Selected American history

CHAPTER V.

The Panic Flight of a Homeless Host.

The scene that was visible in the streets of San Francisco on that dread Wednesday morning was one to make the strongest shudder with horror. Those three minutes of devastating earth tremors were moments never to be forgotten. In such a time it is the human instinct to get into the open air, and the people stumbled from their heaving and quivering houses to find even the solid earth was swaying and rising and falling, so that here and there great rents opened in the streets. To the panic-stricken people the minutes that followed seemed years of terror. Doubtless some among them died of sheer fright and more went mad with terror. There was a roar in the air like a burst of thunder, and from all directions came the crash of falling walls. They would run forward, then stop, as another shock seemed to take the earth from under their feet, and many of them flung themselves face downward on the ground in an agony of fear.

Two or three minutes seemed to pass before the fugitives found their voices. Then the screams of women and the wild cries of men rent the air, and with one impulse the terror-stricken host fled toward the parks, to get themselves as far as possible from the tottering and falling walls. These speedily became packed with people, most of them in the night clothes in which they had leaped or been flung from their beds, screaming and moaning at the little shocks that at intervals followed the great one. The dawn was just breaking. The gas and electric mains were gone and the street lamps were all out. The sky was growing white in the east, but before the sun could fling his early rays from the horizon there came another light, a lurid and threatening one, that of the flames that had begun to rise in the warehouse district.

The braver men and those without families to watch over set out for this endangered region, half dressed as they were. In the early morning light they could see the business district below them, many of the buildings in ruins and the flames showing redly in five or six places. Through the streets came the fire engines, called from the outlying districts by a general alarm. The firemen were not aware as yet that no water was to be had.

On Portsmouth Square the panic was indescribable. This old tree plaza, about which the early city was built, is now in the centre of Chinatown, of the Italian district and of the "Barbary Coast," the "Tenderloin" of the Western metropolis. It is the chief slum district of the city. The tremor here ran up the Chinatown hill and shook down part of the crazy buildings on its southern edge. It brought ruin also to some of the Italian tenements. Portsmouth Square became the refuge of the terrified inhabitants. Out from their underground burrows like so many rats fled the Chinese, trembling in terror into the square, and seeking by beating gongs and other noise-making instruments to scare off the underground demons. Into the square from the other side came the Italian refugees. The panic became a madness, knives were drawn in the insanity of the moment, and two Chinamen were taken to the morgue, stabbed to death for no other reason than pure madness. Here on one side dwelt 20,000 Chinese, and on the other thousands of Italians, Spaniards and Mexicans, while close at hand lived the riff-raff of the "Barbary Coast."

Seemingly the whole of these rushed for that one square of open ground, the two streams meeting in the centre of the square and heaping up on its edges. There they squabbled and fought in the madness of panic and despair, as so many mad wolves might have fought when caught in the red whirl of a prairie fire, until the soldiers broke in and at the bayonet's point brought some semblance of order out of the confusion of panic terror.

This scene in Portsmouth Square but illustrated the madness of fear everywhere prevailing. On every side thousands were fleeing from the roaring furnace that minute by minute seemed to extend its boundaries.

In the awful scramble for safety the half-crazed survivors disregarded everything but the thought of themselves and their property. In every excavation and hole throughout the north beach householders buried household effects, throwing them into ditches and covering the holes. Attempts were made to mark the graves of the property so that it could be recovered after the flames were appeased.

The streets were filled with struggling people, some crying and weeping and calling for missing loved ones. Crowding the sidewalks were thousands of householders attempting to drag some of their effects to places of safety. In some instances men with ropes were dragging trunks, tandem style, while others had sewing machines strapped to the trunks. Again, women were rushing for the hills, carrying on their arms only the family cat or a bird cage.

There were two ideas in the minds of the fugitives, and in many cases these two only. One of these was to escape to the open ground of Golden Gate Park and the Presidio reservation; the other was to reach the ferry and make their way out of the seemingly doomed city.

At the ferry building a crowd numbering thousands gathered, begging for food and transportation across the bay. Hundreds had not even the ten cents fare to Oakland. Most of the refugees at this point were Chinamen and Italians, who had fled from their burned tenements with little or no personal property.

Residents of the hillsides in the central portion of the city seemingly were safe from the inferno of flames that was consuming the business section. They watched the towering mounds of flames, and speculated as to the extent of the territory that was doomed. Suddenly there was whispered alarm up and down the long line of watchers, and they hurried away to drag clothing, cooking utensils and scant provisions through the streets. From Grant Avenue the procession moved westward. Men and women dragged trunks, packed huge bundles of blankets, boxes of provisions—everything. Wagons could not be hired except by paying the most extortionate rates.

