New Ulm weekly review. [volume] (New Ulm, Minn.) 1878-1892, 1886-10-13
Charleston's Condition.

ter OF a century land have never known
to shed a tear-men VINO faced the ter
rible fires Of Battery Wagner and Sc
cessionville and the battles OF Virginia,
without q quiver-one, a campaigner
in the Seminole war and a graduate OF
West Point, calm, imperturbable and
incapable Of fear from visible enemy.
Such men have attempted to tell me
the horrors of that fateful halt minute
of August 81, and the hours of the
endless night which followed, and every
one has broken down in the recital,
some with almost an agony of sob
bing. No one in Charleston pretend
ed to have been brave. And yet, their
trembling was not of fear, but of the
overwhelming sense of awe and power
lessness.
Some conception of the state OF feel
ing which then existed may be realized
by what occurred in my own knowledge
two weeks after. The steamship in
which reached Charleston at nine
CLOCK Monday night last, soon after
mooring at the dock, blew off steam
with more than the usual noise. A
passenger, who had gone ashore, and
was making an inquiry OF a police
man in a street two squares off from
the wharf, was astounded to see the
officer tremble like an aspen leaf, and
to hear him cry out in alarm at the
sound. AS soon as the policeman
learned What was the cause of the
noise, he made apology for his con-
sternation, and said that the heavy
slamming of a door would make peo-
pie flee from their homes. And yet
there are no Drawer men anywhere
than those of our municipal police. A
young friend, who faced, without
t1lnching, and was wounded in one of
the negro riots in our streets after the
war, told me that he ran an entire
block when he heard strange sound,
which proved, afterward, to be moth
ing but the step of man on the turn
table of the street railway.
The situation here has not been
overdrawn and overwritten, for the
simple reason that it could not be.
We have a city Of ruins. There is
enough externally visible, of wreck
and devastation, to alright and par
alize, but what the eye sees is but a
little OF what the most cursory search
reveals. l have seen and heard of
but a single house that escaped un-
scathed. How could it be other wise.
All individual experiences 1have
had so many given me by all ages, sexes,
classes and colors that I have become
absolutely sick at the recital-agree
that the earth, upon which Charles
ton and it's village suburbs were built,
tossed and heaved and swayed and
shook literally like astorm-swept sea.
Men, springing towards their doors,
found themselves climbing, at one
moment, up an ascent, only to be
tossed back again, as upon q refluent
wave. Every movable article in
dwellings followed the motion of the
swinging earth, and chimneys, rafters,
ceilings, walls, came tumbling
about the heads of the impris-
oned jewellers. Whole fronts and
rears of dwellings, porticoes, piazzas,
fell with a crash, and it seemed, for
the moments that appeared months,
that all the foundations of the earth
were undermined. 1 have scarcely
seen one person who hoped to escape
with life. The common expression
has been, II thought the end had
come! I shall never look death in the
face so closely and consciously again.
And yet the deaths that actually
came were strangely and mercifully
few. The doors, which would not
open to presumed safety, shut in very,
very many to the only escape possible.
Nine-tenths of the fatality was in the
street. Young Ainslie Robson was
almost the only one who lost not his
life in the effort to save it, and he was
crushed by the piazza upon which he
was sitting. His two sisters were
buried in the same ruin with him, but
were rescued without scratch. He
lived for hours, hurt in the head, and
died a few minutes after his release
from the superintendent mass of the
fallen beams.
But there is no need to dwell upon
these things. They have been written,
with graphic and faithful pens, by
practiced journalists. What of the
present and future? Why this!
Charleston has not lost heart. hope
or faith. I have yet to hear one
word OF complaint, one breath of dis
heartenment. The people are ready
to spring forward to rehabilitate their
homes and city, not with defiant, but
determined energy. The unspeakable,
lmmeasurable sympathy, help and
tender thought OF the whole country
for them would have nerved their
hands, even if they had been palsied,
but those hands have never lost their
cunning OF confidence to grapple with
adversely, and upheld by the ungrudg-
ing and inspiring support OF the whole
country else, they will fear no failure
to recover what has been lost.
The chief need is aid to rebuild
homes. There is no danger ofstarva-
tion-the city is sentineled with agen-
cies of relief for the Impoverished.
Food and raiment will be lacking to
none. The grandly, generous country,
north, east and west, yea and south,
: