USA > California > Monterey County > History and biographical record of Monterey and San Benito Counties : and history of the State of California : containing biographies of well-known citizens of the past and present. Volume I > Part 38
USA > California > San Benito County > History and biographical record of Monterey and San Benito Counties : and history of the State of California : containing biographies of well-known citizens of the past and present. Volume I > Part 38
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"I got up and walked to the window. I start- ed to open it, but the pane obligingly fell out- ward and I poked my head out, the floor like a geyser beneath my feet. Then I heard the roar of the bricks coming down in cataracts and the groaning of twisted girders all over the city, and at the same time I saw the moon, a calm crescent in the green sky of dawn. Below it the skeleton frame of an unfinished sky-scraper was swaying from side to side with a swing as exaggerated and absurd as that of a palm in a stage tempest.
"Just then the quake, with a sound as of a snarl, rose to its climax of rage, and the back wall of my building for three stories above me fell. I
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saw the mass pass across my vision swift as a shadow. It struck some little wooden houses in the alley below. I saw them crash in like emptied egg shells and the bricks pass through the roof as through tissue paper.
"The vibrations ceased and I began to dress. Then I noted the great silence. Throughout the long quaking, in this great house full of people I had not heard a cry, not a sound, not a sob, not a whisper. And now, when the roar of crumbling buildings was over and only a brick falling here and there like the trickle of a spent rain, this silence continued, and it was an awful thing. But now in the alley some one began to groan. It was a woman's groan, soft and low.
"I went down the stairs and into the streets, and they were full of people, half-clad, dishev- elled, but silent, absolutely silent, as if suddenly they had become speechless idiots. I went into the little alley at the back of the building, but it was deserted and the crushed houses seemed empty. I went down Post street toward the cen- ter of town, and in the morning's garish light I saw many men and women with gray faces, but none spoke. All of them, they had a singular hurt expression, not one of physical pain, but rather one of injured sensibilities, as if some trusted friend, say, had suddenly wronged them, or as if some one had said something rude to them." * * *
He made his way to the Call building, where he met the city editor, who said to him: "The Brunswick hotel at Sixth and Folsom is down with hundreds inside her. You cover that."
"Going up into the editorial rooms of the Call, with water to my ankles, I seized a bunch of copy paper and started up Third street. At Tehama street I saw the beginning of the fire which was to sweep all the district south of Market street. It was swirling up the narrow way with a sound that was almost a scream. Before it the humble population of the district were fleeing, and in its path, as far as I could see, frail shanties went down like card houses. And this marks the true character of the city's agony. Especially in the populous districts south of Market street, but also throughout the city, hundreds were pinned down by the debris, some to a merciful death,
others to live hideous minutes. The flames swept over them while the saved looked on impotently. Over the tragedy the fire threw its flaming man- tle of hypocrisy, and the full extent of the holo- caust will never be known, will remain ever a poignant mystery."
"The firemen there were beginning the tre- mendous and hopeless fight which, without inter- mission, they were to continue for three days. Without water (the mains had been burst by the quake) they were attacking the fire with axes, with hooks, with sacks, with their hands, re- treating sullenly before it only when its feverish breath burned their clothing and their skins."
*
He secured an automobile at the hire of $50 a day to cover the progress of the fire.
"We started first to cover the fire I had seen on its westward course from Third street. From that time I have only a vague kaleidoscopic vi- sion of whirring at whistling speed through a city of the damned. We tried to make the fallen Brunswick hotel at Sixth and Folsom streets. We could not make it. The scarlet steeple chaser beat us to it, and when we arrived the crushed structure was only the base of one great flame that rose to heaven with a single twist. By that time we knew that the earthquake had been but a prologue, and that the tragedy was to be writ- ten in fire. We went westward to get the western limit of the blaze."
