Into the warp and woof of my story of the West, “The Treasure of Hidden Valley,” there have been woven a few incidents of the great calamity that some years ago befell the city of San Francisco. Perhaps some of my readers will care to peruse a more detailed description of that tragic happening.

W. G. E.

IT was on April 18, 1906, that San Francisco was shaken by a terrible earthquake which in its final effects resulted in the city being cremated into cinders and gray ashes.

The trembling, gyrating, shaking and swaying vibrations, the swiftly following outbursts of fire, the cries of those pinned beneath fallen dÉbris and of the thousands who were seeking to escape by fleeing into the parks and toward the open country, produced the wildest pandemonium.

While there was no wind, yet a hundred fires originating at different points quickly grew into sheets of towering flame and spread to adjacent buildings, burning with demoniacal fierceness as if possessed by some unseen mysterious power, pouring forth red hot smoke until the prostrate city was melted into ruin by the intense heat of a veritable hell.

The night of April 17 and 18 had almost ended in San Francisco. It had been like many another night in that cosmopolitan city. Pleasure-seekers were legion,—negligent, care-free, wrapped in the outward show of things—part of it good—part of it not so good—some of it downright wicked as in Ancient Pompeii. Yet the hour was late—or early, whichever you will—even for San Francisco. The clock in the city hall had resounded forth five strokes. Peaceful folk were in the realm of dreams that precede awakening. The roistering hundreds of a drunken night had gathered in places of vice and were sleeping away the liquor fumes. The streets were almost deserted.

The great printing presses that had been reverberating with the thunders of a Jove, gathering and recording the news from the four quarters of the earth, had paused and all was still. Here and there morning papers were on the streets and the preliminary work was in progress of sending them forth to the front doorsteps of the homes of rich and poor, from one end of the city to the other. Then, without warning, just eighteen minutes after the city clock had tolled its five strokes, one of the greatest news items and tragedies of the world’s history was enacted. An historical milestone of the centuries was on that eventful morning chiseled on the shore line of the Pacific Coast.

Suddenly from the womb of sleeping silence, from far below the earth’s crust, just as the dawn of a new day began purpling the eastern sky, there came forth a rumbling and muttering of unearthly noises like the collapsing of palaces of glass or the clanking of giant chains. It came from beneath the entire city and was borne upward and abroad on the startled wings of a mysterious fear. It was a shrieking, grinding confusion of subterranean thunder, like the booming of heavy artillery in battle. It was deafening in its dreadfulness, and drove terror to the heart of the hardiest. It sounded to the affrighted people as if two mighty armies of lusty giants of the underworld were grappling in mortal combat and in their ferocious anger were unwittingly breaking the earth’s fragile shell into yawning cracks and criss-cross fissures. Mount Tamalpais was fluttering like the wings of a snared pigeon.

In the space of seconds, the whole populace awoke, excepting those who had answered the last call; for some there were, pinned under falling walls, who were overtaken by swift death in the very act of awakening.

The uncounted number that were crushed to death and had life’s door closed to them forever, no one will ever know. In the forty-eight seconds that followed the beginning of the deep guttural bellowing of hideous noises from somewhere below the earth’s surface, buildings rocked and heaved and twisted, while heavy objects of household furniture were tumbled across rooms from one corner to the other and the occupants helplessly tossed from their beds.

Such an awakening, such lamentations, such cursing, such prayers, and then into the debris-littered streets the multitude began pouring forth, half-clothed, wild and panic-stricken.

The stunning shock, like a succession of startled heart-beats, lasted twelve seconds less than one minute, but those who experienced the ordeal say it seemed an eternity—forty-eight seconds—terrible seconds—of sickening, swaying suspense. A heaving earth, jerking, pulsing to and fro in mad frenzy, while countless buildings were swaying and keeping time to a wild hissing noise like the noise of boiling, blubbering fat in a rendering caldron.

It was the dawn of a new day abounding in hideous noises—detonations of falling masonry, the crash of crumbling, crushing walls, the shrieks of maimed and helpless victims—and all the people stupefied with a terrible fear, women weeping in hysterical fright and everyone expectant of they knew not what, unable to think coherently or reason, yet their voices filling the stricken city with cries and moans of heart-rending terror and lamentation. And all the while there came up from somewhere an unearthly threatening roar that awed the multitude into unnatural submissive bewilderment.

