San Francisco lay like the crater of a volcano, around which were camped tens of thousands of refugees.
Continuing San Francisco Earthquake of 1906,
Today is our final installment from Jack London and then we begin the second part of the series with Herman Scheffauer.
Previously in San Francisco Earthquake of 1906.
Time: 1906
Place: San Francisco
This section of the city, with the exception of the Mint and the Post Office, was already a waste of smoking ruins. Here and there through the smoke, creeping warily under the shadows of tottering walls, emerged occasional men and women. It was like the meeting of the handful of survivors after the day of the end of the world.
On Mission Street lay a dozen steers, in a neat row, stretching across the street, just as they had been struck down by the flying ruins of the earthquake. The fire had passed through afterward and roasted them. The human dead had been carried away before the fire came. At another place on Mission Street I saw a milk wagon. A steel telegraph-pole had smashed down sheer through the driver’s seat and crushed the front wheels. The milk cans lay scattered around.
All day Thursday and all Thursday night, all day Friday and Friday night, the flames still raged.
Friday night saw the flames finally conquered, though not until Russian Hill and Telegraph Hill had been swept and three-quarters of a mile of wharves and docks had been licked up.
The great stand of the fire-fighters was made Thursday night on Van Ness Avenue. Had they failed here, the comparatively few remaining houses of the city would have been swept. Here were the magnificent residences of the second generation of San Francisco nabobs and these, in a solid zone, were dynamited down across the path of the fire. Here and there the flames leaped the zone but these fires were beaten out, principally by the use of wet blankets and rugs.
San Francisco lay like the crater of a volcano, around which were camped tens of thousands of refugees. All the surrounding cities and towns were jammed with the homeless ones, where they were cared for by the relief committees. The refugees were carried free by the railroads to any point they wished to go and it is estimated that over one hundred thousand people left the peninsula on which San Francisco stood. The Government took the situation in hand, and, thanks to the immediate relief given by the whole United States, there was no famine. The bankers and business men immediately set about making preparations to rebuild San Francisco.
Rome, saith the adage, was not built in a day. Nor was it built in ten years nor in a hundred. Cities are not created out of hand. They are subjected to processes of evolution and gradual growth dependent upon many factors, such as population, commerce and situation. From tent to hut, from hut to house, from hamlet to village, from village to town, from town to city, from city to metropolis, so are the great settlements and centers of civilization evolved by stages slow and successive. But it is not thus with the building of the city that vanished so swiftly little more than a year ago; it is not thus with San Francisco. Almost as suddenly as the old city disappeared, the new one is springing into existence. On the shores of the Pacific, before the black, desolate squares of land had cooled, a myriad men with hopeful hearts and strong hands had said: “Let us build a new city, a city stronger and more beautiful than the old.” They said this as other men might have said: “Let us build a house.”
Never before in the history of mankind has a spectacle such as this been unfolded to the gaze of the nations. There is something so magnificent about this grand ambition, something so epic and picturesque in this vast enterprise, that the facts and fables of history pale and diminish into insignificance. Thebes springing into the air to Amphion’s fluting, the rugged pyramids arduously piled up by Cheops’ slaves, the airy terraces and gardens of Babylon the Magnificent or the Great Wall of China appear less marvelous than this eighth wonder of the world — the recreation of the city by the Golden Gate. The mighty effort of this resolute people of the West, un daunted by a catastrophe that has no parallel among recorded disasters, is full of the romance that will stir the imagination of posterity to a poetic idealization but passes strangely un noticed before the unregarding eyes of the world of to-day. The building of a great and modern city in one year or three or seven is a task that should shed the praise of poetry and history upon the spirits that now labor to recreate more than has been lost. Thus is San Francisco, always a city of roman tic memories, now glorified by a greater romance and a more impressive epic dignity than has enshrined the cities of sad visitations since Troy fell or Pompeii was overwhelmed. In the mighty cincture of cities that surrounds the world, the face of San Francisco is now, as it were, like a blackened pearl that is quickly regaining its original whiteness.
To him who passes idly by and gazes upon the turmoil and disorder of the Californian metropolis, upon its dust and grime, little of this romance, of this poetry, may be apparent. The roaring present rises around him, shatters the vision and obtrudes all that is ugly and ruinous and commonplace, all that makes the inevitable stage of transition from the past to the future so painful and prosaic to eye and ear.
It is a stimulating thing to behold the Third San Francisco rising from its ruins, to see the new edifices leap into the air and new streets sprout and bloom upon the inky wastes made so desolate by the victorious fires of April 18, 1906. In this Period of the Reconstruction, in this Romance of her Renaissance, the city presents phases, pictures and contrasts never before witnessed in any land. For the third time in her brief existence the young metropolis of the West has triumphed over her pyres. The variegated, intense life, the energy and activity in labor displayed by the new-born city, are amazing. Both the remote past and the immediate future of the place are represented — the mining-camp and the modern metropolis. The years of the new century seem to have turned backward for five decades and reestablished many of the rude conditions of the almost legendary “days of forty-nine.”
We want to take this site to the next level but we need money to do that. Please contribute directly by signing up at https://www.patreon.com/history
Some History Moments selections posted before 2012 need to be updated to meet HM’s quality standards. These relate to: (1) links to outside sources for modern, additional information; (2) graphics; (3) navigation links; and (4) other presentation issues. The reader is assured that the author’s materiel is faithfully reproduced in all History Moments posts.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.