155 YEARS AGO, 1867 HURRICANE WREAKED DEATH AND DESTRUCTION IN BROWNSVILLE AND MATAMOROS AREA

(Ed.'s Note: Former City of Brownsville's Public Information Officer Bill Young, a veteran print and broadcast journalist who cut his teeth at the old Brownsville Herald when it strived to be a newspaper of record, wrote a piece on the devastating hurricane of 1867, the storm that dealt the death blow to Puerto Bagdad, the notorious "den of iniquity"through which Confederate cotton had run the Union blockade in the Civil War and made millionaires of Charles Stillman, Richard King and Mifflin Kenedy. We reprint the story with Bill's permission.)

By Bill Young

Special to the Express-News

When a cool northeasterly breeze began to stir the dust on the rutted streets of Brownsville on the morning of Monday, Oct. 7, 1867, many of the 5,000 residents of the city believed the refreshing winds were a harbinger of the end of what had been a sweltering South Texas summer. What they didn't know, and probably couldn't guess, was that the change in the weather would prove to be disastrous for many and deadly for some.

As the day wore on, the cool breezes became gale force winds. By that time, most people must have thought this was no ordinary norther. They were right.

Several hours earlier and a day away by horseback, veteran sailor Capt J.T. Sayles must have cursed when he saw the tide slowly rising and, foot by foot, pushing salty Gulf of Mexico waters over Brazos Island. By early Monday, the high tide had, according to Sayles, “swept over Brazos Island, carrying away every house but two.”

Destruction from the Great Storm of 1867 had begun. Before the winds died down, death, terror and havoc would soon reign over the southern tip of Texas and the northern coast of Mexico.

Stranded on Padre Island

As the storm grew in intensity, Sayles and two companions set out in a skiff hoping to reach the lighthouse on Brazos. The skiff soon capsized, drowning Sayles' two mates and forcing him onto the sandy shore at the south end of Padre Island, near Point Isabel. The Corpus Christi Advertiser of Oct. 19, 1867, reported that Sayles was able to repair damage to his boat and set off again, but he was swept out to the open sea, landing two days later some 40 miles north of Point Isabel.

Sayles' survival story doesn't end there. After landing on Padre Island, he began a three-day walk up the narrow strip of sand in search of food and shelter. Walking until he could walk no more, Sayles collapsed onto the sand and waited for death. He would be spared, however, when a beachcomber from Corpus Christi came upon him, gave him food and water and managed to get help and eventually get Sayles to Corpus Christi. He had been without food for five days and was thought by his friends in the Brownsville area to have perished at sea.

‘The Fearful Tornado'

While Sayles was surviving his adventure, people 20 miles inland at Brownsville — and at all points in between — were suffering the torments and ravages of what witnesses would refer to as “The Fearful Tornado.”

Eyewitness accounts of the storm's fury tell of a truly frightful night of trying to survive the storm's fierce winds.

In an interview with The San Antonio Express in 1952, 92-year-old Grace Clark recounted the events of the great storm 85 years before. Clark's father, William Henry Clark, was the founder of Clarksville on the Texas side, just across the Rio Grande from Bagdad at the northeast tip of Mexico. She recalled that 70 people took refuge in her father's house in Clarksville, which was one of two houses there that survived the blow.

“Oh, my, it was terrible,” she is reported as saying. “I was almost 7 years old at the time. Everything was washed away.”

A reign of fear

While those who sought the safety of the Clark house were holding on for dear life, the nuns at the Convent of the Sisters of the Incarnate Word in Brownsville were fighting for their lives as the storm raged and “fear reigned everywhere. “

In a letter to her superiors in Lyon, France, Mother St. Ange, one of the founders of the order in Brownsville, recounted the ferocity of the storm and the realization that the nuns who lived in the convent were powerless to do anything about it, except pray.

Mother St. Ange wrote that at 7 p.m. on Oct. 7, 1867, after a day of darkness and rain, those in the convent had done all they could to secure the large, brick building. Even though the wind was howling, driving what she described as a “freezing rain” against the convent, the nuns tried to get some sleep, but it was impossible.

“After taking all possible measures for security of the house,” Mother Ange wrote, “we went to bed, but we had scarcely done so when we were obliged to get up. The wind from the north blew so furiously that in spite of all our precautions, the windows began to break and the water to come in in torrents. Again, we fought against the wind, nailing boards against the openings, but the sleet cut the faces and arms of the sisters, rendering it impossible for them to continue.

“Besides,” she continued, “it was useless, as the wind tore off the boards as soon as they were nailed. We tried to protect the sanctuary with mattresses, but it was a useless endeavor — the water overflowed every thing. ‘What shall we do, Mother,' asked the sisters. ‘Nothing, we cannot fight against God. Let us go and pray.'”