At the end of eight and forty seconds the frantically tossed earth quieted—became normal and was still. Some of the buildings righted and were quiescent, and a moment of silence followed, except for the crowing of cocks, the whinnying of frightened horses and the whining of cowering dogs. This condition, however, was only of momentary duration.

Almost immediately the streets became a wild scene of turmoil as the half-clothed, half-crazed men, women and children went rushing up and down in every direction, they knew not why nor where. Doors were broken open to allow egress, shutters were slammed, windows were hastily raised, and like a myriad of ants the rest of the people who until now had been penned up, struggled forth into open ways—thinly clad, some almost naked, trembling, gazing about awe-stricken, looking each at his fellow, indifferent to the destruction going on about them, each filled with prayerful thankfulness for life. Then, like a rehearsed orchestra of many voices, there arose, seemingly in unison, a chorus of heart-piercing wails and calls from thousands of throats for loved ernes—loved ones lost who could not answer.

In the pale light of that April dawn, this vast army of survivors, while chilled with outward cold, shivered also with an unspeakable inward dread.

Along the streets of proud San Francisco in every direction were huge masses of bricks, cornices, fallen ragged chimneys and walls, tumbled together in complex dykes of dÉbris like the winrows of a hay field and interspersed with the dead and dying bodies of man and horse alike, vanquished in life’s uneven contest.

A little later in the vicinity of the ten-million-dollar courthouse, crowds of frightened people gathered, attracted perhaps by the terrific thundering of the mammoth stone slabs and concrete sides and columns of the structure, as, in their loosened condition from the steel skeleton, they kept crashing down upon the street in riotous disorder.

Every block in the city held its tragedy, its silent evidence of a mighty internal upheaving of Goliath strength. There were hundreds of dead, while others lay maimed in tortured suffering, buried under wreckage, pinned down by the giant hands of the Angel of Destruction. The unfortunates still living were fastened like insects caught in traps, helpless, but hoping for relief, awaiting the unwritten chapter that was yet to come.

The great earthquake of San Francisco had spent its force—its rude results lay in careless disheveled evidence on every hand—and now the nerve-strained, half-crazed and bewildered people caught the sound of fire bells clanging hurriedly into nearer distances.

The fire hose and the corps of hook and ladder men came rushing with all speed, drawn by frenzied horses, hastily turning street corners and dashing around fallen walls while the automatic fire bells were cutting the air in metallic, staccato beats of wildest alarm. Soon the throbbing of the fire engines began and false hope sprung rife in the hearts of the people. Those running south on Market Street paused in bewilderment, not knowing which way to go, for fire calls and flames were evident, not in one location nor two, but in hundreds at widely separated places throughout the erstwhile magnificent metropolis of the Occident.

Black columns of smoke began rising from ominous red furnace flames beneath, and curled lazily into the balm of the upper air, indifferent to the wails of the helpless unfortunates maimed and pinned beneath the wrecked buildings of a demolished and burning city.

The murky smoke like mourning crape hung mutely above, while beneath its canopy life’s sacrificial offering lay prostrate, the dying and the dead. The consuming flames spread quickly, and the horror of the hopeless condition of the injured was soon apparent, while the sobs and cries of the doomed victims became maddening because of the very impotency to succor them.

The suddenness of it all did not give time for the rescuers. Then too, the smoke-blinded and half-choked people in the crowded, congested streets were stampeding toward the open country—to Golden Gate Park and the Presidio. Many of the trapped victims, well and strong, might have escaped but could not exert normal power to shake off the fetters that held them down under fallen wreckage too heavy for their hampered strength. It was a veritable bedlam, some cursing, some praying, most all crying loudly as if in crazed pain for assistance.

The first paroxysm passed, the poor unfortunates seemingly became more patient, believing that relief would surely come. The crackling flames mounted higher and came alarmingly nearer. Finally, as the conflagration with a hurried sweep began to envelop these pinioned human beings, they shrieked in agony like lost souls in terrible anguish at a most horrible and certain death. Their voices rose with the rising of the flames until at last the piteous cries were hushed perforce, and only the crackling sound of burning wood and the forked tongues of raging red fire greeted the sun, that morning of April 18, as it climbed above the eastern mountains and looked upon the scene of woeful destruction.

