Galveston Island Quotes

Life was short, cruel, and worth the effort, and compromise and accommodation were easy habits.

The 1900 Galveston storm was the worst US natural disaster in the twentieth century. The city, population 37,789, was submerged in 8 to 15 feet of water, and prior to the wind destroying the Weather Bureau’s anemometer, the last recorded wind velocity was 84 miles per hour. It is speculated that during the height of the storm the winds ranged from 120 to 150 miles per hour. Historians estimate that over 6,000 people were killed in the city and that another 1,000 perished on the rest of the island. On the mainland, the death toll was approximately 1,000. The Promise is a work of fiction but I tried to keep the depiction of the island, the sequence of the storm, and the aftermath grounded in fact as much as possible. A great deal has been written about the city of Galveston but very little about the people who lived outside of the city limits.

intense and accurate shelling by enemy ships of the line. * To the believers—and the terrified—it was natural to look for salvation from the storm inside one of the town’s forty churches or other edifices associated with God’s work on earth. This was especially true regarding Galveston’s Negro population, to whom religion was an elemental life-force and not a conveyance for social or sartorial prestige. Organized worship for the blacks of Galveston began in the 1840s on a three-shift basis; in the town’s then-only church the white masters gathered for service in the mornings, the slaves occupied the pews in the afternoons, exiting in time for the seignoral class to move back in for evening worship. According to an aged former slave known to all as “Auntie Ellen Roe,” it was her one-time master Gail Borden—chief customs collector, later city property agent and prime mover of a dairy fortune—who was responsible for creating separate-but-equal religious facilities on the island. Auntie Ellen recalled how the Bordens “trained her carefully as to body, mind and soul after buying her, at the age of seven, from cruel slave speculators who stole little children and sold them upon the block.” In 1851, Borden secured title to a lot on Broadway, near the booming business district, and helped collect donations for a new all-Negro church. Ellen Roe contributed the first dollar, painfully earned by reciting perfectly her Sunday-School lessons, in which she was strenuously coached by Mrs. Borden and later rewarded at the rate of twenty-five cents per recitation.

A hundred years ago, the Strand was the greatest banking and finance center between New Orleans and San Francisco—the Wall Street of the Southwest.

People are not supposed to live on a sandbar, and the fact that they choose to live on this one tells you something about the collective psyche. These are people who like to be different, who see themselves as select, and maybe even a little invincible. There is an unmistakable attitude of tolerance on this Island, too, similiar to the liberal atmosphere one experiences in San Francisco—another seaport that survived a devastating natural disaster at the turn of the century.

A block south of the Strand, on Water Street (also called Port Industrial Boulevard), is the port of Galveston. Unlike Houston or most other ports I’ve visited, you can walk or drive along the bayfront and see the ships up close. There are usually three or four in port, from the USSR or Norway or Germany or some distant and exotic locale. From the 1870s until World War II, this was one of the busiest ports in the world. Today it’s not even one of the busiest in Texas.

The cannibalistic Karankawa Indians occupied the Island at least as far back as 1400. Cabeza de Vaca, La Salle, and Jean Lafitte all visited it before Texas was a republic. The Battle of Galveston wasn’t the greatest sea battle of the Civil War, but it was one of the most poignant.

You can still see the old Balinese Room extending out over the Gulf. Though no gambling has gone on for years, the B-Room hosted the biggest names in show business, and highest-rolling gamblers. It was almost impossible to raid because the casino area, where the illegal activity took place, was situated on the T-head of the long narrow pier. When raiding parties of Texas Rangers appeared, someone up front pushed a button, the band struck up “The Eyes of Texas,” and the gambling paraphernalia folded into the walls like Murphy beds.

First, supply yourself with pamphlets and maps from the Visitors Center. Then rent a bicycle from one of those places along Seawall and ride north on 19th Street to Sealy. The heart of the East End Historical District is located between 19th and 14th, from Sealy to the Strand. Mainlanders who envision the Island as a barren sandbar are invariably amazed at the canopy of great oaks and the wall of stately palms that grace Galveston’s historic neighborhoods. Many of the homes are identified by markers: the “castle” of the Danish immigrant John C. Trube, at 1627 Sealy, is one of the Island’s strangest and most intriguing homes. It looks as though it were designed by a committee of architects. Trube, once the gardener of a Danish nobleman, had the house designed to resemble a castle in Kiel, Denmark, with battlement towers, and a mansard roof with nine gables. The house on the northwest corner of 17th and Winnie is the boyhood home of King Vidor, one of Hollywood’s best directors in the 1930s. The single most spectacular home is the old Gresham Mansion, now called the Bishop’s Palace, at the corner of Broadway and 14th. In silhouette this immense place looks like a medieval town. This was once the home of Colonel Walter Gresham, whose lobbying efforts secured federal money to widen and deepen the ship channel after the Civil War. Ashton Villa, a more delicate Victorian structure at 2328 Broadway, was once the home of Miss Bettie Brown, who scandalized Islanders in the 1880s by smoking cigarettes in public and racing unchaperoned along Broadway in a carriage pulled by matching teams of stallions—a black pair for day and a white pair for evening. It is said that on occasion Miss Brown’s ghost appears in the dead of night and plays the piano in the villa’s Gold Room.

