The San Francisco Calamity

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THE SAN FRANCISCO CALAMITY BY EARTHQUAKE AND FIRE


A Complete and Accurate Account of the Fearful Disaster which
Visited the Great City and the Pacific Coast, the Reign of Panic and
Lawlessness, the Plight of 300,000 Homeless People and the World-wide
Rush to the Rescue.

TOLD BY EYE WITNESSES

INCLUDING GRAPHIC AND RELIABLE ACCOUNTS OF ALL GREAT EARTHQUAKES AND
VOLCANIC ERUPTIONS IN THE WORLD'S HISTORY, AND SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATIONS
OF THEIR CAUSES.



EDITED BY CHARLES MORRIS, LL. D.




PREFACE


Earthquake and famine, fire and sudden death--these are the destroyers
that men fear when they come singly; but upon the unhappy people of
California they came together, a hideous quartette, to slay human
beings, to blot from existence the wealth that represented prolonged and
strenuous effort, to bring hunger and speechless misery to three hundred
thousand homeless and terror-stricken people.

The full measure of the catastrophe can probably never be taken. The
summary cannot be made amid the panic, the confusion, the removal of
ancient landmarks, the complete subversion of the ordinary machinery
of society. When chaos comes, as it did in San Francisco, and all the
channels of familiar life are closed, and human anguish grows to be
intolerable, compilation of statistics is impossible, even if it were
not repugnant to the feelings. And when order is once more restored,
after the lapse of many weeks, months and perhaps years, the details of
the calamity have merged into one undecipherable mass of misery which
defies the analyst and the historian. It is the purpose of this book
faithfully to record the story of these awful days when years were lived
in a moment and to preserve an accurate chronicle of them, not only
for the people whose hearts yearn in sympathy to-day, but for their
posterity.

Other frightful catastrophes the world has known. The earthquake which
dropped Lisbon into the sea in 1755, and in a moment swallowed up
twenty-five thousand people, was perhaps more awful than the convulsion
which has brought woe to San Francisco. When Krakatoa Mountain, in the
Straits of Sunda, in 1883, split asunder and poured across the land a
mighty wave, in which thirty-six thousand human beings perished, the
results also were more terrible.

The whirlwind of fire which consumed St. Pierre, in the Island of
Martinique, and the devastation wrought by Vesuvius a few days previous
to that at San Francisco, need not be used for comparison with the
latter tragedy, but they may be referred to, that we may recall the fact
that this land of ours is not the only one which has suffered.

But since the western hemisphere was discovered there has been in this
quarter of the globe no violence of natural forces at all comparable in
destructive fury with that which was manifested upon the Pacific coast.
The only other calamity at all equalling it, or surpassing it, was the
Civil War, and that was the work of the evil passions of man inciting
him to slay his brother, while Nature would have had him live in peace.

The earthquake in San Francisco, which crumbled strong buildings as if
they were made of paper, would have been terrible enough; but afterward
came the horror of fire and of imprisoned men and women burned alive,
and now to it was added the suffering of multitudes from hunger and
exposure.

Public attention is fixed on the great city; but smaller cities had
their days and nights of destruction, horror and misery. Some were
almost destroyed. Others were partly ruined, and beyond their borders,
over a wide area, the trembling of the earth toppled houses, annihilated
property and transformed riches into poverty. The cost in life can be
reckoned. The money loss will never be computed, for the appraised value
of the wrecked property conveys no notion of the consequences of the
almost complete paralysis, for a time, of the commercial operations by
means of which men and women earn their bread.

When the weakness and the folly and the sin of men bring woe upon other
men, there are plenty of texts for the preacher and no scarcity of
earnest preachers. But here is a vast and awful catastrophe that
befell from an act of Nature apparently no more extraordinary than the
shrinkage of hot metal in the process of cooling. The consequences are
terrifying in this case because they involve the habitations of half a
million people; but, no doubt, the process goes on somewhere within
the earth almost continuously, and it no more involves the theory of
malignant Nature than that of an angry God.

If we contemplate it, possibly we may be helped to a profitable estimate
of our own relative insignificance. We think, with some notion of our
importance, of the thousand million men who live upon the earth; but
they are a mere handful of animate atoms in comparison with the surface,
to say nothing of the solid contents, of the globe itself.

We are fond of boasting in this latter day of man's marvelous success
in subduing the forces of Nature; and, while we are in the midst of
exultation over our victories, Nature tumbles the rocks about somewhere
within the bowels of the earth, and we have to learn the old lesson that
our triumphs have not penetrated farther than to the very outermost rim
of the realms of Nature.

