The Vanished Texas Coast with author Mark Lardas

CC_Mark L

Speakers: Benjamin Morris & Mark Lardas

Benjamin Morris (00:00):

Mark, welcome to Crime Capsule, and thank you so much for joining us.

Mark Lardas (00:07):

Yes, good to be here.

Benjamin Morris (00:12):

Now, we have had a number of visiting authors with interesting careers come to Crime Capsule before. We have had journalists of course, we've also had judges, we've had tour guides.

Benjamin Morris (00:27):

We've had folks from a pretty wide range of professions, but I think you might be the first real live official card-carrying engineer. Tell me, you are not just an engineer, you're actually an engineer for one of the best known agencies in the world, which is NASA. How did that come to be?

Mark Lardas (00:54):

There really is an interesting story there. That's probably the oldest line you've heard. But my real interest has always been history. And when I was in high school, I decided I was going to be an engineer because that seemed to be the profession where you were most likely to make history.

Mark Lardas (01:20):

And in fact, my high school counselor said, "I don't understand why you're going into engineering. You love history so much." And that's literally what I told him is, “I'd rather make it than just write about it.”

Mark Lardas (01:38):

So, I went I got a degree, oddly enough, in naval architecture and marine engineering and ended up working at Johnson Space Center really by accident.

Mark Lardas (01:55):

I ended up interviewing with someone from, at that time, Lockheed Electronic Company because they'd highlighted naval architects as one of the majors they wanted. And I was curious as to why they wanted a naval architect at JSC.

Mark Lardas (02:15):

And it turns out somebody at placement office had accidentally highlighted naval architects. And so, I looked at the interviewer, he looked at me and I said, "Well, we're both here. Let's see what we have to offer."

Mark Lardas (02:31):

And he's going on about how they're doing vibration analysis on the shuttle, which was then a new project, it had not yet flown. And he fills out part of this vibration matrix, which coincidentally we'd covered in my class the day before because ships vibrate too.

Mark Lardas (02:52):

And he fills out part of it, and while he's talking, I fill out the rest of it. And he stops and he looks at it and he says, "This is right. You can do this?" I said, "Oh, yeah, we covered this in class."

Mark Lardas (03:09):

Anyway, they made me an offer. And I thought, "Oh, cool. I can go down and I can work in the shuttle program for two or three years, and then I'm going to end up because Houston was a big offshore platform center, I can then switch to offshore platforms."

Mark Lardas (03:27):

And I ended up doing vibration analysis on the shuttle for a couple of years. Then I segued into a job where I was doing shuttle navigation analysis. And by this time, it was 1981. We'd actually flown the shuttle a couple of times first.

Mark Lardas (03:46):

And then I ended up getting an offer to do shuttle navigation real time during the missions, which, yeah, I mean, it was like, "Oh, this is cool."

Mark Lardas (04:01):

So, I started doing that, and about the time I'm thinking, "Well, maybe I should cash in my experience and go back to offshore design." They had the big oil bust in Houston. This was in the '80s and-

Benjamin Morris (04:17):

Yeah, early '80s. That's right, yeah.

Mark Lardas (04:18):

And of course, one of the reasons I'd gone to Houston in aerospace was if there are two industries that are contracyclical, it's oil and space and aviation, because when oil prices are up, then that's historically when aviation's been down and vice versa.

Mark Lardas (04:39):

Except of course, in '86, they blew up the shuttle and I couldn't get into the offshore industry because it was in deep recession, and I barely hung on my job. And ended up staying there for a while, going through the worst of the shuttle downside.

Mark Lardas (05:00):

Ended up working on the design of what was supposed to be the Space Station Freedom. And then that got canceled, at which point I decided that space was just too cyclical and decided to go into something that I felt would be more secure, like, oh, e-commerce.

Mark Lardas (05:26):

And this was in the early '90s. That was actually a rocket ride for a while, but of course, in 2000, you had the big bust there. And coincidentally, about the time that happened, 9/11 happened, and I ended up unemployed for nine months.

Mark Lardas (05:49):

And a friend of mine … well, wasn't even a friend, he was just somebody that I'd worked with at McDonald Douglas years and years ago, found out that I looked out of work, and he was NASA fairly high up in at JSC.

Mark Lardas (06:14):

And he said, "Just let me know who the hiring managers or what jobs you're applying for and I'll give you the name of the hiring manager."

Mark Lardas (06:26):

And well, it turned out one of the jobs I was applying for was being the boss for that was somebody I'd worked for when I was at McDonald Douglas years ago. I interviewed for it, ended up back in the shuttle program in 2002, just about the time they lost yet another orbiter but ended up staying with the shuttle program until it ended.

Mark Lardas (07:01):

At which point I was doing space navigation rendezvous analysis, which sounds really impressive. And yeah, it's a lot of fun. But how much a demand do you think there was for that in 2011 when the shuttle program ended?

Benjamin Morris (07:21):

Yeah, yeah. No, you definitely have to keep … the tea leaves there definitely have something to say.

