Isaac Cline, 1900, and the ghost town under the Gulf
Reckoning with the past
Once upon a time, 150 miles southwest of Galveston on Matagorda Bay, there lived a bustling seaport town. In 1870, both Galveston and its rival, by then the county seat of Calhoun County, were growing rapidly. The census that year reported 14,000 in Galveston and over 5,000 in the younger city. Its name was Indianola.
From its beginning in 1846 in the Republic of Texas, Indianola, then known as Indian Point, was the key point of entry for Germans settling in Texas. Most continued inland to settle New Braunfels, Fredericksburg, and numerous towns in Central Texas, where their descendants would eventually speak Texasdeutsch, a Texas German dialect. But several thousand stayed near the Gulf and founded Indianola, which was incorporated in 1853.
In 1856, Indianola was the port of entry for 34 camels, the subjects of the U.S. Army’s experiment to replace horses and mules in the American southwest with animals adapted for deserts. The Civil War put an end to that.
In 1869, Indianola became the first port in the world to send refrigerated beef to another city. By this time, the city had become a shipping powerhouse, second in Texas only to Galveston.
Today, Indianola is a ghost town. Most of it is underwater.
On September 15, 1875, Indianola was wracked by a massive hurricane. The storm killed up to 300 and destroyed three-fourths of its buildings.
The German immigrants who’d established Indianola knew nothing of hurricanes. Many of the survivors moved inland, and Indianola grew smaller. A few thousand were determined to rebuild, and within a few years they successfully reestablished the city.
On August 20, 1886, a second hurricane arrived, and this one was more devastating than the first. This time the survivors left, never to return. In 1887, after a major fire, the post office closed and the town was declared officially dead. Today, erosion from storms has put most of what was once Indianola underwater.
Meanwhile, in Galveston
In 1889, meteorologist Isaac Cline was sent from Abilene to Galveston to organize the first Texas section of the U.S. Weather Bureau, the forerunner of the National Weather Service. Abilene didn’t provide any reason to study the behavior of hurricanes, but Galveston all but demanded it.
Galveston’s leaders had watched with concern what had happened to Indianola. To those who thought about such things, the former city on Matagorda Bay must have seemed less vulnerable to catastrophic storms than Galveston. Indianola was removed from the Gulf by fourteen miles and seemingly buffered from the full force of hurricanes by a string of barrier islands. Galveston itself was perched on a barrier island, hard up against the Gulf.
A few weeks after the 1886 storm that killed Indianola, 30 Galveston leaders who called themselves the Progressive Association decided to build a seawall. The plan was to build a dike 10 feet tall that would surround the island. The state, likewise invested in protecting Galveston, authorized a bond. But time passed, and so did the urgency.
In 1891, fresh off his recent study of hurricanes, Cline delivered a speech to the local YMCA that was reprinted in the Galveston News. It did much to remove whatever lingering concerns remained about Gulf-bred storms. The Indianola storms, he wrote, were “accidental.” They weren’t in any way typical of Gulf storms. He concluded that any fear of hurricanes in Galveston was absurd.
“It would be impossible,” he wrote, “for any cyclone to create a storm wave which could materially injure the city.”
The reckoning
We know what happened next. On September 8, 1900, the Great Storm killed 8,000 Galvestonians and destroyed most of the city. One-hundred and twenty-four years later, it remains the deadliest natural disaster in North America.
After it buried its dead, the City of Galveston was faced with three options: It could do as Indianola did and pull up stakes; it could consider the storm a one-off and rebuild in the hope or conviction it wouldn’t happen again; or it could acknowledge that Galveston’s location made it vulnerable, but that this vulnerability was a problem to be solved rather than a death sentence.
Galveston chose the last. Almost immediately, the city resolved to rebuild. The reckoning – the 17' seawall, the grade raising, the causeway – would come at enormous cost and sacrifice.
The city had suffered a near-death experience. Rather than explain away what had happened as an unrepeatable freak of nature or dismiss mitigation as too expensive, the city looked both square in the eye and reckoned with them.
As far as I can tell, Isaac Cline never reckoned with what experience should have taught him. If he did, he kept the reckoning entirely private.
In public, he found ways to minimize what happened to Indianola. In the 1891 article, he never mentions the hundreds who died in 1875 and 1886. Instead, he compares the property damage from the two hurricanes to that resulting from a single recent tornado in Lousville, Kentucky, without acknowledging the differences in size and development.
In Isaac’s Storm, Eric Larson accuses Cline of “boosterism,” of not wanting to get sideways of Galveston’s promoters, who were intent on proving that Galveston was a safe investment. That might explain Cline’s stress on property damage rather than human lives and his showily confident declaration that Galveston was safe from real harm.
Cline left Galveston in 1901, when the Weather Bureau moved its Gulf Coast forecasting center from the island to New Orleans. He retired from the Bureau in 1935 after a long and distinguished career. He died in New Orleans in 1955 at 93.
Cline had another opportunity to reconsider his own role in what had happened to Galveston when he wrote his autobiography in 1945. In the 1951 edition, he adds a 64-page summary of his 1926 book Tropical Cyclones.
The closest he comes to acknowledging error is in that later addition. The 1900 storm convinced him, he writes, that “the accepted theories giving the directions of the winds in the different parts of the cyclones as they move around the center are not correct and are misleading.”
There is no mention of Indianola or his overweening confidence that Galveston was safe. Instead, he recounts his own experiences on September 8 and his last thought when he believed he would drown and decided to “let the water enter my lungs”: “The world will know that I did my duty to the last.”
He devotes two pages to contemporaneous testimonies from others that back up that belief. Once he’d realized the storm’s magnitude, he writes, he warned people away from the beach and other low-lying areas and issued a hurricane warning without first getting clearance from the Weather Bureau. The loss of life, he argues, would have been twice as great without his warnings that day.
Except for his office’s warning, Larson casts doubt on Cline’s claims. But whether or not they’re true, what can’t be denied is what Cline omits in his autobiography, where he had his last and best opportunity, from the distance of 45 years and a storied career behind him, to provide a full and clear account of what he’d gotten so disastrously wrong.
Writers take different approaches to autobiography. It can be an attempt at full disclosure, or an attempt to establish or preserve a positive legacy, or an attempt to establish or preserve peace with oneself. Most autobiographies contain a little of each.
Confidence is seductive, and often most seductive to the one who is confident. Meteorology was still a young science when Cline came to Galveston, and Cline was still in his twenties. Young sciences and young men are especially prone to the seductions of confidence. Cline was in his 80s when he wrote his autobiography. Maybe the old are most prone to the seductions of self-defense.
I’m writing this outdoors on Easter Sunday. The temperature is 71°, there’s a mild breeze, and right now it is impossible for me to imagine that this island has been and could be again the site of catastrophic, nature-born violence.
The graver the possibility, the more reasons we have to think, in Sinclair Lewis’s words, it can’t happen here. Indianola reminds us of what can happen when we forget.