The Seiche of 1844

From the novel "Buffalo Beachers"

                                   -Joseph Xavier Martin

 

                                  1844 The Seiche rolls across Buffalo

 

                 In the shore side lee of the wall, a small beach grew from accreted sand. At its northern tip, in 1837, the city erected a grand masonry lighthouse to warn arriving ships of dangerous shoals. The new tower was dubbed the “Chinaman’s Light.” The name arose from observations that its roof resembled a Chinese coolie’s hat and because it was also used to keep an eye out for illegal Chinese immigrants crossing over the Niagara River from Canada. 

 

 

        It is along this sandy and ragged shore that our story begins. Poor arriving immigrants, mostly Irish, with not a cent to their names, started erecting shacks in the lee of the wall, using  gathered drift wood and scavenged building materials.

 

No one really knows their initial number. The Cholera plague, of the 1832, caused by poor and non-existent sanitation, took a fearsome toll from the poorer residents of Buffalo. Still, many survived. They worked as sailors, dock laborers, fishermen and ferrymen. One of these ferrymen, a lad at the time, would later in the century win the medal of honor in WW I and go on to head the OSS during WWII. “Wild Bill” Donovan was one of the local lads who made good.

 

        Another one of the residents, Charlie Carney, late of County Clare, Ireland, occupied a primitive hut with his wife Mary and their three children. Charlie worked on the nearby docks. Every day, he was rowed across the Buffalo River, by a ferry man, for a few pennies. There, he unloaded cargo and did whatever work was asked of him by the ship’s owners, for pennies.

 

      “Tis a hard life we live, Mary,” he often said. “But we get to live free, go to Mass and put supper on the table in this great new land.”

 

        “Aye, Charley,” Mary said. “We have a lot to be thankful for. My kin and their bairns are not faring as well in Ireland.”

 

         “And it will get worse, I think,” said Charley. He did not know how prophetic his words would become.

 

          The Carneys and their neighbors lived their simple lives along “The Beach” as they were to call it. Fishing by the men and children added to their meager diet. It wasn’t much, but it was survival. By 1844, others had moved in along the beach area. It was a small and poor community, with an identity all of its own.

 

        It was a Friday, October 21, 1844. The day had started out like most. A fierce wind was blowing across the waterfront from the northeast. Charley completed his day’s work as usual. Then, the family sat for a meager supper in their wooden hut.

 

        “Sure, the gale is blowing fierce,” commented Mary.

 

        “Aye, the boats had best be tied up well, or their will be damage all around,” commented Charley

 

          The Carneys had survived several years of cold and discomfort along the beach. They thought this was just another gale passing through. They were asleep with the loss of daylight.

 

         About 11 P.M that evening, the wind ceased like it had been snuffed out. All was quiet for several minutes. Those few still awake, merely noted the calm and wondered. Shortly after 11:30 P.M, the wind resumed, but this time it had shifted from the northeast to the southwest. It was blowing across the expanse of Lake Erie. As the wind increased in intensity, the lake water began to rise, pushed ashore by the gale force winds. The rise was slow but steady. It washed over the early break wall and began to rise along the beach.

 

          The first the Carney’s became aware of the water was when it slipped under their door frame and began to rise in their shack. Mary, a light sleeper from years of listening to her children, noticed it first.

 

          “Charley, wake up man,” she cried, “The water is upon us.”

 

Charley and the bairns, awakened by Mary shouting, rose and looked around, stunned by the rising water that was now up to their knees.

 

          “We had better run for it, Mary,” Charlie cried. “You grab the little one. I will pick up Bridget and Sean.”

 

           “But where will we go?” cried Mary in exasperation. “Never mind that,”  Charlie cried, “Let’s go, before we get washed away.”

 

             The Carney’s stumbled out into the path along the beach. A few neighbors were there already. “Let’s try the light house,” Charley cried. “It is made of brick and it should hold.”

 

            “Good idea,” said next door neighbor Fergus O’Neil. “Let’s go!”

 

            The small band struggled against the wind and rising waters, walking northward towards the light house. They didn’t see the seven-foot wall of water that was rushing towards them form the Lake. It caught them as a group and carried them across the island, and the nearby Buffalo river, to a watery grave. They were but six of the hundreds that would die that night, in what later meteorologists would call a “seiche.” It a wall of wind-driven water that washes over the land like a tsunami, washing away all before it.

 

         Later news accounts would document that the Seiche washed  halfway across the newly built village of Buffalo,  drowning many and creating a ramshackle disaster scene when the waters withdrew.

 

          The next day, the Buffalo papers, like the morning Express, were filled with harrowing tales of death and destruction:

 

October 21 and 22, 1844  

The Buffalo Morning Express and The Commercial Advertiser

Tremendous Gale!

Awful Destruction of Lives and Property

    On Friday night last, the city was visited by a most tremendous gale, which, for destruction of life and property has no parallel in this part of the country. The gale commenced blowing from the southwest about 12 o'clock (midnight) and in less than half an hour the whole lower part of the city, south of the canal from Black Rock to the Hydraulics, was submerged in water from two to eight feet in depth. On the east side of the city the water came as high as Seneca Street, below Michigan and completely covered it.  So rapid was the advance of the water that we are told by an individual residing on the other side of the creek, being awakened by the noise of the wind, and anticipating a rise in waters, hastily aroused his family, and before he could get his pantaloons on, the water was over three feet deep in the house.  

 

 

            Any number of steam ships and sailing craft were piled along the shoreline from Buffalo to Cleveland. It was an event that would be remembered centuries later. For our story, the small spit of land called the beach, was cleared off like it had been swept with a watery broom. The meager seawall just offshore lay in tatters, with breaches all up and down its length.

 

            The next day, the dead were lain out in rows on Washington Street. No one will ever know the exact number of victims from the seiche. Some few relatives claimed their own for burial. The rest of the poor souls were buried in a common grave, on the waterfront, along-side the Cholera victims from a decade ago. Like the poor in many lands, few knew that they were even there. Few would ever miss them.

 

             There was the odd bright note after the seiche. Ten-year-old Catherine Green had survived the wreckage on the beach, though her parents Tom and Mary Green were swept away. Catherine had been staying with cousins on Fulton St., in the first ward, when the seiche had struck. She would now be a ward of the Green familiy’s relations, until her marriage eight years later, to seaman Emmanuel Martin in 1852.

 

           A new and stronger breakwall would not be completed for another twenty-five years. Until that time, new beachers settled on the sand beach and made a life for themselves.

 

                                                               -30-

                                                      (1,299 words)

                                                     Joseph Xavier Martin