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Texas Tales

published: January 22nd 2010
by: MIke Cox

Texas’ 10 worst disasters
    Long-ago Texas disasters are old news, but history offers lessons to those who take time to seek them.
    A look at the most dire disasters in the state’s history – a list that contains one disaster that happened long before Texas was settled – shows that the worst disasters are the ones that come without warning.
    Today, of course, we know of a hurricane’s approach for days in advance. Tornados form faster, but even with those types of storms, weather forecasters and law enforcement usually are able to warn citizens to take shelter. Consequently, the number of weather-related fatalities has declined over the years. But early-day Texans were not as fortunate. 
    With the catastrophic Haitian earthquake very much in the news, it seems like a good time to list Texas’ most devastating events, from storms to epidemics to plane crashes. Here, in order of severity in terms of loss of life, are the 10 worst disasters in Texas history:
    1. September 8, 1900
    An unnamed hurricane sweeps across Galveston. Fatality estimates range from 8,000 to 12,000. This still stands as the worst disaster in U.S. history in terms of lives lost.
    2. Summer 1867
    Yellow fever outbreak kills thousands in Texas. No definite list of casualties has ever been compiled, but the epidemic ranks second only to the 1900 Galveston hurricane in number of deaths.
    3. October-November 1918
    “Spanish flu” pandemic kills an estimated 20 million world-wide, a half-million in the United States and several thousand in Texas. El Paso, where the disease broke out first among soldiers at Fort Bliss, had 600 deaths.
    4. April 16, 1947
    Explosion of SS Grandcamp at the dock in Texas City, followed the next day by the explosion of the SS High Flyer, kill at least 576 persons. Thousands are injured in Texas’ second-worst non-disease disaster.
    5. March 18, 1937
    Leaking natural gas explodes in basement of New London School in Rusk County. Of 600-plus students and teachers in the school that day, 319 died in the explosion and resulting building collapse. Incident still stands as the nation’s worst school disaster.
    6. September 14, 1919
    A hurricane strikes south of Corpus Christi with 110 mph winds pushing a storm surge of 16 feet. The unnamed storm takes 284 lives.
    7. August 16-19, 1915
    Galveston is again hit by a powerful hurricane. Storm kills 275 and results in more than $56 million in property damage. Devastation would have been even worse but for the seawall built to safeguard the city following the 1900 hurricane.
    8. September 8-10, 1921
    Triggered by a hurricane that came ashore in Mexico, worst rainstorm in Texas history results in the drowning of at least 215 people in Central Texas.
    9. April 29, 1554
    In Texas’ first historical disaster, three Spanish ships laden with silver, gold and trade goods – the San Esteban, the Espiritu Santo and the Santa Maria de Yciar – are washed ashore on South Padre Island by a spring storm in the Gulf of Mexico. As many as 200 passengers and crew members drown.
    10. August 2, 1985
    Delta Airlines Flight 191 crashes on approach at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, killing 135 passengers and crew and the driver of a car on State Highway 114. The crash ranks thirteenth among the nation’s worst aviation disasters.
***
    The Lone Wolf, at least in the figurative sense, is once again at the center of a mystery.
    Long-time Ranger Cap-tain Manual T. Gonzaullas, one of Texas’ best-known 20th century law enforcement officers, died at 85 on Feb. 13, 1977 in a Dallas hospital. Old-time Ran-gers, Department of Public Safety officials, younger officers and many friends packed his funeral service two days later.
    Born in Spain on July 4, 1891 to a Spanish father and Canadian mother,  Gonzaullas was orphaned by the devastating 1900 Galveston hurricane. He got his first taste of gunfire as a major in the Mexican Army in 1911 and later spent five years as a U.S. Customs border guard. Joining the Rangers in 1920, he served until fired by Gov. Miriam Ferguson in 1933.
    Two years later, when the Department of Public Safety was organized, Gonzaullas was hired to set up the new law enforcement agency’s crime lab. In 1940, he opted to return to the Ranger service and soon became captain of Co. B in Dallas. Among numerous other high-profile cases, Gonzaullas spearheaded the investigation into Texarkana’s infamous Phantom Killer murders in 1946. The captain usually prevailed in what he set out to do, but Rangers never apprehended a suspect in the Texarkana slayings. He retired in 1951.
    “In my opinion,” his old boss DPS director Col. Homer Garrison said in 1963, “Gonzaullas will go down in history as one of the great Rangers of all time.”
     Indeed, historians consider Gonzaullas a key player in the modernization of the Rangers. But a third of a century after his death, a writer has made a surprising discovery.
    Ron Franscell, who is working on a book called “Outlaw Texas” that will explore some 400 outlaw-related sites from pirate Jean Lafitte’s base in Galveston to the former Enron headquarters in Houston, decided the final resting place of Lone Wolf was definitely worthy of inclusion. 
    The San Antonio resident went to Dallas last fall to collect Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates and photograph various graves in the area for his book, due out in 2010. One of his stops was Dallas’ Sparkman-Hillcrest Memorial Park Cemetery, where Franscell had read that the famed former Ranger captain had been laid to rest. That’s when he got a shock.
    “The cemetery had no record of him, or anyone by that name,” Franscell said.  “Later research shows he had been cremated but his wife Laura died the following year and she, too, was listed as being buried at Sparkman-Hillcrest.”
    Finding no “Gon-zaullas” in their records at Sparkman-Hillcrest, a helpful funeral home clerk even checked under “Gonzales” in case someone had made a spelling error back when. Again, nothing that fit Lone Wolf and his wife came to light.
