Galveston County Texas Archives News.....The Warnings of Galveston October 9, 1900 ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://www.usgwarchives.net/tx/txfiles.htm ************************************************ File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by: Savanna King savanna18king@gmail.com August 22, 2023, 10:55 am El Paso Herald October 9, 1900 Story of the Previous Horrors That Had Overwhelmed the Gulf Islands, with Incalculable Destruction of Life and Property.--Two Centuries of Disaster.--Col. Baylor Suggests that Galveston Build Places of Refuge Through the Island. [Every reader of The Herald is glad to hear from Col. Geo. W. Baylor. Col. Baylor is at uvalde now, where he has been staying for some time. In a letter just received Col. Baylor says: "I have received many letters from old friends who have heard of me through The Herald, and all ask me to publish my stories in book form, but I will have to wait. However, my Galveston oyster beds won't be hurt, and people will eat oysters just as though no storm had occurred. "I have long dreaded this terrible tragedy since Last Island was destroyed. An old Mexican who was in San Antonio and once belonged to the notorious Lafitte pirates, said he saw such a storm about 1811 that covered the entire island. So the people must rebuild keeping this fact in view, and have places of refuge scattered through the city. Galveston is too important a place to the west, and in fact to the commercial world, to be abandoned, and will be rebuilt better than it ever would have been but for this disaster. "There are in the stricken city many brave old veterans, both of the blue and the gray, who faced death on a many bloody battle field and never faltered, but- -as the bravest are the tenderest--the cry of a woman's voice in distress or the wail of a drowning child would unman them. But after the battle, and after the friends are laid to rest, they will be ready to answer the call of duty as of yore, and rebuild their beautiful city. "With kindest regards to all my old friends, I am "Yours truly, "Geo. Wythe Baylor." Col. Baylor's reference to the Last Island disaster and to the Lafitte pirates makes all the more interesting the following account of the history of the Gulf islands, which appears in a recent issue of the New York Sun. The history is well worth preserving, as it represents a large amount of research and reminiscence that is often hard to secure a second time.] --- The destruction of Galveston by the storm of September 8 and 9 supplies further evidence that the low-lying sand islands fringing the shores of Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas, for a distance of nearly one thousand miles were never intended for human habitation. The evidence has been secured at a frightful sacrifice of life and property, for it is estimated that more than 20,000 lives have been lost and nearly $100,000,000 of property has been destroyed on these islands by hurricanes. Island after island has been the scene of destruction, its population either wiped out or the island itself washed away. Galveston was frequently threatened before, and warned of the fate, but the people believed that their breakwater and substantial buildings would be able to defy the storm. The Galveston horror is the twelfth of its kind in the sand islands of the Gulf. It is the worst in loss of life and property because a city had been built on Galveston Island; but, the other disasters were equally bad, and in most cases the percentage of saved was even smaller than at Galveston. Two Centuries Ago. The record of the loss of life goes back to a time before the white man landed on these shores. When Bienville and Iberville, two centuries ago, occupied this country they found upon the island where they landed opposite where Mobile now stands the bones of hundreds of the aborigines. The French thought that the unburied bodies indicated a massacre, and so called the island Massacre Island; it is Dauphine Island today. It was a massacre, not by human hands but by some mighty storm, which overwhelmed the Indian population and wiped it out of existence. It left a memory behind which the natives never forgot, and the Gulf islands were to them a haunted place never to be visited, in spite of the fact that they teemed with game. When the French settled there they found the islands wholly uninhabited; the Indians had learned what the white man has learned since, how unsafe they are for human settlement. Nor were the French long in learning this lesson, for within two years of their settlement on the Gulf coast, in the very beginning of the eighteenth century, their fleet went down in a hurricane in the magnificent harbor of Isle des Varsseaux, now translated into Ship Island. Ship Island is almost identical in most particulars with Galveston Island, and it has been the aim of the people of Mississippi to build a great port there, like the Texas city, which would handle the commerce and free them from the control of New Orleans. The project has been popular for half a century and a great deal of money has been expended on it. There is a splendid harbor on Ship Island, and by connecting it with the mainland, as Galveston was connected in Texas, a deep-water port could be obtained. A railroad has been built from the mainland into the interior of Mississippi, and all that is now needed is to connect the island with the shore by means of a