When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.

—John Muir, cited by John L. Tveten in Coastal Texas

Galveston! The name resonates in the chords of imagination. There are others in our language: Virginia City, Jackson Hole, Aspen, Las Vegas, Key West, Dodge City, St. Augustine, Taos, Santa Fe. These are places we have heard about; places that are lodged in vague memory; places we will visit when we have the time. Because of their link with the past they all possess a romantic magnet. We are drawn to them by curiosity. So it is with Galveston. It is a name of imagery which summons four centuries of adventure, hope, tragedy, sin, and death.

The Indian name for the island of Galveston was "Auia," but in the sixteenth century the first Spaniards called it "Malhado," the isle of doom.' Sailing under the French flag, Bénard de La Harpe entered Galveston Bay in 1721, and attempted to establish a fort and trading post. The hostility of the local Indians prevented the success of his mission, but he included a map of the bay area in his account of the expedition. This is the earliest known map of Galveston Bay and its configurations are clearly revealed, even though La Harpe left Galveston Island unnamed and called the bay "Port François." In 1785 José de Evia charted the Texas coast at the command of Count Bernardo de Gálvez, the viceroy of Mexico and the former Spanish governor of Louisiana. A tracing of his map at the Barker Texas History Center at the University of Texas at Austin shows the island labeled "Isla de San Luis" with the eastern tip called "Pt. de Culebras" (Snake Point). The bay to the north is labeled "Bd. de Galvestown." A copy of the Evia map, printed in 1799, at the Rosenberg Library of Galveston, leaves Galveston Island unlabeled, notes Snake Point as "Pd. [sic] de Culebras," and calls the area "Bahia de Galveztowm" [sic].

Alexander von Humboldt in 1804 repeated the designations of "I. de S. Luis," and "Pte de Culebras" for the island, and called the bay "Bahia de Galveston." Stephen F. Austin also used this modern spelling of the name in his 1822 map of the coastline. He labeled the island "San Luis," noted the Bolivar Peninsula, which was named for the great South American liberator, and drew a series of small houses on the eastern end of the island as "Galveston." The David H. Burr map, "Texas," in 1833 changed the name of the island to "Galveston Island," and included Pelican Island. The Galveston City Company which established the city in 1838 used the name "Galveston" and thus firmly anchored the name in time.

The island is located on the northwest coast of the Gulf of Mexico, fifty miles southeast of Houston, Texas. It is 345 miles west of the Mississippi River and 280 miles from the Rio Grande, at 29°18'17" latitude and 94º46'30" longitude. It varies in width from one and one-half miles to three miles, and is twenty-seven miles long. Lying parallel to the coast two miles away, Galveston stands as a guardian protecting the land and the bay from the Gulf. The long straight edge facing the sea, which was cut by several short bayous in early days, offers a smooth, sandy beach, while the side facing the mainland is serrated into salt marshes and tidal flats except where altered by humans.

To a geologist Galveston is a sand barrier island. Such islands line and protect the Texas coast. Sand and silt carried by currents from as far away as the Mississippi River move parallel to the shore. As waves reach shallow water and form breakers, they lose their capacity to carry a load. They dump the sand, and eventually an island forms. Sea level changes and catastrophic events, like hurricanes, also play a role. Storms pick up shells and rocks from as deep as eighty feet and deposit them on land. They submerge mud flats with new layers and rearrange shore lines. The 1900 hurricane, for instance, pushed the beach back several hundred feet. The northeast tip of the island has moved westward, and there is evidence from the exposed clay deposits on the Gulf side that the island is moving closer to land.

Pelican Island, the small isle to the north of Galveston, was a narrow marsh with only a hundred feet of dry soil in 1816. Pelican Spit, now a part of Pelican island, was a tidal marsh and shoal as late as 1841. The spit and the island were silt catchers, and prime roosting grounds for seabirds. They gradually enlarged, joined, and emerged above the sea in the nineteenth century.

Galveston Island essentially consists of gray, brownish-gray, and pale yellow fine sand to a depth of many feet. While drilling for water in 1891, the workers took soil samples every 5 feet. To a depth of 1,500 feet the drill went through various layers of sand, clay, shell, sandstone, and shell conglomerates. From as deep as 900 feet the drill brought up fragments of wood. There was no underlying bedrock; it was truly an island of sand. The water table lies within 4 feet of the surface and is brackish. Salt permeates the soil, and to the surprise of the new householders of the Lindale subdivision of the 1950's, their underground water pipes corroded to dust and had to be replaced. Galvestonians, thus, have to import both water and topsoil.

The side of the island toward Galveston Bay consists of mud flats except where "improved" by human beings. Between Galveston and nearby Pelican Island is the Galveston channel, which was scooped out by a bay current. It formed a natural harbor for the sailing vessels and small steamers of the nineteenth century. It attracted early exploitation and was the major geographical feature which made the place desirable. An inner sandbar formed across the channel near its exit into the bay on the northeast end after 1843, and an outer bar, always there, obstructed the entrance from the Gulf into Galveston Bay. The outer bar stretched in horseshoe configuration with the arch pointed toward the sea for four miles between the eastern tip of Galveston Island and Bolivar Peninsula. Still, this was the best natural port between New Orleans and Vera Cruz. "Galveston will be the sea Port sir, for this province," wrote a Texas pioneer in 1822, "water plenty, good Harbour, also an ancorage are exceled by non..."

Extending to the north for thirty miles lies Galveston Bay. It is irregular in shape, about seventeen miles wide and generally seven to eight feet deep. It is the drainage basin for numerous small creeks and rivers. Dickinson Bayou, Clear Creek, and Buffalo Bayou are on the west; the San Jacinto River, Cedar Bayou, and the Trinity River are on the north. A large portion of the northeast quadrant is taken as the estuary of the Trinity River and forms Trinity Bay. South of that is East Bay, which Bolivar Peninsula separates from the sea. In the southwest quadrant is West Bay, which is formed by the two-mile expanse of water between Galveston Island and the mainland of Galveston County. Several small streams, including Halls Bayou and Highland Bayou, feed this portion. The gap between Galveston Island and Bolivar represents the main entryway into the bay, although there is an exit on the west end of Galveston island called San Luis Pass. There was once an attempt to set up a rival town at that point, but the water was too shallow. The pass serves mainly as a tidal funnel for West Bay.

The geological formation is relatively recent. The Gulf of Mexico appeared in the middle Mesozoic Era, about 180 million years ago. The sea advanced and retreated over the region at least nine times and left sedimentary deposits. The vast layers of sand and gravel put down at this time and later in the Cenozoic Era provided the basis for the artesian water and oil resources used in the twentieth century. Around Houston the deposits are twenty thousand feet thick. The youngest stratum is near the coast, and in the spoilage from the dredges at the Texas City dike are found the fossilized teeth and bones of ancient camels and horses. Throughout the area huge plugs of rock salt have punched through the sedimentary strata from salt beds far below. The bent edges of the rock layers caused folds and faults which trapped natural gas and petroleum. The domes also gave sulphur, salt, and gypsum." What happened over 100 million years ago provided an environment of natural resources—salt, oil, gas, sulphur, water, rivers, and harbors—which combined in the twentieth century with the technology and ambition of human beings to establish a petrochemical industry that dominates the economic life of the region.

The land of the Gulf coastal plain slopes gently about two feet every mile. It is only forty feet above sea level in northwest Galveston County. The gradual descent continues into the water and then drops somewhat more rapidly to the edge of the continental shelf six miles from shore. The soil on the mainland of Galveston County does not drain well. There are heavy clay subsoils which remain saturated with moisture for long periods. Portions, moreover, have high salt content, and the native vegetation is coarse grass and herbaceous plants. As a result, farming has never been particularly successful. Even as late as 1930, only 17 percent of the land was used for farming.

An example of the difficulty with the land occurred in 1940-1941 when the federal government built an Army base near Highland Bayou. Camp Wallace had the advantages of proximity to the established base of Fort Crockett at Galveston, an urban water supply, and access to electricity. It possessed 1,600 acres, 161 barracks, a payroll of $150,000 per week, almost four hundred buildings, and a capacity for twelve thousand men. The disadvantages were weather and soil conditions which translated into drainage and flood-control problems. During construction the site flooded three feet deep after a nine-inch rainfall in November 1940. Roads washed away and the only way to move was with horses. There was brief consideration of a shift to higher ground, but the engineers persisted because of high land prices elsewhere. They emphasized the construction of ditches and the building of a railroad. Rail lines, historically, were the way to beat the mud of the area.

The engineers used draglines to dig ditches around the site and laid down three layers of planks to build a road. In December a sixinch rain flooded the site again. Draglines bogged in the mud and the plank road floated away. Soldiers worked knee deep at "Lake Wallace" to unload lumber from a spur track and to watch the material to be certain it did not drift away. The soldiers had to widen the bayou and place ditches throughout the campsite. Eventually they built shell roads with materials dredged from Galveston Bay. Even then roads had to be maintained by hand to remove the large clumps of waxy clay mud that dropped off the tires of trucks. Success came in May 1941, when a six-inch rain left only mud and no flooding.

Late in 1943 the Army left the site. The Navy took it over for a year as a boot camp, but after the war gave it up entirely. The government eventually divided it among Galveston County, the University of Houston, and the Hitchcock School District. The story of Camp Wallace underscores the problems of land use in the coastal area. This environmental limitation also explains part of the success of Houston in the nineteenth century. In contrast to Galveston, Houston possessed a hinterland which produced cotton and other agricultural products. The surrounding land provided an agricultural base for a growing city. True, there was mud to overcome, but Houston merchants solved that with the widespread use of railroads. Galveston lacked nearby farmland and had to span two miles of water and a county before reaching productive soil like that which encircled Houston.