"Thank Heaven for the open space of the Presidio and for Golden Gate Park!" was the unspoken thank-offering of many hearts. The great park, with its thousand and more acres of area, extending from the thinly populated part of the city across the sand dunes to the Pacific, seemed in that awful hour a God-given place of refuge. Near it and extending to the Golden Gate channel is the Presidio military reservation, containing 1,480 acres, and with only a few houses on its broad extent. Here also was a place of safety, provided that the forests which form a part of its area did not burn.

To these open spaces, to the suburbs, in every available direction, the fugitives streamed, in thousands, in tens of thousands, finally in hundreds of thousands, safety from those towering flames, from the tottering walls of their dwellings, from a possible return of the earthquake, their one overmastering thought. There were many persons with scanty clothing, women in underskirts and thin waists and men in shirt sleeves. Many women carried children, while others wheeled baby carriages. It was a strange and weird procession, that kept up unceasingly all that dreadful day and through the night that followed, as the all-conquering flames spread the area of terror.

At intervals news came of what was doing behind the smoke cloud. The area of the flames spread all night. People who had decided that their houses were outside of the dangerous area and had decided to pass the night, even after the terrible experience of the shake-up, under their roofs, hourly gave up the idea and struggled to the parks. There they lay in blankets, their choicest valuables by their sides, and the soldiers kept watch and order. Many lay on the bare grass of the park, with nothing between them and the chill night air. Fortunately, the weather was clear and mild, but among those who lay under the open sky were men and women who were delicately reared, accustomed all their lives to luxurious surroundings, and these must have suffered severely during that night of terror.

The fire was going on in the district south of them, and at intervals all night exhausted fire-fighters made their way to the plaza and dropped, with the breath out of them, among the huddled people and the bundles of household goods. The soldiers, who were administering affairs with all the justice of judges and all the devotion of heroes, kept three or four buckets of water, even from the women, for these men, who continued to come all the night long. There was a little food, also kept by the soldiers for these emergencies, and the sergeant had in his charge one precious bottle of whisky, from which he doled out drinks to those who were utterly exhausted.

But there was no panic. The people were calm, stunned. They did not seem to realize the extent of the calamity. They heard that the city was being destroyed; they told each other in the most natural tone that their residences were destroyed by the flames, but there was no hysteria, no outcry, no criticism.

The trip to the hills and to the water front was one of terrible hardship. Famishing women and children and exhausted men were compelled to walk seven miles around the north shore in order to avoid the flames and reach the ferries. Many dropped to the street under the weight of their loads, and willing fathers and husbands, their strength almost gone, strove to pick up and urge them forward again.

In the panic many mad things were done. Even soldiers were obliged in many instances to prevent men and women, made insane from the misfortune that had engulfed them, from rushing into doomed buildings in the hope of saving valuables from the ruins. In nearly every instance such action resulted in death to those who tried it. At Larkin and Sutter Streets, two men and a woman broke from the police and rushed into a burning apartment house, never to reappear.

The rush to the parks and the dunes was followed in the days that followed by as wild a rush to the ferries, due to the mad desire to escape anywhere, in any way, from the burning city.

At the ferry station on Wednesday night there was much confusion. Mingled in an inextricable mass were people of every race and class on earth. A common misfortune and hunger obliterated all distinctions. Chinese, lying on pallets of rags, slept near exhausted white women with babies in their arms. Bedding, household furniture of every description, pet animals and trinkets, luggage and packages of every sort packed almost every foot of space near the ferry building. Men spread bedding on the pavement and calmly slept the sleep of exhaustion, while all around a bedlam of confusion reigned.

Many of those who sought the ferry on that fatal Wednesday met a solid wall of flames extending for squares in length and utterly impassable. In their half insane eagerness to escape some of them would have rushed into fatal danger but for the soldiers, who guarded the fire line and forced them back. Only those reached the ferry who had come in precedence of the flames, or who made a long detour to reach that avenue of flight. When the news came to the camps of refugees that it was safe to cross the burned area a procession began from the Golden Gate Park across the city and down Market Street, the thoroughfare which had long been the pride of the citizens, and a second from the Presidio, along the curving shore line of the north bay, thence southward along the water front. Throughout these routes, eight miles long, a continuous flow of humanity dragged its weary way all day and far into the night amidst hundreds of vehicles, from the clumsy garbage cart to the modern automobile. Almost every person and every vehicle carried luggage. Drivers of vehicles were disregardful of these exhausted, hungry refugees and drove straight through the crowd. So dazed and deadened to all feeling were some of them that they were bumped aside by carriage wheels or bumped out of the way by persons.

As already stated, the scene had its humorous as well as its pathetic side, and various amusing stories are told by those who were in a frame of mind to notice ludicrous incidents in the horrors of the situation. Two race track men met in the drive.