Mark Lardas (07:27):

So, I recast myself as a tech writer and then spent another almost dozen years doing technical writing in all sorts of fields. Oil drilling platforms, apartment management, airlines, tanker, manuals on how to run super tankers. It was interesting.

Mark Lardas (08:02):

And then I finally got this job where I was documenting call centers, which wasn't much fun, but it sure paid a lot.

Mark Lardas (08:11):

This was 2021, and at that point, I've decided I was doing while on the writing, I'll get back to that. But that my plan at that point was I was going to retire from the day job in January, 2022, and then just write full time because I could cover all of my expenses doing that.

Mark Lardas (08:36):

Well, then in June of 2021, I get this call asking me if I'd be interested in working on the Lunar Gateway Program. And my initial-

Benjamin Morris (08:51):

You've been trying to retire for so long, and yet they keep bringing you back.

Mark Lardas (08:54):

The thing you got to understand about this is when my wife and I moved down to Houston in 1979, we were just 10 years away from the first moon landing, and the two of us thought it'd be another 10 years before we're heading back to the moon.

Mark Lardas (09:11):

So, yeah, the shuttle was fun, but what we really wanted to do was work on a Lunar Program and it had never happened. Now, all of a sudden, I get this call and asking me if I'd be interested in doing that.

Mark Lardas (09:27):

And the Lunar Gateway is a space station that's going to be orbiting behind the moon and will be manned part of the year. So, from an engineer's standpoint, it is as attractive a project as you can work on, especially if you've been in space business for as many years as I had been.

Mark Lardas (09:51):

And I decided, okay, even though I'd been out of it for 10 years, I had some skills that they very badly needed.

Mark Lardas (10:00):

And it's like I said, this is something I dreamed about since I was a kid. I grew up during the Apollo or Gemini. I was in school during Mercury through Apollo. And now, they're offering me a chance to be part of a moon program.

Mark Lardas (10:21):

So, they managed to hire me, and I've been there ever since. And I was forced to cut back on the number of books I'm writing.

Mark Lardas (10:32):

But the thing is, it's literally, “How do you say no to a job you've wanted all your life? So, I'll stay there until they lay me off, and eventually they will, because this is how all the space programs go. They're go, go, go until they finally get it up there, and then they don't need the designers anymore. And by that time, yeah, I'll be ready to just sit back and write.”

Mark Lardas (11:06):

Now, as for how I started writing, I was always the guy that took on any writing task in my group, because I've always been good at it.

Mark Lardas (11:20):

Then in the 1990s, I started writing articles about ship modeling because I was a ship modeler and ended up writing a couple history articles as well. And then around 2000, I'd written several articles for magazine published by Osprey Publishing.

Mark Lardas (11:46):

And they ended the magazine, and I emailed the editor and said, "Well, what do I do now?" And he says, "Why don't you try writing a book?" And I said, "I've never written a book before." And he said, "Just think of it as a magazine article only really long."

Benjamin Morris (12:08):

Yeah. I might have to have a word with that particular guy about some of his categories and concepts, but okay, we'll roll with it.

Mark Lardas (12:17):

The thing is, he was right. I mean, the thing is they give you an outline for every one of the lines that they have, and you break it down into a series of chapters, which are really about the size of magazine articles.

Mark Lardas (12:34):

And he walked me through the process, and the first book that I had was a book about American Heavy Frigates, which were the 44-gun frigates, like the Constitution. And oh, that was fun. And it picked up enough change to pay for one of my son's tuition for a year. And oh, that was-

Benjamin Morris (12:59):

Very handy, yeah.

Mark Lardas (13:00):

And it is, like I said, it was a lot of fun. So, the next thing that I did was a book about the Space Shuttle. And this was before I'd gone back to NASA, and I'd already signed the contract and then got the job working at one of the NASA contractors.

Mark Lardas (13:21):

But from there, I would do a book or two every year for Osprey. And then I decided I wanted something with a little bit more meat to it. So, I ended up writing a book about the Port of Houston for Arcadia Press.

Mark Lardas (13:42):

And this was before they went all pictures. So, it was heavily pictures, but it was also about 11,000, 12,000 words in the chapter headings, which were two or three pages. That was a lot of fun. I did some more for them.

Mark Lardas (14:02):

And then it's like I said, I got interested in doing some long form books like the history prestos, and by then they'd merged with Arcadia.

Mark Lardas (14:21):

And the first book that I did for them was something called Vanished Houston Landmarks, which was about 15 things in Houston that had been really, really big. And in fact, at one point, defined Houston, and then just disappeared and we're gone today.

Mark Lardas (14:41):

The next book I did for them was the one that we're talking about here, which is The Vanished Texas Coast: Lost Port Towns, Mysterious Shipwrecks and Other True Tales. And that kind of followed the same theme.

Mark Lardas (14:58):

There were 15 stories that were really important to Texas that had been largely forgotten. One of the things that most people-

Benjamin Morris (15:13):

Okay, well, allow me to, yeah ... I do have some questions for you which directly pertain to that. This book is a remarkable compendium of stories, of naval battles, of pirates, of explorers.