THE ISLAND’S first residents were a remarkably antisocial tribe known as the Karankawas. The Karankawas patrolled a 350-mile stretch of coastline from the Rio Grande to Galveston Bay, but they lived about half the year on the Island. Except when they were raiding other villages, stealing maidens to marry and children to eat, the Karankawas went out of their way to avoid contact with other tribes. They were one of the few coastal tribes that refused to take part in the Truce of the Tunas, an annual spring mingling of otherwise hostile tribes in South Texas. When the sweet purple fruit of the prickly pear cactus—the “tunas”—ripened each May, Indians from all along the coast declared a truce. They put away their tools and their weapons of war and migrated to the scrubby cactus and mesquite country near the present town of Alice. There they gorged themselves on the succulent fruit, danced, frolicked, and generally conducted themselves like fools rather than warriors for as long as the fruit lasted.

Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was in his mid-thirties when the Spanish fleet set sail from Cuba to conquer the Florida peninsula. His family traced its ancestry (and its ludicrous name) to a humble shepherd who carved a place in Spanish history by showing the troops of King Sancho of Navarre a shortcut through the mountains north of Seville. The shepherd’s name was Martin Alhaja and he marked the mountain pass with the skull of a cow—cabeza de vaca—thus enabling the Spanish to rout the Moors during the Reconquest of 1212. As a reward, the king gave Martin Alhaja the noble name of Cowhead. In the centuries that followed, the family distinguished itself as builders, civil servants, and explorers. Cabeza de Vaca’s paternal grandfather led the conquest of Grand Canary Island in the late 1400s. By 1500 the island of Cuba had become headquarters for Spanish conquistadors. Cortés had sailed from Cuba in 1521 to conquer the Aztecs of Mexico (which he called New Spain).

All the famous pirates operated in the Gulf of Mexico—Henry Morgan, Captain Kidd, Edward (Blackbeard) Teach. Hundreds of Spanish treasure ships passed along the Texas coast in the seventeenth century, bound for Cuba and Spain, and legend has it that pirates sometimes tied lanterns to the backs of burros and led them along the beach, hoping seamen would mistake them for passing ships and pile up on the reefs.

Lafitte’s own house was an impressive two-story structure of heavy masonry, painted red, its tower facing the bay and the noses of two cannons jutting from portholes. The wine cellar of La Mansion Rouge is still apparent today, beneath the ruins of a later structure at the foot of 15th Street.

Aboard the yawl was one Nicaragua Smith, the same man who had stolen a skiff the previous summer and deserted to the Yankee fleet. Smith was court-martialed, then hauled off by cart to face public execution. Smith refused a blindfold, says historian David G. McComb, and stood tapping his foot on the coffin lid as the band played firing-squad music.

Brann also alleged that the colonel used two sets of scales, one for sellers, another for the buyers. When a farmer brought cotton to one of Moody’s warehouses, his hired hand would weigh it and deduct ten pounds per bale “for water.” The bales would then sit for a few weeks on the wharf, soaking up Galveston’s excessive humidity. Then a second weigher—this one an accommodating state inspector—would weigh the bales again, water and all. The state inspector’s figures would be used to calculate what the buyer paid. The difference, which was substantial, went into Moody’s pocket.

One of the cheaper entertainments was to hurry down to the docks to watch the immigrants disembark—Russians in fur coats, Scots with bagpipes, Czechs and Poles staggering under the weight of outsized cooking vessels and trunks of memorabilia. Germans who had migrated previously sometimes rushed up the gangplanks searching for unmarried German women. Wedding vows between complete strangers were not uncommon. Immigrants poured in at a rate of 4,000 a year. By 1880 the population of Galveston had tripled from what it was before the war—from 7,300 to 22,240.

Moody used it to cheat cotton farmers. From his interviews with farmers, Brann cited an example of how Moody worked. Say the market reached 8.5 cents per pound: Moody would hold a large amount of cotton on consignment, but advise his clients to wait for a better price. When the price slumped to 6.5, as Moody knew it would, he would pretend to sell, apologizing to his clients for the unexpected downturn—and at the same time charging them extra storage fees, and interest on money advanced. In fact, Brann claimed, the colonel actually sold the cotton at 8.5, paying hush money to keep the transaction secret.

Galveston had the first gaslight, the first electric light, the first telephone, the first hospital, the first law firm, the first trade union, the first golf course—name any business or institution or invention and Galveston probably had the first in Texas.

Three families in particular—the Sealys, the Moodys, and the Kempners—dominated the Island, and continued to dominate it for more than a century, conveying social and political sanctions, and asserting the right to identify Galveston’s needs and requirements with their own.

There was a touch of irony and a dab of hypocrisy in this approach. All of the worthies on the Deep Water Committee were champions of private enterprise, deeply suspicious and scornful of anyone who fed at the public trough. But this was no time for ideology. The engineer estimated that it would cost $7.7 million to guarantee Galveston thirty feet of water. Members of the DWC weren’t about to dig that kind of money from their own pockets, but they were willing to pull out all the stops to convince the federal government to fork it over.