All the work and money the nuns had poured into the convent and school were lost along with several residents of the convent. Writing in “Civil War and Revolution on the Rio Grande Frontier,” author Jerry Thompson quotes from the New Orleans Crescent of Oct. 29, 1867: “The Catholic Convent collapsed and 13 young women were killed.”

“We have seldom had occasion in our course of journalism,” reported the Rio Grande Courier of Oct. 12, 1867, “to describe an occurrence, so vivid in terror and so prolific in destruction ... we feel incapable to give the merest conception of that night of terror, when families of delicate females and children were rushing from the fallen ruins of their homes to brave the tempest of driving rain, and the air filled with fragments of building material. There are, at the last calculation, three thousand families who have lost everything and are destitute.”

According to the Courier, there was not a “habitation which had not felt the terrible force of the storm, while the majority of our business houses are in ruins. From Brownsville and Matamoros to the Gulf, the tornado swept everything before it.”

River rescue

River steamers, which the Courier said gave such a cheerful appearance and commercial importance to Brownsville, were dismantled and reduced to almost shapeless ruins, at a loss of an estimated $200,000. In all, five steamers were reported total or partial wrecks with two sunk.

Victor Egly had hired on as chief engineer for the steamer Antonia at Bagdad, Mexico, on Aug. 26, 1865. Egly kept a diary of his life on the Rio Grande and recorded this entry for Oct. 7: “The Antonia was blown away from Bagdad in the great storm that night and landed 5 miles up the river on English George's Ranch 300 yards from the river.”

Egly further writes that four days later, he was dispatched up river to help repair the Tamaulipas No. 1, one of the five steamers damaged at Brownsville.

Fortunately for some victims of the storm, the steamer Tamaulipas No. 2, commanded by Capt. Robert Dalzell, two days after the wind quit blowing, was able to sail downriver to Bagdad, stopping along the way to rescue “ninety persons (who) had taken refuge on the steamer Antonia.” Dalzell's mission downriver was prompted by a note he received from Joseph Cooper, who was one of the 90 stranded on the Antonia and pleaded he and the others were “in the gravest distress.”

When Dalzell finally reached Bagdad, he witnessed a scene of death and ruin, including 22 dead and finding “only three or four houses are left standing at Bagdad, and they are badly damaged.” Dalzell was, however, able to rescue several more who had survived the storm by taking refuge in the sand dunes.

Surveying the damage

Once the wind stopped blowing and people ventured out into the wreckage, they began to assess the extent of the damage brought by the storm. Some three weeks after the hurricane, the Galveston Daily News of Oct. 30, 1867, published a list of damaged and destroyed buildings and houses. One big loser was Barney Mooney, who ran a hotel and saloon at Bagdad as well as a barroom and pool hall in Brownsville. Mooney's Brownsville loss was put at $25,000; no mention was made of his holdings in Bagdad.

Israel Bigelow. an attorney who was the first mayor of Brownsville and the first chief justice, or county judge, of Cameron County, lost his office and everything with it. The wind also took the courthouse and jail on Levee Street with all prisoners reported to be “at large.”

Richard King and Mifflin Kenedy lost their new warehouse as well as an iron warehouse they owned in partnership with Charles Stillman.

Both local newspapers — the Ranchero and the Rio Grande Courier — lost their buildings, and W.J. Strake, local correspondent for the New York Herald, saw his house turned into splinters. Somers Kinney, publisher of the Ranchero, sustained a broken leg when a wall of his office collapsed on him.

Exact losses are difficult to assess, but later reports published by the Rio Grande Courier claim that 1,500 buildings and jacals in Matamoros were destroyed, including the entire area around the main plaza, and 200 buildings in Brownsville met the same fate.

Historic photographs

Photographer R.H. Wallis lost his Washington Street studio to the storm and was perhaps deprived of the photographs of a lifetime. 

Wallis competitor Louis de Planque (right) fared much better and was able to salvage photographic equipment from his studio at 62 Calle Abasolo in Matamoros. In the first hours after the storm, he took a series of stunning storm damage photographs. These images of wreckage in Brownsville and Matamoros are thought to be the first photographs ever taken of damage caused by a hurricane. A set of these images is preserved by the Brownsville Historical Association.

Various reports of deaths and injuries were reported as soon as local papers got back to press. Best estimates have at least 68 deaths and more than 100 injured in South Texas. No casualty reports are available from the Matamoros area.

National Weather Service officials say the Great Storm of 1867 was probably a category 3 or 4 storm and that it was a “coast hugger,” never making landfall but raking most of the Texas coast, even swiping Galveston.

Ironically, on Jan. 2, 1867, about 10 months before the hurricane, a rare snowstorm left snow drifts on the streets of Brownsville and Matamoros. There can be little doubt, then, that 1867 was a year for weather and that those who lived it never forgot it.