Benjamin Morris (15:36):

The subtitle, which you offered, I loved your subtitle, is a very accurate description of what is in fact to be found within the covers of Vanished Texas Coast.

Benjamin Morris (15:48):

And there even is for our listeners who love a good paranormal experience, or two, there might even be a ghost in these tales. Now, I'm not going to spoil anything there, and we'll leave them to discover that on their own.

Benjamin Morris (16:04):

But what struck me about the range of examples that you offer in this particular book, Mark, the diversity of cases is that they actually go back all the way to the very beginning of recorded history in the Americas.

Benjamin Morris (16:20):

And I thought that was fascinating, that you're looking at Vanished Texas Coast before there even was a Texas in this particular case.

Benjamin Morris (16:28):

Did you expect that when you first began the researcher and the collection for this book?

Mark Lardas (16:33):

Oh, yes. That was part of the reason I wrote the book. The thing is, when you talk about Texas, everyone thinks about what? We think about cattle, we think about cowboys, and we think about railroads.

Mark Lardas (16:48):

But the thing is that Texas has always been heavily influenced by the sea. It was discovered by the sea. That's one of the chapters in there. There were important shipwrecks along here.

Mark Lardas (17:05):

It managed to get its independence from Mexico, largely because it controlled the Gulf of Mexico, because that was the only way you could get an army. You could march an army into Texas overland, but you couldn't supply it.

Mark Lardas (17:25):

During the American Civil War, the United States Navy was victorious everywhere, but west of the Sabine River. And then once they got west of the Sabine River, weird things happened to them.

Mark Lardas (17:44):

And the thing is that even after the Civil War and into the modern era, the sea has been a big influence on Texas, especially economically, because that's still how you get the big payloads out of Texas through its ports, and the offshore industry, and things like that.

Benjamin Morris (18:11):

Yeah. And I think one of the things that folks may not fully appreciate, frankly is just how extensive in terms of size the Texas coastline actually is. It is enormous.

Benjamin Morris (18:25):

And I am sure there are statistics on this, but you probably know better than I do. It's got to be sort of after California and Florida, in the top five of American states as far as the length of its coastline, maybe after Alaska as well, depending on how you defined it. Possibly even in the top three. Where does it rank?

Mark Lardas (18:49):

Well, it depends on whether or not you include Michigan's coastline, because number one really is Alaska. Number two is Michigan because of the two peninsulas. Three is California. I think Texas is four, maybe Florida. I'm not one that memorizes statistics, I tend to look for the big picture.

Mark Lardas (19:22):

But yeah, it's a big coast. It runs at least a thousand miles. I'd have to check the actual number, but.

Benjamin Morris (19:34):

Yeah. It's truly fascinating. And when you consider just how long human settlement has existed in this particular area. And some parts of it are very lush, they're very virent and then it's not sort of scrub, grass, and prairie. I mean, it's like lush bayou, and so it's beautiful country down there.

Benjamin Morris (19:52):

It's no surprise, is it, as you're doing the research for this book, that you're going to find examples in cases going back century after century after century?

Mark Lardas (20:02):

Yes. And it's, as I said, when I structured the book, I deliberately tried to set it up so that one third of it was before Texas became a republic. The second third was from the Texas Republic to about the Civil War, and then the final third being from, say, the 1870s to the present.

Benjamin Morris (20:34):

Yep. Well, let's turn our attention to one of the cases which kind of maps onto, it's interesting, it's kind of in that transitional zone between the Texas Republic, the Civil War, and into the turn of the 19th century.

Benjamin Morris (20:53):

And our series that we have been working on is Lost Cities. And I have to say, Mark, you have in this particular volume a true lost city. I mean, it meets the definition in every respect.

Benjamin Morris (21:15):

And it's so lost that even as a native of the Gulf South and a resident of the Gulf South, I had never heard of Indianola Texas before. I mean, lived here for a long time, and we all know Galveston and it's hurricanes. But whoo, boy, Indianola, it got a one-two punch.

Benjamin Morris (21:35):

We will come to the main action in a second, but first locate Indianola for us.

Mark Lardas (21:43):

Okay. Indianola, I guess you could say it's on the upper Texas coast, sort of in the middle. You're getting into the transition between the upper coast and the middle coast, and it's in Matagorda Bay, or was in Matagorda Bay. As you pointed out, it's no longer there.

Benjamin Morris (22:08):

Yeah, right.

Mark Lardas (22:09):

And the only thing that it had to recommended as a port was its location, because it was the shortest overland route to San Antonio and the shortest overland route to the parts of the hill country that the Germans settled during the Texas Republic, the New Braunfels, Fredericksburg area.

Benjamin Morris (22:37):

Boerne, Blanco, et cetera.

Mark Lardas (22:39):

It wasn't open road dead, it was shallow, but it was the shortest road. And when everything traveled by either boat or wagon, you picked the port closest to where you wanted to go.