"Already we had to make a huge circle to get above it. The whole district south of Market street was now a pitiful sight. By thousands the multitudes were pattering along the wide streets leading out, heads bowed, eyes dead, silent and stupefied. We stopped in passing at the South- ern Pacific hospital. Carts, trucks, express wagons, vehicles of all kinds laden with wounded, were blocking the gate. Upon the porch stood two internes, and their white aprons were red- spotted as those of butchers. There were one hundred and twenty-five wounded inside and eight dead. Among the wounded was Chief Sul- livan of the fire department. A chimney of the California hotel had crushed through his house at the first shock of the earthquake, and he and his wife had been taken out of the debris with
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incredible difficulty. He was to die two days later, spared the bitter, hopeless effort which his men were to know." * *
"At Thirteenth and Valencia streets a policeman and a crowd of volunteers were trying to raise the debris of a house where a man and woman were pinned. One block farther we came to a place where the ground had sunk six feet. A fissure ran along Fourteenth street for several blocks and the car tracks had been jammed along their length till they rose in angular projections three or four feet high. As we were examining the phenomenon in a narrow way called Treat avenue a quake occurred. It came upon the far- end of endurance of the poor folk crowding the alley. Women sank to their knees, drew their shawls about their little ones, and broke out in piercing lamentations, while men ran up and down aimlessly, wringing their hands. An old woman led by a crippled old man came wailing down the steps of a porch, and she was blind. In the center of the street they both fell and all the poor encouragement we could give them could not raise them. They had made up their minds to die."
"On Valencia street, between Eighteenth and Nineteenth, the Valencia hotel, a four-story wooden lodging-house was down, its four stories telescoped to the height of one, its upper rooms ripped open with the cross section effect of a doll-house. A squad of policemen and some fifty volunteers were working with rageful energy at the tangle of walls and rafters. Eleven men were known to have escaped, eight had been taken out dead, and more than one hundred were still in the ruins. The street here was sunk six feet, and again, as I was to see it many times more, I saw that strange angular rise of the tracks as if the ground had been pinched between some gigantic fingers."
"We went down toward the fire now. We met it on Eighth street. From Third it had come along in a swath four blocks wide. From Market to Folsom, from Second to Eighth, it spread its heaving red sea, and with a roar it was rushing on, its advance billow curling like a
monster comber above a flotsam of fleeing hu- manity. There were men, women and children. Men, women and children-really that is about all I remember of them, except that they were miserable and crushed. Here and there are still little snap-shots in my mind-a woman carrying in a cage a green and red parrot, squawking incessantly 'Hurry, hurry, hurry;' a little smudge-faced girl with long-lashed brown eyes holding in her arms a blind puppy; a man with naked torso carrying upon his head a hideous chromo; another with a mattress and a cracked mirror. But by this time the cataclysm itself, its manifestation, its ferocious splendor, hypnotized the brain, and humans sank into insignificance as ants caught in the slide of a mountain. One more scene I remember. On Eighth street, between Folsom and Howard, was an empty sand lot right in the path of the conflagration. It was full of refugees, and what struck me was their immobility. They sat there upon trunks, upon bundles of clothing. On each side, like the claws of a crab, the fire was closing in upon them. They sat there motionless, as if cast in bronze, as if indeed they were wrought upon some frieze rep- resenting the Misery of Humanity. The fire roared, burning coals showered them, the heat rose, their clothes smoked, and they still sat there, upon their little boxes, their bundles of rags, their goods, the pathetic little hoard which they had been able to treasure in their arid lives, a fixed determination in their staring eyes not to leave again, not to move another step, to die there and then, with the treasures for the saving of which their bodies had no further strength."
The vibrations of the first earthquake shock had scarcely ceased before the fire broke out in a number of different localities. The first alarm came from Clay and Drumm streets on the city front. Others followed in rapid succession until by the afternoon of the first day the fire had al- most entirely circled the lower section of the city. The firemen made a brave fight at various points to stay its progress, but the water mains had been broken and their engines were useless. Then the only hope to arrest the march of the fire fiend was dynamite. The steady boom, boom of that ex- plosive as hour after hour passed and house after
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house was blown up told of the losing fight that was being waged against the destroying element.
The wooden houses south of lower Market street, one of the sections first attacked by the fire fiend, were quickly destroyed and the fire swept on to the westward. By Wednesday night it had swept up to and leaped across Market street. The tall buildings of the Call, Chronicle and Examiner at Third and Market streets succumbed and the great business blocks of the neighborhood were gutted by the flames, only their outer shells re- mained. By Thursday morning the flames had swept over Sansome and Montgomery to Kear- ney and in places beyond.
