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This is the complete text of a twenty-page booklet titled, "How the Army Worked to Save San Francisco," by Henry Anderson Lafler, a respected magazine writer, and friend of poets George Sterling and Ina Coolbrith, as well as Jack London.

This publication was, in the words of its cover, "being a supplementary nature to 'How the Army Worked to Save San Francisco: personal narrative of the acute and active commanding officer by Frederick Funston, Brig.-Gen., U.S.A.' " in "Cosmopolitan Magazine" for July 1906.

The small booklet, published by the Calkins Newspaper Syndicate of San Francisco in 1906, had rubber-stamped upon it, in red, "An attack on Gen. Funston." It criticizes the U.S. Army's role in fighting the Great Fire, and gives lengthy eyewitness accounts to the looting, and other misdeeds, committed by members of the military during its occupation of San Francisco.

The first page is a letter of rejection from "Argonaut" publisher Jerome Hart, who declined to publish the manuscript because of its length.

Lafler wrote entire the booklet as a letter to Hart, as editor of the Argonaut.

The cover - "How the Army Worked to Save San Francisco."

The letter - Jerome Hart's rejection of the manuscript.

The text - Henry Anderson Lafler's answer to Gen. Funston.

For proper context, read Gen. Funston's original "Cosmopolitan Magazine" article

Return to the 1906 Earthquake Exhibit.

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