Louise Herrick Wall set out on foot to walk the burning city. Her acute
observations leave one of the best records about what refugees
thought, felt, and reacted to in the disaster around them. This account appeared in the August 1906 "The New Century Magazine."
Wall, in 1922, edited "The Letters of Franklin K. Lane, Personal and Political," published by Houghton Mifflin. Lane (1864-1921), a Progressive and
ardent conservationist, was San Francisco's City Attorney, and then Secretary of the Interior during the Wilson
administration.
HEROIC SAN FRANCISCO
A WOMAN'S STORY OF THE PLUCK AND HEROISM
OF THE PEOPLE OF THE STRICKEN CITY
BY LOUISE HERRICK WALL
Horror panic, dread, terror are the words that have been most by the local
and Eastern press in describing the effect of the extraordinary disasters that
have rushed upon us here in San Francisco during the last two weeks,
filling every hour since the great earthquake shock of the morning of April
18--and the vastly more disastrous succeeding days of the
fire--with a tempest of hurrying events. And yet to the
thousands who have been caught within the whirlpool of intense activity
the words seem unreal, crude, and essentially false to the spirit that
animates the whole mass of the people who are living with passionate
energy through this time. The truth is that despair is not to be seen on any
face, nor the droop of it weighing upon any shoulder, nor the ring of it
heard in any voice, except where extreme old age or habitual
self-indulgence has already set its mark.
Early in the morning of April 19, twenty-four hours after the
heaviest shocks, when the earth still quaked at short intervals and the walls
of wrecked buildings crumbled in at a puff of wind; when the fire had
swept the Mission and most of the water-front bare, and was rushing
against and overwhelming the great business blocks of the main
thoroughfares, at that moment attacking the heart of San Francisco itself;
when Market street was the fuel through which the fire sucked its air from
the bay; when marble and brick and concrete business blocks crashed in on
themselves or, in the weak of the breakers of fire, glowed down into heaps
of lime and stick and ash and wire-draped junk; when the incessant
explosions of dynamite of the fire-fighters, who strove to save by
destruction, came in rushes of sound on each wave of ash laden air that
burned the face and dimmed the sight, I walked the whole length of San
Francisco from the ferry to army headquarters in the Presidio and back
again, and made a number of detours into the burning city, as far as the
bayonets of the fire-line of guards would permit, over hot debris
and under festoons of half-melted, fallen wires, where the city in its
first hot haste was vomited out upon these ruined streets; and yet I saw no
despair upon any human face.
In that day's tramp of twenty blistering miles I saw only four faces that
showed the trace of tears and heard fewer shaken voices, and yet for miles
my way lay among those who had just lost their homes and had burned but
then from seeing the complete destruction of all their material wealth. I
was close to the people, often wedged in among them for twenty minutes at
a time, I must have spoken to several hundred refugees, so could not have
failed to know the temper of the crowd, even if it had interested me less
profoundly.
For hours as I walked I was combating the fatal but almost universal belief
that the ferries had stopped running, that the wharves were all burned, and
that the only hope of safety lay in reaching the west side of Van Ness
Avenue and, if driven from there, to seek final refuge in the
sand-dunes of Golden gate Park and the Presidio. If the people who lived
in the down-town district had known on the 18th, 19th, and 20th of
April that they could escape from San Francisco into the country by way of
Oakland, Berkeley, Alameda, and the Marin County towns, an inestimable
amount of suffering would have been spared, but they firmly believed
themselves hemmed in by the fire. The city, to them, was a trap with only
one possible egress, miles and miles to the west. Day after day and all night
long, without regular food, drink, rest, or respite from intense anxiety,
thousands of families of women and little children dragged themselves
from place to place in front of the flames, lying without shelter in vacant
lots, exposed to fog and chilling rain. Premature childbirth and death to the
feeblest of the old people resulted from the fatal misconception. In many
cases families were walking and dragging their few rescued possessions
away from the reach of the flames for four or five successive days and
nights, going from one place of temporary shelter to another without the
commonest necessities of life and without sleep.
