Annie Laurie

San Francisco Examiner/September 18, 1900

Amusing Youngsters in the “Journal” Nursery

Rosalle Glynn and I had a good time yesterday. We took the little boy with the broken foot and the little girl whose shoulder is hurt and the little boy on crutches and moved their cots over into a corner right by one of the big doors, where the wind swept in fresh and cool from the prairies. Then we went and got the little boy whose chin quivers every time he gets time to think and wonder in the evening they left their home, the husband wading in water up to his armpits and carrying his wife. Fortunately gallant men were rescuing those in distress. In this way they were taken to the Broadway school, the horses swimming part of the way, floating the wagon. The school withstood the storm, and relatives in Monterey, Watsonvllle and Santa Cruz will be glad to know that they are safe and unhurt though their house went completely to smash. 

James Grady came here from Los Angeles last January to work for the Southern Pacific as bridge inspector. His house was at Forty-first and M streets. Early in the evening of the storm he became alarmed at the force of the wind and started home. Already the water was two feet deep at his door, so he told his wife he would go to the grocery for provisions, because he might not be able to get out the next day. Before he got back the water was over his waist. With his wife he waited in alarm till there was six feet of water on his parlor floor. Then he built a raft from the drift which had lodged against his house, put his wife on it and pushed out into the night. They got to the house of a neighbor, but that was insecure, so they launched their raft again. Another woman was taken aboard and the raft began to threaten to go to pieces. A house came floating by and they climbed into it through a broken window. It stranded at the cemetery, with the doors at a bad angle, and the water was up to their chins. But by piling chairs on a table the women were able to keep their heads out, while Grady perched as best he might. When the water went down Grady was stripped of most of his clothing, but his wife was unharmed. 

This House Stood The Strain

There are three Apffel boys here—Fred, George and Albert. Each has a family and their father resides at 2038 O’Farrell street, San Francisco. All the Apffels are safe. The water was ten feet deep in George Apffel’s house and nineteen people made it their refuge. Every house around it was washed away, but it stood the strain and its inmates were unharmed. 

Henry Meyer, a barber who used to live in California and who has a brother who is also a barber with a shop on Twenty-fourth street, between Brannan and York streets, developed into something of a hero when his house filled and began to go to ruin. He ferried his wife and two children to a neighbor’s. Then he went out to rescue others, and one after another he brought in five women and children. By this time the current was so strong and he was so nearly exhausted that he could not himself get back to the house. He took to a plank and was buffeted for a long time before he was swept to the house where he had left his wife. Then a blanket was lowered to him from the second story and he was hauled to a place of safety. 

These Californians Alive

The following among those inquired for at “The Examiner” office have been located and found alive: Dock Beall, Herman Lang, Leo Posner, C. E. Wedemeyer, Thomas Brick, William C. Baker and family, L. J. Selby, Fred A. Apffel and family, George Apffel and family, Albert Apffel and family, C. E. Matley, Mrs. Beulah Mattley, Lulu George, Fred Lamburne, J. J. Delaney, F. H. Eastman, William Samuels, Charles Lumozet, J. H. Crossett, Harry Fitzpatrick, Thomas Stout, Mr. White, Attorney Walter L. Wilson and family, John Meyer, D R. Tattenham, C. A. Weatherington, Miss Mollie Walsh, Lawrence Burck. Ebenezer Allen and family were all drowned. The Rev. J. B. Haston is now said to be safe at Arcadia, Tex. 

“No man has any business here unless he is a fine swimmer and quick on the trigger,” soliloquized a Texan as he chewed and talked from the top of a trunk in the information bureau tent of the “Examiner-Journal-American” this morning. 

“If it isn’t the Brazos it is the Negroes; if it isn’t the Negroes it is the vendetta, and if it isn’t the vendetta it is the gulf. This is the richest city of its size in the world,” he added hastily, with true Southern boastfulness, as if he felt he had been flinging the hummer too far. 

Certainly a man should be a good swimmer, and some of these Texans do swim like sealions. If I hadn’t seen some of the Dallas rough riders take to the water in Buffalo bayou as we came down I would never believe some of the stories of aquatic prowess told since the storm; but those rough riders could put the best of our Lurine and Olympic swimmers to the test, so perhaps the tales the Galveston swimmers tell are true. 

Swam With His Mother

Here, for instance, is the tale of Willie. His home was on Twenty-fifth, where for a mile and a half there was hardly a foundation stone to show where human habitations once stood. 

The full swing of the gulf breakers struck the Mack house and it was swept away to ruins. Willie Mack took his mother on his back and swam. He was picked up at Thirty-fifth street, still swimming, and his mother still alive. That is a swim of ten blocks, three hundred feet to the block, eighty feet to each street – or, as I figure it, 3,800 feet. It seems incredible that in a hurricane, battered by floating debris, cut by flying missiles, a man could make that swim, bearing a human burden; but the fact remains that the Mack home was at Twenty-fifth street and it was washed away, and Willie Mack was rescued at Thirty-fifth street swimming with his mother on his back.