Jack London, in "Collier's" of May 5th, gives the following dramatic description of the scenes in the heart of the business section :
"At nine o'clock Wednesday evening I walked down through the very heart of the city. I walked through miles and miles of magnificent buildings and towering skyscrapers. Here was no fire. All was in perfect order. The police patrolled the streets. Every building had its watchman at the door. And yet it was doomed, all of it. There was no water. The dynamite was giving out. And at right angles two differ- ent conflagrations were sweeping down upon it.
"At one o'clock in the morning I walked down through the same section. Everything still stood intact. There was no fire. And yet there was a change. A rain of ashes was falling. The watchmen at the doors were gone. The police had been withdrawn. There were no firemen, no fire-engines, no men fighting with dynamite. The district had been absolutely abandoned. I stood at the corner of Kearney and Market, in the very heart of San Francisco. Kearney street was deserted. Half a dozen blocks away it was burning on both sides. The street was a wall of flame. And against this wall of flame, silhouetted sharply, were two United States cavalrymen sit- ting their horses, calmly watching. That was all. Not another person was in sight. In the intact heart of the city two troopers sat their horses and watched.
"Surrender was complete. There was no wa- ter. The sewers had long since been pumped dry. There was no dynamite. Another fire had
broken out further up-town, and now from three sides conflagrations were sweeping down. The fourth side had been burned earlier in the day. In that direction stood the tottering walls of the Examiner building, the burned-out Call building, the smouldering ruins of the Grand hotel, and the gutted, devastated, dynamited Palace hotel. The following will illustrate the sweep of the flames and the inability of men to calculate their speed. At eight o'clock Wednesday evening I passed through Union Square. It was packed with refugees. Thousands of them had gone to bed on the grass. Government tents had been set up, supper was being cooked, and the refugees were lining up for free meals.
"At half-past one in the morning three sides of Union Square were in flames. The fourth side, where stood the great St. Francis hotel, was still holding out. An hour later, ignited from top and sides, the St. Francis was flaming heavenward. Union Square, heaped high with mountains of trunks, was deserted. Troops, refugees, and all had deserted.
"Remarkable as it may seem, Wednesday night, while the whole city crashed and roared into ruin, was a quiet night. There were no crowds. There was no shonting and yelling. There was no hysteria, no disorder. I passed Wednesday night in the path of the advancing flames, and in all those terrible hours I saw not one woman who wept, not one man who was ex- cited, not one person who was in the slightest degree panic-stricken.
"Before the flames, throughout the night, fled tens of thousands of homeless ones. Some were wrapped in blankets. Others carried bundles of bedding and dear household treasures. Some- times a whole family was harnessed to a carriage or delivery wagon that was weighted down with their possessions. Baby buggies, toy wagons and go-carts were used as trucks, while every other person was dragging a trunk. Yet every- body was gracious. The most perfect courtesy obtained. Never, in all San Francisco's history, were her people so kind and courteous as on this night of terror."
* *
"All night these tens of thousands fled before
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the flames. Many of them, the poor people from the labor ghetto, had fled all day as well. They had left their homes burdened with possessions. Now and again they lightened up, flinging out upon the street clothing and treasures they had dragged for miles.
"They held on longest to their trunks, and over these trunks many a strong man broke his heart that night. The hills of San Francisco are steep, and up these hills, mile after mile, were the trunks dragged. Everywhere were trunks, with across them lying their exhausted owners, men and wo- men. Before the march of the flames were flung picket lines of soldiers. And a block at a time, as the flames advanced, these pickets retreated. One of their tasks was to keep the trunk-pullers mov- ing. The exhausted creatures, stirred on by the menace of bayonets, would arise and struggle up the steep pavements, pausing from weakness every five or ten fect.
"Often, after surmounting a heart-breaking hill, they would find another wall of flame advanc- ing upon them at right angles and be compelled to change anew the line of their retreat. In the end, completely played out, after toiling for a dozen hours like giants, thousands of them were compelled to abandon their trunks.
