Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [95]
Isaac Cline moved through an increasingly hellish realm. He could not escape the pyres. There was Phillip Gordie Tipp’s fire at 25th and O½, another at the foot of Tremont Street opposite the wharf, where several hundred bodies stacked four and five feet deep were burned at once. Fires burned along the beach at intervals of three hundred feet. At night the fires lit the horizon in all directions, as if four suns were about to rise. The men tending the fires soon lost any sense that they were doing something extraordinary. One survivor said the fires became “such a usual spectacle as to create no comment.”
Rumor and apocrypha supercharged the night. There was talk that a second huge storm soon would arrive. Isaac’s bureau quashed it. On Sunday night, September 16, an immense fire destroyed the Merchants and Planters Cotton Oil Mill in Houston, lighting the sky to the north. In Galveston, where local flames already rimmed the night, it seemed as if the end of the world had come. And for William Marsh Rice, the elderly New York millionaire who owned the plant, it was indeed the end—the hurricane and fire prompted him to begin preparations for transferring a large amount of cash to Houston to begin reconstruction, which in turn caused his valet and an unscrupulous lawyer to accelerate their ongoing plot to poison him.
Black men were said to have begun looting bodies, chewing off fingers to gain access to diamond rings, then stuffing the fingers in their pockets. The nation’s press took these stories as truth, then pumped them full of even more lurid details. On Thursday, September 13, the Mobile, Alabama, Daily Register told its readers that fifty Negroes had been shot to death in Galveston. “The ghouls,” the newspaper reported, “were holding an orgie over the dead.”
Nothing of the sort happened, although it is likely that some theft by whites and blacks alike did occur. A reporter for the Galveston News reported a rumor that seventy-five looters had been shot in the back, but he was skeptical. “Diligent inquiry discloses the incorrectness of this report.” He hedged, however. If any had been killed, he wrote, certainly the total could not have exceeded half a dozen. John Blagden, who survived the storm without injury, heard a rumor that four men had been shot on September 10. “I do not know how true it is,” he said, “for all kinds of rumors are afloat and many of them false.”
A fog of putrefaction and human ash hung over the city. The steamer Comal arrived on Monday and berthed at Pier 26, but her captain was so repulsed by the stench, he moved the ship down the wharf. The weather was clear and bright, and hot. “Fearful hot,” one man said. He estimated the temperatures at close to 100.
“Every day the stench from rotting bodies got worse,” Ruby Credo said. “I could barely keep from retching, it was so bad.”
ISAAC READ THE News closely. Everyone did. In the days after the storm it became the city’s main source of information about friends and relatives. On Thursday, it looked like a real newspaper again. It was back to full size and gave readers its first big narrative of the storm, along with a drizzle of little stories, including a report that someone’s pet prairie dog had been rescued alive from a dresser drawer. The paper also ran a list of telegrams that had accumulated at the Western Union office on the Strand, undelivered because so many recipients and messenger boys were dead, and because 3,600 homes had disappeared. The list of telegrams had five hundred names.
On Friday the News ran its first advertising since the storm. Companies reassured customers they would not jack up prices to take advantage of the disaster. A store called The Peoples offered goods at manufacturers’ cost. Friday’s death list wrapped around an ad for the