Color was given to the rumor of the destruction of the ferries by the fact
that the fire, which did sweep away most of the buildings on lower Market
street except the ferry buildings, had for some hours on the 18th prevented
transit by boat to and from town. Moreover, the ferry building had been
seriously injured by the earthquake and many of the roofs of adjacent
boat-landings
had collapsed upon the staggering pier. The metal flag-staff
on top of the ferry tower, whipped back and forth by the
violence of the oscillation at that height, had been bent at a sharp angle,
giving a look of greater insecurity to the whole building. All this was more
than enough to confirm the reports of a complete blockading of the port.
Early in the morning of the 19th the extreme down-town section of
Sin Francisco was wiped out. For the short way that the eye could penetrate
the more one could make out only the shattered walls and columns of
wrecked buildings sending up vast plume of exquisitely tinted
smoke,mauve,
pink, white, and graywith explosive
bursts of orange flames tearing the obscurity beyond. The fragments of
buildings near at hand were already mere pale monuments of ruin.
Market street was a trough of flame; and the only way up-town was
to skirt the fire to the north and follow the streets least obstructed by fallen
poles, fire, and wreckage. This had been a section of warehouses, factories,
and canneries that had been shaken down and burned over some hours
before. Thousands of tins of peach and apricot, their once gaudy labels
roasted into blackness, were scattered among the bricks and rubbish of the
fallen buildings, Now and then a can exploded with trivial ferocity and
bespattered the passengers with scalding fruit. Thrifty,
black-bearded Italians from the fishermen's quarter were making packs of
the cans and slinging them over their shoulders. Street Arabs, themselves
blackened past any racial classification, broke into the tins, and squatting
among the smoking debris, freely feasted on the twice-cooked fruit.
Every part of these streets was encumbered with wreckage; the pavement,
torn and ruptured here more than elsewhere by the shock, was blocked by
sliding piles of brick, in places as high as a man's head, that had to be
climbed through and over, while everywhere leaning poles, draped with
ensnaring wreaths of half-melted electric wires, made progress a
mere crawl. As I worked my way through this smoking quarter, where the
stones were hot beneath the feet, I began to overtake refugees fleeing
toward the Presidio.
The sidewalks, already almost impassable with
wreckage, were filled for miles, from this point onward, with household
goods of every known variety,sewing-machines,
wads of bedding, pans, dishes, mirrors, crayon portraits enlarged from
photographs of the dear, ugly dead, no doubt, bureaus,
beds, pianos, banjo, soup tureens, and every object that ever helped to
complicate existence under a roof, were set upon legs that day. Everything
that moved on wheel or castor became a wagon. Baby-carriages,
piled high with clothes and bedding, sometimes running upon a single
wheel, and trunks with castors, or two or three trunks a-tandem,
were drawn through the streets by ropes of torn sheets. Women with
lap-dogs and hundreds of men and women with bird
cagesparrots, canaries, and love-birds hurried with the hurrying
caravan.
In a clear space I saw a well-dressed old gentleman of
about sixty, with a white mustache and imperial and a well-brushed
high silk hat, trotting along briskly with a large new trunk, fastened by a
new trunk strap, trundling and bumping at his heels as a toy sheep bumps
and trundles at the heels of a two-year-old. A wealthy and
well-known dry-goods merchant of San Francisco had turned
his trunk over and was nailing a pair of roller-skates to the bottom,
to give speed to this ark of his fallen fortune.
In the confusion people met your gaze abstractedly; if questioned, they
would answer, and return instantly to their interrupted tasks. All were
intent on some immediate furious effort to save from the approaching fire
what was left to them of family and possessions. The broken anthill, with
its myriad escaping ants each carrying pupae, grub, or some burden
greater than himself, is neither less nor more tragic to look upon than these
eager human creatures in their determined effort to save their own. In
many you saw the tightening of the will that is a strong joy to the strong,
and the fight for life quickened by the near rumble and jar of dynamite and
fanned by the flame-beaten air laden with ash and cinder. The
breeze swept scorching from the south, where the fire was swallowing a
fresh block of houses every ten or fifteen minutes. The whole sky in that
quarter was steam and smoke, torn by wallowing bursts of flame.
