Lindsey Graham

Forty-three bodies were lodged in the cross braces of a railroad bridge.

In a grove of salt cedar trees, one hundred bodies were found in the branches, some with double puncture wounds left by snakes.

One witness to the destruction was 18-year-old P.G.

Tipp, who had left Galveston on a fishing trip four days earlier and came home early Sunday morning aboard a small sailboat.

He later recalled the harrowing sights that greeted him as he drifted closer to shore, writing, "'We kept running into so many dead bodies that I had to go forward with a pike and shove the dead out of the way.

Men, women, children, babies, all floating along with the tide.

Hundreds of bodies, going bump, bump, hitting the boat.'

I was sort of in a daze, picking them out of the way.

It was the most horrible thing I have ever seen.

But the survivors still had no idea how many victims the hurricane had claimed.

Early estimates put the death toll at 500.

Only much later would they learn that between 6,000 and 8,000 had lost their lives.

To this day, the Galveston hurricane remains the deadliest natural disaster in the history of North America.

The storm had carved a large swath of destruction, leveling nearly two-thirds of Galveston's structures, amounting to between $17 and $30 million in property losses.

Entire neighborhoods had vanished, homes swept up from their foundations and broken apart, joined a battering ram of debris that cleared a 1,500-acre stretch of the coastline before coming to rest just south of Broadway, the city's central thoroughfare.

There, a 30-foot-high, three-mile-long mound of wreckage concealed bodies and animal carcasses and slowed the drainage of floodwaters.

Making matters worse, telegraph, telephone, and electrical lines were all destroyed, as were the four bridges connecting Galveston to mainland Texas.

The city was cut off from the outside world in a moment when it desperately needed aid.

so the surviving city leaders knew they needed to tell the world what had happened.

They enlisted six men to serve as messengers.