A CITY BURNED
While I was in Sonora, the entire town, with the greater part of the
property it contained, was utterly annihilated by fire.
It was about one o’clock in the morning when the fire broke out. I
happened to be awake at the time, and at the first alarm I jumped up,
and, looking out of my window, I saw a house a short distance up the
street on the other side completely enveloped in flames. The street was
lighted up as bright as day, and was already alive with people hurriedly
removing whatever articles they could from their houses before the fire
seized upon them.
I ran downstairs to lend a hand to clear the house, and in the bar-room
I found the landlady, _en deshabille_, walking frantically up and down,
and putting her hand to her head as though she meant to tear all her
hair out by the roots. She had sense enough left, however, not to do so.
A waiter was there also, with just as little of his wits about him; he
was chattering fiercely, _sacré_ing very freely, and knocking the chairs
and tables about in a wild manner, but not making a direct attempt to
save anything. It was ridiculous to see them throwing away so much
bodily exertion for nothing, when there was so much to be done, so I set
the example by opening the door, and carrying out whatever was nearest.
The other inmates of the house soon made their appearance, and we
succeeded in gutting the bar-room of everything movable, down to the bar
furniture, among which was a bottle labelled “Quisqui.”
We could save little else, however, for already the fire had reached us.
The house was above a hundred yards from where the fire broke out, but
from the first alarm till it was in flames scarcely ten minutes elapsed.
The fire spread with equal rapidity in the other direction. An attempt
was made to save the upper part of the town by tearing down a number of
houses some distance in advance of the flames; but it was impossible to
remove the combustible materials of which they were composed, and the
fire suffered no check in its progress, devouring the demolished houses
as voraciously in that state as though they had been left entire.
On the hills, between which lay the town, were crowds of the unfortunate
inhabitants, many of whom were but half dressed, and had barely escaped
with their lives. One man told me he had been obliged to run for it, and
had not even time to take his gold watch from under his pillow.
Those whose houses were so far distant from the origin of the fire as to
enable them to do so, had carried out all their movable property, and
were sitting among heaps of goods and furniture, confusedly thrown
together, watching grimly the destruction of their houses. The whole
hillside was lighted up as brightly as a well-lighted room, and the
surrounding landscape was distinctly seen by the blaze of the burning
town, the hills standing brightly out from the deep black of the
horizon, while overhead the glare of the fire was reflected by the smoky
atmosphere.
It was a most magnificent sight, and, more than any fire I had ever
witnessed, it impressed one with the awful power and fury of the
destroying element. It was not like a fire in a city where man contends
with it for the victory, and where one can mark the varied fortunes of
the battle as the flames become gradually more feeble under the efforts
of the firemen, or again gain the advantage as they reach some easier
prey; but here there were no such fluctuations in the prospects of the
doomed city--it lay helplessly waiting its fate, for water there was
none, and no resistance could be offered to the raging flames, which
burned their way steadily up the street, throwing over the houses which
still remained intact the flush of supernatural beauty which precedes
dissolution, and leaving the ground already passed over covered with the
gradually blackening and falling remains of those whose spirit had
already departed.
There was an occasional flash and loud explosion, caused by the
quantities of powder in some of the stores, and a continual discharge of
firearms was heard above the roaring of the flames, from the numbers of
loaded revolvers which had been left to their fate along with more
valuable property. The most extraordinary sight was when the fire got
firm hold of a Jew’s slop-shop; there was then a perfect whirlwind of
flame, in which coats, shirts, and blankets were carried up fifty or
sixty feet in the air, and became dissolved into a thousand sparkling
atoms.
Among the crowds of people on the hillside there was little of the
distress and excitement one might have expected to see on such an
occasion. The houses and stores had been gutted as far as practicable of
the property they contained, and all that it was possible to do to save
any part of the town had already been attempted, but the hopelessness of
such attempts was perfectly evident.
The greater part of the people, it is true, were individuals whose
wealth was safe in their buckskin purses, and to them the pleasure of
beholding such a grand pyrotechnic display was unalloyed by any greater
individual misfortune than the loss of a few articles of clothing; but
even those who were sitting hatless and shoeless among the wreck of
their property showed little sign of being at all cast down by their
disaster; they had more the air of determined men, waiting for the fire
to play out its hand before they again set to work to repair all the
destruction it had caused.
The fire commenced about half-past one o’clock in the morning, and by
three o’clock it had almost burned itself out. Darkness again prevailed,
and when day dawned, the whole city of Sonora had been removed from the
face of the earth. The ground on which it had stood, now white with
ashes, was covered with still smoldering fragments, and the only objects
left standing were three large safes belonging to different banking and
express companies, with a small remnant of the walls of an adobe house.