DURING WHAT came to be known as the Texas Revolution, Galveston Island was the capital, and nearly the final retreat for General Sam Houston and his ragtag army. Except for a decisive battle across the bay, on the banks of the San Jacinto River, Galveston might have gone down in history as the second Alamo, and Texas might be part of Mexico.

As governor of Tennessee, Houston had been the focus of a marvelous scandal when his bride of a few months suddenly ran home to her parents. Houston offered no public explanation, and threatened to kill any man indelicate enough to stain his wife’s honor with speculation. He resigned his office in disgrace, and for years lived among the Cherokees, who knew him as “Big Drunk.” Like many other outcasts of his generation, Houston ended up in Texas. He was exactly the sort of man to rally an army of rowdies and misfits, and settlers rushed to join up.

There was much talk at the time about the United States annexing Texas, Williams reminded his visitor. Merging the Republic of Texas with the United States was not Williams’ idea of good business, a notion with which the British government heartily agreed. One way to stop annexation, Williams pointed out, was for England to recognize Texas as an independent republic, and then lean on Mexico to do likewise. Recognition would have the added benefit of striking a blow against the hated Southern planter, who was counting on Texas statehood to increase the slave vote in Washington. The British diplomat apparently was convinced by Williams’ arguments. In 1842 Great Britian officially recognized the Republic of Texas. In a short time brigs were sailing regularly and directly from Liverpool to the wharves of Galveston, delivering manufactured goods and sailing home to England with their holds loaded with cotton, grain, sugar, and other products of mainland Texas. International trade was a boon to all the merchants in Galveston, but to none more than the firm of McKinney & Williams.

The homes of both Williams and Menard have weathered storms since 1838 and are still standing today: Menard’s old residence at 33rd and Avenue N1/2 is privately owned, but Williams’ home is open to the public.

the city of Galveston passed an ordinance requiring all free blacks and mulattoes to register at the office of Mayor Sydnor, the slave auctioneer. There they were required to post a $1,000 bond to ensure that they would not become public charges or disturb the peace. Hardly anyone, black or white, had $1,000 in 1840. Blacks who were legally free were frequently arrested and sold at auction.

William Walker was a pious and dangerously deluded man who cultivated his image as carefully as any contemporary television evangelist. In an earlier, unsuccessful attempt to conquer the Mexican state of Sonora, Walker had bestowed on himself the title of colonel. After his invasion of Nicaragua, he promoted himself to generalissimo, and later el presidente. Born in Nashville, the eldest son of a banker who had immigrated from Scotland, William Walker was the archetypical southern gentleman and aristocrat. He loved to put on airs. He did not drink or smoke or use profanity, and he considered purity of thought and deed as the first and finest duty of a Christian. William Walker was a practitioner of that unique blend of lunacy and hypocrisy that characterized the antebellum South. What attracted many of the wealthier Islanders to Walker, however, was his outspoken opinions on race and slavery: he referred to slavery as “the divine institution.” In Walker’s twisted view God put the black man on earth to “secure liberty and order” for the white race, which in turn was obliged to “bestow comfort and Christianity” on blacks. As proof of this, Walker pointed out that God allowed Africa to “lie idle until the discovery of America gave a chance of utilizing the raw material of slavery.” Walker believed that fighting for the institution of slavery was his destiny. Some Texans saw Walker for what he was. “Walker is not a liberator,” wrote the editor of the Quitman Free Press, “he’s a slaver.” But many more saw him as man of extraordinary vision.

Immigrants by the thousands were pouring into ports such as Galveston. Some of the immigrants took a liking to the Island and settled there, on land purchased from the Galveston City Company. Most took one look and headed inland. One regal Galveston immigrant who arrived about that time was a pompous fool named Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels. The prince brought along a shipload of serfs and marched them across 170 miles of wilderness to found the German colony of New Braunfels, between Austin and San Antonio. The prince rode ahead of the pack with his retinue of horsemen, including his personal architect, cook, and hunter. Solms-Braunfels passed through Galveston again on his way back to the Fatherland: he had gotten homesick, and left the colonists to fend for themselves.

There wasn’t yet a permanent water supply, but a steamer made daily trips with fresh water from the San Jacinto River. There was talk, too, of building a bridge to the mainland. By now Galveston had not one but two hotels. The Tremont (also owned by McKinney & Williams) was the largest and grandest in the Republic. The Island supported fifteen retail shops, six taverns, an oyster house, three warehouses, two printing establishments, a newspaper, and a number of small artisans’ shops. Ice cream was available for three dollars a gallon; schooners brought the ice from the coast of Newfoundland. Gail Borden enventually quit his job with the Galveston City Company and opened a meat-biscuit factory in a two-story building at the corner of the Strand and 25th Street.

For some inexplicable reason word spread that Galveston was a wonderful health resort. A traveler from Ohio wrote that invalids who had come to the port to arrange passage to the United States “all revived under the salubrious influence of the climate.

Disappointed, Kleberg returned to the mainland with his family and the two Mexican prisoners. It is interesting to speculate how the course of Texas history might have been altered if the Klebergs had stayed at Galveston and developed a ranch. Instead, Kleberg’s son later married the youngest daughter of Richard King, who was in the process of buying 1.5 million acres of ranchland in deep South Texas, near the Rio Grande. Since 1886 the descendents of Robert and Rosalie Von Roeder Kleberg have controlled the King Ranch, the most famous ranch in America.

