es floating in the water. I saw one dray with sixty-four dead
bodies being drawn by four horses to the wharves, where the bodies
were unloaded on a tug and taken out in the gulf for burial."

Mr. Wortham, ex-secretary of state, after an inspection of the scene,
made this statement: "The situation at Galveston beggars description.
Fully seventy-five per cent. of the business portion of the town is
wrecked, and the same percentage of damage is to be found in the
residence district. Along the wharf front great ocean steamers have
bodily dumped themselves on the big piers, and lie there, great masses
of iron and wood that even fire cannot totally destroy. The great
warehouses along the water front are smashed in on one side, unroofed
and gutted throughout their length; their contents either piled in
heaps or along the streets. Small tugs and sailboats have jammed
themselves into buildings, where they were landed by the incoming
waves and left by the receding waters.

"Houses are packed and jammed in great confusing masses in all the
streets. Great piles of human bodies, dead animals, rotting
vegetation, household furniture, and fragments of the houses
themselves, are piled in confused heaps right in the main streets of
the city. Along the Gulf front human bodies are floating around like
cordwood."

As time passed on the terrible truth was pressed home on the minds of
the people that the mortality by the storm had possibly reached 8,000,
or nearly one-fourth of the entire population. The exact number will
never be known, and no list of the dead could be accurately made out,
for the terrible waters carried to sea and washed on distant and
lonely shores many of the bodies. The unknown dead of the Galveston
horror will forever far surpass the number of those who are known to
have perished in that awful night, when the tempest raged and the
storm was on the sea, piling the waters to unprecedented heights on
Galveston island.

One of the great catastrophes of the century in the United States was
the flood that devastated the Conemaugh valley in Pennsylvania, on
May 31, 1889. Though the amount of property destroyed was over
$10,000,000 worth, this was the slightest element of loss. That which
makes the Johnstown flood so exceptional is the terrible fact that it
swept away half as many lives as did the battle of Gettysburg, one of
the bloodiest of the Civil War, and transformed a rich and prosperous
valley for more than twenty