The mud flats and salt marshes which rimmed the bay and the northern part of Galveston island, nonetheless, are extraordinary. An acre of marsh produces ten times more protein than an acre of farmland. Cordgrass, sedges, and rushes with their roots in brackish water shelter, for example, frogs, spiders, snakes, bees, butterflies, herons, bitterns, blackbirds, mice, and ducks. Ninety percent of the coastal fish and shellfish depend upon the estuaries. The marsh is intensely alive. A Rice University report on the wetlands of East Bay states:

The plants, predominantly grasses, that flourish in this environment serve two biological functions: productivity and protection. From the amount of reduced carbon fixed by these plants during photosynthesis, this ecotone must be considered one of the most productive areas in the world and truly the pantry of the oceans. The dense stand of grass also represents a jungle of roots, stems, and leaves in which the organisms of the marsh, the "peelers," larvae, fry, "bobs," and fingerlings seek refuge from predators. Organisms invade from both fronts, fresh and saline. Insects, spiders, birds, and mammals from the landward face. Crabs, clams, oysters, shrimp, and fish from the marine environment. The energy of the sun is trapped in the process of photosynthesis. Herbivors, the primary consumers devour these plants, and they in turn are eaten by other predators in the food chain.

Alligators are common in the mainland marshes and show up once in a while on the island. In 1875 citizens observed a four-foot alligator comfortably walking along the street near Postoffice and 25th. In 1877 a seven-foot reptile was caught near the wharves, and in 1948 workers near John Sealy Hospital found a ten-foot beast in a drainpipe. In 1958 fishermen roped a 275-pound one in shallow water near the jetty on East Beach and towed it ashore. In East Bay in 1961 after Hurricane Carla men shot a twelve-foot, 400-pound alligator which had probably been dislodged by the storm.'

Much more common to Galveston and of greater danger are the rattlesnakes. The Indians feared them and avoided permanent settlement in part because of them. The early maps designate the eastern tip as the "Point of the Snakes." Every year, even now, doctors at the University of Texas Medical Branch treat twenty to thirty people for snakebite. These reptiles stay mainly in the marshes and the sand dunes of the west end, but sometimes show up in town. In 1964, for example, Willie Burns, the police chief at the time, was resting at home while his wife was working in the garden. He heard her scream, "Willie, it's a rattlesnake! Don't move! Call the police!" There was a five-foot rattler on the sidewalk. "Call the police?" he asked. "Why should I call the police? I am the chief of police." With that pronouncement, he killed the snake with a rake.

There is food for humans in the flats, too, if they care to gather it. Green cattails can be eaten like corn on the cob and the roots crushed for flour. Quahog oysters and scallops can be harvested along with crabs and flounders. More interesting, perhaps, are the ducks—especially to a hunter. As Joel Kirkpatrick, a journalist, explained:

Well, every morning during the duck and goose hunting season, the sun brings the daylight, and sometimes it smears a salmon-colored sunrise along the horizon.

The wind frosts over the ponds with ripples and leaves its footprints on the marshgrass, and hunters crouch in blinds and look and listen for wildfowl, and breathe the fecund air of marshlands.

And finally, ducks come, wings whistling and cupped feet lowered, in to the decoys, and they're too beautiful to shoot—almost.

Bolivar and the area of High Island and East Bay have long been prime hunting and poaching areas-Pelican Island, too, in the nineteenth century. The first seizure for illegal hunting came in 1912, and the hunters, like the fishermen, liked to tell their tall tales. A hunter named Little John was bragging in a High Island cafe, "Why, with one shot I killed twenty-five ducks."

A stranger got up from a table, walked over, looked Little John in the eye, and asked, "Do you know who I am?"

"No."

"Well, I'm the new game warden, and what you did is illegal."

Little John paused and then said, "You know who I am?"

"No," the warden replied.

"I'm the biggest liar at High Island."

Then there is the story of a hunter who flagged down the manager of a game preserve during the season and said, "I've shot some geese I can't identify. Can you help?"

"Sure," replied the manager as the hunter opened his trunk. He looked in at a pair of white birds and laughed, "Why man, you've shot seagulls."

The huntsman turned red and angrily retorted, "You can't fool me. These are geese! I'm a doctor from Galveston and I ought to know what seagulls look like!" He slammed the trunk and left. The manager could only wonder what the seagulls tasted like at the doctor's table.

Other people come to watch Galveston's birds rather than shoot them. Some two thousand ornithologists visit each year, since the island is on a migratory flyway. At Galveston Island State Park, a two-thousand-acre preserve which includes wetlands, salt meadows, beach, dunes, and coastal prairie, the migratory birds include cuckoos, thrushes, orioles, warblers, tanagers, buntings, and grosbeaks. In 1962 an "extinct" Eskimo curlew was spotted and photographed. Permanent residents include the mockingbird, great blue heron, snowy egret, white ibis, mottled duck, bobwhite, mourning dove, red-bellied woodpecker, starling, red-winged blackbird, house sparrow, seaside sparrow, marsh wren, meadowlark, and horned lark, as well as the usual coastal birds such as sandpipers, gulls, plovers, rails, terns, and pelicans.

The white pelican, a fresh-water migratory bird which winters in Galveston, has not had the trouble of the brown pelican, which lives there on a year-round basis. The browns were plentiful as late as 1955, when flocks of fifty to sixty at a time could be seen floating on the water. They proved to be extremely sensitive to the DDT they absorbed from the fish they ate. The eggshells of the young became thin and cracked, and after 1960 the brown pelican population went into a severe decline. The bird became an endangered species, and pelicans from Florida had to be brought to Galveston to reestablish the colony.

Much more hardy are the seagulls; there are fifty-three species at Galveston. They are graceful, buoyant fliers, good swimmers, and poor walkers. Most gulls are scavengers and act like beach bums. They hover and pick up morsels wherever they can—the sanitation crew of the beach. The most common is the laughing gull, noted by its dark-red legs, thirty-two-inch wingspan, and raucous laugh. It lives for eight to fifteen years. There is also the Franklin gull with black head and black wing tips; the herring gull which has a fiftyfour-inch wingspan and migrates to the South for the winter; and the ring-billed gull with yellow legs, a forty-eight-inch wingspan, and a black ring on its bill. In addition, the skimmer gull, northern gull, and various terns share the beach. The terns have narrower wings, cruise the waves, dive into the water, and live off fresh fish. It is considered an ill omen when the gulls fly in high, spiraling circles over the city. It is a sign of foul weather.

The birds are at the top of the food chain. They all feed in their evolved manner and at their own depth; each has a distinct place on the tree of life. The plovers, for example, rush busily about picking up worms and crustaceans with their short beaks while the sandpipers probe the sand with their slender bills. There are all sorts of predators on the beach. Each species, seemingly, eats others while providing a meal for those which prey upon it. Some feed on plankton, others on algae. The moon snail drills into the shell of mollusks with its radula until it can reach and digest the inhabitant.

There are sand dollars and seashells in abundance. Among the bivalves are clams, oysters, cockles, scallops, and mussels. They burrow into sand and cling to stone. The teredo, a wood-boring clam known as shipworm, destroys unprotected wooden pilings and ships within a few years. Galveston also has spiraled snail shells such as the wentletrap, olive, tulip, and whelks. In the rocky habitat of the jetties and groins are sponges, starfish, and sea urchins.

Purple Portuguese men-of-war drift onto the beach with their dangerous trailing tentacles which can inflict a chemical type of burn on the unwary. Sargassum, a free-floating weed which harbors pipefish, flatworms, hydroids, and anemones, also floats ashore. In quantity both the men-of-war and the seaweed cause a stench while the sun and air decay them. Blobs of tar, some as large as baseballs, wash ashore and melt in the sun to the distress of barefoot tourists. Ships and offshore oil drilling catch the blame. Coastal Indians, however, used the tar for decoration and waterproofing, and the de Soto expedition of the sixteenth century referred to it. The material likely comes from natural asphalt seeps along the Mexican coast. Kerosene easily removes it from the bottom of the feet.

On occasion, in August or September, a "red tide" appears along the shoreline. This is caused by blue-green algae which make the water look red in the sunlight. It is harmless to humans, but hurtful to fish when it cuts off oxygen in narrow channels. In 1909 another curiosity turned up in the form of schools of phosphorescent fish drawn by high tides into Galveston Bay. A good pair of eyes could read a newspaper by their light at two o'clock in the morning, so it was reported. Turtles also have shown up. A large green turtle weighing forty pounds and caught with a hook and line was served at Peter Liselle's restaurant in 1872. A dozen two-hundred-pound sea turtles came ashore near 41st Street in 1880 presumably to lay eggs. They were captured. A shrimp boat brought in a two-thousand-pound leatherback turtle from the north jetty area in 1951. It managed to knock over a dock worker with a flipper before meeting its fate of steak and soup. In 1978 the National Marine Fisheries Service established a laboratory at Galveston to raise Ridley turtles to one year of age in order to give them a head start in life. They are an endangered species, and the scientists hoped to establish them on Padre Island. One of the tagged specimens turned up on a beach in France after 569 days.