Mark Lardas (22:56):

And so, it was founded in the 1840s by Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels. That's why you've got New Braunfels in Texas. And he was going to bring a whole bunch of German colonists over to Texas, and they were going to get wealthy on farming here.

Mark Lardas (23:26):

And they actually did, the Germans did very, very well here. But they needed a port to get to where their land grant was. So, they created this port called Carlshafen, which is literally Carl's Harbor at Indian Point. And that later became Indianola.

Mark Lardas (23:54):

First house went up in 1845 during the Mexican American War. That was the port that most of the US Army's supplies went through to support the ... yeah.

Mark Lardas (24:11):

And again, it's also the start of what's called the Sonoma Trail, which is an overland, call it a wagon route, but overland route that goes to Sonoma Valley in California that goes all the way to the Pacific Coast.

Mark Lardas (24:31):

So, it was blessed by geography. It certainly wasn't blessed by the harbor that it had because it was very shallow. And they ended up eventually building these long, long warts that went out to where it was deep enough to anchor a ship. I've got a illustration of that in the book.

Mark Lardas (24:59):

But before that, you had to anchor offshore and unload your cargo into boats, and then take the boats up to shore.

Benjamin Morris (25:14):

Pretty common in some of those areas along the Gulf Coast that was very frequently done in Lake Pontchartrain here in New Orleans. You would have to anchor your ship out in the lake, and then take your smaller draft vessels into the local bayous and waterways and so forth.

Benjamin Morris (25:32):

You write in your book that the founding of Indianola involved a few hundred souls, a few hundred kind of settlers and so forth.

Benjamin Morris (25:44):

But by the 1860s, right before the Civil War, it had really blown up as they say. I mean, it had ballooned. Talk of rail had accelerated it. It had gotten these shipping lines established and it was really kind of on track to become one of Texas great coastal cities.

Mark Lardas (26:08):

It was the second largest port in Texas and was threatening Galveston’s preeminence. And again, a lot of that was simply due to geography, that Indianola was how you got into the heartland of Texas.

Mark Lardas (26:30):

Galveston ended up growing up first because it was in the area that was first settled, and that meant pretty much the cotton planting area.

Mark Lardas (26:42):

But Indianola was how you got to San Antonio. It was also, how you got to the ranch country. And a lot of what exported initially was tallow and hides.

Mark Lardas (26:58):

And then later on, it ended up being a big meat exporting port again, because of technology, because they could refrigerate and freeze beef, which they couldn't have done prior to about the 1870s.

Mark Lardas (27:13):

So, it was going to become, I guess, the Chicago of the South because they were shipping meat initially to New Orleans, but then eventually around the world. So, from that standpoint, it should have taken off.

Benjamin Morris (27:39):

Yeah. Well, before we turn to the Civil War, which was consequential for Indianola, and then the storms, which became its undoing, I have to ask you one question which this comes from a brief moment in your account.

Benjamin Morris (27:56):

It's absolutely not the sort of thing that one would expect to find in an account of this particular nature. So, I assure you mark that with great joy and delight, I sat straight up in my chair as I was reading your book, and I said, "What?" And then I said, "Camels?"

Mark Lardas (28:20):

Absolutely.

Benjamin Morris (28:22):

So, can you tell us just what in heaven's name are camels doing on the Texas coastline?

Mark Lardas (28:32):

Moving inward, seriously.

Benjamin Morris (28:37):

Getting on the coastline.

Mark Lardas (28:38):

Remember what I said about the Sonoma Trail, and a lot of that is really, really arid desert. And in the 1850s as Secretary of War, Jeff Davis, who went on to other things later on, but-

Benjamin Morris (28:58):

Indeed, he did.

Mark Lardas (28:59):

But he came up with a brilliant idea that you could use camels as pack animals in that area. So, they ended up importing a herd of camels to use as a supply train.

Mark Lardas (29:13):

And remember what I said about that was the nearest port to San Antonio and the road to California. That's the reason they unloaded them there. And technically, the Army did not set up a camel corps. Oddly enough, no.

Benjamin Morris (29:40):

Well, what an oversight.

Mark Lardas (29:42):

Oddly enough-

Benjamin Morris (29:43):

What a major disappointment. Yeah.

Mark Lardas (29:46):

I researched that. Basically, they were going to use it as a supply train. And they did that for a while. But essentially civilian drovers were running the camels the same way that civilian drovers ran the wagon trains during the Mexican American War, and actually during the Civil War as well.

Benjamin Morris (30:14):

Well, I have to say that your visuals in this particular chapter were wonderful. And your illustration in particular of the unloading of this ostensible camel core remains a joy to my heart, Mark.

Benjamin Morris (30:29):

And the best thing about it, it was clearly drawn by somebody who had never actually seen a camel.

Benjamin Morris (30:34):

So, I love those like those medieval beastie eras where like you open it up and someone has drawn a picture of an armadillo, and clearly they have never ever seen an armadillo, they've only ever heard about it. It's just marvelous.