Carried Miles By Sea

Then there was a log ratisseau who lived about fifty miles down the island. His house was crushed by the waves at 6 o’clock in the afternoon. He is a strong swimmer, but he could not save his wife and three children, who sank in his sight. Finding he could do nothing for them, he struck out for himself. At 3 o’clock Sunday afternoon, a boat from the steamer Mexican picked him up in Bolivar roads, ten miles from his home. He swam through all the fury of the storm and then lashed three rafters together with the floating line of a cast net. Pushing this ahead of him he managed to get close enough to the steamer to attract attention. That is pretty good swimming, too; but when the ratisseau was picked up he was as blind as a bat, and can see very little now.

Perseverance Saved Life

And there was a stout chap, whose name I do not remember, but he worked for William Ryan, five miles down the island. He floated and swam and was carried by wind and tide across the bay and up the bayou to above Arcadia, twenty-five miles from here, and lives to tell the tale. He thought a dozen times he would give up and drown, but kept at it till he caught a piece of timber in the bayou and then let the tide carry him wherever it would.

A round buoy on the beach attracted the attention of all sightseers. I heard this story. Two men who were washed away from the waterfront got into a boat. The boat was overturned and then smashed by a heavy timber. They struck out in the night and one suddenly bumped into something floating high in the water. It was the buoy, which had been torn from its moorings. The swimmer caught it and summoned his companion out of the storm and darkness. Together they were swept through the bayou, between the jetties and into the gulf. 

Clung To A Sea Buoy

Morning came and the hot sun with it. The blistering day waxed and waned. Night came and went, still they clung to that buoy, far out to sea. On Tuesday a steamer rescued them and yet such things were so common that rescuers did not even bother to keep the men’s names. I have the tale, however, from those who are to be believed. 

William Cowan, who lived at Twenty-fourth and O streets, put his wife on a raft when his house went to wreck. Soon a great wave came and broke the raft in two. Cowan heard his wife call for help but could do nothing and could not see her in the dense blackness of the storm. He gave her up for lost and was whirled and buffeted for an hour or more, until he managed to reach the Ursuline Convent, at Twenty-seventh and N streets. 

Stripped Of All Clothing

 Just as he was about to reach a footing, he heard a woman’s cry for aid. Weak as he was he plunged into the flood to render help. There he found his wife, still clinging to her piece of raft. When she was separated from him she was fully dressed. When he found her she was without clothing. This general stripping of the women who were cast into the flood shows, as well as anything, the force of the wind. Nearly all the corpses are nude, and many of the rescued were.

When Fireman Donovan was out in the full fury of the storm rescuing people, he was finally forced to take refuge in a house where were seven women. Along came a heavy wave and smashed in the windows of the room in which all were huddled, carrying out the sash and all. With the next wave came through that window a young girl, entirely nude, but alive and little injured. All the party weathered the storm. 

Girl’s Terrible Experience

Against this lucky chance of one young woman is the shuddering experience of another. Her father was helping her to escape from the second floor of their tottering house to a tree in the garden, to which a plank had been stretched. He was holding the plank. She fell with her feet on him and was so wedged that she could not move. She was forced to stand on his body until he was drowned, while she was afterward rescued and told the heartrending story of how she had become her father’s executioner. 

When the home of Mrs. Potter of the Southwestern Telephone Company collapsed and sank into the waves, her father, mother and sister were carried down with the wreck and drowned, but some force shot her right up through the broken roof. She caught on some drift and was carried away and in time rescued—the only one of all her household to escape death. 

Children Floating At Sea

At the Catholic Orphan Asylum were ninety-two children and eight sisters when the big building was swept away. The sisters had tied the children together and then tied the different squads to themselves in the last hope of rescuing the little ones. An incoming steamer passed their bodies floating together in death. Out of the heart-breaking catastrophe, but three lads escaped and they cannot themselves tell how. The rope around them loosened, they caught on some wreckage and were driven ten or twelve miles across the bay, where they were found and cared for the next morning.

 John Haymond, a coal hoister, was driven from his falling home on Eighth street.  He caught on a plank and was sent drifting up and down in the storm-lashed waters of the bay all that dreadful night. On Monday one of the steamer Mexican’s boats rescued him some five miles from his home. Early in the day those on the Mexican heard cries for help and saw a negro and then a white man go drifting by. At that time no boat could live in the sea and rescue was impossible, but by the time Haymond came along the waves had stilled so that it was possible to launch a boat and get to him.