"It was in Union Square that I saw a man of- fering $1,000 for a team of horses. He was in charge of a truck piled high with trunks from some hotel. It had been hauled here into what was considered safety, and the horses had been taken out. The flames were on three sides of the Square, and there were no horses."
* * * *
"An hour later, from a distance, I saw the truck-load of trunks burning merrily in the mid- dle of the street."
All day Thursday the fight was waged, the flames steadily advancing to the westward. It was determined to make the last stand on Van Ness avenue, the widest street in the city. It was solidly lined with magnificent dwellings, the resi- dences of many of the wealthy inhabitants. Here the fire fighters rallied. Here all the remaining resources for fighting the destroying element were collected, dynamite, barrels of powder from
the government stores and a battery of marine guns. The mansions lining the avenue for near- ly a mile in length were raked with artillery or blown up with dynamite and powder. Here and there the flames leaped across the line of defense and ignited buildings beyond. Two small streams of water were secured from unbroken pipes and the fires that broke out beyond the line of defense were beaten out, principally by the use of wet blankets and rugs. By midnight of the 19th the fire was under control, and by Friday morning the flames were conquered. A change of wind during the night had aided the fire fight- ers to check its westward march. As the wind drove it back, it swept around the base of Tele- graph Hill and destroyed all the poor tenement houses near the base of that hill that it had spared on its first advance, except a little oasis on the upper slope that had been saved by a liberal use of Italian wine. In the great fire of May 4, 1851, De Witt & Harrison saved their warehouse, which stood on the west side of Sansome street between Pacific and Broadway, scarce a stone's throw from Telegraph Hill, by knocking in the heads of barrels of vinegar and covering the building with blankets soaked in that liquid in place of water, which could not be obtained. Eighty thousand gallons were used, but the on- ward march of the flames in that direction was stopped. How many gallons of wine were sac- rificed will never be known.
The earthquake shock had scarcely ceased be- fore General Funston, in command of the mil- itary forces at the Presidio, called out the troops and sent them down into the stricken city, to aid in keeping order and fighting the fire. Mayor Schmitz issued a proclamation placing the city under martial law. Across the streets were thrown cordons of soldiers, who forced the dazed and half-crazed crowd to keep away from the danger of the advancing fire and falling walls. In addition to their other duties the military had to undertake the repression of crime. Even amid the scenes of suffering, desolation and death, thieves looted stores and robbed the dead bodies, and ghouls, half-drunk with liquor, committed deeds of unspeakable horror. These when caught received short shrift. They were shot
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down without trial. Several regiments of the National Guard, from different parts of the state, were called out and they did efficient service in San Francisco, Oakland and Alameda. The Pre- sidio, Golden Gate Park and other parks were converted into refugee camps and rations issued. Military organization was prompt and effective. Four days after the fire there were military butchers, blacksmiths, carpenters, chimney inspec- tors and sanitary inspectors. Strict military reg- ulations were enforced in the various camps and a constant watch was kept up to prevent the breaking out of epidemic diseases. Train loads of provisions and clothing were hurried from all parts of the state and beyond for the immediate relief of the sufferers. Contributions of money flowed in from all over the country, until the to- tal ran up into the millions. The railroads fur- nished free transportation to all who had friends in other cities of the state. The Red Cross Re- lief Society, at the head of which is James D. Phelan, ex-mayor of San Francisco, had taken up the burden of caring for the destitute until they could take care of themselves.
The actual number of lives lost by the earth- quake will never be known; many who were pinned down in the wrecked buildings would have escaped with slight injuries had not the fire followed so quickly after the earthquake shock. The total number of deathis officially reported up to the last of May was three hundred and thirty-three. The property loss ranges from two hundred to two hundred and fifty millions of dol- lars. Insurance covered about one hundred and twenty millions; whether all of this will be paid is yet to be decided.