A few weak, almost helpless, creatures, we millions of men stand upon
the deck of a great ship, which goes rolling through space that is
itself incomprehensible, and usually we are so busy with our paltry
ambitions, our transgressions, our righteous labors, our prides and
hopes and entanglements that we forget where we are and what is our
destiny. A direct interposition from a Superior Power, even if it
be hurtful to the body, might be required to persuade us to stop and
consider and take anew our bearings, so that we may comprehend in some
larger degree our precise relations to things. The wisest men have
been the most ready to recognize the beneficence of the discipline of
affliction. If there were no sorrow, we should be likely to find the
school of life unprofitable.

For one thing, the school wherein sorrow is a part of the discipline is
that in which is developed human sympathy, one of the finest and most
ennobling manifestations of the Love which is, in its essence, divine.
In human life there is much that is ignoble, and the race has almost
contemptible weakness and insignificance in comparison with the physical
forces of the universe.

But man is superior to all these forces in his possession of the power
of affection; and in almost the lowest and basest of the race this
power, if latent and half lost, may be found and evoked by the spectacle
of the suffering of a fellow-creature.

The human family looks on with pity while the homeless and hungry and
impoverished Californians endure pangs. Wherever the news went, by
the swift processes of electricity, there men and women, some of them,
perhaps, hardly knowing where California is, were sorry and willing
and eager to help. There are quarrels within the family sometimes, when
nation wars with nation, and all love seems to have vanished; but the
world is, in truth, akin. "God hath made of one blood all the nations of
the earth," and the blood "tells" when suffering comes.

THE PUBLISHERS.



TABLE OF CONTENTS


CHAPTER I.

SAN FRANCISCO AND ITS TERRIFIC EARTHQUAKE


CHAPTER II.

THE DEMON OF FIRE INVADES THE STRICKEN CITY


CHAPTER III.

FIGHTING FLAMES WITH DYNAMITE


CHAPTER IV.

THE REIGN OF DESTRUCTION AND DEVASTATION


CHAPTER V.

THE PANIC FLIGHT OF A HOMELESS HOST


CHAPTER VI.

FACING FAMINE AND PRAYING FOR RELIEF


CHAPTER VII.

THE FRIGHTFUL LOSS OF LIFE AND WEALTH


CHAPTER VIII.

WONDERFUL RECORD OF THRILLING ESCAPES


CHAPTER IX.

DISASTER SPREADS OVER THE GOLDEN STATE


CHAPTER X.

ALL AMERICA AND CANADA TO THE RESCUE


CHAPTER XI.

THE SAN FRANCISCO OF THE PAST


CHAPTER XII.

LIFE IN THE METROPOLIS OF THE PACIFIC


CHAPTER XIII.

PLANS TO REBUILD SAN FRANCISCO


CHAPTER XIV.

THE EARTHQUAKE WAVE FELT AROUND THE WORLD


CHAPTER XV.

VESUVIUS DEVASTATES THE REGION OF NAPLES


CHAPTER XVI.

THE GREAT LISBON AND CALABRIAN EARTHQUAKES


CHAPTER XVII.

THE CHARLESTON AND OTHER EARTHQUAKES OF THE UNITED STATES


CHAPTER XVIII.

THE VOLCANO AND THE EARTHQUAKE, EARTH'S DEMONS OF DESTRUCTION


CHAPTER XIX.

THE THEORIES OF VOLCANIC AND EARTHQUAKE ACTION


CHAPTER XX.

THE ACTIVE VOLCANOES OF THE EARTH


CHAPTER XXI.

THE FAMOUS VESUVIUS AND THE DESTRUCTION OF POMPEII


CHAPTER XXII.

ERUPTIONS OF VESUVIUS, ETNA AND STROMBOLI


CHAPTER XXIII.

SKAPTER JOKULL AND HECLA, THE GREAT ICELANDIC VOLCANOES


CHAPTER XXIV.

VOLCANOES OF THE PHILIPPINES AND OTHER PACIFIC ISLANDS


CHAPTER XXV.

THE WONDERFUL HAWAIIAN CRATERS AND KILAUEA'S LAKE OF FIRE


CHAPTER XXVI.

POPOCATEPETL AND OTHER VOLCANOES OF MEXICO AND CENTRAL AMERICA


CHAPTER XXVII.

THE TERRIBLE ERUPTION OF KRAKATOA


CHAPTER XXVIII.

MONT PELEE AND ITS HARVEST OF DEATH IN 1902


CHAPTER XXIX.