"Hello, Bill; where are you living now?" asked one.

"You see that tree over there—that big one?" said Bill. "Well, you climb that. My room is on the third branch to the left," and they went away laughing.

Another observer tells these incidents of the flight: "I saw one big fat man calmly walking up Market Street, carrying a huge bird cage, and the cage was empty. He seemed to enjoy looking at the wrecked buildings. Another man was leading a huge Newfoundland dog and carrying a kitten in his arms. He kept talking to the kitten. On Fell Street I noticed an old woman, half dressed, pushing a sewing machine up the hill. A drawer fell out, and she stopped to gather the fallen spools. Poor little seamstress, it was now her all."

A more amusing instance of the spirit of saving is that told by another narrator, who says that he saw a lone woman patiently pushing an upright piano along the pavement a few inches at a time. Evidently in this case, too, it was the poor soul's one great treasure on earth.

He also tells of a guest berating the proprietor of a hotel, a few minutes after the shock, because he had not obeyed orders to call him at five o'clock. He vowed he would never stop at that house again, a vow he might well keep, as the house is no more.

In one room where two girls were dressing the floor gave way and one of them disappeared.

"Where are you, Mary?" screamed her companion.

"Oh, I'm in the parlor," said Mary calmly, as she wriggled out of the mass of plaster and mortar below.

At the handsome residence of Rudolph Spreckels, the wealthy financier, the lawn was riven from end to end in great gashes, while the ornamental Italian rail leading to the imposing entrance was a battered heap. But the family, with a philosophy notable for the occasion, calmly set up housekeeping on the sidewalk, the women seated in armchairs taken from the mansion and wrapped in rugs and coverlets, the silver breakfast service was laid out on the stone coping and their morning meal spread out on the sidewalk. This, scene was repeated at other houses of the wealthy, the families too fearful of another shock to venture within doors.

Another story of much interest in this connection is told. On Friday afternoon, two days and some hours after the scene just narrated, Mrs. Rudolph Spreckels presented her husband with an heir on the lawn in front of their mansion, while the family were awaiting the coming of the dynamite squad to blow up their magnificent residence. An Irish woman who had been called in to play the part of midwife at a birth elsewhere on Saturday, made a pertinent comment after the wee one's eyes were opened to the walls of its tent home.

"God sends earthquakes and babies," she said, "but He might, in His mercy, cut out sending them both together."

There were many pathetic incidents. Families had been sadly separated in the confusion of the flight. Husbands had lost their wives—wives had lost their husbands, and anxious mothers sought some word of their children—the stories were very much the same. One pretty looking woman in an expensive tailor-made costume badly torn, had lost her little girl.

"I don't think anything has happened to her," said she, hopefully. "She is almost eleven years old, and some one will be sure to take her in and care for her; I only want to know where she is. That is all I care about now."

A well-known young lady of good social position, when asked where she had spent the night, replied: "On a grave."

"I thank God, I thank Uncle Sam and the people of this nation," said a woman, clad in a red woolen wrapper, seated in front of a tent at the Presidio nursing one child and feeding three others from a board propped on two bricks. "We have lost our home and all we had, but we have never been hungry nor without shelter."

The spirit of '49 was vital in many of the refugees. One man wanted to know whether the fire had reached his home. He was informed that there was not a house standing in that section of the city. He shrugged his shoulders and whistled.

"There's lots of others in the same boat," as he turned away.

"Going to build?" repeated one man, who had lost family and home inside of two hours. "Of course, I am. They tell me that the money in the banks is still all right, and I have some insurance. Fifteen years ago I began with these," showing his hands, "and I guess I'm game to do it over again. Build again, well I wonder."

Among the many pathetic incidents of the disaster was that of a woman who sat at the foot of Van Ness Avenue on the hot sands on the hillside overlooking the bay east of Fort Mason, with four little children, the youngest a girl of three, the eldest a boy of ten years. They were destitute of water, food and money.

The woman had fled, with her children, from a home in flames in the Mission Street district, and tramped to the bay in the hope of sighting the ship which she said was about due, of which her husband was the captain.

"He would know me anywhere," she said. And she would not move, although a young fellow gallantly offered his tent, back on a vacant lot, in which to shelter her children.

In the Golden Gate Park there was the most woefully grotesque camp of sufferers imaginable. There was no caste, no distinction of rich and poor, social lines had been obliterated by the common misfortune, and the late owners of property and wealth were glad to camp by the side of the day laborer. As for shelter, there were a few army tents and some others which afforded a fair degree of comfort, but nine out of ten are the poorest suggestions of tents made out of bedclothes, rugs, raincoats and in some cases of lace curtains. None of the tents or huts has a floor, and it is impossible to see how a large number of women and children can escape the most disastrous physical effects.