In certain of the streets even downtown one came upon back-waters
of comparative quiet where the people, who had left their houses the night
of the earthquake, still sat or lay upon their possessions outside of their
own doorways half asleep from the fatigue and exciting vigil of the day and
night. Among these groups there was no excited talk nor consultation: they
seemed to have received their orders and to be awaiting drowsily the prod
of the flames to set them on the march.
The flight of the people in these first hours of the great fire was so like
what everyone has read and heard about such flights that it had the
familiarity, combined with grotesque strangeness, of a recurrent delirium,
or one of those double mental impressions in which each phase of
unfolding events is half-anticipated by the tired mind, when one is
ready to say, "If this is Hell, I have been there before." The traditional
bird-cages, the inevitable parrot only unexpected in repeating each
one his own little set of phrases, one crying in a harshly irritable voice,
What is it? What is it?" and another, sunk among his plumage, imitating the
broken sobs of a woman's voice and stammering out, "Poor, poor Polly!"
From a hundred heaps of rescued treasure gramophones lifted their
foolish, brazen mouths. Invalids rode in baby-carriages or across the
locked hands of men or on shutters, or on mattresses of woven wire. One
sick woman, whose hip had been injured before the disaster was pushed
from near the City Hall to the ferry on two bicycles lashed together,
catamaran fashion, and steadied over the debris by her sons. She was four
days on the bed they had improvised for her of a chair tied to the wheels
before she reached a place of safety. Babies were born on doorsteps, and
mothers delivered before their time by those who were kind enough to stop
and help. There is no way to exaggerate the extraordinary pain, hardship,
and, above all, the killing suspense suffered during the flight, but at every
point it was met and matched by heroism, ingenuity, family tenderness, and
disinterested devotion.
"This awful time may not be worth the suffering it has cost," cried a young
soldier, himself pallid with nights of work and watching, "but it is worth
all the money it has costall, and more." It has been
wonderful and stirring to see the kindness, the magnanimity, the absolute
absence of greed in taking advantage of one another's misfortunes. It takes
more than pain or loss to make a tragedy when the spirit of a free people
burns up strong and clear to meet its fate as it has burned in stricken San
Francisco. Everywhere that American spirit that
"..Turns a keen untroubled face
Home, to the instant need of things,"
everywhere the spirit that dares
"To shake the iron hand of Fate
And match with Destiny for beers"
lifted its dauntless, impudent front, and with half satanic humor has
lightened the load of hardship with a jest.
"I got to California just before the earthquake," said a comely young
woman, who had saved her best hat by wearing it. "I sure never was so
warmly received or got such a shake of welcome." She was living between
two street cars in the middle of the street. A woman of seventy, white,
wrinkled, but erect, said, "I am a miner's wife. We came out in the fifties,
and I saw quite some hardships then. It would be queer if this should faze
me. I've still got the clothes I stand in."
But of all the calm, unruffled people, the Chinese were by far the most
self-contained. As the fire reached the squalid, gorgeous,
ever-delightful streets of old Chinatown and ran like a swift blade into its
sheaf, through their long, low, wooden shanties and into the great tiled and
gilded bazaars turning to dross old Satsuma, carved ivories, polished teak,
and tender porcelain of feather-weight, and all that world of beauty
and strangeness wrought by the patient oriental knife and brush and needle
out of insensate wood, brass, gold, silver, and silk to stir the senses of an
alien race with wonder and delightthe grave, sad merchants
of Chinatown gathered a few portable treasures into packs and long pole-
swung baskets, and, with wives and children, coolies and slaves,
poured out of their city into the unfamiliar reaches of North Beach. Their
women and children, dressed in green and rose and gold, came in family
groups, walking softly on padded, embroidered shoes through the debris of
wrecked buildings, still with smooth, unwritten faces and calm eyes.
The small-foot, Number One wife of some great merchant tottered
on her three-inch soles and clung to the shoulder of a plebeian maid.