Mark Lardas (30:50):

Well, the fun part about it is the sailors are accurate, and the boat is accurate, and what's happening is accurate. But you're right, I don't think they really ever saw a camel.

Mark Lardas (30:59):

But it must have been a mess getting them from the ship that came from the Ottoman Empire to Indianola, and then offloaded them onto a small boat.

Mark Lardas (31:13):

And then take these stubborn, recalcitrant creatures and then unload them on the Texas shore. But they eventually ended up in California, the whole lot of them.

Mark Lardas (31:26):

And apparently there was one incident where the camel train was attacked by Indians, and they charged the Indians with camels and routed the Indians, because horses don't like the smell of camels.

Benjamin Morris (31:50):

Oh, interesting, interesting. Wow. Well, on that note, let us journey even deeper into the strange and bizarre moments of the past when we take a look at what happened in the Civil War to Indianola and to its undoing down the road.

Benjamin Morris (32:19):

So, you write that the Civil War years actually presented a novel experience for the residents of the area, and that they were occupied. There were skirmishes, there were battles, and they were occupied by the Union forces.

Mark Lardas (32:33):

Yes. The Union tried to control the Texas coast. They didn't try and go much inland, and when they did, they generally had bad luck. There were other battles covered in other chapters of this book that show you exactly how strange things got.

Mark Lardas (32:56):

Indianola's occupation was pretty benign, other than the fact that this is a port city, and it depends on cargoes coming from inland and being shipped out. And that stopped.

Mark Lardas (33:10):

So, from an economic standpoint, that was a really hard time for Indianola. And plus, you had the humiliation of being occupied.

Mark Lardas (33:24):

And while there were portions of Texas that were very friendly to the north, the Texas coast wasn't one of them. But the thing is that once the war ended, all of a sudden, Indianola is how you get stuff inland again. And it boomed from the end of the Civil War through the middle of the 1870s. And again-

Benjamin Morris (34:00):

Yeah, markets need to open back up and people are trying to resume some semblance of commerce that is critical for the original survival, of course.

Mark Lardas (34:10):

There was another factor at work too, which was the fact that the Morgan Line was in a feud with the Port of Galveston because Galveston had previously given them free warpage, but then decided they were going to start charging. And that ended up doing two things.

Mark Lardas (34:33):

One was Morgan started financing the construction of a channel to Houston to use Houston as a seaport. But what was a whole lot easier was to move a lot of his operations to Indianola.

Mark Lardas (34:51):

And so, it was kind of like having the biggest shipping company on the coast decide that your city was the city it wanted to operate out of.

Benjamin Morris (35:08):

And that being one of the absolute major means of commercial transport up and down the Gulf Coast flat out and throughout the entire Caribbean basin, I mean, if you have that company operating out of your harbor, you are bound for the stars, aren't you?

Mark Lardas (35:24):

Yes. And the only thing that threatened them was that Port Lavaca was going to put in a railroad and that would make Port Lavaca a more attractive port.

Mark Lardas (35:37):

Port Lavaca was further up the bay and so what the citizens of Indianola did was finance a railroad to Indianola, which was finished in the mid-1870s.

Mark Lardas (35:52):

And everything was going great. Indianola was going to be the premier port in the state of Texas by oh, 1900 maybe. So, but then-

Benjamin Morris (36:12):

Let me ask you right at this moment because I think this is a really interesting moment not just for narrative tension, but really in terms of urban planning and architecture and what it meant for Gulf Coast settlements to grow into what could be a hostile environment atmospherically and climatically sometimes.

Benjamin Morris (36:35):

What I want to ask you, Mark, is this prior to what happened in 1875, Indianola had been there for 35, 40-ish years and so forth. And taking my cue from that great maritime work of cinematic genius jaws, I'm listening in the soundtrack here for a little bit of a ...

Benjamin Morris (37:00):

And I'm waiting to hear in that 40-year history, had there been any storms along the bay or that stretch of coast that had given anybody an indication of the fury that Gulf of Mexico hurricanes could bring? I mean, had there been any indication of what was coming?

Mark Lardas (37:31):

There was, and there wasn't. There were storms, there were always storms, but the thing that a lot of people miss is the destruction that a hurricane does tends to be fairly narrow.

Mark Lardas (37:45):

Hurricanes aren't atomic bombs, which just wipe out everything. The damage is focused in the area closest to the eye, and it has to be a really powerful storm.

Mark Lardas (38:06):

So, if a hurricane went in on the far side of Lavaca bay, yeah, it would tear up that far side but Indianola would've just gotten some flooding-

Benjamin Morris (38:29):

Outer rain bands, basically. The outer rain bands would've lashed the area, but then moved on fairly quickly even given the bands.

Mark Lardas (38:36):

Yeah, even claiming the middle because the thing about hurricanes is the damage done is proportional to the square of the speed of the wind.

Mark Lardas (38:45):

So, if you're 30-mile an hour winds, you do one damage. 60 miles, you might do two to three times the damage. At 80-mile, 90-mile winds, all of a sudden you're doing 16 times the damage. But it's kind of like a fairly steep hill, and the further away you get, the less the damage.