pier or bridge. This has been repeatedly proposed, but never done, mainly for financial reasons. The destruction of Galveston will have a tendency to delay if not to kill the project, particularly as the Galveston storm washed away a portion of Ship Island. The Gulf Islands. Stretching from Mobile to the Rio Grande is a long fringe of islands differing very little from one another. Indeed, any of them might pass for Galveston Island, so alike are they, the only difference being that some of the eastern ones have trees, whereas west of the Atchafalaya they are generally bare and open, and therefore more dangerous, being exposed to the waves and wind. They range from ten to twenty miles long and from one to two miles wide. They are composed almost exclusively of sand underlaid by clay or quicksands, covered in part with a coarse scraggy sea grass. They begin at Dauphine Island and stretch westward as follows: Petti Bois, Horn, Dear, Ship, Cat, the Chandeleurs, Breton, Bird Grand, Timbalier, Caillou, Last Island (originally one island, but cut into two by the great storm of 1857), Marsh, Galveston, Matagorda, St. Joseph, Mustang and Sadie. Cheniere Caminada and Indianola are in reality islands, although technically not known as such, being separated from the mainland by swamps always under water. Every One Has Suffered. At one time or another every one of these islands has been struck by a hurricane and depopulated and changed or modified in shape. They will change their appearance entirely in a night. As a consequence most of them are without stable population today, as in the Indian days when, notwithstanding the game on them. A few charcoal burners and cattlemen live on Cat Island. The others are mainly frequented by fishermen, for they are fine fishing stations. Of the entire lot, perhaps Chandeleur Island, as it is called, is the worst. It may have been an island once; it is an archipelago today. Facing southeast and acting as a breakwater to the country around New Orleans it catches all the storms and has been the scene of more wrecks than perhaps any other place in the country. Originally forty or fifty miles long the storms and the ocean have cut it up into a score of islands, and its form changes with every hurricane. It has completely changed its character within historical times, and is apparently being washed away and likely to become in time a mere reef. The water now pours over it with every storm and the island disappears completely from view, buried under the Gulf. Originally covered with wax myrtles, from which the Creoles made their candles, hence its name (Chandeleur) it now boasts of nothing but marsh grass and a single palm tree which by some strange freak of chance has survived all the hurricanes. Ominous Warning. Some years ago the United States government, on the persistent demands of the people of Louisiana and Mississippi, established its Gulf quarantine station on Chandeleur Island, in what was supposed to be a very safe spot. In the storm of 1886, which may be called the Sabine Pass storm, since it was the Sabine Pass country that was overwhelmed that year, the quarantine officers had just time to get away from the station. When the physicians went back to look for their station they could not find a trace of it. The very site had disappeared and a few battered pieces of wood picked up on the coast and supposed to be the wreckage of the quarantine station were the only remains ever found. The station was never rebuilt, but moved to Ship Island. Chandeleur Island is wholly uninhabited today, and its sole occupants, except birds, are a species of wild boars, which seem to have some way of defying the elements. The other islands, Errel Bird, etc., stretching to the mouth of the Mississippi, are but pieces of Chandeleur that have been separated from the main island by violent storms which have torn it to pieces. Lafitte's Stronghold. West of the Mississippi the islands which have suffered most in the Gulf hurricanes, for many attempts have been made to settle them. Grande Terre, the first of these, was of old the haunt of that famous Louisiana pirate Lafitte, and it is a curious coincidence that Lafitte, after being driven from the island by the United States federal authorities, should have sought refuge in Galveston Island, where he flourished for several years, the island then belonging to Spain and being wholly uninhabited and without the pale of the law. Fearful Destruction. West of Grande Terre is Grande Isle and immediately adjacent thereto Cheniere Caminada. Grande Island has been visited by a dozen storms and severely ravaged by them, but while nearly all the property on the island was wrecked in 1893 and many lives lost, it escaped wholesale destruction thanks to a grove of oaks planted many years ago, whose roots act as a sort of levee or protection to the land. Not so fortunate is Cheniere Caminada lying just across the channel and only two miles distant. It was the worst victim of the hurricane of October 2, 1893. At that point alone, in a fishing village known as Caminadaville, no less than 1150 lives were lost and 1678 were lost in all, every one of the neighboring islands having suffered. The bodies of only a few of the dead were recovered. The great majority were swept out to sea and many were found by vessels fifty miles distant from the shore. The Last Island Storm. West of these islands come the group of Timbalier, Caillou and