She walked for the first time in her life in broad day beside her lord, like a
fearless American, over the torn cobbles of the streets. In each group of
these richly dressed Chinese refugees there was at least one lacquered and
pearl-inlaid treasure-chest slung across a pole borne by two
bearers. These chests were like tiny ornate coffins, locked with heavy,
hanging padlocks of elaborately wrought metalbrass and
gold In all my former prowlings in Chinatown I had never before seen one
of these jewel-cases; but on this day, when the secrets of all hearts
were open and all desires known, I saw dozens of them carried between
pole-bearers. The seed of a new Chinese city lay in their burnished
pods.
I worked my wavy up-town on the lower levels of the north water-
front until I was about in line with the hotel district, then, turning
south, I climbed one of the sharp ascents that still sheltered the north side
from the flames. As I mounted the Taylor street hill, the crowd lessened,
until I found myself almost alone and the way barred by the ready bayonet
of one of the young soldiers of the fire-line guard. These men were
stationed at every street entrance within a block or two of the fire and
performed their military duties with the enthusiastic bloodiness of word of
the peaceful citizen in uniform.
I reached the crest of California street at about half past ten o'clock, just in
time to see the roof of the Bella Vista, one of the oldest and
best-known family hotels of San Francisco, sink in upon its dissolving
sides. The Pleasanton, the Colonial, the Cecil, the Buckingham, the Renton,
and at least threescore others of the great caravansaries of this quarter,
were then hung with final doom, and all were burned to the ground in a
few hours. It was just there, in the Bella Vista, and the Cecil that those that
had lived a few hours before, but now there was absolutely no way to trace
man or woman in the rout.
On the highest levels of this quarter stood the old show-houses of
San Francisco, products of the seventies. Here the Crockers, Fairs, Floods,
Stanfords, and Mark Hopkins had erected huge family altars to wealth, to
be this day claimed and preempted from them by fire.
By the marked physiognomy of San Francisco, where the over steep
hill-sidesthe "hog-backs" of the
pioneerand drop down socially with every drop of physical level, to rise
again with each succeeding elevation, you found every hilltop of the of the
city that commanded a view of the bay crowded by the richest of the city's
homes. California street was the best illustration of these variations of
altitude and fortune. It rose humbly in a shabby wholesale quarter of the
town, on "made ground," to climb gently toward the broking and banking
Center near Montgomery street and the Merchants' Exchange, and then
hastily skirting Chinatown, climbed on to its culmination on Nob Hill,
where the houses of the millionaires of the old regime looked off over the
whole city and harbor at their feet. All her rising and falling greatness, for
miles from the ferry was that day lapped up and leveled to a gray
uniformity in the democracy of ruin.
Edging along the fire-line, it was still possible to enter Van Ness
Avenue by way of Sutter street. All the morning I had been hearing the
repeated assertion that the fire would be stopped when it came to Van Ness
Avenue. It was said that it could not cross the chasm of that widest
thoroughfare of the city when its width had been augmented by blowing up
the buildings on the east and south sides of the street. As I hurried along
Sutter street, in and out of several of the abandoned hospitals of this
doctors' quarter, I noticed that the street in front of Dr. McNutt's hospital,
near the corner of Van Ness avenue and Sutter street, and just opposite the
beautiful white pile of the St. Dunstan, looking radiant against a near
back-ground of flame and smoke, was almost clear of people. I ran into
the hospital, thinking that some sick person might have been left behind, to
find the place absolutely deserted. The rooms were exquisitely clean, but
wildly disordered with the surface litter of the flight. Absorbent cotton,
bandages, and instruments had been torn from drawers; open bottles of
drugs evaporated their odors into the emptiness; and on the floors of the
silent lower suites, occupied the day before by wealthy private patients,
many beautiful oriental rugs, bits of good furniture, brass, and carved teak
stood awaiting destruction. In one room a huge bunch of dewy-fresh
scarlet carnationsas many as a woman could
carrywere tossed upon a table.
