Al Roker - The Storm of the Century: The Great Gulf Hurricane of 1900

A SCORCHING END TO A HOT SUMMER: THATS WHAT EVERYBODY was saying. It was the first week of September in the grand turn-of-the-century year of 1900, and people in Galveston, Texas, were complaining about the heat.

Thats one reason little Mary Louise Bristol, seven years old, was looking forward to the weekend. At her mother Cassie Bristols boardinghouse, not far from the harbor on Galveston Bay, work went on despite the heat, just as it always didand just as work went on everywhere else all the time in bustling, steaming Galveston. This island city in the Gulf of Mexico, lying two miles off the Texas mainland, had become the most important port in the state, the foremost cotton-trading center in the world.

Gangs of hustling longshoremen, black, white, and Mexican, loaded and unloaded ships on the wharves on the bay. Bankers and lawyers made deals in their offices above the broad sidewalks of Avenue B, known as the Strand. Cassie Bristol, a widowed mother of four, ran her boardinghouse near the harbor in hopes of feeding and bettering her family. Along with nearly 40,000 others, they all played their parts in a booming citys busy life.

Mary Louise Bristol, known as Louise, was Cassies youngest. And Louise was the only member of her family who had any time for play. Sometimes she played alone. Sometimes she played with her friend Martha, who lived across the street.

But everybody else in the Bristol family was always busy with work. The girl knew her house wasnt only a home but also a living, and she knew her mother was a smart woman. Louises father, a seaman, had died at sea when Louise was just a baby, and Cassie, left alone with four children, rolled up her sleeves, took out a mortgage on the house, added a second floor, and started renting rooms. Cassie had a goal: keep her children from falling into poverty and disgrace while teaching them the ways of a genteel life.

That ambition made Cassies life a struggle. But it was a battle she was winning, thanks to constant work. Louises brothers were old enough to have jobs and to bring home their pay. Her sister Lois, fifteen, helped their mother at the boardinghouse.

And the Bristol place was especially busy this week. School was back in session after the summerLouise had just nervously started first grade on Mondayand every September, the house began filling to the brim with students of the University of Texas Medical School here in Galveston. Those young men were among Cassies most reliable customers. Soon theyd be swarming over the place, their trunks hauled in by horse-drawn wagon and humped inside by porters, their rooms assigned, their questions answered, their beds made, their food served. Louises mother was spending this week getting the place ready: cleaning and airing and washing and drying. Cooking and canning and stocking up on stores.

What the little girl most looked forward toas the endless work went on at home, and the heat of early September remained so oppressivewas the weekend. Hoping to forget about school, hoping for a change in the weather, Louise was looking forward to Saturday, when she could play.

S aturday, of course, would come. When it did, on the eighth of September, Louise, her mother, and the rest of the Bristol family would find themselves fighting gigantic volumes of ocean and wind beyond anything they could ever have imagined. Saturday would plunge them all, with all of their fellow Galvestonians, into a dark world of sheer horror.

A rnold Wolfram too was wilting out the end of summer with his fellow citizens in that first week of September. Wolfram would have seemed a staid enough, ordinary enough Galvestoniana member of the thriving German American community in that polyglot gulf town. At forty-three, Wolfram worked in a fruit and produce store, where he made sales and took inventory. He was married to the former Mary Schmidt. They had six children, with four still living at home.