The Great Galveston Disaster, Containing a Full and Thrilling Account of the Most Appalling Calamity of Modern Times Page: 438

438 WONDERFUL COURAGE OF SURVIVORS.
handed the baby to its mother and told her I must go, and ordered
my clothes prepared for the trip. In two hours I was on the way."
"Did you have any idea what you were summoned to Galveston
for?"
"No; only I knew there was some disaster threatening my
children. I did not know what it was, but I could not refrain
from going."
Asked further about the trip to Galveston, he said the passengers
got into the depot, but he never saw or heard of any of
the train crew, and he thought they all must have perished. "I
got a negro to show me the way to where my daughter, Mrs.
Chilton, lived. The water was then all over the city and rising
rapidly. When we got to Eighth street, my son-in-law here,
Stufflebram, called out to me across the street. He had seen and
recognized me. I went over and we started on. There was a lot
of timber and driftwood floating, and some people along the way
were pulling all of it in the houses they could get.
HOUSE WASHED TO FRAGMENTS.
" We had to push it apart to get through in places, and some
of them laughed and said push it to them, and I did so, and they
began hauling it in. Nobody thought how serious it was, but
looked on it as merely high water. A little later all those buildings
along there were destroyed and all the people there drowned.
Stufflebram had taken his wife up to Chilton's and Clarkson also,
because it was a litle higher ground there. We finally reached
it, on Twenty-second street, just opposite Harmony Hall. We
were all in the house together when Prof. Smith sent word over
from Harmony Hall that we had better get out at once.
"We went to the hall, and the last of the party had hardly
cleared the sidewalk when a large brick building gave way and
mashed Chilton's house to fragments. We staid in Harmony
Hall until the cyclone ceased, though it looked once as if the hall
would go when the roof blew off. It was the awfulest time I ever
saw. My daughters and their families were saved, and-I am
truly thankful for it. They said at Galveston that we were the