It was a strange sight, this rich, silent, flower-perfumed place, the
flames less than a block away, and, though I did not know it until a moment
later, with gun-cotton already laid under the building. There was no
answer to the call I gave once or twice in the corridors. As I left the
building and came out upon the empty street a soldier shouted to me: "You
are here at your risk. Dynamite!" Then I saw why the street was empty
about the building. I had somehow slipped in between the lines, and my
useless errand was the last futile thing that would be done under that
hospital's roof. I pressed along Van Ness. On the west side of the avenue
miles of luggage and seated people attested a general faith that the fire
would not cross that street. Families were doing a little cooking, people
were lying, deeply sleeping, on bedding laid upon the sidewalk, weak from
their long race for safety. For a moment the fierce game was suspended as
the players paused for breath with one foot on the home base.
There was more talk, relaxation; neighborliness than I had seen before.
Some comfortably dressed men were telling amusing stories of the
earthquake. They were of the sorts who had "known defeat, and mocked it
as they ran."
"My brother Sam," one was saying, "had been out on the night shift and
turned in at about five o'clock. He'd just about gotten off when the
earthquake struck him. He jumped up swearing mad and poked his head out
of his door. 'I say, who is this blankety-blank fool shaking my bed?
How do you expect a man to sleep? '" But most of the refugees were too
worn out to talk. A happy few, on "inverted
four-posters,"a table spread with a
mattress,--slept profoundly, and
others drowsed on the curbstone, leaning against the empty hydrants, that
mocked the city's drought.
There was one more hospital that I had
known,Lane's,about a mile beyond the
present fire-line. When I
reached the shattered pile of red masonry it was to be told by the doctor in
charge that only a few of the patients remained and that there were more
doctors and nurses to care for the sick than patients. It was just one more
case of the good management of those in charge of the sick. Although
private individuals, with nothing to think of but their own needs, escaped
from the hotels in the same localities with only a handful of clothes, every
hospital in the city removed its loads of sick and surgical cases, and a large
quantity of necessary medical stores, to places of safety. The courage and
trained intelligence of doctors and nurses showed in this, and the humanity
of a civilized world that served the need of the weakest first. One large
Jones street hospital managed to transfer patients, nurses, and a good
equipment, to a ship in the harbor hours before the fire reached Jones
street. As I turned from the Lane Hospital, I thought of a possible clue to
finding one of those I had come to find. There were army officers in my
friend's family, and what more natural than at a time when all were
turning to military protection she should seek shelter at the Presidio post? I
dropped again to the level of the north side, to avoid the hills of the
fashionable quarter, greatly fortified by a gill of cream that I had bought
from a vendor of milk on the street, and drunk from a bottle. As I joined
the throng pushing and dragging their loads toward the Presidio, or resting
in exhaustion in the dust of the road, I once more tried to convince
members of the crowd that behind them, toward the ferry, lay the road of
greatest safety. Here and there groups of men and women were convinced
and turned back, intensely relieved to learn of a way of escape.
"They make you pay two dollars to cross the bay," I heard a score of times.
"I paid ten cents this morning," I protested. "The ferry tower has fallen
in," insisted others. "I walked under the tower five hours ago, and there
has been no earthquake since," I replied. "They won't let us pass," "They
will turn us back," "No one could walk so far, after last night," were some
of the answers. The fire seemed to hold them as it holds a moth. It had
taken everything; why should they leave it?
On that day there was scarcely an automobile to be seen on the main road
to the Presidio. I afterward learned that all private cars had been impressed
for public service, some to carry the sick and dying from the burning
Mechanics' Pavilion, where the victims of the earthquake had been at first
taken for safety, and many over the wreckage of the street with their
perilous loads of dynamite from Fort Mason to the dynamiters on the
fire-line. These gallant little toys of the rich ran almost into the fire,
rocking and tottering over the wreckage of the street with their perilous
loads of dynamite, and back again to safety. They were the only effective
means of locomotion left in the city, where every street car was paralyzed.
The automobile is the unquestioned hero of the San Francisco fire. The
story has not been and probably never can be told of what a few hundred
of these machines have done toward saving life and property. Their value
was too immense for private use, and the government early in the day
seized all cars for imperative needs. Two weeks after the fire one hundred
dollars a day was still the hiring price of a two-seated runabout, at a
time when the hire of a sound horse and buggy was five dollars a day. This
illustrates the ratio between horse and gasoline power.