In the national election of 1860 Lincoln didn’t get a single vote in Galveston. Islanders were angry, frightened, and confused. Anarchy seemed to sweep across the Island. Roving gangs of armed thugs dogged immigrants from the North, threatening bodily harm if anyone dared speak up for abolition. A black who attempted an “outrage” on a white woman was dragged with a rope around his neck to a tenpin alley and hanged from a beam, then his head was cut off and his body thrown in the bay.

In February 1857, these Ranger units rendezvoused in Galveston, where they were guests at a grand reception at the Methodist Church and a gala ball at the Tremont. The principal speaker, Francis R. Lubbock, praised the volunteers for their efforts to strengthen the institution of slavery and secure a base for the slave trade: Lubbock’s views on slavery later got him elected to a term as governor.

Free blacks had never had it easy in Texas, and in the antebellum mood of the 1850s their position became untenable. State law prohibited blacks from immigrating to Texas, and required those who were already there to get special legislative permission to stay. Deeds of freedom were meaningless, and blacks were frequently kidnapped off the streets of Galveston and sold. Captain Thomas Chubb, a Galveston shipmaster who would later command the Confederate steamer Royal Yacht during the Civil War, hired crews of free blacks in Boston and sold them as slaves when they reached Galveston.

The testimony of a black was inadmissible in any case involving a white: thus, when a white hauled a black into court for any reason, the black’s inability to testify in his own behalf preordained the verdict. Blacks accused of real or alleged crimes were sold into slavery as punishment.

Three years after that, on another filibustering expedition to Honduras, Walker was captured and executed. At the age of thirty-seven destiny had finally caught up with him.

The military retreat wasn’t the only example of official stupidity that week. In his order for the evacuation of civilians, Governor Francis R. Lubbock asked Galvestonians to kindly burn their city on the way out. Naturally, the governor’s scorched-earth policy was ignored, but Islanders never forgave Lubbock and helped defeat him in the next election.

Most of the other ships in the U.S. fleet had retreated out to sea, but the USS Westfield had run aground. While another officer negotiated a truce with CSA forces, Captain Renshaw decided to blow up the Westfield rather than surrender it to the enemy. The U.S. commander and some of his men laid a trail of gunpowder leading to the ship’s magazine, lighted it, and took to the lifeboats. But something went wrong. The Westfield didn’t immediately explode. Renshaw went back to check the fuse, at which point the ship blew to bits, killing Renshaw and fourteen of his men. When word of Renshaw’s death reached the fleet, Renshaw’s second-in-command ordered it to set sail for New Orleans. The federal troops on Kuhn’s Wharf, abandoned though not defeated, had no choice except to surrender. The Confederates had captured six ships, sunk one, run another aground, and taken nearly 400 prisoners. They had lost 143 men, killed or wounded, and one ship, but they had won the Battle of Galveston and secured the Island, for whatever it was worth.

Most of the dead were buried in the cemetery at 43rd and Broadway. Young Sidney Sherman, whose father had helped Texas win its war of independence with Mexico, was put to rest not far from the graves of two Yankees—Lieutenant Commander Edward Lea, who had died in his father’s arms, and Captain Jonathan Wainwright, whose grandson and namesake became a famous American general in World War II and hero of the Bataan Death March.

LOOKING BACK, it is obvious that the Karankawas were already doomed to extinction. The Island was too attractive for white settlers to ignore. It abounded with game, and there was supposed to be buried treasure. Hunters prospered by selling meat and game to mainlanders—deer, geese, teal and canvasback ducks, red fish (settlers called them the cod of the Gulf), perch, trout, oysters, crabs, shrimp, turtles.

In their compromise with the peculiarities of Island living, Galvestonians learned to tolerate degrees of squalor. The sweet, heavy smell of oleander and the exotic fragrances of green bananas and South American oranges swirled with the scent of fish, decaying weeds, and open sewers. Originally, the Galveston sewer system had consisted of pigs that ran wild and ate all forms of human waste, including excrement. Things had improved, but not much. Until the 1890s, when water and sewer service became generally available, citizens still stored the products of their outhouses in barrels, which were collected by night in horse-drawn carts and dumped into the Gulf.

Though he was a scholar with considerable lingustic talent and training—he collected colloquialisms, which he recorded on the cuffs of his shirt—

The largest enterprise on the Island was Texas Star Flour Mill, owned by Morris Lasker. As industrialists went, Morris Lasker was fairly progressive. A Jew from East Prussia, Lasker had studied the classics, and thought of himself as a liberal and an intellectual. His Texas Star Flour Mill was the first industry in Texas to install an eight-hour workday, for which Lasker was labeled “a traitor to his class.

The mill employed 550 women and 150 children, and paid them 90 cents for their thirteen-hour day. They worked in hot, poorly ventilated, poorly lighted rooms—one light bulb for every four looms—under brutish foremen who slapped them around and docked them five to fifteen cents a day for mistakes. Many tried to quit and return to their homes on the mainland, but few could afford a ticket off the Island. They appealed to city aldermen, who were sympathetic but unwilling to buck the power structure. Company officials claimed that a sixty-six-hour work week was standard for the industry, and pointed out that, after all, the workers had gotten off Christmas Day. When the women and children decided to strike, mill owners did what management almost always did in those days—brought in strikebreakers. In the end, everyone on the Island lost.