Mark Lardas (39:15):

So, yeah, they had an idea that hurricanes could be bad. They just didn't know how bad until one made a direct hit on Indianola. And Indianola's problem was compounded because it was an open road stead. There were no barrier islands between Indianola and the Gulf.

Mark Lardas (39:40):

So, when the 1875 hurricane comes roaring in there, it comes in with this just tidal surge that ends up not just flooding the town, but just scouring it and-

Benjamin Morris (40:04):

Yeah, it's a wall of water. I mean, for folks who've never seen it or experienced that, you're looking at a wall of water of millions of gallons that is bearing down upon a flat plane and just sweeping everything that is in front of it, quite literally off its foundations just sweep like a house made of matchstick. And so, very few things can withstand that kind of level of just pure force.

Mark Lardas (40:29):

But the thing is, you don't have to get very far inland for the damage to go down dramatically. I mean, yeah, it's like a hammer blow for anything within five miles of the coast, but then beyond that, you're pretty safe.

Mark Lardas (40:47):

So, while Indianola ended up getting really hammered, Port Lavaca did not. They got hurt, but not to the point where you end up losing most of the town.

Benjamin Morris (41:03):

Yeah. And the first one was bad enough that it resulted in, I mean, we're talking hundreds and hundreds of casualties from this one, weren't we?

Mark Lardas (41:11):

Right. The thing is that after the first one, they told themselves, "Oh, this can't happen again." This is a once in a century thing, and they rebuilt the town, but they didn't do anything to protect the town from another hurricane.

Mark Lardas (41:31):

And then another one came through in 1886, which was just 11 years later. And this was about everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

Mark Lardas (41:46):

If you live on the Gulf Coast, one of the things you do hope for are some tropical storms early in the season because they suck the heat out of the water of the Gulf. In this case, it did not.

Mark Lardas (42:01):

It was a fairly late storm. It had been a hot, pretty much rainless summer on the Texas coast. And when it went over the outer islands, Haiti, Hispaniola, and Cuba, it hit a Gulf of Mexico that was just filled with energy in hot water. And so, it ended up building into, I think it was a Cat 4 storm.

Mark Lardas (42:33):

Now, the good news was this time, the last storm hit at night and people weren't aware that it was even at hand. And that was why the casualty rate was so high.

Mark Lardas (42:45):

This time people recognized that there was a hurricane in the Gulf and it was heading their way, and they decided that maybe they'd leave town and give the hurricane a little extra room without them to bother it.

Benjamin Morris (43:03):

I've got a reporter friend here in town who whenever we see warm water in the gulf, in the summertime, he just calls that hurricane food. And it's just amazing to see how quickly they can grow in a matter of hours. I mean, even not just days, but hours when they are exposed to that.

Benjamin Morris (43:22):

And a Cat 4 bearing down on a settlement of effectively wood frame houses and shops, I mean, what do you think's going to happen, right?

Mark Lardas (43:29):

And what was worse is if the water wasn't bad enough, there was a signal station there that had a lot of oil in it for the lamps and it got swept off its foundations and the fuel there caught fire and set fire to the rest of the town. So, talk about fire and water simultaneously.

Benjamin Morris (44:00):

Yeah. If it's not one thing, it's another. I tell you what, there was one interesting detail I wanted to ask you about. And I know it's sort of we're compressing a lot of destruction and kind of rebuilding into a short sort of 10 to 12 period here.

Benjamin Morris (44:19):

But there's a detail in one of these storms, which I thought was so interesting, and it's about the courthouse. You mentioned that the courthouse was built differently-

Mark Lardas (44:31):

Concrete construction.

Benjamin Morris (44:31):

That there was still activity in and around it. Concrete, yeah, exactly.

Benjamin Morris (44:34):

And in fact, in one of these storms, there was a trial going on during the hurricane. I mean, so what was happening there?

Mark Lardas (44:42):

The thing people forget is you didn't have the early warning of a hurricane the way we do today. Or even into after 1900, they'd set up a hurricane warning system.

Mark Lardas (44:59):

All they saw were the clouds. And of course, when a hurricane's heading towards you, a lot of times the weather improves from the standpoint of it doesn't rain. Yeah, you've got a nice steady wind, but it's steady and things seemed pretty good.

Mark Lardas (45:23):

And they had a really big murder trial going on, and nobody saw any reason that they should postpone it because it wasn't like it was raining or anything. And until all of a sudden it was. And they ended up trapped in the courthouse, which turned out to be the safest building in the town.

Mark Lardas (45:55):

And ironically, I think it was the defendant ended up leaving the building several time to rescue people that were floating by and drag them back into the courthouse.

Benjamin Morris (46:08):

The guy who was accused of murder goes out and starts saving lives.

Mark Lardas (46:12):

Right. As I recall, the whole trial had to do with a feud that was going on in that county at that time. So, it wasn't pure lawlessness, it was just lawlessness directed against one family by another and vice versa.