By two o'clock in the afternoon of the 19th only a few refugees had
arrived at the Presidio, and they were being housed in some poor little
quarters in Tennessee Hollow, once used for bachelor quarters for junior
officers. In front of one of the bare little shanties a carriage with liveried
coachman and footman awaited orders. Again, in the Presidio, my search
was useless; but I was able to carry back with me some letters and messages
from the silenced city from which no word could travel by post or
telegram, written by refugees to relatives or friends outside I posted
several notices of inquiry, and turned to walk the seven devious miles back
to the ferry.
The fire at this time could be mounting the hills toward the south, and
there seemed little reason to suppose that it would be stopped so long as a
fat eucalyptus-tree remained to be burned a wooden house stood
upon its foundations.
On my return walk I had one "lift" of about twenty blocks in an Italian
drayman's wagon. We talked together on the high front seat, he in his
seven words of English and I in my five of Italian; but we understood and
liked each other, though he refused to let me carry home and take care of
the least of his four bambini who lived with their mother, it seemed, in a
wooden shanty, at that hour still unburned, that we passed on the road.
He parted from me, gently asking only "foura bita" for my ride; "no
charga for the fire," deprecatingly.
We had spoken of beautiful Venezia, safe from fire on her blue canals, and
of unhappy Napoli. We rode in Italy far out of the dust of the Presidio
road, with its straining throngs of refugees beating a weary way to safety,
and we breathed sweet Italian air, cleared of dust and cinder and smoke,
for that short, pleasant while. It was a wonderful lift for me.
I reached the ferry at about four o'clock and found a large but not an
overwhelming crowd turned toward Berkeley. I was scarcely seated in the
ferry-boat before a woman was half-carried in by two young
Relief-Corps men and deposited with two large bags beside me. At
once she began, in a quiet way, to speak of her adventures. Pressed in close
on my other side was a family group of an en elderly woman, her
daughter, and a young man. They were half-submerged beneath
their belongings, which were neatly tied up in sheets and quilts. The older
woman of this group told me that they had been hurrying for
thirty-six hours ahead of the fire. Suddenly she broke into tears; in a
muffled voice she said that her young daughter, the girl who sat huddled
together in her seat with a look of curious pallor on her face, was about to
be delivered of her first child. For a moment the mother's old face worked
pitifully, as she spoke of her child's condition; but the eyes of the
mother-who-was-to-be were fixed steadily
aheadher hour bad not yet come.
My companion of the bags, a woman of about sixty, leaned across me and
said firmly to the weeping woman:
It is not goot to cry, already."
And who should know the use of tears better than this brave old soul? She
had just told me that fifteen days before she had come, as a stranger, to San
Francisco from a small interior town, brought to "the" city by her four
children to undergo a serious surgical operation in a private hospital. They
were "goot childer" and they had stayed with her until a tumor had been
removed and she had been pronounced out of danger. As she spoke on, in
serene acceptance of events, I looked into the broad, old face, with its
habitual weathered ruddiness spread like a film over the pallor of illness
and fatigue beneath, and once more I felt how good it is to be alive in a
world where such a woman in such an hour smiles at you with the
confidence of an obedient child.
"No, I wasn't scairt at de eart'quake. It was the night my girl [I interpreted
this as being her private nurse] left me. I yust laid dere as still as I could
for de rollins round, an' I helt on goot to my wound. Dis mornin' dey say
we 'd had to leaf de hospital, de fire was a'most there already. So dey gived
us some milk and a piece o' bread, and I comed avay."
It was then after four in the afternoon; she had eaten nothing since early
morning. She had been all those hours on the blockaded streets with about
forty pounds of hand-baggageand a fresh wound.
"How did you carry your bags?" I demanded. "No, I didn't carry no bags,"
she said. "Efery time somebody dey carried my bags. De young men dey
helped me goot. And now," she smiled, "you help me goot. Is it not so? I
goin' to my childer on de night train." When we reached Berkeley I put
her in the hands of a university student who wore the Relief Corps badge.
The old, the sick, the feeble are the people who are rightly supposed to
have been the greatest sufferers in this disaster, and yet nowhere have I
heard the note of fearless energy struck more surely than by these weak
ones.