ST. VINCENT ISLAND AND MONT SOUFRIERE IN 1812


CHAPTER XXX.

SUBMARINE VOLCANOES AND THEIR WORK OF ISLAND-BUILDING


CHAPTER XXXI.

MUD VOLCANOES, GEYSERS AND HOT SPRINGS





THE SAN FRANCISCO CALAMITY BY EARTHQUAKE AND FIRE



CHAPTER I.

San Francisco and Its Terrific Earthquake.


On the splendid Bay of San Francisco, one of the noblest harbors on the
whole vast range of the Pacific Ocean, long has stood, like a Queen of
the West on its seven hills, the beautiful city of San Francisco, the
youngest and in its own way one of the most beautiful and attractive of
the large cities of the United States. Born less than sixty years ago,
it has grown with the healthy rapidity of a young giant, outvieing many
cities of much earlier origin, until it has won rank as the eighth city
of the United States, and as the unquestioned metropolis of our far
Western States.

It is on this great and rich city that the dark demon of destruction has
now descended, as it fell on the next younger of our cities, Chicago, in
1872. It was the rage of the fire-fiend that desolated the metropolis
of the lakes. Upon the Queen City of the West the twin terrors of
earthquake and conflagration have descended at once, careening through
its thronged streets, its marts of trade, and its abodes alike of
poverty and wealth, and with the red hand of devastation sweeping one
of the noblest centres of human industry and enterprise from the face of
the earth. It is this story of almost irremediable ruin which it is our
unwelcome duty to chronicle. But before entering upon this sorrowful
task some description of the city that has fallen a prey to two of the
earth's chief agents of destruction must be given.

San Francisco is built on the end of a peninsula or tongue of land lying
between the Pacific Ocean and the broad San Francisco Bay, a noble body
of inland water extending southward for about forty miles and with a
width varying from six to twelve miles. Northward this splendid body of
water is connected with San Pablo Bay, ten miles long, and the latter
with Suisun Bay, eight miles long, the whole forming a grand range of
navigable waters only surpassed by the great northern inlet of Puget
Sound. The Golden Gate, a channel five miles long, connects this
great harbor with the sea, the whole giving San Francisco the greatest
commercial advantages to be found on the Pacific coast.


THE EARLY DAYS OF SAN FRANCISCO.


The original site of the city was a grant made by the King of Spain of
four square leagues of land. Congress afterwards confirmed this grant.
It was an uninviting region, with its two lofty hills and its various
lower ones, a barren expanse of shifting sand dunes extending from their
feet. The population in 1830 was about 200 souls, about equal to that
of Chicago at the same date. It was not much larger in 1848, when
California fell into American hands and the discovery of gold set in
train the famous rush of treasure seekers to that far land. When 1849
dawned the town contained about 2,000 people. They had increased to
20,000 before the year ended. The place, with its steep and barren hills
and its sandy stretches, was not inviting, but its ease of access to the
sea and its sheltered harbor were important features, and people settled
there, making it a depot of mining supplies and a point of departure for
the mines.

The place grew rapidly and has continued to grow. At first a city of
flimsy frame buildings, it became early a prey to the flames, fire
sweeping through it three times in 1850 and taking toll of the young
city to the value of $7,500,000. These conflagrations swept away most of
the wooden houses, and business men began to build more substantially
of brick, stone and iron. Yet to-day, for climatic reasons, most of the
residences continue to be built of wood. But the slow-burning redwood
of the California hillsides is used instead of the inflammable pine, the
result being that since 1850 the loss by fire in the residence section
of the city has been remarkably small. In 1900 the city contained 50,494
frame and only 3,881 stone and brick buildings, though the tendency to
use more durable materials was then growing rapidly.

Before describing the terrible calamity which fell upon this beautiful
city on that dread morning of April 18, 1906, some account of the
character of the place is very desirable, that readers may know what San
Francisco was before the rage of earthquake and fire reduced it to what
it is to-day.


THE CHARACTER OF THE CITY.


The site of the city of San Francisco is very uneven, embracing a series
of hills, of which the highest ones, known as the Twin Peaks, reach to
an elevation of 925 feet, and form the crown of an amphitheatre of lower
altitudes. Several of the latter are covered with handsome residences,
and afford a magnificent view of the surrounding country, with its
bordering bay and ocean, and the noble Golden Gate channel, a river-like
passage from ocean to bay of five miles in length and one in width. This
waterway is very deep except on the bar at its mouth, where the depth of
water is thirty feet.

