"The Examiner Building went up like a flash. I was standing in front of the Crocker Building and saw the first smoke. Just then the soldiers ran us out. We went around two blocks and the next view we had the building was a mass of flames. The burning of the Palace was a beautiful sight from the bay."
--J.R. Hand
"Fire was breaking out in hundreds of places over the city and the streets were becoming crowded with hurrying refugees. Where they were unable to procure horses, men and women had harnessed themselves to carriages and were drawing their belongings to places of safety. As we passed through the residence district where wealthy people lived we saw automobiles drawn up and loaded before houses. Their owners remained until the flames came too near, and then, getting into the machines, made for the hills.
"We saw one man pay $2,000 for an automobile in which to take his family to a place of safety."
--Martha Stibbels
"We had hardly got seated when firemen came along asking for volunteers to take bodies from the ruins just above the hotel. There was a ready and willing response. It was a low building on which had toppled a lofty one, and all in the former were buried in the debris. We heard the stifled cries and prayers, 'For God's sake, come this way,' 'O lift this off my back,' 'My God, I'm dying,' and others, nerving us to greater efforts.
"Finally we got to some of them. Bruised, bleeding, blinded by smoke and dust, terrified past reason, the poor fellows who fell in the street fell from utter exhaustion. Those that were penned away below we could not reach, and their seeming far-off cries for mercy and life will ring in my ears till death."
--Mr. Sternberger
"The fire swept [Chinatown] clean. It left no shred of the painted wooden fabric. It ate down to the bare ground and this lies stark, for the breezes have taken away the light ashes. Joss houses and mission schools, grocery stores and opium dens, gambling hells and theaters -- all of them went. The buildings blazed up like tissue paper lanterns used when the guttering candles touched their sides.
"From this place I, following the fire, saw hundreds of crazed yellow men flee. In their arms they bore their opium pipes, their money bags, their silks and their children. Beside them ran the baggy trousered women, and some of them hobbled painfully."
--W.W. Overton
"[My room] was two miles from the fire and I thought I was safe enough when I got into my bed at noon, but about two hours later they awoke me to tell me that the fire was only two blocks away, and we got out only a short time before the house went up in flames.
"No exagerration of the horrible scenes on the street is possible. There was one poor fellow pinned to earth with a great iron girder across his chest. It in turn was weighted down by a mass of wreckage that could not be moved. He could not be saved from the flames that were sweeping towards him, and begged a policeman to shoot him.
"The officer fired at him and missed him, and then an old man crawled through the debris and cut the arteries in the man's wrists. The crowd hurried on and left him to die alone."
--Sol Allenberg
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