Outside of one of the Japanese missions, where the matron sat on the
curbstone preparing some food on one of the street-ovens in
universal use since the chimneys of the town have been condemned, I
noticed a little Japanese baby boy playing gaily. He was a spirited,
charming boy of about three or four years.
"When the shock came," said the matron, "I was alone with this boy and ten
other Japanese babies. This little fellow was wakened by the violent rocking
of his bed and the crash of falling chimneys. He sat up an called out to me:
'never mind! Never mind! Soon stop.' "
The tunic of the plump philosopher was less than a man's hand.
"It must be the courage of excitement. Wait for the reaction," I said to
myself incredulously as the ferry drew from drunken wharves and the
smoke of the wasting city hung over the place where San Francisco had
been.
THE READJUSTMENT
The next ten days and nights were filled so full of work that there was no
time to think of the destroyed city. Ten thousand refugees reached
Berkeley from San Francisco. Over forty of the sick were laid on
mattresses on the floor of one of the university gymnasiums that was
converted into an emergency hospital between night and day.
In the lull of work, on the morning of April 28 just ten days after the
beginning of the fire, a valiant relief-worker took me in her
automobile for a three-days' trip through the ruins of San Francisco.
As we entered the intensely congested street from the Oakland ferry, most
of the fires were mere feebly smoking ash-heaps, and certain streets
had been partly cleared of overhanging poles and wires. The eyes, unveiled
of smoke, could now range across the wasted city from one notable ruin of
house or church or hotel, with a growing sense of the dignity and majesty
of the ruins set in space. Strange and terrible as is the destruction, San
Francisco was never so nearly beautiful. There is no blackening of the
ruins; the heat seems to have been so intense that it consumed all its own
smoke charcoal. leaving faintly colored surfaces of crumbled iron, marble,
and brick. The ruins stretch out in the softest pastel shades of pink and
fawn and mauve, making the wasted districts look like a beautiful city a
thousand years deadan elder Troy or Babylon. The streets
so recently thronged with violently active refugees seeking for any place of
safety were lined with tents and shanties, The ingenuity of the
home-building instinct is astonishing. There are hundreds of decent
shelters made of fire-warped corrugated iron, of window-
shutters, of wooden doors torn from wrecked buildings. One
especially complete little nook was built between the ends of two adjacent
Pacific-Avenue cars and fitted with stove and seats. Tents were made
of coats and bed-comfortables. Down near the old fish-
market were some piratical-looking tents made by the
fisher-folk, of old sail-cloths and spars, with a rakish list to leeward,
as though ready to ship a crew and set sail in any of the elements.
On this tenth day from the fire the park showed hundreds of acres of lawn
covered with well-arranged tents set among the blooming roses and
flowering shrubs of the park's conventional flower beds. The shadow of
leaves plays on clean canvas, and rescued canaries hat at the
tent-peaks chirping contentment. Here and there a hurrying load of
furniture or a laden foot-passenger recalls the exodus of a few days
before, but these grow hourly more unusual.
The most foreign element in the park is the great crowd that collects about
the Relief Camps, where thousands stand in the bread-line three
times each day to be fed. The Los Angeles Relief Camp is especially
complete in its equipment. In front of its great cooking tents tables are
spread with shining rows of tins. They chose a sheltered cove of green
sward, an acre or so in extent, surrounded by trees, and nothing could be
more orderly or pleasant to look upon than the arrangement of their work.
New buildings of redwood, depots to receive a part of the 27,000 tons of
food supplies sent in by neighboring cities and States, have been run up and
completed in a week. Here food is handled and distributed to the homeless
refugees by the military. The generosity and good-will of every
State in the Union has reached out and touched and given its healing virtue
to California. San Francisco has been borne up in safety on the goodness of
the of the world, as a sea-gull, at sea, sleeps safely on the wing.
A young doctor who was hurrying through Utah to offer his services in
San Francisco says that he could not buy bread to eat in Ogden. The bakers
had cut down the local supply: Ogden had to wait, they were baking bread
by the car-load for San Francisco. All the schools in Ogden were
closed on that day that the children might collect food supplies to carry to
the waiting relief cars.