Since its early days the growth of the city has been very rapid. In 1900
it held 342,782 people, and the census estimate made from figures of the
city directory in 1904 gave it then a population of 485,000, probably
a considerable exaggeration. In it are mingled inhabitants from most
of the nations of the earth, and it may claim the unenviable honor of
possessing the largest population of Chinese outside of China itself,
the colony numbering over 20,000.

Of the pioneer San Francisco few traces remain, the old buildings having
nearly all disappeared. Large and costly business houses and splendid
residences have taken their place in the central portion of the city,
marble, granite, terra-cotta, iron and steel being largely used as
building material. The great prevalence of frame buildings in the
residence sections is largely due to the popular belief that they
are safer in a locality subject to earthquakes, while the frequent
occurrence of earth tremors long restrained the inclination to erect
lofty buildings. Not until 1890 was a high structure built, and few
skyscrapers had invaded the city up to its day of ruin. They will
probably be introduced more frequently in the future, recent experience
having demonstrated that they are in considerable measure earthquake
proof.

The city before the fire contained numerous handsome structures,
including the famous old Palace Hotel, built at a cost of $3,000,000 and
with accommodations for 1,200 guests; the nearly finished and splendid
Fairmount Hotel; the City Hall, with its lofty dome, on which $7,000,000
is said to have been spent, much of it, doubtless, political plunder;
a costly United States Mint and Post Office, an Academy of Science, and
many churches, colleges, libraries and other public edifices. The city
had 220 miles of paved streets, 180 miles of electric and 77 of cable
railway, 62 hotels, 16 theatres, 4 large libraries, 5 daily newspapers,
etc., together with 28 public parks.

Sitting, like Rome of old, on its seven hills, San Francisco has long
been noted for its beautiful site, clasped in, as it is, between the
Pacific Ocean and its own splendid bay, on a peninsula of some five
miles in width. Where this juts into the bay at its northernmost point
rises a great promontory known as Telegraph Hill, from whose height
homeless thousands have recently gazed on the smoke rising from their
ruined homes. In the early days of golden promise a watchman was
stationed on this hill to look out for coming ships entering the Golden
Gate from their long voyage around the Horn and signal the welcome news
to the town below. From this came its name.

Cliffs rise on either side of the Golden Gate, and on one is perched the
Cliff House, long a famous hostelry. This stands so low that in storms
the surf is flung over its lower porticos, though its force is broken
by the Seal Rocks. A chief attraction to this house was to see the seals
play on these rocks, their favorite place of resort. The Cliff House was
at first said to have been swept bodily by the earthquake into the sea,
but it proved to be very little injured, and stands erect in its old
picturesque location.

In the vicinity of Telegraph Hill are Russian and Nob Hills, the latter
getting its peculiar title from the fact that the wealthy "nobs," or
mining magnates, of bonanza days built their homes on its summit level.
Farther to the east are Mount Olympus and Strawberry Hill, and beyond
these the Twin Peaks, which really embrace three hills, the third being
named Bernal Heights. Farther to the south and east is Rincan Hill, the
last in the half moon crescent of hills, within which is a spread of
flat ground extending to the bay. Behind the hills on the Pacific side
stretches a vast sweep of sand, at some places level, but often gathered
into great round dunes. Part of this has been transformed into the
beautiful Golden Gate Park, a splendid expanse of green verdure which
has long been one of San Francisco's chief attractions.

Beneath the whole of San Francisco is a rock formation, but everywhere
on top of this extends the sand, the gift of the winds. This is of such
a character that a hole dug in the street anywhere, even if only to the
depth of a few feet, must be shored up with planking or it will fill as
fast as it is excavated, the sand running as dry as the contents of
an hour glass. When there is an earthquake--or a "temblor," to use the
Spanish name--it is the rock foundation that is disturbed, not the sand,
which, indeed, serves to lessen the effect of the earth tremor.


THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE CITY.


Leaving the region of the hills and descending from their
crescent-shaped expanse, we find a broad extent of low ground, sloping
gently toward the bay. On this low-lying flat was built all of San
Francisco's business houses, all its principal hotels and a large part
of its tenements and poorer dwellings. It was here that the earthquake
was felt most severely and that the fire started which laid waste the
city.

Rarely has a city been built on such doubtful foundations. The greater
part of the low ground was a bay in 1849, but it has since been filled
in by the drifting sands blown from the ocean side by the prevailing
west winds and by earth dumped into it. Much of this land was "made
ground." Forty-niners still alive say that when they first saw San
Francisco the waters of the bay came up to Montgomery Street. The Palace
Hotel was in Montgomery Street, and from there to the ferry docks--a
long walk for any man--the water had been driven back by a "filling-in"
process.

