New York's awful excursion boat horror (1904)

Author: Hanson, John Wesley, [from old catalog] ed
Subject: General Slocum (Steamboat)
Publisher: [Chicago?
Possible copyright status: NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT
Language: English
Digitizing sponsor: Sloan Foundation
Book contributor: The Library of Congress

CHAPTER I
THE COUNTRY HORRIFIED
Hundreds Roasted Alive or Drowned—Passengers Panic-stricken—A Carnival
of Terror—Women and Children with their Hair and Clothing en
Fire—Wailing Children and Old People Trampled under Foot—Crowded
into the Water—The Fall of the Hurricane Deck—Rotten Life Preservers—
Heroic Captain and Pilots—The Cause of the Fire—Story of
Cruel Selfishness^The Tide Gives Tip the Dead—Ghastly Evidence.
On Wednesday, June 15, 1904, occurred one of the most
horrible catastrophes in history. A steamer, the General Slocum,
filled with happy excursionists, burst into flames near
Hell Gate, in the East River, New York, and hundreds of
people, mostly Sunday school pupils and their parents, were
consumed by fire or hurled to a watery grave in the seething
flood.
The disaster exceeded in numbers and wholly matched in
pitifulness and horror the Iroquois theater fire in Chicago last
December. It was appalling in its immensity, dramatic in its
episodes, and deeply pathetic in the tender age of most of its
victims.
VICTIMS MOSTLY WOMEN AND CHILDREN
As in the Iroquois fire, most of the victims were women
and children. They were members of the Sunday school of
St. Mark's German Lutheran church, bound for their annual
excursion up Long Island Sound, happy, gay, care free, and
full of joyous expectations of their day of all days in the year......Read more