Is it any wonder that strong men wept? Is it to be marveled at that those separated from friends and relatives grew bewildered, frantic and crazed with grief and fear, and that chaos reigned supreme?

Gradually amid the whirl of emotions there stepped forth men who until now had been stunned into silence and temporarily bereft of reason. The first staggering shock passed, they became possessed in a measure with calmness and courage. They girded their belts afresh and although many of them began by cursing the heartless, cruel fire and the terribleness of it all, they quickly and determinedly turned to the stupendous work of endeavoring to subdue its ravages.

Then a new terror raised its ghostly head and held the people in a grip of deepest despair. The earthquake had broken the supplying water mains, and presently the city was without water and the fire engines and other fire-fighting apparatus were worthless junk. It was a grievous blow to momentarily raised hopes and courageous resolution.

The flames raged on with the fleetness of race horses, eating out the heart of the city, burning it into cinders, and cremating the flesh and bone of fallen victims.

Dynamite was brought into use, gunny sacks and bedding of all sorts were saturated with water from barrels and tanks. Grappling hooks and human hands made up the armament of puny defense against the over-powering and masterful flames of annihilation.

Against these feeble weapons, the grim demon of fire planned an attack of certain devastation. It was as if his Satanic Majesty with all his imps were in their ruthless cunning directing a fiendish work that would permit no record but death to the unfortunate, no record to the proud city but gaunt-ribbed skeleton buildings, red hot cinders and blackened ash heaps.

Overturned stoves in a thousand houses throughout the residential districts had early started a multitude of fires and split the fire-fighters into many divisions, and therefore into less effective units in their futile efforts even partially to check the mighty master—the devouring tempest of fire that crackled and sported in its insatiable greed.

There was still to follow yet another misfortune, an execrable crime—that of wicked inhuman incendiarism. At places flames burst forth kindled by the hands of a coterie of merciless ghouls. These inhuman devils added to the calamities heaped upon their fellows by setting fire to unburned dwellings whose owners had fled. There was neither necessity nor reason for their dastardly acts. With sponges soaked in kerosene, they did this damnable work—indulging dreams perhaps of greater loot, greed and avarice in their cruel eyes, blackest hell in their debauched hearts.

In the beginning of this losing fight with terrors of the fire king, seemingly unconquerable, only one ray of hope was discernible—there was no wind from ocean or bay in San Francisco that April morning. The clouds that filled the heavens with ominous blackness were only stifling smoke from the burning buildings below.

High above the crimson snake-tongued flames the black smoke hung like a pall, silent and motionless, while fringing it around far away in every direction was the clear blue sky, serene, unfathomable.

As the heroic work of fighting the fire demon progressed, it was soon discovered that the police were insufficient. Crowds of ghouls were pressing the firemen, while robbery, rapine and murder ran riot. Human blood that day was easily spilled. For the sake of pelf and plunder, life was cheap.

The boldness of this lawless condition brought about its own remedy. Strong men arose in their might. Under able leadership they quickly formed a committee of safety. The National Guard was sent to help them.

General Fred Funston of the U. S. Army telegraphed to the Secretary of War for authority, and within three hours was hurrying United States troops into the burning city, and immediately placed it under martial law. The crowds were quickly driven back by the soldiers, fire lines were established, government troops, guards and police all bent nobly to the task of endeavoring to subdue the flames. Buildings were dynamited to shut off the fire’s progress, insubordinate as well as predatory ruffians were shot down without mercy, and thus was order brought out of chaos. But as the hours went by, despite all efforts, the gormandizing flames consumed acres and acres of buildings.

Every wandering automobile was pressed into service and loaded with dynamite. Thus for hour after hour the losing fight with the merciless flames went on.

As the fire burnt its way south on Market Street, the isolated centers crept toward each other with ever widening circles of flame. While there was no breeze to fan them on, yet the flames seemed possessed of some invisible means of progression—an unseen spirit of continued expansion lurked within. The buildings were like so much dry timber, igniting without direct contact of spark or flame, only from the tremendous heat that was generated. Sweeping on and on the different conflagrations at last came together—joined in greater strength, flared up hundreds of feet high, until it looked as if the entire city was one vast molten lake of undulating waves of fire.