Engineers were regarded as the heroes of the new millennium, and Galveston’s board of commissioners voted to put its problem in the hands of three of the best known—Colonel Henry M. Robert, Alfred Noble, and H. C. Ripley. Robert, who had recently retired from the Army Corps of Engineers (and was famous for having drafted Robert’s Rules of Order), knew Galveston well. He had been instrumental in deepening the harbor, and had recommended constructing a dike between Pelican Island and the mainland, to redirect the current and prevent sedimentary deposits from clogging the channel. He had also recommended building a breakwater along the beach, a recommendation that, had it been approved, might have saved thousands of lives in the 1900 storm. But it had been rejected, beaten back by the argument that such a construction would obscure the view and play hell with the tourist trade.

Alfred Noble had built bridges across the Mississippi, constructed the breakwater across the lakefront at Chicago, and helped build the locks at Sault Ste. Marie. Ripley had served with the Corps of Engineers in Galveston—he had designed the wagon bridge across the bay—and was considered an expert on Island pecularities like tides, winds, currents, and the workings of storm tides on sand and subsoil. This latter field of expertise was especially vital since the 1900 storm had drastically rearranged the Island’s topography.

Albert Lasker’s biographer, “The Dixie Champ took one look at Choynski, who had hands like hams and was a real professional to boot, and promptly fled town on the same train that had brought Choynski in.” Lasker had invested most of his savings in this fight. He had promoted it, sold tickets, rented Harmony Hall. What to do? That’s when he remembered a black dockworker that people called Li’l Artha’ Johnson. Li’l Artha’ could fight.

In his spare time, Lasker organized a boxing club and began promoting fights. For most of the nineteenth century, prizefighting was legal in Texas, as was dogfighting, bullfighting, and bearbaiting. But in 1891 the law was changed to make boxing a felony, punishable by prison terms of two to five years.

the seventeen-year-old Lasker had his eye on bigger things. He contacted a nationally known heavyweight from Philadelphia named Joe Choynski and offered him five hundred dollars to take on the Dixie Champ.

Even though the grand jury refused to indict, authorities held the two boxers in jail for twenty-four days. They were treated well, however, and sparred daily for the amusement of their jailers. In his book Papa Jack, Randy Roberts claims that Li’l Artha’ really learned to box during these jailhouse sparring sessions with the old pro, Joe Choynski. A short time later Johnson left Galveston for a career in the prize ring. In 1903 he won the world’s black heavyweight title. And five years after that, in Sydney, Australia, he defeated Britain’s Tommy Burns in fourteen rounds to become the first black ever to win the heavyweight championship of the world. Arthur John Johnson—or Jack Johnson, as he was better known—never returned to Galveston, not that he would have been welcome. When Islanders read about Johnson’s famous affinity for white women,

Underfed and poorly trained, Li’l Artha’ Johnson made a fight of it for five rounds and then quit. At that exact moment, five Texas Rangers raided the arena and hauled away both boxers, though not the promoter, and certainly not the well-connected spectators.

To bring the city to a level that would protect it from the ravages of the sea, every house, every building, every church and school over an area of five hundred blocks had to be raised on jackscrews and filled under with sand. Streets had to be torn apart and repaved. Streetcar tracks, water pipes, gas lines, trees, and even cemeteries had to be elevated. The grade would vary across the Island, from seventeen feet at the beach to ten feet or less at Broadway: the average was about thirteen. The technology of jacking up large buildings had been used successfully during Chicago’s grade elevation: Alfred Noble had worked on that project.

The Denver construction company of J. M. O’Rourke built the seawall in sixty-foot sections, using massive and sophisticated equipment and techniques never seen before in Texas. Giant four-foot-square blocks of granite and carloads of gravel came by rail from Granite Mountain west of Austin. Forty-two-foot pilings were shipped from the forests of East Texas. Four-horse wagons delivered the materials to the Little Susie line at 15th and Avenue N, and from there they were hauled on specially constructed tracks to the excavation along the beach where the wall would eventually sit. Steam-powered pile drivers that looked like oil derricks hammered the pilings down into the clay stratum, and work crews covered the pilings with foot-thick planking that became the base for the wall. Once the materials started

At its base the wall was sixteen feet thick, tapering to a width of five feet at its top. The seventeen-foot-high wall presented a concave face to the sea, driving the force of the waves upward and back over onto themselves. To protect the toe of the wall from the constant pounding of the sea, a twenty-seven-foot apron of riprap—giant granite boulders—was laid in front, extending out into the Gulf at high tide. The first piling was hammered into place in October 1902. A year and four months later, the initial three-mile section was completed. The wall started at the south jetty on the east end of the Island, followed 6th Street to Broadway, then angled to the beach. From there it ran straight up to 39th Street. In the meantime, the federal government authorized extending the wall from 39th to 53rd, so that it would protect the army installations at Fort Crockett. This mile-long section was completed in October 1905. Over the years the county continued to extend the wall until by 1960 it was 10.4 miles long and girded one-third of the Gulf coastline.

