Relief efforts came from near and far with donations pouring in from around the country and organizations such as the Red Cross setting up camps to assist residences in their struggle to return to normalcy. Clara Barton, the President of the Red Cross, described her arrival in Galveston in a letter to President McKinley as beyond exaggeration:
“It was one of those monstrosities of nature which defied exaggeration and fiendishly laughed at all…attempts of words to picture the scene it had prepared. The churches, the great business houses, the elegant residences of the cultured and opulent, the modest little homes of laborers of a city of nearly forty thousand people; the center of foreign shipping and railroad traffic lay in splinters and debris piled twenty feet above the surface, and the