The roar of the flames could be heard far beyond the confines of the city—the immense columns and clouds of black smoke continued to sweep upward, until high aloft they spread out into the great canopy as if in shame they fain would hide from angels above the terrible destruction being wrought in this fiery pit below.

As the hours went by, the exodus of people continued. The fascination of it all held the multitudes spell-bound. They for a time were forgetful of hunger, but moved on, this way and that as the burning districts compelled them to go. The public parks began to fill with refugees. The Presidio and the hills overlooking the city were blackened with throngs of people shivering from cold and beginning to suffer the pangs of hunger, the rich and the poor touching shoulders, condoling one with the other in lamentations. This surging mass of famishing humanity were clothed, or partially clothed, in strange and ridiculous costumes.

Household goods littered the outlying streets. Most of the wayfarers who reached the country had little luggage. Many had carried some useless article nearest at hand, selected in their hurry without thought of its value or utility.

One woman held a bird cage under her arm—empty, with the door swinging open. Another carried a carving knife in one hand and a feather-bedecked hat of gaudiness in the other. One man was seen dragging an old leather-bound trunk by a rope—investigation proved the trunk to be without contents.

Notwithstanding the people had lost their all, and in most cases were famishing, yet the great mass were good-natured and tolerant, the strong helping the weak. The chivalry of the West and its rugged manhood abided in their midst There was a common brotherhood in the ranks of these homeless human beings. Distinctions between rich and poor were obliterated—they were all fellow refugees.

No street cars were running in the city. Market Street, into which the greater number of street car railroad tracks converged, was littered with fallen buildings, useless hose and fire fighting apparatus, twisted beams, cinders, heaps of hot ashes and charred bodies of the dead.

It was about eleven o’clock in the morning of the first day of this terrible devastation that the famous Palace Hotel had finally been emptied of its last guest. The rooms throughout were bestrewn with fallen plaster from ceiling and walls, but otherwise, strange to narrate, the structure had suffered but little damage from the earthquake while all around were collapsed and fallen buildings.

At the Mission Street side of the building and on the roof the employees had fought bravely to save this noted hostelry. But as the noon hour approached they gave up all hope. Hurrying through the rooms of the departed guests in an endeavor to save, if possible, abandoned luggage, they gossiped about the “yellow streak,” as they called it, of a world-noted singer—a guest of the hotel—who had been frightened almost to death by the earthquake and developed evidence of rankest selfishness in his mad efforts to save himself.

Then in sadder tones they talked of the impending and inevitable destruction of the magnificent hotel, where most of them had been employed for years. As the heat from the on-sweeping flames began to be unbearable, they hurried away one by one until the famous caravansary was finally deserted by man and in full possession of the ruthless devouring flames.

Great crowds stood on Montgomery Street near the site of the Union Trust Building and watched the burning of the Palace Hotel. Held back by the soldiers in mournful silence, the mass of people watched the angry flames leaping from roof and windows. Soon the fire spread to the Grand Hotel across the street. The flames shot up higher, and then when their task of destruction was finally finished, gradually sank down until nothing but roofless, windowless, bare bleak walls, gaunt, blackened and charred, were left—a grim ghost of the old hotel that boasted of a million guests during its gorgeous days of usefulness, and around which twined a thousand memories of the golden days of the Argonauts of California.

Half a block away a newspaper building had been blown up by dynamite—a similar attempt with the Monadnock Building failed of its purpose.

When night finally fell, those on the north side of Market Street rejoiced greatly, for it seemed that the fire, at least in the down-town business district, had burned itself into submission. So said a well-known milliner for men, as he ate a huge steak at a famous resort on the ocean shore and indulged heavily in champagne in celebration of the saving of his premises. He celebrated a day too soon—the following morning his business house was in ashes.

To the few who were care-free in the sense that they had not lost relatives or friends, the panorama of the fire when darkness came on will never be forgotten because of the wonderful pyrotechnic display—the magnificent yet appalling splendor and beauty of the burning city.

