Produced by Donald Lainson
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