The fire devastated two hundred and sixty-nine blocks, covering an area of nearly three thousand acres, or about five square miles. In this vast fire-swept desert there were three little oases that the destroyer had left unscathed. In the very heart of this desert stood the mint with its accumulated treasure unharmed by fire or earth- quake shock. Thirty-five years ago, when Gen. O. H. La Grange was superintendent of the mint, he had sunk an artesian well within the inclosure. He received neither thanks nor encouragement from the government for his work. When the
fire surged around it the employes and ten sol- diers were housed within it; for seven hours they fought against the onslaught of flames that dashed against the building. The courageous fighters, aided by the thick walls and the water supply from the artesian well, won the victory and the building with its treasure was saved. Throughout the days and nights that the fire raged the tall tower of the Ferry building loomed up through the smoke of the burning city, the hands of the silent clock mutely pointing to 13 minutes past 5, the moment the temblor began its work.
The post office, with but nominal damages, survived the wreck and ruin of the city. The palatial homes of the bonanza kings and rail- road magnates, built on Knob Hill thirty years. ago, were wiped out of existence. Of Mark Hopkins Art Institute with its treasures of art only a chimney is left. Of the Stanford house, the Crocker mansion, the Huntington palace and the Flood residence only broken pillars, ruined arches, heaps of bricks, shattered glass and piles. of ashes tell how complete a leveler of distinction fire is. Chinatown, the plague spot of San Fran- cisco and the old time bête noir of Denis Kearney and his followers, has been obliterated from the map of the city. Not a vestige is left to mark where it was, but is not. Kearney's slogan, "The Chinese must go," is again reiterated; and it is questionable whether the almond-eyed followers of Confucius will be allowed to relocate in their former haunts.
OAKLAND, ALAMEDA AND BERKELEY.
The cities across the bay from San Francisco, Oakland, Alameda and Berkeley, escaped with. but slight damage. A number of buildings were wrecked and chimneys thrown down, but the fire. did not follow the shock and the aggregated loss of property in all three did not exceed $2,000,000. There were five lives lost in Oakland. These cities became great camps of refuge for the homeless of San Francisco. The hospitality of their people was taxed to the utmost to take care of the San Francisco sufferers, who fled from their stricken city as soon as the means of exit were available.
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STANFORD UNIVERSITY.
With a strange partiality the temblor spared the buildings of the State University at Berkeley. Located only a dozen miles from San Francisco, scarcely a brick was displaced from a chimney, but it wrought ruin to many of the noble build- ings of Stanford University, thirty-four miles dis- tant from the metropolis. The Memorial Church, the unfinished library, the new gymna- sium, part of the art museum, the Stanford resi- dence at Palo Alto and the memorial arch were badly wrecked. Some of them were hopelessly ruined. Encina hall (the men's dormitory) was injured by the fall of stone chimneys and one student was killed. The loss in all amounted to $3,000,000.
SAN JOSE.
The city of San Jose seemed to be in the line of march chosen by the temblor. The business center was wrecked, its court house destroyed and many of its dwellings badly damaged. For- tunately it escaped a visitation by fire. Nineteen lives were lost and the property loss exceeded $2,000,000.
SANTA ROSA.
The city of Santa Rosa, the capital of Sonoma county, in proportion to its wealth and the num- ber of its inhabitants, suffered more severely than any other city in California. The business por- tion of the city, which was closely grouped around the Court House Square, was entirely de- stroyed. As there were no suburban stores the supply of provisions was cut off. The breaking off of communication left the outside world ig- norant of Santa Rosa's fate. For a time she was left entirely to her own resources to aid her suf- ferers. As in San Francisco, fire followed the temblor, which increased greatly the loss of life and property. The water mains were not brok- en and within three hours the fire was practically under control.
Among the buildings destroyed by earthquake and fire were the court house, the new Masonic temple, the public library, six hotels, a five-story brewery, a shoe factory, a four-story flour mill, two theaters, the Odd Fellows hall, and a num-
ber of office buildings, flats and apartment houses. The number of dead reported was fifty- six. The injured and missing numbered eighty- seven.
The business houses in San Mateo, Belmont, Palo Alto and Redwood City were nearly all wrecked. Many of the stately mansions and rose- embowered cottages that line the road between San Francisco and San Jose on the western side of the bay were thrown from their foundations and chimneys falling on the roofs had cut their way to the ground.
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