No one would ever know for certain how many Islanders died, but the most reliable estimate was somewhere between six and seven thousand. Since the population of the city in 1900 was 37,700, that meant that in the hours between Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning one out of every six citizens of Galveston perished. Thousands more were killed on the mainland. The storm was recorded as the worst disaster in the history of the United States.

Two weeks after the hurricane, Will Moody, Jr., purchased a thirty-room mansion at 2618 Broadway, for ten cents on the dollar.

A German servant girl working in the home of W. L. Moody, Jr., was sent outside on an errand, and returned to report that the water standing in the yard tasted salty. Salty? How could that be? Then Moody began to understand, and ordered his servants to evacuate his wife and children to the home of his father, a block west on 23rd Street. The unthinkable had happened—the entire Island was covered by water. The Gulf and the bay had converged, and for the time being, Galveston was no longer an island, but merely part of the ocean floor, its houses and buildings protruding like toys in a bathtub.

From one end of the Island to the other—in their instinctive struggle to survive for even one more minute—people committed astonishing, desperate, heroic, and sometimes foolish acts. A nurse on duty at a home near the beach wrapped the body of a stillborn infant in a blanket, administered a sleeping potion to the helpless, pain-racked mother, and then, as the house began to disintegrate, calmly made preparation for her own escape. She put on a man’s bathing suit, cut off her hair with scissors, and plunged into the sea. From eight in the evening until two in the morning, she clung to a piece of driftwood, finally washing ashore on the mainland. Naked, bleeding, and shivering in the cold rain, she found a shaggy dog and snuggled up against him until daylight.

In the deadly days of summer, when the yellow-fever epidemic was claiming up to twenty lives a day, the bitter irony came crashing home. And still there was a reluctance on the part of the government and the business community to acknowledge the obvious. Quarantines, of course, were bad for business. For years medical experts on the Island claimed that quarantines weren’t effective—when in fact quarantines were the only remedy that was effective. When an epidemic hit Galveston in 1870, Houston sent its militia out with shotguns and bludgeons to stop trains from Galveston, with orders to tear up the tracks if necessary. Islanders yelled that Houston was using the quarantine for its own profit, but six years later Galveston did the same thing to New Orleans, halting trade because an epidemic had swept the Crescent City.

TWO COMPETING forces were tearing at the Island. Far out at sea the storm was piling up walls of water and pushing them toward shore, and on the mainland a north wind was pushing in the opposite direction. The tide had forced itself steadily into the harbor, raising bay waters six feet, and the north wind drove angry brown waves against and over the wharves and railroad tracks. By one in the afternoon the wagon bridge and the three railroad bridges across the bay were all submerged. If anyone had thoughts of escaping to the mainland, it was too late.

The crisis created by the hurricane was the perfect excuse for a political power play—if Galveston had been Nicaragua, what Kempner and his friends accomplished might have been described as a bloodless coup. The instruments of insurrection were in place. Kempner was already city treasurer, and minister of finance for the Central Relief Committee. Kempner, John Sealy, Morris Lasker, and Bertrand Adoue provided a link between the Central Relief Committee and the Deep Water Committee. By simply withholding taxes, members of the DWC created the illusion that the Jones administration was being irresponsible and probably dishonest in handling the public purse. Whatever the DWC had in mind, the Galveston Daily News could be counted on for support. When Mayor Jones accused the DWC of using the hurricane to bring down the duly elected government, the newspaper charged that the mayor was appealing to “class differences.

Work crews attempting to load bodies on carts reported that the corpses were falling to pieces. The only solution, it became apparent, was immediate and wholesale burial at sea.

The barges were taken out into the Gulf and remained there all night, until it was light enough for the negroes to fasten the weights and throw the bodies overboard. When the barges returned those negroes were ashen in color.

Two days later Father Kirwin’s face was similarly ashen. A member of his congregation came to the cathedral and told the priest: “My mother-in-law is back.” “That’s impossible!” said Father Kirwin, reminding the man that they had dumped his mother-in-law’s weighted body eighteen miles out to sea. But she was back, as were the bodies of hundreds of others: they had washed up on the beach overnight. The committee had to rethink its strategy. Since it was no longer possible to haul decaying bodies through the streets, the committee decided to burn corpses on the spot.

The property would be raised from its current grade of 5.3 feet to 12.2 feet, thus requiring a fill of almost seven feet. That would take 17,144 cubic yards of material, which meant that the actual cost of raising the man’s property to grade would be $3,171. But the owner would pay nothing, not even his normal taxes. On the other hand, owners of property not in the canal’s path would have to pay for the raising of their houses, as well as their taxes: the city would pay for the fill. Amazingly, the entire project was carried off without a single condemnation suit, demonstrating the spirit with which Islanders approached a feat that amounted to pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps.

and pumped sand from Offatt’s Bayou. By 1911 more than 2,100 structures had been raised, and more than 16 million cubic yards of fill spread across the Island. It took 700 jackscrews to lift the newly restored 3,000-ton St. Patrick’s Church a mere five feet, but they did it without interrupting services.