People have shown greater curiosity about the whales which become stranded every now and then. According to stories, three whales blew ashore in the storm of 1810, and a sixty-two-foot sperm whale in the storm of 1818. The latter killed a seventeen-year-old Portuguese sailor with a swat of its tail. There was also memory of a fifty-foot whale that washed up on the west end in 1848 and was melted down for oil. A whale discovered in the Galveston channel near Bolivar in 1875 brought a scramble for possession in which everyone lost except the catfish, which ate it. In 1916 two black men captured a sixty-foot Atlantic right whale with broken bones east of the south jetty. There had been a hurricane south of Corpus Christi, and supposedly it came from that area. The men towed it to a dock, covered it with canvas, and charged ten cents for the curious to view it. They later towed it back to the jetties for dissection. In 1951 sightseers paid twenty-five cents per adult and ten cents for a child to see a seventeen-foot finback whale on the beach at Bolivar. The specimen finally decomposed after 3,500 people saw it, and the exhibitors gave the money to a polio charity drive. Although there once was discussion in the early twentieth century about starting a whaling industry, nothing happened. There were just not enough whales in the Gulf of Mexico to support the enterprise.

Away from the hard-packed surface of the shoreline, at the upper reaches of the beach, dunes form from dry, blowing sand. The dunes move and shift with the winds until covered with vegetation. Salty air dehydrates and stunts. Plants must have tough, wiry stems and thick leaves in this essentially desert habitat. Sea oats boldly thrust into the air, but most flora hug the ground like the beach morning glory. There are dove weeds, goatweeds, sunflowers, and all sorts of grasses. They stabilize the dunes and form a natural breakwater during storms. Left alone, the dunes grow naturally and acquire a covering of plants. At one time, before the residents of the city took the sand for filling purposes, Galveston dunes reached fifteen feet high. Nothing like that exists at present. Now, as then, however, the dunes provide a home for beetles, grasshoppers, katydids, lizards, ghost crabs, gophers, mice, rabbits, birds, and diamondback rattlers.

Mosquitoes have always been around Galveston to annoy human beings. Even with current fogging techniques, an early morning jog across a grassy area will prove their hardiness. When the wind stops, the mosquitoes close in. Two boys who worked the cotton presses in 1875, for instance, took their girl friends for an early evening sail near Pelican Island. The wind dropped and they drifted ashore. They tried to sing songs, but insects "as big as sparrows" attacked, and they discovered that "love and musquitos will not harmonize." The boys prepared to swim for help, but the girls had a better idea of using the planks from the boat as paddles. After a forty-five-minute effort they reached the wharf well-bitten, but safe.

Oscar M. Addison wrote to his mother in 1845:

You may think you have some fleas "to hum," but were you to pass a few nights in this City, the conclusion would force itself upon your mind that there is none in comparison to what we have here, for sometime after I arrived here, sleep was almost impossible, and it is only by use that I have become accustomed to their disagreeable company. But Musquitoes and fleas united form a desperate anoyance and the poor fellow who has to sleep without a bar is in a "bad fix" and is really deserving of sympathy.

In addition to all of these natural phenomena, there is something else that makes Galveston different. This can be seen, and felt, and heard at the beach. From two hundred yards away as you face the sea, you hear a steady whiffle of wind which usually blows at a rate ideal for kite flying. From one hundred yards you hear not only the wind, but also a steady, low, roar from the Gulf. Closer, at twenty-five yards, the sound becomes more complex. You can hear individual waves as they run with a shhhhh sound to the shore and then break with a ka-shhhh on the sand. They arrive in a rough cadence, one about every six seconds.

At Galveston the easy slope of the continental shelf and the small tides, which rarely rise over two feet, do not produce crashing surf. For the most part the waves are gentle, and somewhat inconsistent because of the variance of the wind. As a wave nears the shore the friction of the bottom causes the lower part of the wave to slow and the top portion to fall forward and break. The breaker then rushes foaming to the beach until its energy dissipates and the water slides back into the sea with a never-ending pulse.

Even on the winter beach, when the wind comes from the north rather than from the usual southeast direction, the sonance of the waves continues. "The waves sounded on the beach with crisp and icy splashes," wrote a reporter in 1876, "and over the broad open area of sand from east to west, as far as the eye could reach, the north wind whistled with relentless viciousness, defying the glare of openfaced sol." Of the elemental sounds of nature, as Henry Beston once noticed about Cape Cod, the sounds of the ocean on the shore are the most varied. There are roars, hisses, splashes, whispers, and hollow tumblings which change in accent and tempo. The sound can be soothing, slow, and lulling. In times of storm it can resound like a cannonade as the ancient war between land and sea reopens. To the listener it is a reminder that we, as human beings, long ago cast our destiny with the land. The voice of the storm king thundering on the beach raises a prehuman terror because we know that the sea has not forgiven our infidelity.

The beach invades our other senses as well. It is not just sound, but also sight, and smell, and feel. The air is heavy with salt and moisture. It coats the skin and films over glass surfaces. The air is highly corrosive, a solvent which attacks the technology of humanity. Galveston always looks in need of a can of paint, and the people buy used cars to reduce the high cost of rust. The odor is salty, and sometimes fishy as well. If the sun is out and it is warm, the combination of air, smell, and feel is highly sensual. What is seen, too, is different. The haze produces pastel colors—lavender sunsets and misty, orange sunrises over the shore. The softness is addictive.

On the beach there is a strong, almost primordial urge to sit naked in the surfline and allow the warm water and sun to wash away the worries of life. It promises renewal. Here on the beach you stand at the edge of the world. Here is the border of the two primary divisions of earth and water. Here you can feel the heartbeat of the planet. Here the voice of creation can still be heard. Galveston Island is one of the youngest of nature's land children. It is still in formation. It stands on the edge of time, and time is new.

The edge of the sea and land is a gateway of evolution. Once the transition is accomplished, however, it is dangerous to linger. The edge is treacherous as well as nurturing. It is unstable and subject to more natural violence than older places. In shallow waters the salinity and temperature ranges are greater than elsewhere, and shoreline creatures must adapt to the constant smash and wet immersion. Such inhabitants develop hard shells and claws in order to hang on to their environment. Human beings, also, have found life on the edge difficult. The natural death toll by disease and storm has made Galveston in its short history one of the dramatic killing grounds of the Western Hemisphere. The four horsemen of the Apocalypse—fire, famine, war, and death—have thundered across the island and left their hoofprints in the sand.

***

Although the surrounding coastal land is comparatively unproductive, the bay and the sea provide a bountiful harvest. Fresh water from rivers and bayous reduces the salinity of the bay, supports marshlands, and provides nutriments for infant oysters and shrimp. Oysters prefer clean, shallow, diluted seawater, and in early days they flourished in the many bays along the Texas coast. Across Galveston Bay, cutting it in half, was a great oystershell reef called Red Fish Bar. It was a hazard to navigation, but a tribute to long centuries of industrious oysters. There were other oyster beds in the bay and along the lee shore of Galveston Island. Shell ridges once cut across the eastern end and midway down the island. Indians, thinking that the shell would keep the rattlesnakes away, preferred to camp on the ridge.

In the nineteenth century the city developed a seasonal oyster industry which in 1885 employed five hundred men and shipped oysters throughout the Southwest. Reduced in size, the business continues to the present. It is hard, dirty work. Oyster gatherers use a broad, four-foot rake to scoop across a reef. With a winch it is raised to the boat and dumped upon a culling table. "Irons" which look like meat cleavers are used to sort out the shell, crabs, beer cans, and oysters less than three inches. These are thrown overboard, and the small oysters are allowed to grow to legal size. Dredging in the area has greatly reduced the extent of the oyster beds. Mud-shell became a useful substitute where gravel was scarce, and from 1880 it was used for paving streets, providing ballast for highways and railroads, producing lime, and improving chicken feed. Led by W D. Haden and his successors, the shell industry removed 214,000,000 cubic yards from Texas shores during the half-century from 1912 to 1962.

Brown and white shrimp also find existence in the shallow water. They spawn offshore; the babies hatch and migrate to the inlets and salt marshes. In two to three months they mature and return to the sea to start the cycle over again. To0 much fresh water, to0 much salt, or to0 much pollution will diminish the numbers. At first shrimp fishers used seines, but after 1912 they adopted trawls, copied from those utilized by scientists working along the coast of North Carolina. The idea spread from Florida, where the first shrimp trawl was used, along the Gulf Coast. In 1955 shrimpers from Rockport, Texas, began using powerful two-rig trawls which increased the catch by one-third. On one- to five-day voyages the boats prowl the coastline and bays. Workers use a small "try" net to locate their prey and then deploy the large nets which are pulled along the bottom to capture the shrimp. The nets are opened on the deck of the boat and the trash separated. The shrimp are iced and brought to port for sale. During the late 1940's the catch of white shrimp from the bays declined. It was then that the shrimp boats began to venture into the Gulf in pursuit of brown shrimp, which now compose about 8o percent of the annual catch.

The variety of sea life is enormous and has contributed not only to the dining tables of humans, but also to their entertainment and sport. The types of fish are like those of the South Atlantic Coast, and the markets in Galveston are similar to those of Charleston and Norfolk." Flounder, redfish, Spanish mackerel, red snapper, sheepshead, croakers, and speckled trout are all-time favorites, while the silver king tarpon is the most exciting. Dave Huddleston holds the record with a 192-pound, seven-foot, four-inch silver king taken from the Galveston Ship Channel. Most weigh 125 -150 pounds. All have a silvery appearance and the spectacular ability to leap five to six feet from the water when attempting to throw loose a hook. Silver kings have been characterized as having the "agility of the mountain trout, wisdom of the serpent, courage of the tiger, and the weight of a full-grown man." No wonder they are a thrill to catch.

