WELL do I remember my first earthquake experience. It was on a Saturday, early in October, 1868, in San Mateo County. My father, myself and four Chinamen were digging potatoes in a field on a plateau which sloped from some hills easterly to a ravine in which was laid the track of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company running from San Francisco to San Jose. Another plateau sloped from the western foothills of the San Bruno Mountains westerly to the same ravine. The San Bruno Mountains are seven or eight hundred feet high. They rise abruptly, near the division line between the City of San Francisco and San Mateo County, nearly opposite and east of Lake Merced. They run southerly and terminate abruptly near Baden, where the old cattle king, Henry Lux, of Miller Lux, had his home.
The Chinamen were digging, my father was sorting and picking up the potatoes and putting them into sacks, while I sewed up the sacks. All at once my father called to me, and said:
"Look at that fool mountain!"
Beginning at the northern end, it was dancing up and down. The motion was traveling southerly. While we were looking, my father again said:
"Look at that freight train!" which was proceeding north on the San Francisco tracks. The train was weaving up and down like a snake. The next instant we all saw, coming towards us from the northeast, a wave of earth. It looked to me to be six feet high. When it reached us we were all knocked down, the sacks of potatoes were overthrown. I felt a peculiar weakness in my knees and could not get up for a few minutes. I was not frightened. It was some sort of an electric affection of the knees. My father complained of the same feeling. The Chinamen shouted to each other in terror and as soon as they got on their feet they started towards our home, where they were stopping in a small house near the barn. They never stopped at their house, but kept on to the village of Colma, half a mile beyond, where they caught a stage which took them to the street-car line to the Mission in San Francisco. They did not come back for three days.
My father and I sacked and sowed up the potatoes that were dug, gathered the sacks into a pile, covered them with weeds and potato vines, to prevent sunburn, and then went home. When we got there, my mother called to us to come to the milk-room. About a dozen pans of milk had been milked that morning. Every pan was empty. They did not turn over. The milk simply splashed out with the swaying motion.
Between the first shock at 8 o'clock in the morning, and midnight, there were thirty-seven distinct shocks, none of them of great severity. My greyhound, Flora, had a warm spot on a hillside, back of the house, where she would lie in the sun and was protected from the wind which came from the ocean, but passed over her. A short time before any of us felt any of the additional shocks, she would come running to the house whining with terror. I suppose that she was that sensitive that, lying on the ground, she detected the coming shock before it manifested itself by motion.
We were located on the fault which heads up in Mendocino County, crosses the bay this side of Sausalito, then heads in a straight line through what is now Golden Gate Park, and down through San Mateo County. The occupied portion of San Francisco hardly felt this earthquake , which did some damage in the cities of San Mateo and Redwood.
The California Reader
http://www.notfrisco.com/calmem/index.html