Go where you will in San Francisco to-day, you find yourself
inevitably drawn back to the great battle-field of Van Ness Avenue.
Here the last desperate fight was made by the half-dead firemen, the
professional and amateur dynamiters, the blackened engineers, and military
and civil chiefs of the city. It was here that the automobiles loaded with
dynamite rushed in their perilous loads. Van Ness Avenue, with the
anguished Western Addition behind it, was the last stand of hope. The
history of the struggle is written in the ashes and complete ruin of the
eastern and southern sides of the avenue and in the partly burned lines of
houses, with their shattered windows and the dynamited gaps between
houses, of the western side. Here and there the fire leaped the avenue and
dynamite snatched from the flames the twice-doomed houses of
those rich merchants and financiers who had built to themselves a "house
upon the sand." Books, pictures, rare Japanese art collections, and the
treasures of two generations of wealthy San Franciscans, were sacrificed
that night by dynamite to save what was left of the city.
On the west side of Van Ness stands the Catholic cathedral of St. Mary's.
The big brick building was too shaken by the earthquake to be safe for
worship, but three times on Sunday, the 29th, mass was celebrated by
hundreds of worshipers, who knelt with bared heads on the steps of the
cathedral. At their back stretched for miles the wasted city, raising broken
shafts of delicately tinted ruin against the even grayness of the morning
sky, while in front the people bowed before the unseen altar of their unseen
God.
No quarter of the whole town is more strangely altered than what was once
the congested picturesqueness of Chinatown. Where the wooden buildings
have melted into ash a stout property-line of heavy wire, reinforced
by an armed guard, has be stretched across to prevent any further looting
of the heathen by the Christian hordes. To
one who has loved this Chinese quarter, which exercised upon some minds
a fascination undimmed by familiarity, the destruction of Chinatown is the
most poignant loss of the San Francisco fire. The faults of dirty, smelly,
delightful old Chinatown will prevent its ever being what it has been.
As I sat on a little embankment, where a bazaar had stood, amid the hot
ashes of Chinatown, a tingling in the throat from the acrid smoke that
curled up from the burrowing little fires about me, I could think of no
more joyful consolation than that Robert Louis Stevenson had not lived to
feel the pang of this desolation. Just below me the shaken house where be
had lived and the little golden galleon of his monument outlived the ruin of
the quarter that he had loved.
Against the property-line, looking in on the ruins, several Chinese
merchants stood and talked in low voices.
I went up to one tall Cantonese with an impulse to say something of the
sorrow I felt in the blow to his honest, loyal people in the loss of their
homes and trade.
"Bye and bye," he said slowly and without swagger, "we build all new."
Yes, they might build it new,--I thought of the
coffin-shaped treasure chests,--but the old haunt of opium
dreams was gone. The contrast between old Chinatown, or even what
remains of it now, and the new Chinese encampment at Fort Point is
absolute. The tent city of the Chinese, after one or two removals, has
finally been concentrated in an open, rolling stretch of country near the
bay, with the purple Marin bills beyond. Just now the green fields are
washed with the yellow, white, violet, and orange of mustard, lupine, and
poppy flowers. A sweet, breezy empty, salubrious place, it must seem most
strangely unhomelike to its new dwellers. I heard the meadow-larks
calling across the swales above the sound of "tent-peg that answered
to hammer-nose." Under close military inspection, soldiers in khaki
and Chinamen in black broadcloth were raising scores of clean, new tents,
in ordered rows, over the bruised meadow flowers of yesterday. The
whole equipment here was noticeably good; from tents and ropes to stoves
and shining refuse-cans, the material was new and sound, the best I
had seen issued by the government to refugees. Behind the newly rising
city of khaki tents was the big white tent of the medical department, with
its red cross insignia winding and unwinding itself on the staff. Cows were
browsing in the meadows and the earth lay innocently blooming, as if there
had been no harm intended by those few seconds when the hide of our
great mastodon-earth twinkled away the fly-like vexation of
man and his little works.
The Century Magazine
August 1906
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