    The sprawling cemetery, located at 7405 W. Northwest Highway on Dallas’ north side certainly has its share of notables. Oil tycoon H.L. Hunt, blues musician Freddie King, baseball great Mickey Mantle and actress Greer Garson among others are buried there.
    Franscell says he walked around the cemetery looking for a grave marker for Gonzaullas and his wife but found none.
    “It’s possible he is really at Sparkman-Hillcrest and their records are wrong,” Franscell continues, “or that when he was cremated and given to Laura, she scattered the ashes somewhere or was buried with them herself when she died…or they were both scattered somewhere else. They had no children.”
    Gonzaullas had married Laura Isabel Scherer, a New Yorker, on April 12, 1920 in Riverside, CA. The definitive biography on Lone Wolf, Brownson Malsch’s “Lone Wolf,” says that the old Ranger died holding her hand, but makes no mention of Gonzaullas’ burial. The Dallas Morning News noted on Feb. 15, 1977 that Gonzaullas would be cremated, but did not report what would be done with his ashes. (Laura joined her late husband in death on Aug. 15, 1978.)
    Shortly after Gonzaullas’ death, former Carson County sheriff John Nunn, who had been a Highway Patrol trooper in Dallas in 1947-48 and shared an office with Gonzaullas for seven months, reminisced about the old lawman.
    Noting that the captain had piercing blue eyes, Nunn recalled in an interview published in the Pampa Daily News how he had kept “pestering” Gonzaullas to show him his quick draw. Finally, Gonzaullas assented.
    “He only showed me one time,” Nunn said. “He was the fastest man I ever saw.”
    The former sheriff said he asked Gonzaullas how he came by his famous nickname and got this reply:
    “I guess I got that nickname because I went into a lot of fights by myself – and I came out by myself, too.”
    Nunn said he traded a pair of revolvers to Gonzaullas for a fine saddle made by the renowned leather craftsman Sam Myers of El Paso. The former sheriff used the saddle off and on for years before loaning it to the Square House Museum in Panhandle.
    So, while various museums have firearms and other artifacts associated with Gonzaullas, no one seems to know where his ashes ended up.
    “Whatever the circumstances are,” Franscell concludes, “I’d hate for one of the great Rangers to be ‘lost.’”
***
          Carr Spraberry, who came to Jones County in the fall of 1879, knew what it was like to be thirsty.
          Years after the fact, a ride he made from near present day Anson to Fort Phantom Hill to fetch a doctor for a sick woman still stood out in his mind. He didn’t say what time of the year he made the ride, but it must have been summer.
          "I became very thirsty and really suffered,” he recalled.
    After a time in the saddle, he rode into a hollow and saw a profusion of cow trails.
    “ ‘Must be water near,’ I said to myself. The trails got bigger and bigger, and finally I found water. I knelt down at the pool and drank, and stayed half an hour, taking two more swigs of water.”
    The water enabled him to continue his mercy mission.
          "A day or two later I met a man who asked me how many dead cows there were at that pool. 'I saw none and tasted none,' said I. Said the man, 'There are nine dead cows in that pool, and it was not over 20 steps long.'
    Spraberry’s next drink came from the Clear Fork of the Brazos.
          "I got to the river,” he said. “Drank more water. When you get right thirsty for water, I'll tell you, any water is good. I know; for, as you see, I have tried it."
           From the river Spraberry still had another four-mile ride to Fort Phantom Hill. And when he got there he discovered that the doctor had ridden to Albany on another emergency.
           Some helpful soul suggested that lacking a doctor, Spraberry should bring the sick woman mustard (for plasters), spirits of nitrate and Tutt's pills.
           Stuffing the frontier medicine into his saddlebag, he left at sundown on his return journey "and I rode a good horse down on the trip."
    His thirst and hard riding proved to have been all for naught.
          "I got back at break of day," he recalled. "They had just laid Mrs. Riley out."
          Spraberry got one good night's sleep before he had to make another trip to Phantom Hill. This time he rode in a wagon with his brother-in-law to buy a coffin for their aunt, who had died from an attack of colic.
          On their way, they met the preacher on his way back from Phantom Hill with a coffin for Mrs. Riley.
          The woman Spraberry had tried to get a doctor for had the distinction of being the first person buried in Anson's Mount Hope Cemetery. Spraberry's aunt, Mollie Carr, was the second.
    Spraberry had not been able to save Mrs. Riley, but in a way, he had been lucky. Along the Texas frontier, bad water posed just about as much of a problem as no or little water.
    The common perception is that Indians posed the greatest threat to settlers and U.S. soldiers stationed along Texas’ western frontier. But that’s wrong.
    Mindless enemies of another sort lurked around all the Army’s forts, ready to kill the unwary. They could not be seen, which made them hard to fight.
    Fort Concho, established along the Concho River in 1867, guarded that part of the frontier for more than 20 years. Comanche and Kiowa Indians posed a definite threat to the soldiers stationed there, especially during the post’s earlier years. But the soldiers faced a deadlier foe – bad water.
    In October 1870, the post surgeon reported 35 cases of typhoid fever, 69 cases of acute diarrhea and dysentery and 21 cases identified as “continued and remittent fever.” Six soldiers died that month from one or another of those ailments.
    The doctor may or may not have had a microscope at his disposal, but he knew the culprit: Tainted water. A year before, he had reported that the North Concho River at that time consisted of only shallow, stagnant pools. The main arm of the river, he said, had been contaminated with putrefying animal matter, including buffalo carcasses. River water smelled bad and tasted worse.
    Indeed, when the river was low it teemed with harmful microbes, the invisible life forms that could kill a man as surely as a red-painted Comanche arrow or a spiraling .50 caliber slug from a Spencer carbine.
    Living on the frontier wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t too hard to die.
SLS