The best tarpon fishing occurred from 1938 until 1965, when it was possible to hook them from the piers and jetties. Even then you had to be patient; there were only one or two strikes per day. People blamed the decline in the 1960's on pollution and the dynamiting of fish for fertilizer on the Mexican coast. The blasting has stopped and it is hoped that the fish are recovering.

Spanish mackerel, plentiful around the rock jetties, are among the more beautiful and graceful of game fish. They have burnished sides, silver flecked with gold, and are about two feet long with a row of dense spines. Also numerous around submerged structures are sheepshead. They are scrappy fighters and good eating, but they are hard to clean and have jaws and teeth which can cut through wire. In 1887 "old darkies" were observed "crack fishing" through the planks on the New Wharf for such fish at the harbor. The men would lie on their stomachs and hold the line in their teeth. When one got a nibble he jerked his head and grabbed the line. Strangely enough, the technique was successful.

Redfish runs in the surf after storms, especially in the early fall, are sensational. Redfish are bottom feeders and like rough, sandy water. It helps to be there at the right time, because the conditions do not last long. In 1967 people hauled in reds from the Flagship pier, some twenty-five feet above the water. The fish weighed up to forty pounds and there were broken lines with lost fish in the process. After Hurricane Cindy in 1964 about three thousand redfish were caught in Galveston waters.

Then there are some oddballs caught every now and then. In 1887 a fisherman told of being towed two miles by a "granduquois." It was six feet long, resembled an alligator gar, and finally broke the line. The same man also pulled one into his rowboat. It flopped around, knocked him and his tackle over the side, tipped the boat over, and escaped. Jewfish, or junefish as they are sometimes called, also appear. They weigh as much as 700 pounds; measure six feet in length; are rough-scaled, sluggish, and dark green in color; and make a good ingredient for chowder. Sawfish sometimes surprise people. In 1962 two boys fishing near the concrete ship, a half-submerged vessel at the edge of the harbor, threw a fifteen-pound anchor overboard and hooked a ten-foot sawfish. The fish tore free as they tried to tow it to shore, but it left saw marks on the side of the boat. A seventeen-foot sawfish was caught from Kuhn's Wharf in 1860 by boys fishing for jewfish. Its bill was almost six feet long, and it took several rifle shots to kill it. Another one, twenty feet overall, was caught by hand in the surf in 1885 and hauled onto the sand. More recently, a shrimp fisherman caught a seventeen-and-a-half-foot sawfish weighing around 2,400 pounds in his net near Texas City.

Devilfish, or rays, have shown up in the surf around the bathhouse piers. One captured in 1885 and brought up to the beach measured sixteen feet and had a mouth large enough for a flour barrel. Another, captured in 1910 with harpoons, rifle fire, and a forty-pound anchor used as a hook, was fourteen feet wide and weighed 2,000 pounds. There have also been eels, sea horses, and porpoises, but those attracting the greatest and most persistent fascination have been the sharks.

There have always been a lot of sharks around Galveston. In 1856 a ten-and-a-half-foot shark with a mouth large enough to swallow a small boy was caught at the wharves. In 1868 an eight-foot one with a mouth large enough for a hamper basket was captured at the same place. Fishing for jewfish in 1873, John Benson hooked a twelve-foot shark that began towing him and his small boat to sea. The pilot boat came to his rescue, and the fish towed them both until killed with a harpoon. A ten-and-a-half-foot shark caught from the wharves in 1877 had a dog collar with rope attached in its stomach. From the wharves in 1890 fishermen caught a twelve-foot shark. "Black Tom," a twenty-one-foot shark with a black dorsal fin, lived for a while in the Galveston channel in the 1930's. People shot the fin and left it with white pock marks. Once, a band of twenty blacks on the dock hooked him. The tug of war ended when the inch-and-a-half manila rope broke with a crack and snapped back over the heads of the men to the top of a cotton shed. Then in 1947 an eight-and-ahalf-foot, 240-pound sand shark was brought to land from the 25th Street pier. A five-gallon can would fit in its mouth, but sand sharks are not noted for eating humans.

Galvestonians have often stated that the waters around the island are safe from shark attack. That information is reassuring to swimmers, and for the most part the claims are correct. Ben C. Stuart while a lad in Galveston in the late nineteenth century used to swim nude with other boys near the wharves at 16th Street. One of their thrills was to swim into the channel behind the steamboats and "take the wash" of the paddle wheels. The boys would also dive twelve to fourteen feet to the bottom to fetch mud with which to plaster their companions. They were never bothered by sharks and had more fear of the three-hundred-pound constable who tried to catch them and who chased them home in their "airy costume."

In the 1940's, beachfront businesses sponsored long-distance swimming contests on the Gulf shore to demonstrate that there was no shark menace. There was never a problem, but it is doubtful that the athletes knew how they were being used. The director of the beach patrol in 1978, Bill Scott, stated that he had never heard of a shark attacking a swimmer at Galveston. Much more dangerous in his opinion were the Portuguese men-of-war and the powerful currents around the groins. "Floaters," bodies which drift into shore, moreover, do not show shark bites even though they have been weeks in the water. Galvestonians make a convincing case, but there are, nonetheless, some isolated incidents.

At the turn of the century judge George W. Baylor, a long-time fisherman who caught sharks from the wharves, recalled a deadly attack on a man trying to wade across San Luis Pass. A sailor who had been swimming around the docks at Texas City in 1911 experienced some minor wounds when a shark took a swipe at his feet dangling in the water. The most serious case, however, occurred in 1937. A police officer found a fourteen-year-old boy, wounded, in shallow water on the beach two miles west of 61st Street. He had been swimming in four-foot-deep water when struck. His lower right arm was gone, along with the flesh of his upper right leg. No one saw a shark, but they could see tooth marks. The boy died at the hospital. One cannot be certain that it was a shark, but it probably was.

Farther offshore there is more evidence. A four-hundred-pound shark hoisted tail up aboard a boat two miles south of the south jetty regurgitated a human body. It had not been long since eaten. A day later, in 1976, a fishing boat caught a tiger shark, fourteen feet long, with a human skull inside, seven miles off Galveston. The discovery surprised the skipper, and he foreswore his habit of taking a noontime recreational swim around his boat. In 1983 a windsurfer disappeared from Galveston waters. His leg with a Nike shoe still on the foot, severed by a shark, washed into Corpus Christi. The board was found thirty miles at sea from Sabine Pass. The idea that sharks at Galveston are not dangerous, as local propaganda states, is just not true. There is danger in the water. For swimmers it is unlikely to come from a shark. But it can happen.

Commercial fishing, other than for oysters and shrimp, developed along with the sport fishing. There is an early story about a visit of a French admiral in 1839. While the mayor and other dignitaries visited the flagship, a fishing boat came alongside and sold a cargo of red snapper. The fish had been caught off some banks, but, unfortunately, the men neglected to note the location. It remained lost until 1868, when Captain "Dave" McCluskey discovered red snapper at the Campeche Banks of Mexico. In the same year Galveston fishermen began to catch snappers about forty miles out from Galveston.

By the time of the First World War Galveston possessed a fishing fleet that regularly coursed the Campeche Banks. Small-scale fishing, meanwhile, kept Galveston markets well supplied with a variety of fish. Most often the fishers sold to a merchant, but others marketed in their own way. In 1875 a black fisherman brought to shore a 140-pound jewfish, still in the water, towed behind his boat. As he dickered with buyers on shore about the price, a twelve-foot shark came by and took all but the head. Everyone laughed except the fisherman, who turned to the last bidder and said, "I b'lieve you knowed dat shark was dere all de time."

Fishing and fishermen always create exaggerated stories. Journalist Christie Mitchell recorded one in 1961. Two old fishermen were discussing their exploits. One claimed that he caught a six-foot, eighty-pound trout in front of the Galveston jetties. That had to be the biggest sea trout in the world, his companion noted, but he also had something to brag about. The second man claimed that while fishing near the concrete ship he pulled up a lantern just like the one his grandfather used a hundred years ago. The surprising thing was that the lantern was still lit. The first man heartily protested such a lie, so the second replied, "O.K. I'll make a deal with you. You can cut four feet off that trout and I'll blow the light out of the lantern.""

People also relate to the weather—probably the most talked—about subject in the world. The temperature at Galveston averages 49ºF. in the winter and 87º F. in the summer. Forty-two to forty-seven inches of rain fall per year, and the wind blows from the southeast except in the winter months, when it comes from the north. In summer Galveston is cooler than most of Texas which gave the island an early reputation as a place to go to escape the heat. The water temperature shifts from 67º F. in the winter to 84º F. in the summer. There can be extremes and unusual conditions, but for the most part the climate is mild.

The winter sometimes brings "blue northers" of great intensity. Robert H. Hunter recorded in his diary of the 1820's about being caught near Cedar Bayou:

I got about half way home when the norther sprung up a fresh, rained and sleeted, and my lazy horse, I could not git him a long. And I got so cold that I had no fealing. The icicles hung to my hat brim so that I could hardly see my way. I finally got home, I rode up to the gate and Pa come out to git some wood and saw me. He cald me to git down. I heard him, but I could not speak. He came to me and took me off the horse and stude me on the ground and I fell over.

The "blue norther" approaches Galveston as a heavy bank of dark, purple clouds on the northern horizon. It attacks with a whirring noise, bends trees, slams shutters, and lowers the temperature by as much as 24º F. in an hour . It arrives either dry or wet, but always cold. As an editor commented in 1876, "The norther has many ways of demonstrating its affection for animal objects. It can come about as near getting over, and under, and around, and inside of a thinly clad specimen of the human species as almost anything else that the material universe has yet turned out in the long list of its prodigious productions.