Benjamin Morris (46:35):

I mean, did they acquit the guy because he managed to help everybody out? What happened in the aftermath?

Mark Lardas (46:43):

I honestly don't remember. The two accused murderers saved several men. I think they disappeared before the trial could be reconvened, which seems to me-

Benjamin Morris (47:04):

Kind of in the chaos, you mean?

Mark Lardas (47:05):

Yeah. It seems to me a reasonable proposition from the standpoint of those two, because they probably had the opportunity to get away.

Mark Lardas (47:17):

And again, we're talking about a society that doesn't have telephones, doesn't have mass communications. Once you get outside of 50 miles, nobody has heard of you.

Benjamin Morris (47:32):

Yep, yep, yep. And if you can find a horse that's all you need to make your escape.

Mark Lardas (47:39):

Or a railroad.

Benjamin Morris (47:40):

That makes perfect sense.

Mark Lardas (47:40):

Trains go faster.

Benjamin Morris (47:41):

Or a railroad, yep. And you don't have to stop and … well, I guess you do have to feed and water them in a kind of chemical sense, maybe not so much a nutritional sense.

Benjamin Morris (47:55):

So, let me ask you this, Mark, after 1886, the second storm, as you said, was just this kind of perfect blend of terrible, terrible conditions in order to (and I'm so sorry to have to sort of use this metaphor) put the nail in the coffin of the town itself.

Benjamin Morris (48:17):

I mean, people had moved away between the storms, some people had stayed to kind of built back. But this second one, as far as the one two punch goes, the second punch was a knockout punch. It was a TKO.

Mark Lardas (48:29):

It really was because nobody felt safe shipping goods to and from Indianola. More than that, I mean, the people had been through it twice.

Mark Lardas (48:42):

They actually picked up and moved their houses elsewhere. Some to Port Lavaca. Some as far away as Victoria, which is a fairly long way to move a house in a pre-mechanized era.

Benjamin Morris (49:02):

And the state comes in, you write that the state of Texas, actually, it's not just that people abandoned the site, the state of Texas declared Indianola dead.

Mark Lardas (49:17):

Pretty much, although it was kind of like a coroner declaring a body dead.

Benjamin Morris (49:24):

Fair.

Mark Lardas (49:26):

They didn't kill the city so much as they found that it was dead. So, a lot of what had been done, a lot of the shipping move to Port Lavaca.

Mark Lardas (49:39):

But more than that, a lot of it shifted to either Galveston or Corpus Christi. There was a general feeling that it was unsafe to have a port at that particular location.

Benjamin Morris (49:53):

And what's left? What's left when you go there now?

Mark Lardas (50:00):

Not terribly much. You can still see the foundations of the courthouse. Although the coast has shifted and the courthouse is now out in the middle of the water, there is a monument to Indianola if you're going along the coast. And that's pretty much it. Isn't a whole lot there.

Benjamin Morris (50:26):

Yeah. I got curious, and I just sort of plugged it into the computer to see if I could find Indianola on the map if it still turns up. And there were one or two hits on there.

Benjamin Morris (50:43):

One thing that interested me, Mark, was that it's an east facing city. I had thought that it was more of a southerly facing city or was. But just with the particular orientation along the bay there, I mean, that east facing probably got doubly hard hit from the storm.

Benjamin Morris (51:00):

But I will say this, I did find it was not directly in Indianola, but it was kind of maybe a little further down the coast that it looks like there's one marina, which is now operating.

Benjamin Morris (51:12):

And it looks like they got pretty good hamburgers and some decent sized fish in that bayou. So, maybe it's worth going to check it out.

Benjamin Morris (51:20):

But other than that, yeah, it is a lost city. It is under the waves, and it exists pretty much only in our memories and in records like yours.

Mark Lardas (51:36):

And fuzzy photographs.

Benjamin Morris (51:38):

And fuzzy photographs of poorly drawn camels, of course. I have to ask you one quick question before we begin to sort of turn our attention to what you're working on now.

Benjamin Morris (51:54):

But everybody knows about the Galveston storm of 1900. That's one of the most famous destructive, deadly hurricanes in history. It is still, as you write in your chapter on the Galveston storm, the standard by which all other storms are judged, which is a terrible, terrible sort of jewel in one's crown to have to wear.

Benjamin Morris (52:20):

But I'm fascinated by the tension between Indianola and Galveston which is to say they both got hit by incredibly powerful storms at different points in their growth and development. Storms that threatened to wipe them both off the map.

Benjamin Morris (52:41):

And yet Galveston is still here, and Indianola isn't. So, why is that?

Mark Lardas (52:46):

There were a couple reasons why. One is that Galveston realized after the 1900 storm, because Indianola had been hit by two storms in about 12 years, that they could be hit by another storm and that they better do something about it.

Mark Lardas (53:08):

And they ended up putting in a sea wall. And more importantly, they literally raised the town so that it was at least 17 feet above sea level. And it was the largest civil engineering project in the United States right on up to the construction of the Hoover Dam. And it was a massive effort.