Last or Derniere Island. They were the victims of the Last Island storm of 1857, so named from the island which was the worst sufferer, just as the storm of 1857 was the Indianola storm, that of 1886 the Sabine Pass storm, that of 1893 the Cheniere Caminada storm, and that of 1900 the Galveston storm. The Last Island storm was memorable because of the large number of prominent persons drowned. Last Island was a pleasure resort at the time and the hotel there was crowded with prominent Louisianians. The storm that destroyed it was like all the others in its origin and action. A violent wind drove up the water in the bays back of the island, piling it ten or twelve feet high there. Then it veered from south to north, driving the waters back on the Gulf with a force that swept everything before it out to sea. The wind and the waves cut the island in half, and where the fashionable Last Island hotel once stood is now a part of the Gulf of Mexico. There were only 284 victims of the Last Island storm, but they included the lieutenant governor of Louisiana, the speaker of the state house of representatives and many others prominent in the political and social history of the state. Last Island Repeated. West of Last Island the islands are too low and soft for human habitation and in consequence they have never been settled. They have gone under with every storm, but it has fortunately been without loss of life. Near the Texas line, some twenty years ago, a large number of armers settled on Johnson's Bayou. It is what would be called high land on the Gulf, rising six feet above the water. The settlers planted orange trees and soon had some of the best groves in the state, but in 1886 a tornado struck them and the settlement was annihilated and some 250 persons killed in identically the same way as at Last Island. The wind drove the water into the swamp back of the bayou, then changed from south to north and swept the land away in to the Gulf. The Sabine Pass Disaster. A few miles from Johnson's Bayou is Sabine Pass, which met with a similar disaster. The water piled up in Sabine lake and dashed down on the town, which is situated on a peninsula or island, at the mouth of the lake. It was completely swept away, with great loss of life. There is a Sabine Pass today, the terminus of a railroad and a great deal of anxiety prevailed in regard to it during the Galveston storm of the other day, but it is an entirely new town and some distance from the town wrecked in 1886. The Ruin of Indianola. Next comes Galveston, and beyond that is Indianola, which, although theoretically on the mainland, is practically an island. The hurricane which swept over the Gulf coast in October, 1875, struck Indianola just as the other storms have struck Galveston, Last Island, Sabine Pass, Johnson's Bayou, Cheniere Caminada and other exposed points. Indianola at that time was a town of about 4000 people and the terminus of an important railroad system. It was a rival of Galveston and deemed a dangerous rival for the trade of western Texas. It was situated at the head of a long bay, on land, like that at Galveston, only a few feet above tidewater, and behind it there was such a network of bays, bayous, and small lakes that it was really an island. The water was backed up by a continuous wind to an extraordinary height, and for many miles back of the town. Then the north wind drove it seaward with a force that was irresistible and only three houses were left standing in the town. It virtually killed Indianola, which is smaller than it was forty years ago; and its harbor is completely ruined. The Great City on the Sand. Such has been the experience that Galveston had before it; but in no wise daunted it has gone to work to build up a great city on the low sand spit that juts out into Galveston bay. It was not a bit safer than any of the other Gulf islands; indeed, it is not so safe as many of them. Cat Island is covered with trees, whose roots bind together the ground; Ship Island rises in places forty feet high. It is true that these are more sand dunes, liable to be swept away in a storm, but they afforded at least a refuge from the water, when the wind drove it over the island, and the islands are broader. Galveston Island is only five feet high at best above the waters of the Gulf, only one or at most two miles wide, practically useless, with a foundation of salt, clay and quicksand. But at this spit some 50,000 persons settled and invested $30,000,000 in building up one of the prettiest and most prosperous towns in the south. Galveston has for years boasted of being the wealthiest city per capita in the southwest, and was proud of the fact that Strand street alone possessed twenty-eight millionaires. Deceived and Over Confident. But all this prosperity was built on a quicksand. The people of Galveston knew this as did everybody in the southwest; but as year after year passed and Galveston escaped ruin in the storms which desolated or destroyed neighboring islands a spirit of confidence was aroused that it would altogether escape; that the town was too substantially built, too well protected by breakwaters to be ruined, as the less solidly built Indianola had been. The grade of the principal streets was raised a few feet and the pavements were deemed a further protection against the waves and likely to prevent the washing away of the ground. But there were some who doubted, who built their houses like the