The unspeakable chaos that prevailed was apparent in no way more than in the system, or lack of system, of registration and location. At the entrance to Golden Gate Park stands a billboard, twenty feet high and a hundred feet long. Originally it bore the praises of somebody's beer. Covering this billboard, to a height of ten or twelve feet, were slips of paper, business cards, letter heads and other notices, addressed to "Those interested," "Friends and relatives," or to some individual, telling of the whereabouts of refugees.

One notice read: "Mrs. Rogers will find her husband in Isidora Park, Oakland. W. H. Rogers." Another style was this: "Sue, Harry and Will Sollenberger all safe. Call at No. 250 Twenty-seventh Avenue."

There were thousands of these dramatic notices on this billboard, and one larger than the others read: "Death notices can be left here; get as many as possible."

Another method of finding friends and relatives was by printing notices on vehicles. On the side curtains of a buggy being driven to Golden Gate Park was the following sign: "I am looking for I. E. Hall."

That searchers for lost ones might have the least trouble, all the tents, here known as camps, were tagged with the names or numbers. For instance, one tent of bed quilts carried this sign: "No. 40 Bush Street camp."

Most of the tents were merely named for the family name of the occupants, the former streets number usually being given. But these tent tags told a wonderful story of human nature. A small army tent bore the name, "Camp Thankful," the one next to it was placarded "Camp Glory" and a few feet farther on an Irishman had posted the sign "Camp Hell."

The cooking was all done on a dozen bricks for a stove, with such utensils as may usually be picked up in the ordinary residential alley. But in all of the camps the badge of the eternal feminine was to be found in the form of small pieces of broken mirrors, or hand mirrors fastened to trees or tent walls, in some cases the polished bottom of a tomato can serving the purposes of the feminine toilet.

One woman, in whose improvised tent screeched a parrot, sat ministering to the wounds of the other family pet, a badly singed cat. The number of canaries, parrots, dogs and cats was one of the amusing features of the disaster.

Among the interesting and thrilling incidents of the disaster is that connected with the telegraph service. For many hours virtually all the news from San Francisco came over the wires of the Postal Telegraph Company. The Postal has about fifteen wires running into San Francisco. They go under the bay in cables from Oakland, and thence run underground for several blocks down Market Street to the Postal building. About forty operators are employed to handle the business, but evidently there was only about one on duty when the earthquake began.

What became of him nobody knows. But he seems to have sent the first word of the disaster. It came over the Postal wires about nine o'clock, just when the day's business had started in the East. It will long be preserved in the records of the company. This was the dispatch:

"There was an earthquake hit us at 5.13 this morning, wrecking several buildings and wrecking our offices. They are carting dead from the fallen buildings. Fire all over town. There is no water and we lost our power. I'm going to get out of office, as we have had a little shake every few minutes, and it's me for the simple life."

"R., San Francisco, 5.50 A. M."

"Mr. R." evidently got out, for there was nothing doing for a brief interval after that. The operator in the East pounded and pounded at his key, but San Francisco was silent. The Postal people were wondering if it was all the dream of some crazy operator or a calamity, when the wire woke up again. It was the superintendent of the San Francisco force this time.

"We're on the job, and are going to try and stick," was the way the first message came from him.

This was what came over the wire a little later:

"Terrific earthquake occurred here at 5.13 this morning. A number of people were killed in the city. None of the Postal people were killed. They are now carting the dead from the fallen buildings. There are many fires, with no one to fight them. Postal building roof wrecked, but not entire building."

The fire got nearer and nearer to the Postal building. All of the water mains had been destroyed around the building, the operators said, and there was no hope if the fire came on. They also said that they could hear the sound of dynamite blowing up buildings. All this time the operators were sticking to their posts and sending and receiving all the business the wires could stand. At 12.45 the wire began to click again with a message for the little group of waiting officials.

This message came in jerks: "Fire still coming up Market Street. It's one block from the Post Office now; back of the Palace Hotel is a furnace. I am afraid that the Grand Hotel and the Palace Hotel will get it soon. The Southern Pacific offices on California Street are safe, so far, but can't tell what will happen. California Street is on fire. Almost everything east of Montgomery Street and north of Market Street is on fire now."

There was a pause, then: "We are beginning to pack up our instruments."

"Instruments are all packed up, and we are ready to run," was another message. It was evident that just one instrument had been left connected with the world outside. In about ten minutes it began to click. Those who knew the telegraphers' language caught the word "Good-bye," and then the ticks stopped.

At the end of an hour the instrument in the office began to click again. It was from an electrician by the name of Swain.

"I'm back in the building, but they are dynamiting the building next door, and I've got to get out," was the way his message was translated. Dynamite ended the story, and the Postal's domicile in San Francisco ceased to exist.