On its south lawn, honeymooners from all over the country sat on wooden swings, watching the tropical moon, listening to the roar of the Gulf, and wondering, perhaps, what would happen when another severe hurricane hit the Island. The answer to that question came in 1915. The storm hit with such fury that it lifted a three-masted schooner out of the water and tossed it over the top of the seawall, and hurled four-ton blocks of granite riprap across the boulevard. The storm blew out windows, flooded downtown streets, and demolished nearly all the buildings beyond 53rd Street. On the Island eight died, compared with more than three hundred on the mainland and Bolivar. But the seawall did its job. In the ballroom of the Galvez Hotel people drank champagne and danced the night away.

A wildcatter named Patillo Higgins leased a thousand acres along an inconspicuous hill called Spindletop, near Beaumont, but ran out of money before he completed drilling. Looking for investors, Higgins first contacted John D. Rockefeller at Standard Oil, but Rockefeller wasn’t interested. Finally, he found a backer named Joseph Cullinan, a Pennsylvanian who had set up a refinery in North Texas, at Corsicana, and who had experience in raising seed money for drilling operations. Cullinan had heard of the Moodys of Galveston and decided to visit the Island and offer them a chance to invest. The story of that meeting is one of the Island’s enduring legends. During the negotiations, the story goes, Cullinan happened to mention that he had recently paid $10,000 for a painting by a well-known New England artist. The look that passed between Colonel Moody and his son would have fried a ship’s anchor—ten grand for a single picture! The Moodys decided that anyone that gullible wasn’t worth additional conversation, and they dismissed Cullinan as quickly as possible. Cullinan and Higgins eventually hooked up with a gambler and speculator named John W. “Bet-a-Million” Gates, who had hung around Texas in the late 1890s trying to peddle barbed wire, and in his dealings had acquired ownership of the Kansas City & Southern Railroad. Gates’ railroad connections were an invaluable asset for a field as isolated as Spindletop, and he agreed to take 46 percent of the action. On January 10, 1901, Spindletop blew in with such force that it shattered the derrick and spit drills and equipment hundreds of feet in the air. The raging spout of oil measured a steady 160 feet—it was nine days (and a loss of half a million barrels) before they got it capped and controlled. So prodigious was the strike that at the time it was estimated that Spindletop could supply one-sixth of the world’s oil. The company in which the Moodys declined to invest became known as Texaco.

The Kempners helped the Sealys maintain control of the wharves because they needed the Sealys’ support for their own agenda. They were activists, constantly devising what they considered to be cures for the Island’s malaise—building a bridge to Pelican Island, filling in mud flats, extending the seawall, advocating new parks and playgrounds. The Moodys recognized no malaise, and liked Galveston just the way it was. To the Moodys, the Kempners and the Sealys were arrogant fools. To the Kempners, the Moodys were cretins who exhibited, as I. H. Kempner wrote, “the smugness and the self-conceit of those whose wealth so far exceeds their civic pride.

Ike Kempner incurred the wrath of the Moodys and many other wealthy families in 1907 when he fought against an ordinance that would require blacks to sit at the rear of streetcars. Not only did he oppose the ordinance, Kempner made certain that the names of those who signed petitions favoring it were published and distributed across the Island. In the space of a few weeks about one-third of the Island’s maids, coachmen, and cooks quit in protest. But the ordinance was passed anyway, and remained in force for more than fifty years.

There was one other reason, however, that the Great Depression went almost unnoticed in Galveston, and it was the biggest reason of all: the rackets. Gambling and prostitution had always thrived in Galveston—particularly so in times of economic hardship—but the national crisis that really jump-started Galveston’s economy and kept it at full throttle for years was Prohibition. In its fifteen-year run, from 1919 to 1933, Prohibition altered the city’s power structure and changed its character.

Starting in the spring of 1919, schooners from Cuba, Jamaica, and the Bahamas began running booze to the Island, up to 20,000 cases at a time. The ships dropped anchor thirty-five miles out at sea, at a rendezvous point southwest of Galveston called Rum Row, and the booze was off-loaded into small powerboats or flat-bottomed launches for delivery to spots along the miles of deserted beach. The boats usually beached in shallow water, and work crews waded out and carried the goods to shore. Each case was wrapped in a burlap sack, and two sacks were tied together for easy handling. Sometimes the goods were delivered to remote piers at Offatt’s Bayou, or to one of the coves near San Luis Pass.

Eventually, two rival gangs divided up the Island, using Broadway as a line of demarcation. The Beach Gang, so called because it landed most of its goods on West Beach, occupied the south half of the Island. It was led by an oldtime mobster named Ollie J. Quinn, and his partner, Dutch Voight. A rotund, unfailingly pleasant man, Quinn was an Island icon. On Sundays he faithfully attended services at the First Baptist Church, always placing a hundred-dollar bill in the collection plate. In secular circles, however, Quinn was the acknowledged kingpin of Galveston vice. He ran a joint at 21st and Postoffice called the Deluxe Club, and leased slot machines and other gambling equipment through his Modern Vending Company. Quinn and Voight ran a dependable, relaxed, downhome operation, known for its tolerance to competition and its commitment to peace among outlaws.