The scene was set as by a wonder-hand of stagecraft. The fire was raging fiercely in an immense pit—topographically the lowest part of the city. Around this pit the rising ground, like a Greek amphitheatre, stretched up toward the Sutro Estate and Ricon Hill on the one side and toward California Street, Nob and Telegraph Hills on the other. To the east was Alcatraz like a sentinel in the waters; across the Bay the cities of Alameda, Oakland and Berkeley. On every vantage point the people gathered—on the heights of Alcatraz and on the roofs of buildings in the trans-bay cities. In silence they gazed at the awe-inspiring drama of destruction that was being enacted before them.

With the advance of night, the towering flames in this vast sweep of many miles of a circular fire line presented a scene that defies description. The general color effect was of a deep blood red, while the smoke as a background to the picture belched up in rolling black volumes, with here and there long forks of flashing fire shooting above the deep crimson glow of the mighty furnace.

Before the roaring billows of flame the tallest buildings were as tinder wood in their helplessness. The Call Building, lifting its head high above its neighbors, was like an ignited match-box set on end. The living flaming wall behind overtopped it as a giant does a pigmy.

Nine o’clock! Ten o’clock! Midnight!—and those who watched and waited and slept not, with nothing but excitement to stay their hunger, saw in the lurid light that by a flank movement the fire had unexpectedly crept far up Montgomery Street from the Ferry. The trade winds were stirring. The fire, in its pulsing undulations, presented the lure and the sensuous poetry of death. It barred all trespassing on the one side and burnt its way through on the other. It was seen that the entire banking district was doomed. Alas, the feeble protests of feeble men! It was a wild outlaw, untamed and untamable fire, that defied all human interference.

And Chinatown—the world-noted Chinatown of San Francisco—what of that? It too had gone the way of annihilation. They say brutality was practiced, and it is whispered to this day that those in charge of dynamiting the Chinatown section of the city were careless and did not warn the inmates of opium dens—it is said they blew up many buildings that held within them, or in the grottoes beneath, innumerable inmates. Whether or not this is true no one can positively say. If true, there is some excuse. The Chinese dwellings were honey-combed underground with dark and devious passages, and it was perhaps impossible, for lack of time and dearth of knowledge how to penetrate these hidden recesses, to warn the drugged dreamers.

In this district the fire raged as if possessed by a million devils. Over the city’s tenderloin on the edge of Chinatown, it swept with a flame of reckless wrath and purification. Buildings whose very timbers were steeped in vice and immorality burned into ashes of cleanliness. The haunts of the lustful, the wine-bibber and the dope-fiend were consumed in a fashion horrible, terrible, pitiless and final.

The city was burned into scrap iron of contortioned steel beams, ragged chimneys half broken and heaps of blackened cinder. As the hours went by it seemed the fire continually found new fuel to feed upon in its savagery and madness. The accumulation of days and years of human labor crumbled into nothingness. Thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then millions, until the enormous total reached $600,000,000 of wealth that was melted away in this fiery crucible!

Egypt, cursed by Moses and weeping for its firstborn, was in no more pitiable plight than this calamity-visited city of San Francisco shaken by earthquake shock, then swept by fire.

Four and one-half miles one way the fire travelled, then four and one-half miles the other it burned its devastating way. Behind it in its path of ruin were only cracked granite walls, twisted steel girders, crumbling and broken cornices; before it, a scattering field of a few untouched buildings yet to conquer.

A Nero with an evil eye on a city’s undoing, and the power of a wicked tyrant to fulfill his sordid wish, could have been no more ruthless in his dastardly heartless methods of destruction.

When the fire was finally ended the buildings that had been burned, if placed in a row, would have extended for two hundred miles in a straight line.

Never in the world’s history has there been such a fire. The burning of ancient London was child’s play beside it. Chicago’s fire was a mere bagatelle. Never has the world read, never had the world dreamed, of such a conflagration. In days to come, grandfathers will tell of it to their grandchildren, nodding their sage old heads to emphasize the horror of it all, relating to the young people who gather about their knees, how great buildings supposed to be fire-proof crumpled up before the swirling sheets of melting flame and the entire city became a prey to the all-devouring conqueror. And this is the tragic story of proud San Francisco, cosmic-tossed and fire-beleaguered capital of the Occident.