At times Galveston Bay has frozen. Jane Long experienced such a condition during her fruitless, lonely vigil on Bolivar in 1820-1821 waiting for her husband to return. In 1886, with temperatures a few degrees above zero, the bay froze five miles out to a thickness of twoand-a-half inches. Several schooners were caught and one captain died. A twelve-hour snowfall resulted in five-foot drifts and a frolic for the city folks. Improvised sleighs with crude slats to replace wheels appeared on the streets. Beaver hats became prime targets for snowballs, and the businessmen from the Strand turned out to have fun. An Englishman who tried to run a gauntlet with his umbrella for protection lost both his umbrella and his dignity. Upon complaint, a policeman explained to him, "Why, these are our representative citizens just indulging in a bit of a lark for the fun of the thing, you know. "

An aged black man on a dray, after receiving a merciless pelting, leaped from the wagon with a yell, ran, and collapsed in a snowdrift. The attack stopped, and someone said, "He's dead!" A young man, Johnny Moran, approached, gently called, and stooped to look at him. At that, the old man leaped up with a laugh and said, "Possum!" Moran could only say, "Dod bum it," at being fooled, but the crowd escorted the man back to the dray and gave him a cheer.

The most lively point of activity was the corner of Tremont and Market. Through this dangerous defile came a man casually driving a large wagon, and the snowball brigade saw him coming. They gathered ammunition and pelted the unconcerned driver in the slicker until he was close-by. "Up boys, and at 'em!" he shouted, and a gang of ten men rose from the wagon to fire back at the surprised multitude. The counterattack resulted in a rout. The wagon and its surprise cargo then calmly went in search of more prey.

The police finally had to break up the fun, but not before one intrepid character tried to get down the street with his head in a barrel for protection. The attackers found his rear exposed, and the adventurer could not get his head out of the barrel. In retreat he finally stumbled into a drugstore.

In 1895 the same thing happened. The bay froze and the city received a fourteen-inch snowfall. Numbed fish floated in the surf, and plumbers working on the frozen pipes became heroes. The streetcars had to have snowplows affixed, and a fight between blacks and whites which began with snow degenerated into fists and bottles. On another occasion, in 1935, thousands of cattle died during a blizzard, and in 1951 people could dip stunned fish from the bay during a cold snap. In 1962 the same situation made fishing with nets easy; the ice reached fifty feet from the bay shore. Through these times the citizens had the good sense to insure survival with the insulation provided by the "hot Scotch" and warm "Tom and Jerries" served in the Galveston bars.

There were also times of excessive rain which would flood the streets. A five-hour cloudburst in 1950 brought four feet of water and $400,000 in damages. A five-inch rain in 1973 pushed water up to the steps of the new ANICO Building. In 1843 there was so much rain in the region that sailors could dip fresh water from the bay for over a month. The converse—a shortage of rain—also happened. An estimated thousand head of cattle died on the island because of lack of water in 1857. Some wandered into town searching for water, died, and had to be hauled away. In 1872 and 1876 the same thing happened, and this time the cisterns ran dry. Water sold for twenty-five cents per bucket. The city had no assured water supply and depended upon rainfall.

The dense fogs of winter which immobilized the ships in the harbor also gave rise to tall tales. It seems, for example, that two men drove from Houston to Galveston in a Model-T Ford to go fishing in the surf. The fog became so thick that neither could see the road, and finally the driver stopped. He stepped out, sniffed, and reached for his gear. There was salt grass around and they were still on the highway. "Aren't you going to fish?" asked the driver as he baited a hook. "Hell no," was the incredulous reply. "I ain't never fished in a place like this before. We're nowhere's near the sea. I'm liable to hook a brahma bull." The driver, nonetheless, sent the line, hook, sinker, and bait into the fog with a whir and waited. There was no splash. Shortly, however, he reeled in an eight-pound redfish. The surprised companion quickly scrambled for his equipment and the two of them caught twenty-five fish before the fog lifted. Then they could see that they were fifteen miles from the Gulf and had been fishing in a fog bank. Galveston, indeed, produces thick fog.

Of even greater density than the fogs are the waterspouts that touch Galveston once in a while. These tornadoes filled with water rarely cause damage, but they leave a wet trail across the land and thousands of dancing silvery minnows in the puddles. Two small ones crossing Bolivar in 1969, however, dumped over seven house trailers and injured one person. The folklore method for dispelling a waterspout is to make the sign of a cross, or shoot it with a shotgun or cannon. Having no artillery, a captain in 1890 ordered his seamen to pound the sides of his schooner while he maneuvered to avoid a spout one hundred feet in diameter. The tactic did not work, but the waterspout finally disappeared into the clouds, carrying fish and debris with it.

More serious are the actual tornadoes that sometimes strike the island. Tornadoes injured thirty-three people in 1943 and five in 1961. In June 1981 a whirlwind skipped across the city from the southeast and over Offatt's Bayou, while blowing out windows and taking off roofs. In September the same year seven tornadoes struck at dusk and caused $3 million in damages. One of them lifted an 8,139-ton ship and turned it 180 degrees. These small, vicious destroyers whose winds reach 500 miles per hour often accompany hurricanes.

The West Indian hurricane is the most important weather phenomenon in Galveston history. People have known about these storms and feared them since the beginning of life on the island. No one knows why they form. Perhaps it is to release the heat of the tropics, since they originate in the central Atlantic Ocean near the entrance to the Gulf of Mexico during the summer and fall. Warm, moist air rises into the upper atmosphere like smoke going up a chimney. It can carry 17 billion tons of water and produce twenty-inch rainfalls. The storm develops an eye as the air funnels upward and the winds form a wall around the center. The rotation of the earth gives the winds a counterclockwise motion. The general course of the hurricane in the Gulf is northwestward, and it gathers strength as long as it remains over the water. The U.S. Weather Service calls an area of unsettled weather a tropical disturbance, but when the storm becomes a closed low-pressure system with winds up to 39 miles per hour, it is classified as a tropical depression. Between 39 and 73 MPH it becomes a tropical storm; at 74 MPH and faster, it is a hurricane. Great storms range upward from 120 MPH and push a dome of water fifty miles wide called a storm surge. Hurricane Camille produced a tide of twenty-five feet; Carla reached twenty-two feet, resulting in Texas floods ten miles inland.

Because of the counterclockwise wind motion, the highest tides are usually east of the center, along with most of the tornadoes. Camille spawned one hundred tornadoes and Carla gave birth to twenty-six. The worst situation for Galveston City—as was the case with Alicia in 1983—occurs when the eye crosses at San Luis Pass, the extreme western end of the island. The slower the storm moves, the higher the tide. The lower the barometric pressure, the higher the tide. A five-foot surge will flood much of Galveston; a fifteen-foot tide will cover 90 percent of the island.

During the nineteenth century hurricanes struck Galveston at least eleven times. There was only passing reference to a tempest in 1810, but the local Indians suffered its wrath. Joseph O. Dyer, who first visited the island in 1874 and wrote about its history, interviewed some of the early inhabitants. Colonel Warren D. C. Hall told him an old squaw referred to that early storm which drowned the Indians who had taken refuge on the shell ridge midway down the island. Dyer also reported a storm in October 1815 which disrupted the formation of a revolutionary army at Bolivar. Out of sixty-seven people, only eleven men and one woman survived. A conflicting report by Hall, however, indicated that this preliminary effort by Henry Perry failed when the main supply ship foundered in the Bolivar breakers after being lost in a fog. A hurricane may have caused the trouble, but the record is unclear.

Refugees from the unsuccessful French colony on the Trinity River, Champ d'Asile, described the cyclone of 1818. Through the indulgence of Jean Laffite, who then controlled the island, the refugees set up a temporary camp. As the two-day storm surged landward the sky darkened, the wind rose with a sound like cannons, and the seabirds sought inland safety. The salt water flowed over Galveston to a depth of four feet. Only six houses endured, including that of the pirate chieftain. Laffite lost four of his ships. Three of them dragged their anchors and foundered with the loss of all on board. The fourth traversed the bay and broke up at Virginia Point. Later, artillery from this ship was found and salvaged.

In 1837, while Galveston was being used as a base after the Texas Revolution, the wrath of the sea came once more. An eyewitness commented, "In the month of October, during the storm which laid waste the whole southern coast, from Mobile to Vera Cruz, and still further south, it was my lot to witness vessels of considerable tonnage floating over the foundations of the future city." The turbulence lasted three days and nights. "It appeared ... as if the heavens were making battle with the earth." Although people floated about on boards, only one died. Eight ships ended up on dry land, and there were shattered masts and rigging everywhere.

Another observer, Amasa Turner, said that only one house survived, the old Mexican customhouse which he had converted to his home. "After this," recorded Turner, "many felt discouraged and left Galveston, thinking it would always be subject to such storms, while others maintained that this one was an exception." The new Texas customhouse built under the orders of the customs agent, Gail Borden, Jr., was gone. It was but two days old. Borden moved to a beached brig for the next year, but reconstruction by others began quickly with the arrival of building materials. Joseph Ehlenger, a local carpenter, suggested that Borden place the rebuilt customshouse on four-foot pilings to keep it above flood waters. The practice of placing buildings and houses on stilts thus became a Galveston style.

