On this day in 1900, the hurricane that came ashore at Galveston, Texas, killed at least six thousand people. Official reports most often cite eight thousand. Some seven thousand buildings were destroyed on an island whose population was under thirty-eight thousand, and about ten thousand people were left without a home. It remains the deadliest natural disaster in United States history.

Galveston was not unwarned. The city had a Weather Bureau office, staffed by men who had been following the storm's track for days, and by the morning of the 8th a hurricane warning was up. Isaac Cline, the local section director, rode along the beachfront urging people to move to higher ground, though on that island there was very little higher ground to move to. Warnings can tell you a storm is coming. They could not raise the land, and in 1900 there was no seawall and no bridge that would survive what arrived. The surge ran eight to twelve feet deep over a city whose highest natural point stood at about nine.

The telegraph lines went down, and so did the single cable to the mainland. By nightfall Galveston could neither hear nor be heard. The front page below is the Evening Star of that same Saturday in Washington: twenty-four pages, two cents, and in the fourth column only a short notice from New Orleans that many lives were thought lost. Word of what had actually happened had to leave the island by boat the next day, carried by a handful of survivors, and be wired from Houston. For most of a day, the rest of the country did not know.