dwellers upon Lake Maracaibo, ten feet from the ground, mounted high on poles, so that the sea could sweep under them if it rose too high and not flood the floors. And at every Gulf hurricane there were anxious inquiries whether Galveston had got through it without injury. Many Narrow Escapes. There were good cause for these inquiries; for while Galveston escaped serious damage from these tornadoes it was only because the storm struck somewhere else and Galveston did not get its full brunt, and in all the cases it had a very narrow escape. In 1857 the entire island was flooded, and the waters of Galveston bay and Gulf met over it so that it completely disappeared from view; but the town was then a small one, and the loss of life was inconsiderable. In the storm of October 3, 1867, Galveston again went under water, the Gulf pouring over it so that Mechanic street, the principal business thoroughfare, was six feet deep--and it then was on the edge of the storm and did not catch its full force. Again, in 1871, it was twice beneath the waters, first in June and again in September, one flood coming from the waters of the Gulf, other when the water was piled up in the bay until it swept through the principal streets back to the Gulf of Mexico. In October, 1873, and in September, 1875, and December, 1877, the town was again flooded. Five Floods in Ten Years. Thus five times in ten years Galveston was swept by the waves and became a second Venice, all of its streets being from two to five feet under water. All of those storms were severe and did great damage, although Galveston caught only their fringe. But the storm of 1875 was by far the worst and Galveston then escaped by only an hour, perhaps the disaster which has visited it today. Had not the wind changed at the very moment it threatened to destroy the Island City the latter would have probably been swept into the Gulf with great loss of life. The storm did Galveston an immense amount of damage and there were lives lost all along the Texas coast, but the city escaped a great catastrophe. A strong south wind piled the water up in Galveston bay until in Buffalo bayou near Houston, it reached a height of thirty-seven feet. Forty persons were drowned in and around Galveston. Morgan's dredging fleet was sunk, the government works swept away and incalculable harm done. Then the wind veered around to the north and all this immense mass of water was thrown back on Galveston island. In twenty-five minutes it had cut the island in half, making a channel 250 feet wide and 25 feet deep at the east end, near Fort Point, and just beyond the built up portion of the island. The land washed away like so much sugar, and it was evident that the entire island would be swept into the Gulf, but just as the new made channel reached the city the wind receded again, the water was driven eastward and passed out through Galveston Pass. It was the narrowest of escapes for fifteen minutes more of that north wind would probably have carried a hundred houses out to sea and drowned every occupant. The channel cut by the storm of 1875 still remains as a warning of danger to everyone on the island, unless it was destroyed in the storm the other day. Two years afterward, in 1877, another storm destroyed the government works at Galveston harbor, but the town escaped any very great injury. The storm of 1886 which destroyed Sabine Pass and Johnson Bayou, was the last serious one to visit Galveston and again that town was flooded. Trapped Like Rats. These storms explain to a large extent the present Galveston disaster. It bred a feeling of desperate confidence among the people that no storm could injure Galveston. When, therefore, the hurricane struck it on Saturday, instead of seeking places of safety they shut themselves in their houses and waited for the storm to blow. They knew, of course, that the streets would be under water, but the streets had been under water so often before that this did not carry the same significance to them as it would to the people of other cities. But this time the storm, which had dodged around Galveston so often before, struck the island fairly and squarely. This confidence caused the great loss of life. At Sabine Pass and other places which suffered from the recent hurricane the people sought refuge on the higher ridges, or congregated in the stronger buildings; but in Galveston they shut themselves up in their houses and were trapped like so many rats. Islands Never Made for Settlement. It will be some time before it is possible to determine what effect the storm has had on the island proper and on Galveston bay and the jetties. Apparently the island is less hurt than by the storm of September 17, 1875, when the southern portion of it was cut off; but it is not certain that it has escaped permanent injury, for it is covered everywhere by sea ooze. As for the bay and the jetties, upon which the United States government expended $8,000,000, to which Galveston owes so much of its present prosperity, only a careful examination can disclose whether they have been injured or not. Judging by the experience of Indianola, Sabine Pass and other places the chances are that the whole character of the bay and the surrounding country has been changed by the storm. But it has proved once again that in their present condition the sand islands of the Gulf were never made for settlement. 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