Mark Lardas (53:34):

I've got some ghost stories about stuff that resulted from that, including a lost cannon, but we won't go into that right now.

Benjamin Morris (53:46):

Next time. Next time. Yeah, yeah.

Mark Lardas (53:49):

But they literally raised the city and put in the sea wall. And then in 1916, it got hit by a hurricane that was even worse than the 1900 storm.

Mark Lardas (54:04):

But because of the sea wall, it ended up not taking terribly much damage from that one at all. And that hurricane has actually been largely forgotten. Nobody talks about the 1916 hurricane, which proves success is boring.

Benjamin Morris (54:25):

You know what else it proves? It's remarkable actually, Mark, there's that old ade that says those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. This may be one of the very few instances in which somebody actually remembered the past so that they would not repeat it. It’s astounding.

Mark Lardas (54:41):

Right. The other thing is that Galveston had one advantage over Indianola in that its harbor was on the inland side of the barrier island. Whereas Indianola, the port was open to the sea and the city got pushed aside. The strand is on the north side of Galveston Island.

Mark Lardas (55:10):

And so, a hurricane has to batter its way, not just through the sea wall, but through the rest of the island. And since they raised the island, it didn't suffer the same magnitude of destruction in 1916 as it had in 1900.

Mark Lardas (55:34):

And again, that's part of what I'm talking about when I'm saying that the energy of a hurricane tends to drop off exponentially, and you have to pretty much have a bullseye hit to get the amount of damage that you got in Galveston in 1900 or in Indianola in 1875 and 1886.

Mark Lardas (56:01):

But that sea wall and the fact that they raised the island literally preserved Galveston. And yes, Galveston has been hit by hurricane since then, but it's pretty well survived them.

Benjamin Morris (56:21):

Yeah, it's standing okay.

Mark Lardas (56:22):

Yeah. I ended up having to do jury duty in Galveston after Ike, and I swear that it really looked like pictures of bombed out Berlin in 1945 with all the stuff by the side of the road.

Mark Lardas (56:37):

And that's one reason that they're planning on building something called the Ike Dike, which will provide even more protection to Galveston Island, Galveston Bay, and the Port of Houston.

Benjamin Morris (56:54):

Good deal. Good deal. Yeah. We need all the help we can get. And speaking from your neighboring state of Louisiana, we're open to all good ideas and we're trying to implement as many as we can as well.

Mark Lardas (57:10):

Well, it really has to be a bad storm to as hurt New Orleans because New Orleans is fairly well inland, but it can be hurt.

Benjamin Morris (57:20):

It can indeed, as we saw just most recently in Ida a couple years ago, if you get like you said, the right mix of elements and the right angle, the right strength, anything can happen. So, we remain vigilant, shall we say.

Benjamin Morris (57:38):

Let me ask you this, for your book is just so full of interesting accounts like this and really gives such a unique perspective on the depth of history along the Texas coastline. What are you working on now?

Mark Lardas (57:55):

The current book I'm working on is set half a continent away because it is about B-29s and Japanese night fighters in World War II.

Mark Lardas (58:11):

And before that, I had finished a book on US submarines and Japanese aircraft carriers oddly enough that has a Texas connection because one of the submarines involved was the Cavalla, which is preserved in Galveston at Seawolf Park, and just coincidentally happens to be celebrating the 80th anniversary of its launched tomorrow.

Benjamin Morris (58:44):

Yeah. How about that? How about that? That is remarkable. We love a good little coincidence like that. Well, they sound like very productive projects, and we wish you all the best with them.

Benjamin Morris (58:57):

If folks wanted to reach out and get a copy of Vanished Texas Coast or any of your other titles, the Vanished Houston Landmarks, or any of the other histories you've written, what's the best place for them to do that?

Mark Lardas (59:11):

Depends on where they live. The most reliable way that you can get them is either directly from the Arcadia Publishing website or from Amazon. A lot of the local bookstores in Texas carry my books but it's kind of catch-as-catch-can.

Mark Lardas (59:34):

I keep having friends tell me that they see Vanished Texas Coast and Vanished Houston Landmarks in various Walgreens around here, but I've not seen them but they're available. I would go online to get them.

Mark Lardas (59:53):

If you want an autographed copy, Schroeder's Book Haven in League City where I live will sell and ship an autographed copy to somebody.

Benjamin Morris (01:00:07):

That's an offer that we can't refuse. Thank you for that, Mark.

Mark Lardas (01:00:11):

And my website is marklardas.com.

Benjamin Morris (01:00:17):

Perfect. And will you spell that for us?

Mark Lardas (01:00:19):

M-A-R-K-L-A-R-D-A-S.C-O-M.

Benjamin Morris (01:00:25):

Brilliant. Thank you so much. And we really appreciate your making the time for us when you are quite literally involved in figuring out how to get humanity back to the moon. So, we are very grateful on that front and all the best to you in all your endeavors.

Mark Lardas (01:00:46):

Well, thank you very much for inviting me. I enjoyed it.

Benjamin Morris (01:00:53):

Alright. So, Bill, will.