People now began to venture down upon the still smoking site of the
city, and, seeing an excitement among them at the lower end of the town,
I went down to see what was going on. The atmosphere was smoky and
stifling, and the ground was almost too hot to stand on. The crowd was
collected on a place which was known to be very rich, as the ground
behind the houses had been worked, and a large amount of gold having
been there extracted, it was consequently presumed that under the houses
equally good diggings would be found. During the fire, miners had
flocked in from all quarters, and among them were some unprincipled
vagabonds, who were now endeavoring to take up mining claims on the
ground where the houses had stood, measuring off the regular number of
feet allowed to each man, and driving in stakes to mark out their claims
in the usual manner.
The owners of the houses, however, were “on hand,” prepared to defend
their rights to the utmost. Men who had just seen the greater part of
their property destroyed were not likely to relinquish very readily what
little still remained to them; and now, armed with pistols, guns, and
knives, their eyes bloodshot and their faces scorched and blackened,
they were tearing up the stakes as fast as the miners drove them in,
while they declared very emphatically, with all sorts of oaths, that any
man who dared to put a pick into that ground would not live half a
minute. And truly a threat from such men was one not to be disregarded.
By the laws of the mines, the diggings under a man’s house are his
property, and the law being on their side, the people would have
assisted them in defending their rights; and it would not have been
absolutely necessary for them to take the trouble of shooting the
miscreants, who, as other miners began to assemble on the ground,
attracted by the row, found themselves so heartily denounced that they
thought it advisable to sneak off as fast as possible.
The only buildings left standing after the fire were a Catholic and a
Wesleyan church, which stood on the hill a little off the street, and
also a large building which had been erected for a ball-room, or some
other public purpose. The proprietor of the principal gambling-saloon,
as soon as the fire broke out and he saw that there was no hope for his
house, immediately made arrangements for occupying this room, which,
from its isolated position, seemed safe enough; and into this place he
succeeded in moving the greater part of his furniture, mirrors,
chandeliers, and so on. The large sign in front of the house was also
removed to the new quarters, and the morning after the fire--but an hour
or two after the town had been burned down--the new saloon was in full
operation. The same gamblers were sitting at the same tables, dealing
monte and faro to crowds of betters; the piano and violin, which had
been interrupted by the fire, were now enlivening the people in their
distress; and the bar-keeper was as composedly as ever mixing cocktails
for the thirsty throats of the million.
No time was lost by the rest of the population. The hot and smoky ground
was alive with men clearing away rubbish; others were in the woods
cutting down trees and getting out posts and brushwood, or procuring
canvas and other supplies from the neighboring camps.
In the afternoon the Phœnix began to rise. Amid the crowds of workers on
the long blackened tract of ground which had been the street, posts
began here and there to spring up; presently cross-pieces connected
them; and before one could look around, the framework was filled in with
brushwood. As the ground became sufficiently cool, people began to move
down their goods and furniture to where their houses had been, where
those who were not yet erecting either a canvas or a brush house, built
themselves a sort of pen of boxes and casks of merchandise.
The fire originated in a French hotel, and among the ashes of this house
were found the remains of a human body. There was merely the head and
trunk, the limbs being entirely burned off. It looked like a charred and
blackened log of wood, but the contour of the head and figure was
preserved; and it would be hard to conceive anything more painfully
expressive of intense agony than the few lines which so powerfully
indicated what had been the contorted position of the head, neck, and
shoulders of the unfortunate man when he ceased to move. The coroner
held an inquest as soon as he could raise a jury out of the crowd, and
in the afternoon the body was followed to the grave by several hundred
Frenchmen.
This was the only death from the fire which was discovered at the time,
but among the ruins of an adobe house, which for some reason was not
rebuilt for several weeks afterwards, the remains of another body were
found, and were never identified.
As for living on that day, one had to do the best one could with raw
materials. Every man had to attend to his own commissariat; and when it
was time to think about dinner, I went foraging with a friend among the
promiscuous heaps of merchandise, and succeeded in getting some boxes of
sardines and a bottle of wine. We were also fortunate enough to find
some hard bread, so we did not fare very badly; and at night we lay down
on the bare hillside, and shared that vast apartment with two or three
thousand fellow-lodgers. Happy was the man who had saved his
blankets,--mine had gone as a small contribution to the general
conflagration; but though the nights were agreeably cool, the want of a
covering, even in the open air, was not a very great hardship.
The next day the growth of the town was still more rapid. All sorts of
temporary contrivances were erected by the storekeepers and
hotel-keepers on the sites of their former houses. Every man was anxious
to let the public see that he was “on hand,” and carrying on business as
before. Sign-painters had been hard at work all night, and now huge
signs on yard-wide strips of cotton cloth lined each side of the street,
in many cases being merely laid upon the ground, where as yet nothing
had been erected whereon to display them. These canvas and brush houses
were only temporary. Every one, as soon as lumber could be procured, set
to work to build a better house than the one he had lost; and within a
month Sonora was in all respects a finer town than it had been before
the fire.