The other major smuggling outfit, the Downtown Gang, was distinguished by its reputation for having considerably more guts than brains. The Downtown Gang was headed by a dandy named Johnny Jack Nounes, a legendary high roller who wore a diamond stickpin and carried a roll of hundred-dollar bills as thick as a cucumber. Johnny Jack was famous for his generosity. He gave toys to kids at Christmas, and once spent $40,000 on a party at the Pennsylvania Hotel in New York, where silent film stars Nancy Carroll and Clara Bow are said to have bathed in expensive champagne. He was equally famous for his careless approach to business. He sometimes hijacked truckloads of booze belonging to rival smugglers, and once stiffed a group of Cubans by paying for their boatload of rum with soap coupons.

Two other promising newcomers in the early days of Prohibition were Rosario (Rose) Maceo and his younger brother, Salvatore (Sam) Maceo. Born in Palermo, Sicily, the Maceos migrated to Louisiana with their family around the turn of the century, and moved to Galveston in 1910. The Maceo brothers were barbers. Sam worked in the shop at the Galvez Hotel, and Rose operated a single barber chair in a corner of a seafood canteen at Murdoch’s Pier. Rose passed out glasses of “Dago Red” wine to his customers, and sold bottles of liquor concealed in hollowed-out loaves of French bread.

Quinn liked the Maceo brothers. Rose was mean, tough, and calculating. Sam was smooth and diplomatic. When Quinn and Dutch Voight opened the Island’s first big-time nightclub in 1926, the Maceos were included in the partnership. The Hollywood Dinner Club was built from ground up, at 61st and Avenue S, on the western edge of the city, beyond the seawall. Instantly, it was the swankiest night spot on the Gulf coast—Spanish architecture, crystal chandeliers, rattan furniture, a dance floor bigger than the ballroom at the Galvez. And air conditioning! The Hollywood was the first air-conditioned night club in the country. Sam Maceo gave instructions that the temperature be maintained at 69 degrees, on the theory that drinkers who were cool didn’t feel the booze, and drinkers who didn’t feel the booze were lousy performers at the crap tables.

In the months and years that followed, the Maceos expanded their empire until it included dozens of casinos, nightclubs, and betting parlors, not only on the Island but in such small mainland towns as Texas City, Kemah, La Marque, and Dickinson. Motorists driving south on the highway from Houston spoke of crossing the Maceo-Dickinson Line. With their unabashed attitude toward sin and corruption, the Maceos brought prominence, notoriety, and an enduring nickname to the Island. For the next three decades it was known as the Free State of Galveston.

Papa Rose Maceo was a preferred customer at the Moodys’ City National Bank. He borrowed up to a half-million dollars at a time. On his signature alone Maceo could borrow $100,000 for a load of bootleg liquor. He usually repaid the money within two weeks, at 25 percent interest. Big Sam Maceo went to his broker’s office every Monday morning and bought a $25,000 municipal bond: in those days municipal bonds were a foolproof method of laundering money.

THE MACEOS changed the rules in Galveston. The underworld become the overworld. Activities that had been merely tolerated became part of the mainstream economy. Professional criminals became respected businessmen—and friends, not to say patrons, of the police commissioner.

John Sealy died in January 1926, in the American Hospital at Neuilly, France, following an attack of influenza contracted in Naples, Italy. His position as head of the Wharf Company was filled by his nephew, George Sealy, Jr., a chip off the old block. George Junior was also chief executive officer of the Cotton Concentration, and the world’s foremost authority on the cross-pollination of oleanders. His mother, Magnolia Willis Sealy, had planted oleanders all over the Island in the 1920s, and had made this poisonous shrub Galveston’s official flower. When the family built the Cotton Concentration complex on West Broadway, George Junior included an oleander nursery that covered fourteen city blocks. Much as his uncle had loved Paris, George Junior loved his nursery: together with the company’s horticultural superintendent, Edward F. Barr, Sealy developed sixty varieties of oleander, each named for a wealthy Galvestonian or a distinguished visitor to the Island. Some critics believed that Sealy spent so much time with his plants that he forgot about the Wharf Company.

The black editor of the City Times wrote that his people had a loving spirit for whites: “The colored people of Galveston are not trying to run the city in her commercial, financial, labor, or political progress, but instead are honestly doing their humble part to help keep things going right.” And things went right—or at least peacefully—until 1928 when a black schoolteacher named John H. Clouser stood before the city commission and demanded that the signs in Menard Park that read FOR WHITE PEOPLE ONLY be removed. Black people paid taxes, too, Clouser reminded the commissioners, and had a right to walk through the park and listen to city band concerts. The city was spending $26,000 a year for the recreation of whites, but not a penny for blacks. “Our children live in alleys,” Clouser said. “There’s no place for them to play.

The commission paid attention as Clouser made his case against the offensive sign at Menard Park, then voted to have the sign removed. Moreover, they designated a square block, bordered by Avenues P and Q and 41st and 42nd streets, as a playground for black children. This was a magnificent, though short-lived, victory for Galveston’s blacks. Unfortunately, it created a backlash among a group of white racists. White vigilantes burned crosses at the site of the proposed park, and held a series of indignation meetings. Eventually, they forced a referendum vote, the first in Galveston’s history. By a two-to-one margin the commission was overturned, and the site became a park for white children instead. To placate the blacks the commission voted to turn a second site on what had been the old Lasker homestead into Wright Cuney Park for blacks. Most blacks accepted the compromise, but not John Clouser, who waited a chance to strike back at the power structure.