Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [89]
Soon Sterett would see for himself. He was riding in a crowded passenger coach attached to a Great Northern relief train bound for Virginia Point, the last railroad stop on the mainland. As one of the region’s best-known newsmen, and a Civil War veteran, Sterett had experienced no difficulty gaining permission to board the train, nor had his friend, Tom L. Monagan, dispatched by an insurance company to assess the damage to its interests in Galveston. In Houston, Monagan had volunteered to help prepare the train for departure and was assigned the task of making sure that everyone on the train had an official pass. Relief officials did not want any sightseers sneaking aboard. The train carried soldiers and two commanders: Brig. Gen. Thomas Scurry, adjutant general of the Texas Volunteer Guard, and Gen. Chambers McKibben, commander of the Texas Department of the U.S. Army. It also carried ordinary citizens, and Sterett knew just by the look in their eyes that they had families in Galveston.
At first Sterett and the other passengers joked and talked of minor things, but soon dread filled the car. The wounds in the landscape became more evident. Here and there a house rose from the grass at a cockeyed angle, its curtains blowing free through jaws of fractured glass. The swollen bodies of drowned cattle lay in the pampas like huge black balloons. As more and more debris appeared along the right-of-way, the passengers grew quieter and quieter. In places water covered the tracks. The train slowed until it seemed to make no noise at all. The slowness amplified the dread. For Sterett it brought to mind a funeral cortege.
Masses of lumber appeared along the railbed. Sterett saw fragments of houses, lace curtains, armoirs, bedposts, sheets and blankets. He saw boats, and in the distance, a large ship aground on the prairie. A child’s rocking horse stood by itself on a low rise, no house in sight. “And so help me,” Sterett said, “I would rather have seen all the vessels of the earth stranded high and dry than to have seen this child’s toy standing right out on the prairie, masterless.”
Debris and flooding forced the engineer to stop the train just north of Texas City, well shy of Virginia Point. The passengers set out on foot. Sterett and Monagan took off their shoes and rolled up their pants, exposing legs so pale as to be nearly translucent.
Now they saw things they had missed from the train. Intimate debris. Stockings, letters, photographs. Their first corpses. What was so striking about the dead was their battered condition. Their bodies had been stripped naked.
At Texas City, the generals seized a lifeboat from the Kendal Castle, a British ship blown ten miles from its Galveston pier. They loaded it with soldiers and supplies and began at once to row across the bay, leaving Sterett and the other passengers behind.
Sterett and Monagan spotted a sailboat making slow progress toward the city in a calm that had made the bay “as gentle as a country pond.” While waiting, Sterett roamed the bay shore. Where the water met the prairie he saw bloated horses and cows, chickens, cats, dogs, and rats. “Everything, it seemed, that breathed, was there, dead and swollen and making the air nauseous. And by their sides were people.”
Groups of men moved along the bay shore hauling bodies from the water and burying them in shallow graves. They buried fifty-eight that day. Sterett found a letter and read the first line, “My Darling Little Wife,” then closed it and dropped it back in place.
The sailboat proved to be a large schooner. Monagan, using his authority as an officer of the train, commandeered it and invited one hundred passengers