The hurricanes by this time had given Galveston a deadly reputation. Samuel Swartwout wrote to James Morgan one month later, on November 3, 1837, "I take for granted that Galveston is done up.... The roads may be well enough for vessels to ride in, but the land will hereafter, be regarded as a dangerous place for a city or even a residence." Swartwout was attempting to build a rival town and in 1842 wrote to Morgan, "Clear out Red-Fish Bar, & that would in time, become the commercial Emporium, for as sure as there is a God, the whole of Galveston will be swept away within ten years."

It did not happen quite according to that prediction, but in 1842 a cyclone banged the ships about the harbor, flooded the business district, and knocked the Episcopal Church off its high blocks. In 1854 another storm ravaged Matagorda, flooded the Strand, and broke a steamer in two pieces. Much worse was the hurricane of 1867. It submerged and tore up all but one of the Galveston docks, inundated the business area with two to four feet of water in the lower floors, sank a steamer so completely that even the smokestack was beneath the surface, left two ships upside down on the wharves, and deposited the schooner Julia at the corner of the Strand and 26th Street. It drove four ships with anchors dragging and catching across the tracks of the railroad bridge and left only the pilings. The city government forgave the $240,000 debt owed by the railroad company in exchange for its rebuilding the bridge. It took over a month to get the gaslights on again, and over a year to completely restore the wharves. The Houston and Texas Central Railway began to argue at this time for a ship channel to Houston to gain safety from coastal destruction.

Galveston experienced three "hurricanes" in 1871. The first two, in June, were closely spaced. On June 4 the Galveston Daily News reported heavy rain and minor damages. A storm had been noted in Key West and, therefore, so the newspaper thought, traveled seven hundred miles in thirty hours. The courageous rescue of fourteen sailors clinging to the rigging of the bark Virginia Dare as it foundered on the outer bar merited a gold watch from the citizens for Captain R. Irvine. Although the storm was designated a hurricane, the barometer dropped only to 29.51 and the wind blew only thirty-nine miles per hour.

Six days later a second storm arrived with winds over fifty miles per hour and a barometer reading of 29.58. It drove various small craft ashore and left three sloops and one schooner on 19th Street. The railroad bridge held up, but St. Patrick's Church fell down. Two men died. One of the interesting features of these 1871 storms was the increased sophistication in measuring the ferocity of the tempests with wind gauges and barometers. The U.S. Weather Service was just beginning to function.

In early October the city took another weatherbeating. The barometer dropped to 29.68 and wind velocity reached sixty miles per hour. Pushed by north winds, the bay backed into the city and there was widespread small damage. During the cleanup workers found the bodies of two blacks on the beach, a sloop across the railroad track near the depot, and more damage to the railroad bridge.

Except for a few high spots, water again covered the town in 1875. "The storm is now raging with terrible violence," stated a report on September 15. "The east end of the city is submerged, and the small houses in that locality are being washed away. ... At the City Hospital the waves are breaking against the building.... The wharves are submerged and freight much damaged." The Weather Service reported a low reading of 29.04 on the barometer. The tide was thirteen-and-a-half-feet above normal in Galveston Bay, and six people died. Among the lost were Dr. George W. Peete and his grandson. They were unable to escape from the U.S. Quarantine Station, which he directed. The waves destroyed the station, and Peete's body was found later floating in the bay in three feet of water.

On the mainland a Houston reporter saw a thirty-ton schooner lying three hundred yards from the bay. At Galveston he observed little damage to the business section, but massive destruction, "pitiable to see," on the Gulf side of the island. Some five hundred houses had been smashed, and looters threatened those who tried to stop them. The storm made deep cuts into the land at loth, 25th, and 29th streets. The city government reacted but slowly to the emergency needs of the destitute—the mayor was out of town and the aldermen were so split over a gaslight contract that they were unable to function. Finally, after nine days the mayor appointed a committee to distribute relief funds and allowed the use of beach sand to fill in the holes.

The Morgan steamer Harlan, meanwhile, sailed into Galveston with its flag at half-mast. It carried the news of the complete devastation of Galveston's rival, Indianola. There, water poured over and through the low-lying city for eighteen hours while the flooded prairies and lakes behind the city prevented escape for the people. Over a hundred buildings were gone, and only twelve remained. In the following days ships in the Gulf found bits of furniture, pieces of buildings, trees, and the bodies of animals. The death list amounted to 270 recovered corpses. Most of the survivors wanted to move the town, but the Morgan Line refused to change locations. Indianola struggled on, the lesson yet unlearned.

At Galveston, citizens began to talk about protection from storms, and the city asked the state legislature to finance the construction of a breakwater. Representatives argued that Galveston provided one-eighth of the state's taxes, and, therefore, the state should protect Galveston just as it protected people living on the frontier. Opponents said that Galveston contributed to its own problem by taking sand from the beaches, and that it would be better if the Gulf covered up the island. The port would then be located inland and closer to the people. The bill never passed. Lamely, in 1878, the city responded to the problem and planted salt cedars along the line of the old sand dunes. It was hoped that the tough plants would form a network of roots, accumulate sand, rebuild the dunes, and form a natural breakwater to protect the city.

In 1886 the storm god struck again. A small hurricane in June knocked over trees, blew off roofs, and flattened fences. There was minor flooding and damage to the wharves. It was not too bad. "The town got a pretty thorough drenching and a good shaking up, but is doing business at the old stand, as gay as a lark and as spruce as a grass widow," so judged the Galveston Daily News. The wind blew eighteen miles per hour at Indianola.

A second storm came in August. Flooding of one to four feet brought salt water into the lower floors of Galveston's business buildings and floated away the wooden blocks used for paving. There occurred an estimated $150,000 in damages, a few deaths, and more talk about protection. At Indianola the hurricane repeated the destruction of 1875, and fire from a broken kerosene lamp added to the loss. Before this storm, both Indianola and Galveston had received warning from the weather station at Key West. At Indianola, moreover, people had learned to rely on a new system of warning flags begun shortly after the storm of 1875. The hurricane, nonetheless, destroyed the place, and the citizens, this time, decided to move. They abandoned the site, and the town died.

Such a lesson should have been plain for Galveston. It was not. People demonstrated a cavalier attitude. "Yesterday's squall," wrote the editor of the Galveston Daily News the day after the hurricane, "frightened a good many people of Galveston at first and subsequently entertained them. A couple of feet of salt water here and there on some of the principal streets was a curiosity." A letter to the editor argued that Galveston could never suffer like Indianola because it only happened where the storm surge hit a solid object like the mainland. The bay would absorb the shock for Galveston. Although there was some discussion in 1886-1887 about building a seawall, nothing was accomplished.

Worse yet, Matthew F. Maury, a national authority, famous for navigational observations, stated that Galveston was exempt from the force of destructive hurricanes. It was located in a "cove of safety," protected by shallow water and sandbars running parallel to the shore. Inhabitants need not be apprehensive, he said, because the storm waves could never reach the shore in full force. One of the more articulate local writers, H. M. Stringfellow, repeated Maury's argument and commented that when he moved to Galveston from Houston a dozen friends warned him that the place was dangerous and that it was only a matter of a few years before it was washed away. Stringfellow's reaction was that citizens of Galveston had nothing to fear and the "periodical overflow joke is getting just a little stale."

In consideration of a century of opposing evidence and experience, such talk and response was not only foolish, but also reckless. The people of Galveston lived on the border of land and water where the power of nature was strong, and they placed themselves in harm's way. The next storm, in 1900, was the greatest natural disaster in the history of the United States. It was a profound event which not only molded the mind and character of modern Galveston, but also provided a demonstration of the distinguishing characteristics of Western civilization. It is a story for a later point in Galveston history; first comes settlement and development.

***

The first humans to utilize the resources of Galveston Island were the Karankawa Indians. Our earliest knowledge of them comes through the report of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, who landed with a thump on the Texas coast in November 1528. He was second in command of the ill-fated Spanish expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez. After failure in Florida, the starving explorers floated westward along the Gulf Coast in makeshift barges. Eighty to ninety survivors eventually landed on the island they called "Malhado," and Cabeza de Vaca recorded:

As we drifted into shore, a wave caught us and heaved the barge a horseshoe-throw out of the water. The jolt when it hit brought the dead-looking men to. Seeing land at hand, they crawled through the surf to some rocks. Here we made a fire and parched some of our corn. We also found rain water. The men began to regain their senses, their locomotion, and their hope.

There is some debate among historians about the location of Cabeza de Vaca's Malhado. He was imprecise, and his dimensions do not fit, but otherwise, it appears that the Spaniards landed on Galveston. The relationship of the island to the major rivers he described places it in the correct position. Considering the passage of four centuries and the effect of storms on sand barrier islands, it would be a wonder if the dimensions were the same then as now. It is likely that Cabeza de Vaca landed on a younger version of Galveston Island.

The shipwrecked men shortly discovered that they were on an island, and the Indians shortly discovered them. The meeting was friendly. The white men gave the Indians bells and beads, and received food in return. Having recovered somewhat, the Europeans tried to continue their journey. They stowed their clothing and equipment on the barge, shoved away from the beach, and capsized a hundred yards offshore. Three men drowned and the rest were cast back on land "naked as they were born, with the loss of everything we had." The Karankawas, understanding their plight, first sat down and cried for thirty minutes in compassion. Then, after building four large fires along the pathway to keep them warm, the Indians took them to their village. The Spaniards thought that they would become sacrificial victims, but instead they received food, shelter, and an all-night dance celebration. The initial contact with the Karankawas, therefore, was one of friendship, helpfulness, and compassion.