Carried A Headless Corpse

Out on Avenue H, between Thirtieth and Thirty-first streets, a man who was engaged in the work of rescue, wading in the water to his chin, heard the cry of a drowning man. He reached out, took the man in his arms, and started for a house which seemed to have a chance to weather the gale and flood. Suddenly something came out of the night and a gleam of light showed the rescuer that he carried a headless corpse. The flying slate or ton of timber had decapitated the poor fellow who had been just rescued from drowning. Such are the simple tales of hundreds, which speak of the freakishness of fate in the storm. 

It would be supposed that one-legged people would stand a small chance for life in a flood which hurled to death so many able-bodied men, but Randall Shadowmantle, a fireman of the Galveston, Houston, and Henderson railway, who wears a wooden leg, was swept from his home at Thirty-fifth and Church streets, and brought up, and the little girl who cries for her mother every time she wakes up in the night, and the three little fat roly-polys from the country who never cry for anything except a piece of bread and molasses, and the shy brother and the timid sister who were floated ashore on a piece of driftwood somewhere down by Virginia Point and have been too terrified to speak ever since, and then we had a party. 

There was lemonade at the party and then there were stories. Rosalie Glynn and I told the stories. Rosalie Glynn is the best little girl who ever lived. She is about 10 years old. She came in with her mother and two smaller children. The mother is very severely hurt in the back. Our nurses are taking care of her at the hospital. The father has gone back to Morgan Point to try and pull together what little the storm has left him. 

Rosalie is the life of the whole hospital. She told the children all about Brother Terrapin and what a sly old fellow he was, and all the children’s eyes grew big with amazement at the story of his cunning, and then she told about old Br’er Fox and the time he made the wolf get into his saddle, and all the children laughed and clapped their hands—all but the little boy from Alvin. He did not laugh.

 The little boy from Alvin hid his face on my shoulder and he and I went off into the corner and talked it all over. His father had told him all those stories, he said, and now his father was gone “way off somewhere in the angry water and he had called and called just as loud as he could; he had called him and he never heard.

“Last night,” said the boy from Alvin, “I thought I heard him speaking to me: ‘Johnny, Oh, you Johnny!’ he said just as plain, and I hollered back: ‘Here I am, Daddy!’ right loud and he did not find me—Where do you reckon my daddy is?” And I could not tell him, and for all that I could do or say, he would not be comforted. There are few orphans in our hospital. Most children whose parents drowned were drowned with them.

 We have in our hospital, however, a great many children. And it was a sight worth going many miles to see little Rosalia sitting in a corner telling “varmint” tales to keep them quiet.

Captain William Haines of the Fort Point Life-Saving Station got his wife into the lifeboat when the water rose about the station. From the boat, he was assisting her to climb into the second-story window, thinking that refuge safe, when suddenly the entire building collapsed, carrying Mrs. Haines down with it to her death, but leaving the boat afloat. It was driven across the bay but the captain and his entire crew were saved.

 To-day I had from County Attorney Edward D. May the story of his experience in the storm, and it is typical of many. 

“I was at Tremont and Market streets, and at about 7 o’clock started to see my mother at 1415 Broadway. The water along Tremont Street was breast deep, and the wreckage was thick, but I could make headway against it. Ex-Congressman Miles Crowley joined me, and we pushed on together. 

Church Crashed On Him.

“When I got to I Street the tower of a church at Twenty-second and I came crashing down and sent a lot of wreckage whirling about me. Between Broadway and I Street a big tin roof came down and I ducked under it. It struck me on the back, but I told Crowley I could go on. At Broadway, Crowley went on down Tremont Street, and I turned east on Broadway. Soon the water was over my head as I swam between Twenty-first and Twenty-second streets a piece of slate came hurling out of the dark and struck my right eye. I went totally blind and remained so for what seemed like a quarter of an hour, but I got over to the Esplanade, where I touched bottom, and there I stripped off my coat and shoes, for I saw it was to be a battle for life instead of a rescue of my mother.

Whirled In Raging Waters.

“As soon as I could see again I found myself in a great mass of wreckage, driven with tremendous force by the rush of the waves. But it began to crumble, so I tried the next, and got onto the front gallery of the Conklin House. Soon it, too, began to fall away about my ears. I saw a gleam of light across the street, but that gleam showed me such a tangle and rush of debris as to make me pause. But to swim that street through the wreckage seemed my only hope, so I plunged in, was nearly crushed by a telegraph pole which had been uprooted and was pounding up and down in the churn of the swift water, and had most of my clothing torn off by the tangled wires and a fence on which I struck, but I reached the house and was pulled in through a window. 

“From the time I left Crowley till I was hauled to safety I saw no light and no human being, living or dead. I fought it out alone and was not able to get within a half-mile of my mother. She weathered the storm at her home, and I am little the worse, save for my badly damaged eye and a hundred bruises and abrasions. But Heaven save me from such another night!”