speak now and then about the outlaws, and about counting the Rangers as friends. And sometimes Arnold alluded mysteriously to a time when he had to ride bareback for the government on important official business.

  Now a new century was beginning, and the cowboy days of cattle-boom Texas were fading into the past. Arnold Wolfram was a settled middle-aged man. He raised his big family, did a day’s work for a day’s pay, walked or trolleyed to work on Galveston’s broad streets, and complained about the heat like everybody else.

  Arnold Wolfram had good reason to believe that the wild times and big adventures were all behind him now. He was wrong.

  Out on the east end of town, right down by the beach and the gulf waters, lived Annie McCullough. She was twenty-two, only recently married to Ed McCullough. Annie and Ed owned a little corner house with a sweet flower garden that featured Annie’s prized rosebushes.

  The McCulloughs’ lot lay two short blocks from the gulf beach, almost perfectly level with the flat sand. Nothing blocked the view down to the water, nothing obscured the big gulf sky. The neighborhood was nice and, as a young wife, Annie McCullough was having a busy and happy time there. Ed was a hardworking and competent man, handling multiple jobs. Among them was making deliveries on his flat two-wheeled mule-drawn wagon, called a dray.

  While she was not yet a mother, Annie nevertheless had a big family. She was a Smizer, one of the oldest African American families on the island, descended from the Galveston slaves who had been the first in all of Texas to receive news of their emancipation after the Union victory in the Civil War. The McCulloughs too had a history in Galveston’s black community. Ed’s relatives lived in nearby streets; a nephew of his lived with Ed and Annie. Annie’s mother lived nearby too, as did many others in the Smizer family.

  Annie’s father, Fleming Smizer, however, worked for the federal government at the Custom House at Sabine Pass, an inlet controlling access to the city of Port Arthur, northeast of Galveston. So Mr. Smizer was often out of town, dependent on tugboats and other transport for periodically getting back to his family in Galveston. Ordinarily that wasn’t a problem. He came home often.

  The McCulloughs’ east-end neighborhood on the beach was busy and thriving, but the lure of “beachfront property” had little meaning for Galvestonians in 1900, and the community on the gulf was largely working and middle class. The city’s richest people lived some way off the beach. The really fancy homes were on Avenue J, also known as Broadway. Running parallel to the gulf and the bay, bisecting the city and itself divided by a nicely planted median strip, Broadway was Galveston’s high ground—meaning it stood a few feet above sea level. The street was broad and elegant, with a trolley running down its median, and the palaces of the city’s first families lined it on both sides. Those houses—rambling, with gables, porches, and porticos—combined the crazy excesses of ornate Gothic detail with a tropical mood left over from the island’s French and Spanish days.

  Where the newlywed McCulloughs lived, things were less fancy. This week, the main things on Annie McCullough’s mind were her beloved roses, various family matters, and a new pair of shoes that didn’t fit. She planned to have Ed return the shoes on Friday.

  Newer to town than the McCullough and Smizer families were the Ketchums. Yet despite his standing as an outsider, Edwin N. Ketchum served as Galveston’s chief of police.

  In this first week of September 1900, Chief Ketchum was just getting back to town from a trip to Chicago, where he’d joined a reunion encampment of the Grand Army of the Republic—the organization for Union veterans of the Civil War. Ed Ketchum, top law-enforcement officer in Galveston, Texas, was a dyed-in-the-wool, unapologetic Yankee and former soldier of the Union army.

  Galveston was full of proud former Confederate soldiers. Old and getting older, in 1900 they still held yearly civic celebrations to commemorate their role in the Civil War. They recalled the lost cause of Southern secession with greater sentiment as every passing year made that cause more remote.

  So it was an indication of Galveston’s unusually mixed culture that in 1900 the city accepted not merely as a citizen, but also as its most important policeman, a person who had come of age while waging war on that same Confederacy. Ed Ketchum’s commitment to the Union cause was hardly subtle. He’d joined up as a drummer boy. By the war’s end, he was a captain. He was proud of his service, and his northern reunion trips proved it.

  But Ed Ketchum was not about to keep fighting the Civil War. That’s something the city of Galveston, as a whole, didn’t do either. Fifty-seven now, Ed was tall and skinny, a calm and genial man with a wife and eight children. The Ketchums lived in a solid, generously proportioned wood-frame house that had been built by one of Galveston’s founders, Michel Menard, who had come from Montreal. Despite its recent connection to the Confederacy, by 1900 Galveston in particular, and the state of Texas as a whole, were products of recent immigration and settlement from far-flung places. Both the booming city and the booming state of which it was such an important part had been ethnically, politically, and racially mixed from day one.

  And so Chief Ketchum, though a proud Yankee veteran, was a popular man in town. On his grand lawn, he held annual picnics open to the public. The Ketchums were known to own one of the city’s largest coffee urns, and when the Confederate reunion groups convened in Galveston, those aging Johnny Rebs borrowed the coffee urn from Ed Ketchum, the aging Billy Yank.

  That week, returning from his Chicago jaunt, Ed confronted a pile of paperwork on his desk at City Hall—a grandly turreted stone castle, chateau-like, with peaked cupolas and a clock tower. Heat or no heat, there was nothing for Ed to do but get on it. Like everybody else’s, Chief Ketchum’s work went on that week.

  And yet by Friday afternoon, when water from the Gulf of Mexico started running from the beach into town, and most of the citizenry of Galveston was preparing for nothing more than an exciting lark, Ed Ketchum would be among the first to start worrying.

  It wasn’t just the heat that first week of September. There was a stillness too.

  Everybody could feel it, and Daisy Thorne, bicycling on the sidewalks of Gal
veston, was no exception. Daisy embodied the new ideal of modern American beauty—chastely appealing yet mildly athletic, forward looking yet demure. A schoolteacher of twenty-three, notably pretty, with luxuriant reddish hair, Daisy owned the first pneumatic-tired bicycle in town.

  Cycling around town and along the beachfront, she wore a long skirt, a white shirtwaist, and a straw hat; a veil protected her face from the sun. To resist the sun still further, she bathed in the gulf waters only in the early evening, fully draped in the heavy bathing costume of her day.

  Daisy was modest and genteel, yet she was also posing as a woodland nymph for an amateur painter named Mrs. McCauley. The young woman’s physique and style—five-foot-four and 113 pounds, reddish hair pulled loosely back—offered just the kind of romanticism that painters and early photographers in 1900 loved to capture.

  This adventure as a model verged on the risqué, and Daisy’s mother had exacted a promise from the painter not to render her daughter’s face in a recognizable way.

  In real life, Daisy was a hard and focused worker. A graduate of the teaching program of the Sam Houston Normal Institute on the mainland in Huntsville—a three-year course that Daisy had completed in only one year—she now taught history, literature, and drawing to seventh graders at the Rosenberg Free School. She lived in Lucas Terrace, an upscale, fairly new apartment complex on Broadway’s far eastern end—the same end of town as Annie McCullough, though slightly farther from the gulf beach. There Daisy shared a large two-story apartment with her widowed mother, her aunt, her sister, and her brother.

  Like many genteel young women of modestly prosperous circumstances in 1900, Daisy spent her time at home in the pursuits of young womanhood considered appropriate in the day. She was an expert seamstress, sewing her own and others’ clothes. She and her mother cooked the family’s meals on the apartment’s wood-burning stove. She liked to play the parlor piano.