Cold, malnutrition, and dysentery soon began to kill both natives and Europeans. Five isolated Spaniards, in desperation, devoured human flesh, and only the emaciated body of the last one was found uneaten. This cannibalism shocked the Indians, and they blamed the visitors for the dysentery and death. The Karankawas threatened to kill the remaining sixteen Spaniards, but spared them to work as medicine men and slaves. Later, after remaining among the Indians of Texas for six years, Cabeza de Vaca and three other survivors of the expedition walked into northern Mexico, thus regaining Spanish civilization.

Cabeza de Vaca described two similar groups of Indians living on the island. Both were tall and well-built. The men wore no clothing, carried bows and arrows as their only weapons, and inserted large pieces of cane through holes drilled in their nipples and lower lips. The women covered themselves, in part, with Spanish moss, and maidens dressed in deerskin. The women worked incessantly in camp and in the mud flats gathering roots, while the men hunted and fished with cane weirs. They stayed on Galveston from October to February, and moved elsewhere during the rest of the year in order to harvest oysters and blackberries. They treated children kindly, readily shared their possessions, and observed elaborate marriage and death customs.

Three centuries later the daughter of a ship captain, Alice Williams Oliver, studied the Karankawa language and customs. She recorded her findings shortly before her death in 1889. The Indians spoke, she noted, with repressed breath which gave a sighing sound to their speech, and they never looked at the person to whom they spoke. The men were tall, well-formed, and possessed good teeth. They had long, black hair which was sometimes braided and tipped with the rattle from a snake. It was rarely combed. Both sexes wore bracelets of untanned deer hide, and the women were short, stout, and disagreeable. Both sexes wore simple skirts, but children went naked until ten years of age. Everyone was dirty and smelled of shark's oil which was used to repel mosquitoes. They applied blue, curved tattoos to the face and possessed a reputation for cannibalism. They still used bows and arrows, but also clubs, tomahawks, and knives received from white traders. The arrows were a yard long, and the bows reached from the ground to a man's chin. They ate deer, fish, oysters, turtles, berries, nuts, persimmons, but had no corn and no agriculture. They waded across a shallow ford, Carancahua Reef, to reach Galveston, and also used crude dugout canoes with the bark left on them. By and large, Oliver found the Indians lazy, begging, dangerous when drunk, and generally "destitute of heroic traits."

In 1962 while excavating the Jamaica Beach subdivision down the island near the location of Carancahua Reef, workers uncovered a Karankawa burial site. Rice University archeologists sifted the dirt and found no evidence of cannibalism or Spaniards. Perhaps Malhado was elsewhere and the idea of cannibalism among the Karankawas was a bit of Spanish propaganda to hide their own indiscretions. There may have been some ritual eating of an enemy—other primitive people have done that—or the Indians may have learned cannibalism from the Spanish. There is not enough evidence. Karankawa technical knowledge, however, was slight. They possessed no agriculture and few tools; they lived uncomfortably at the mercy of nature. They had neither resources nor knowledge to challenge the environment in order to create a better life for themselves. The Indians of the area, moreover, could not withstand the powerful technology of the Western world. In the 1820's they fought the settlers and lost. As their numbers thinned, they joined other coastal tribes and slowly retreated into northern Mexico. After 1858 the Karankawas existed no more.

One of the reasons for the Indians' hostility in the 1820's was their experience with the pirates of Galveston. At that time, the Spanish empire in the New World crumbled. Mexico, among others, struck for independence, and there were those who used this situation for their own profit. A priest, Don José Manuel de Herrera, represented the Mexican patriots in New Orleans. He appointed Don Louis Aury, the naval commander of the fleets of Venezuela, La Plata, and New Grenada, as the commodore of the navy of Mexico. Aury was instructed to go to Galveston Island to carry out offensive operations against Spain. Galveston Bay had been a rendezvous point for the former pirates of Barataria Bay (in Louisiana), led by Jean Laffite, and was well known.

On September 1, 1816, Aury arrived at Galveston with a dozen small vessels. He organized a government, declared Galveston a part of the Republic of Mexico, set up an admiralty court, and sent his privateers out to raid Spanish shipping. He was in business. Colonel Henry Perry soon joined him in this shadowy enterprise. In 1815 Perry had tried to assemble an army to invade Texas from Bolivar. Poor support and ill fortune defeated the effort. After the success of Aury Perry returned with about one hundred followers and joined the men at Galveston. Another soldier of fortune with similar ambitions, Xavier Mina, brought in an additional two hundred troops which raised the total force at Galveston to around seven hundred.

They decided to attack the Spanish town of Soto La Marina as a start for the invasion of Mexico, destroyed the huts at Galveston, and left on April 5, 1817. The three commanders, however, would not cooperate, and after landing the soldiers, Aury decided to return to his profitable privateering business. Perry and Mina then split up. Perry tried to return overland, and Mina pushed on into the interior of Mexico seeking glory. The Spanish caught them and they found nothing but death. Aury, meanwhile, returned to his base, and met a surprise.

During his brief absence a new set of buccaneers had taken over Galveston, and Aury, with smaller numbers, moved on to Amelia Island off the coast of Florida. The newcomers on Galveston pledged fealty to Mexico and organized a government under the leadership of Jean Laffite. After his expulsion from Barataria in 1814, the "Pirate of the Gulf" had searched for a new location. Armed with letters of marque from Venezuela, and serving as a double agent for Spain to spy on Mexican activities, Laffite set up his port to prey upon Spanish shipping. His affiliations meant little. It was pirate business as usual. Claimed by the United States, Mexico, and Spain, Galveston was located on an uncertain boundary, and, thus, was an ideal meeting place for freebooters to dispose of their contraband and take on fresh supplies. This was Laffite's role—a broker for pirates.

From captured vessels Laffite sent jewelry, laces, calicos, silks, linens, seersuckers, and muslins by pack mules overland to New Orleans for sale in the black market. Other items—iron, rails, tallow, glassware, beef, crockery—he sent boldly to port aboard the prize ships to be sold openly. The population of the Mississippi port supported his efforts. The pirates also captured slave ships. The slaves were sold to planters who went to Galveston to make a selection, or to dealers like the Bowie brothers. James, Resin, and John Bowie bought the Africans from Laffite for one dollar per pound, walked them down the Bolivar Peninsula and cross country to New Orleans, and turned them over to the customs officer. Since the slave trade was illegal, the Bowies received a reward of half the value of the slaves. The U.S. Marshall then sold the slaves and the Bowies bought them back again. These transactions made the slaves legitimate and the brothers then resold them legally in the United States. In two years the Bowies earned $65,000 with this trade.

The U.S. Collector at New Orleans, Beverly Chew, wrote about this illegal traffic in his official correspondence. He stated that it started with Aury and continued with Laffite. It was practiced with impunity "by a motly mixture of freebooters and smugglers at Galveston under the Mexican flag." Chew reported one instance of a prize ship carrying three hundred slaves and a contagious fever which the pirates cut adrift in the Gulf to prevent the spread of the disease. The United States made an effort, then, to suppress the slave trade and close the base.

The pirate camp at Campeachy on Snake Island, as the inhabitants called it, had grown rapidly to a mixed population of about one thousand. The most substantial structure in the town of crude huts was Laffite's two-story frame house. It had a ditch around it, four cannons, and red paint. The William H. Sandusky map of Galveston in 1845 places the house on the bay front at Avenue A and 14th Street. Others have located it variously between 11th and 15th on A. There exists no explanation for the vivid color of the "Maison Rouge" except a story: Satan offered to build Laffite's house for him in return for the first living creature the Devil saw the next morning. Laffite agreed and Satan built the house. First thing the next morning, however, the pirate chief threw a mongrel dog into the Devil's tent. Outraged, the ruler of Hell took revenge by painting the house scarlet. It made a good target.

The character and figure of Laffite are encrusted with legend, but there are several eyewitness accounts. Mrs. James Campbell was the wife of one of Laffite's captains. She lived at Campeachy for three years and provided the Galveston Daily News with her observation in 1879. She was born at the beginning of the century and lived with her stepfather on the Sabine River. In 1816 she married James Campbell who had been born near Baltimore, trained as a sailmaker, and served with Captain Oliver H. Perry at the Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812.

They moved to the buccaneer camp in 1817, when it had about one hundred houses. The mixed population of men of different nationalities with their wives and mistresses received supplies from New Orleans. Campeachy was located on the bay side on the ruins of Aury's camp. Laffite was then about forty years old, dark-complexioned, handsome, and over six feet tall. He was strongly built, had black hair, side-whiskers, and hazel eyes. He never wore a uniform, nor weapons except once when he expected an attack by a rebellious officer.

Another witness was Colonel Warren D. C. Hall, who came to the area as part of the forces of James Long. Hall met Laffite in 1820, when Long was trying to obtain Laffite's assistance for an attempt to invade Mexico. Hall said that Laffite was six feet, two inches tall with remarkable symmetry except for small hands and feet. He wore no uniform, spoke English with a French accent, and closed one eye when conversing.

The most remarkable description, however, resulted from an 1821 visit by the U.S.S. Enterprise. Because of piratical depredations, the United States ordered Laffite to leave Galveston and sent the Enterprise to enforce the order. A report of this visit was supplied by "T," presumably one of the ship's officers, to United States Magazine and Democratic Review in 1839. The ship arrived as Laffite was preparing to leave in his brig of sixteen guns. "T" said Laffite was five feet, ten inches tall, and simply dressed in a blue frock coat and foraging cap. He had an olive complexion and small, black eyes. The buccaneer was courteous and took the officers to see his red fort dismantled. "But I am not a pirate. You see there?" he gestured toward a gibbet on the beach where a dead man dangled. "This is my justice. That vaurien plundered an American schooner."

