Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [58]
There was other news, of course. The Galveston News, like most papers of the day, gave extensive coverage to foreign events. On Saturday, the Boxer Rebellion in China dominated the front page. But the News also covered the most insignificant stories. It reported the newest arrivals at the Hotel Grand and the Tremont Hotel, and the general comings and goings of Galveston’s citizens. Saturday’s paper noted, for example, that a boy named Louis Becker had left town on Friday to attend school in Carthage, Missouri. The Reverend W. N. Scott of the First Presbyterian Church returned on Friday from a summer away in cooler Virginia. And W. L. Norwood departed Friday night for Buffalo to attend the National Association of Undertakers and Embalmers convention set to begin on September 11. He took his wife and his young daughter along.
In just a few hours, these reports of Friday’s arrivals and departures would take on an entirely different cast, and be seen instead as stories of miraculous escape and tragic bad timing.
If there were a Pulitzer for bleak irony, however, it would go to the News for its Saturday-morning report on one of the most important local stories of the year—the Galveston count of the 1900 U.S. census, which the newspaper had first announced on Friday. The news was excellent: Over the last decade of the nineteenth century, the city’s population had increased by 29.93 percent, the highest growth rate of any southern city counted so far. “Galveston has cause to feel proud in having grown 30 percent in ten years,” the News reported. “That is a good record to start out with on the new decade, when the prospects are bright even to surpass it.”
AT THE COMPETING Galveston Tribune, editor Clarence Ousley spent Saturday morning writing his editorials for the Sunday edition. He looked out the window at the harsh sky. Patches of blue still showed, but mostly he saw clouds as black and low as any he had ever seen. The storm seemed a good subject for comment. Off and on that morning he had called home for reports from his family on the condition of the surf, which his wife and children could watch from the windows of the second floor. It was very exciting—storms always were—but he did not think this one would be terribly different from any other.
“There have been high waters before, when the effect was mainly discomfort and the destruction of fences,” he typed. No flood could ever exceed the high-water marks already noted on landmarks around town, he argued. “Physical geographers”—mainly Commodore Matthew Fontaine Maury—“argue plausibly, with the support of experience, that the high-water records have been the maximum of possibility because the beach at Galveston slopes so gently to the ocean depths that destructive waves will be broken and their force dissipated before reaching the shore.”
He struck a reassuring note: “An inundation might be wasteful and damaging, to be sure, but there is no possibility of serious loss of life.”
The Tribune never published the editorial. The storm flooded the presses. Many decades later, Ousley’s daughter Angie would describe the flooding as an event “which did much to preserve my father’s reputation for editorial profundity.”
CHILDREN FOUND THE storm nothing but delightful. Henry C. Cortes of Houston was eight years old when he came to Galveston on Saturday, September 8. Early that morning his father made the impulsive decision to take the family to visit Grandmother Cortes on her birthday. Henry dressed for the day in high-laced black boots, black cotton stockings with elastic black garters, white starched linen pants that ended just below the knees, a sailor-style blouse, and a stiff hat known as a straw katy. The trip took ninety minutes. Immediately after Henry and his family left the station, they got slapped by a powerful gust of wind that lifted Henry’s hat off his head. It disappeared forever. When he reached his grandmother’s house around lunchtime