Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [108]
Luckily, Isaac left a memoir, Storms, Floods and Sunshine, published in 1945. It reveals little of his emotional life, but provided insights into the character of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America that one would be hard-pressed to find elsewhere. Where else could one learn that the state of Arkansas had become so fed up with improper pronunciations of the state’s name that it passed legislation making the official pronunciation “Arkansaw”?
I hunted Isaac’s trail, too, through the wonderfully rich, achingly fragile archives of the Weather Bureau, lodged in the new National Archives Annex outside Washington—a place that makes deep historical research not a chore but an exciting and always profitable journey. I touched records, it seemed, that no one had touched for the better part of a century. I handled the very telegrams that Willis Moore, chief of the bureau, himself had touched. I sneezed a lot.
Equally important, if more sterile, were the microfiche copies of Clara Barton’s papers at the Library of Congress. Barton knew her place in history. She kept letters and drafts of letters, telegrams and drafts of telegrams, even mundane communications aimed at securing free transportation to and from Galveston. (The Pullman Palace Company gave her a richly appointed Palace car, which railroads agreed to pull at no charge.) Most striking was her growing frustration at the discord that always seemed to accompany her forays into the field.
The single most valuable trove of documents on the hurricane, however, lies in Galveston’s Rosenberg Library, God’s gift to any student of the great hurricane. The library has hundreds of letters and personal accounts that describe the storm, and over four thousand photographs, some quite macabre. I mined the library’s holdings for anything that might provide a fragment of my dinosaur’s skin. I used photographs as original documents and spent hours studying them with a magnifying glass. I used details from these photographs to decorate the scenes in Isaac’s Storm. For example, I describe in one section what Isaac saw from the house where he and his daughters came ashore the night of the storm. Incredibly, the Rosenberg archive has a photograph of exactly that view.
One resource I found exceptionally useful was the library’s very detailed map of Galveston in 1899 (see “Fire Insurance Map,” in Sources), an immense bound volume that told me Isaac’s house was one of the largest in the neighborhood, that it had a slate roof, a small stable out back, and porches or “galleries” on the north and south sides. The map showed me, too, where his house stood in relation to the homes of neighbors like Dr. Samuel O. Young and Judson Palmer. It showed me that as Isaac headed toward the city Saturday morning after his first visit to the beach he would have passed near a wood-planing mill, a bulk coffee roaster, and numerous livery stables, some occupying entire blocks. Each must have perfumed the day. Anyone transported to Isaac’s time, I contend, would have found the air permeated by the scent of horse sweat and manure.
In places I relied on my own observations. I did so, for example, in describing the big fat dragonflies of Galveston Island, the behavior of seagulls in a north wind, and the colors of wave crests during a tropical storm. I was lucky enough on one visit to arrive just after a severe tropical storm and before the arrival of another. At one point, as the sun fell, I found myself lost on a narrow spit of land somewhere east