He invited them to dinner on his ship, and they ate turkey, dried fish, stew, yams, and wine. Laffite explained that he once had been a rich merchant in Santo Domingo, but had been captured and robbed by a Spanish man-of-war while en route to Europe. He was abandoned on a cay and rescued by an American schooner. He landed penniless in New Orleans, where his wife died. Joining with others he bought a ship and proceeded to wage war against Spain. That was why he hated the Spanish; he bothered no one else.

During the meal they were joined by a beautiful quadroon, but not introduced to her. According to "T" she was "the most glorious specimen of the brunett ever dreamed of. A full and voluptuous form of faultless outline—beautiful features and sleepy black eyes, with the blackest and most luxuriant hair that ever curled." She flirted with the guests, but a glance from Laffite resulted in her abrupt departure. The meal ended, and shortly after that Laffite vacated Galveston.

On the island, Laffite ruled with an iron hand, and he was known to execute those who defied him. In 1819, for example, one of his captains against orders raided an American plantation, and a U.S. revenue schooner chased him back to Galveston. Laffite ordered the disobedient captain hanged and turned the crew over to the United States for punishment. The dead Captain Brown, suspended from the middle of a tripod, swung to face the settlement at dusk and turned away at night, so it was said. This was considered an evil omen.

Following the visit of the Enterprise, Laffite burned Campeachy, departed on his ship, Pride, and disappeared into the mists and legends of history. There are various accounts of his later life and death, including a fake diary which says he died in East St. Louis in 1854. Jean Laffite is one of those historical characters who attract collectors of documents and also forgers. The most reasonable conclusion is that Laffite died in Yucatan in the 1820's. An 1852 account by William Bollaert refers to a letter from Thomas M. Duke which claimed Laffite died in 1826. There is also a letter to Mirabeau B. Lamar from Rhoads Fisher dated 1838 which reported a meeting with a fisherman off the coast of Yucatan. The man told Fisher that he had sailed with the pirate chieftain and helped bury him about ten years before near Teljas, a village on the mainland. Laffite had died of a fever.

In his wake Laffite also left tales about buried treasure, and the fortune hunters came immediately. Historian Joseph O. Dyer reported people looking in 1822 and 1823. Jesse A. Ziegler, who was born on the island in 1857, remembered searching for treasure as a boy, and often seeing men with sacks, lanterns, shovels, and picks go into the area of the three trees midway down the island. Only a few doubloons were ever found. A persistent tale, however, was that shortly before his departure Laffite paced the floor and was heard to mutter, "I have buried my treasure under the three trees." Some pirates who remained behind dug in the area and found a long, wooden box. They eagerly pried off the lid and found staring out at them in the moonlight the pale face and rigid form of the chieftain's dead wife.

The legacy of buried treasure continues to the present and is a subject which fires the imagination. Government dredge boats in the Galveston channel in 1903 brought up six silver coins, two copper coins, large stones, and copper spikes and bolts. One of the silver coins carried an 1812 date. Reaction to divers who successfully plundered a sunken treasure galleon off Padre Island in 1967 resulted in a Texas Antiquities Law. Treasure seeking, nonetheless, goes on. Two people, one in 1970 and the other two years later, sought permission to dig on Pelican Island. Nothing came of it. Laffite's treasure, if such exists, and that of others have not been found. What is left of the pirate's adventure at Galveston is a lurid memory. In the words of Stanley E. Babb whose poetry was inspired by Galveston:

A dead man's bones on a lonely beach,
A seagull's mocking cry;
The swelling lunge of long grey waves
And a red moon in the sky.

A cutlass instead of a crucifix,
Splotched with blood and rust;
And a dead man's bones on a lonely beach,
Crumbling into dust.

Shortly after Laffite's departure, General James Long moved to Galveston and rebuilt the fort. He had tried unsuccessfully to persuade the buccaneer to leave the base intact, and there is disagreement in the accounts about Laffite's promise to help Long in his enterprise. Whatever the truth of the matter, in action, Laffite did nothing to help Long, and left the adventurer on his own.

Long sought the independence of Texas and in 1819 declared Texas a republic while raising a lone star flag over Nacogdoches. Long established a station at Bolivar and Galveston, and may have fought a battle with the Karankawas. According to one account, in February 18 a French sloop loaded with wine went ashore on the beach. The Indians attacked, killed the crew, and drank the wine. In the midst of their revel Long crossed from Bolivar with one hundred men and surprised the Indians near the three trees. The Karankawas, numbering between one and two hundred, fought back, but lost thirty warriors. Long's force suffered seven wounded, none killed.

Other accounts contend that it was Laffite who fought this battle at an earlier period. Some of his men, supposedly, captured an Indian maid, and the Karankawas struck back by eating two pirates. Laffite mustered two hundred men and two cannons and fought for three days against three hundred Indians. After losing thirty men, the natives fled. The Laffite story seems more likely from the standpoint of circumstance, but the Long version has the authority of Warren D. C. Hall, who worked with Long and lived to relate the story. Be that as it may, the result afterward was a fateful and determined hostility on the part of the Karankawas. There was no one to tell their side of the episode.

Long, hearing of rebellion at La Bahia, rushed to the scene of the action, promising to return in three weeks. He left behind at Bolivar his wife and about fifty men. Long never returned and eventually met death in Mexico. After a month the men at Bolivar began to leave. Although she could have gone with them, Jane Wilkinson Long chose to wait for her husband to come back. The headstrong twenty-four-year-old pregnant woman was left alone at the fort with her daughter, Ann, her black servant girl, Kian, and a dog. Across the water at Galveston she could see Karankawa campfires, and when the Indians threatened she hoisted a red-flannel petticoat (or, perhaps, pantaloons) on the flagstaff and fired a cannon to keep them away.

During the winter, while Galveston Bay froze for one-fourth mile from the shore, she gave birth to another child. It was the first time American settlers had a child in this frontier, and Jane Long thus earned the sobriquet "the Mother of Texas." After losing her fishhooks, she used an old hammock as a seine and preserved the fish in a pickle barrel of brine. News came first of her husband's capture, and later of his death. With that information and near starvation, in the summer of 1822, she left with the first of the Austin settlers. She lived until 1880 and was known to wear a homespun dress with a palmetto-leaf hat, and smoke a pipe. She was a tough woman suited for a hard land.

For the next decade and a half, developments on Galveston and Galveston Bay involved the struggle for Texas independence. What had proven an illusion for James Long became a reality for Stephen F. Austin and his followers. Settlers, moving by land and sea, poured into Texas seeking the cheap land and new opportunity offered through various colonization schemes. Grumblings against Mexican rule turned into full-throated protest and revolution in 1835. As the war progressed, Galveston with its natural harbor became increasingly important. The Mexican government designated it a port of entry in 1825 and built a small customshouse there in 1830. It was abandoned two years later, but during the revolution Galveston became the home of the Texas Navy and the last point of defense for the Texas government. With Sam Houston and the Texan army retreating before the advance of Santa Anna, President David G. Burnet, other government officials, and refugee families took shelter there.

Lewis B. Harris, a young volunteer who arrived at Galveston on April 21, 1836, found people living in tents and drinking brackish water. The customhouse, a mere shell, still stood about a mile from the point of the island near Laffite's old fort. The ditches of the fort were still there, but the wood had been used for steamboat fuel. There were about one hundred men on the island, and they feared invasion from the west end. At one time freshly washed clothes flapping in the breeze were mistaken for the guidons of Mexican cavalry, and the camp went into a panic. Burnet, at the moment of Harris' arrival, was preparing to move the government to New Orleans.

On that same day, however, General Sam Houston rallied the troops at San Jacinto and, to the music of a four-piece band playing the tune of a popular love song, "Will You Come to My Bower I Have Shaded for You?" the Texans won victory and everlasting glory in eighteen minutes. Surprised and routed, the Mexican army met defeat and carnage. The rebels took General Santa Anna captive, and the war ended.

Houston sent four men to carry the news to Galveston. One of them, Captain R. J. Calder, particularly wanted to go because of his interest in a young woman, Mary Walker Douglas, among the refugees on the island. The messengers left the battlefield on April 23 with no food, foraged through an abandoned farmhouse, found some cornmeal, and began to travel along the bay shore in a leaky skiff. They spent a night on a beach in a downpour with a rattlesnake for company, and then tried to cross the bay the next day. En route, a small Texas war vessel picked them up. The captain, William Brown, when he heard the news sailed his hat into the sea and fired his pivot gun three times. At Galveston the refugees crowded the rigging of the ships in the harbor while the commodore fired a thirteen-gun salute and fed the hungry couriers. Burnet, the last to know, was so angry he threatened to arrest the messengers. Commodore Charles Hawkins, however, intervened, and the anger passed. It is pleasant to note, moreover, that Captain Calder married Miss Douglas. They moved to a farm at Richmond, Texas, and reared five children.

The government soon moved to Velasco because of the "entire want of accommodation at the Island." Soldiers, meanwhile, gathered the scattered weapons from the battlefield, and Burnet ordered them sent to Harrisburg for storage to avoid the destructive "saline atmosphere" of Galveston. The island, temporarily, became a garrison of two thousand where the Mexican prisoners were taken. Santa Anna was there briefly, and Sam Houston passed through on his way to New Orleans for treatment of his injured ankle, shattered by a musket ball at San Jacinto. At the moment, however, the future of the island remained uncertain.