This is the district that especially suffered, that south of Market
and east of Montgomery Streets. Nearly all the large buildings in this
section are either built on piles driven into the sand and mud or were
raised upon wooden foundations. It is on such ground as this that the
costly Post Office building was erected, despite the protests of nearly
the entire community, who asserted that the ground was nothing but a
filled-in bog.

In none of the earthquakes that San Francisco has had was any serious
damage except to houses in this filled-in territory, and to houses built
along the line of some of the many streams which ran from the hills down
to the bay, and which were filled in as the town grew--for instance,
the Grand Opera House was built over the bed of St. Anne's Creek. A bog,
slough and marsh, known as the Pipeville Slough, was the ground on which
the City Hall was built, and which was originally a burying ground. Sand
from the western shore had blown over and drifted into the marsh and
hardened its surface.

When the final grading scheme of the city was adopted in 1853, and
work went on, the water front of the city was where Clay Street now is,
between Montgomery and Sansome Streets. The present level area of San
Francisco of about three thousand acres is an average of nine feet
above or below the natural surface of the ground and the changes made
necessitated the transfer of 21,000,000 cubic yards from hills to
hollows. Houses to the number of thousands were raised or lowered,
street floors became subcellars or third stories and the whole natural
face of the ground was altered.

Through this infirm material all the pipes of the water and sewer system
of San Francisco in its business districts and in most of the region
south of Market street were laid. When the earthquake came, the
filled-in ground shook like the jelly it is. The only firm and rigid
material in its millions of cubic yards of surface area and depth were
the iron pipes. Naturally they broke, as they would not bend, and San
Francisco's water system was therefore instantly disabled, with the
result that the fire became complete master of the situation and raged
uncontrolled for three days and nights.

Although the earthquake wrecked the business and residential portions
of the city alike, on the hills the land did not sink. All "made ground"
sank in consequence of the quaking, but on the high ground the upper
parts of the buildings were about the only portions of the structures
wrecked. Most of the damage on the hills was done by falling chimneys.
On Montgomery Street, half a block from the main office of the Western
Union Company, the middle of the street was cracked and blown up, but
during the shocks which struck the Western Union building only the
top stories were cracked. Similar phenomena were experienced in other
localities, and the bulk of the disaster, so far as the earthquake was
concerned, was confined to the low-lying region above described.


THE BANE OF THE EARTHQUAKE.


From the origin of San Francisco the earthquake has been its bane.
During the past fifty years fully 250 shocks have been recorded, while
all California has been subject to them. But frequency rather than
violence of shocks has been the characteristic of the seismic history of
the State, there having been few shocks that caused serious damage, and
none since 1872 that led to loss of life.

There was a violent shock in 1856, when the city was only a mining town
of small frame buildings. Several shanties were overthrown and a few
persons killed by falling walls and chimneys. There was a severe shock
also in 1865, in which many buildings were shattered. Next in violence
was the shock of 1872, which cracked the walls of some of the public
buildings and caused a panic. There was no great loss of life. In April,
1898, just before midnight, there was a lively shakeup which caused
the tall buildings to shake like the snapping of a whip and drove the
tourists out of the hotels into the streets in their nightclothes. Three
or four old houses fell, and the Benicia Navy Yard, which is on made
ground across the bay, was damaged to the extent of about $100,000. The
last severe shock was in January, 1900, when the St. Nicholas Hotel was
badly damaged.

These were the heaviest shocks. On the other hand, light shocks, as
above said, have been frequent. Probably the sensible quakes have
averaged three or four a year. These are usually tremblings lasting from
ten seconds to a minute and just heavy enough to wake light sleepers
or to shake dishes about on the shelves. Tourists and newcomers are
generally alarmed by these phenomena, but old Californians have
learned to take them philosophically. To one is not afraid of them,
the sensation of one of these little tremblers is rather pleasant than
otherwise, and the inhabitants grew so accustomed to them as rarely to
let them disturb their equanimity.

After 1900 the forces beneath the earth seemed to fall asleep. As it
proved, they were only biding their time. The era was at hand when they
were to declare themselves in all their mighty power and fall upon the
devoted city with ruin in their grasp. But all this lay hidden in the
secret casket of time, and the city kept up to its record as one of the
liveliest and in many respects the most reckless and pleasure-loving
on the continent, its people squandering their money with thoughtless
improvidence and enjoying to the full all the good that life held out to
them.