Roy T. Hughes, 31, farmer, helped to save Elma. J. Stafford, 28; May Turner, 29, and eight children, aged 2 to 15, from drowning, Letot, Texas, May 24, 1908. Although other men refused to go, Hughes and a companion entered a boat and, in darkness, paddled it a mile and a half across the flooded countryside, in the waters of the Trinity River, to the house that the women and children had entered for safety and that was in danger of being washed away. Another boat followed, and, when the house was reached, the women and children were taken into the two boats. After the boats were paddled a quarter-mile from the house, the boat following Hughes’s was swept against a tree by the current and upset, the boat and one of the men handling it being swept away. The children in it, with difficulty, were pulled into Hughes’s boat and taken to a barn a quarter-mile distant, where they were landed. With their original passengers, Hughes and his companion paddled toward their starting point, but they lost their way in flooded timberland and tied up until morning, when they paddled to safety. 5340-647
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