An hour after the first word reached Los Angeles on that fateful Wednesday morning our train pulled out of the depot. There was an ominous number of reservations for Santa Barbara on the chair car. Most of the San Francisco men came on board there.
Beyond San Luis Obispo, two big freight trains were stalled by a cave-in caused by the earthquake. They crawled out just in time before every one went mad.
At Salinas, about dark, the conductor came back, shaking his head; a freight train ahead at Pajaro had been completely buried by a mountain of earth hurled in the quake.
The men said it was likely to be a week before any train went through.
Three or four of us httrried into the town looking for an automobile. One of the passengers on the train was Mrs. 'Robert Louis Stevenson, and the news had been kept from her until this delay.
Strange to say, there were a number of automobiles in town, but none were to be had. One man was hurrying through from Los Angeles in his own touring car with his three boys to find his wife, their mother, who, was somewhere in the burning city.
We were getting ready to hire saddle horses when the twin lights of an automobile came glaring down the street. There were two New England spinsters aboard. They had been in the Palace Hotel when the clerk telephoned to their rooms to tell them the city was burning and that the hotel was about to be blown up by dynamite by the soldiers of the Engineer Corps.
They hired an auto to San Jose at an outrageous price and paid $75 to be taken from there to Salinas. Had it not been for a bridge which kind Heaven smashed, I guess they would have been going yet. As it was, we persuaded them that the train was the place for them and managed to hire the automobile back to San Jose. The cost was $20 a seat.
Men came to us and begged like frightened children to be taken; but we dared not risk a breakdown and had to refuse. But never shall I forget the look that was in their eyes.
We started at 10:30 and rode all night. It was bitterly cold and we suffered terribly, not having overcoats. The chauffeur had been using his auto all that morning taking medicines to the demolished insane asylum at Agnews.
His story of the scenes there was horrible. Scores of dead were lying stretched on the lawns and others were walking about hideously wounded. Amid this scene an insane woman was wandering, blithely singing little songs of her own improvision about the earthquake and the killing.
One giant maniac had broken his shackles and rescued one of the guards from the building. He had just one sane moment; long enough to be a hero. Then: he fled howling into the hills.
It was just dawn when we got to San Jose. Sentries from the militia and special officers were patrolling the streets. A dead line had been established to keep persons away from wrecked buildings. There were jewelry stores whose fronts had been entirely torn off; these would have been plundered.
All through the city we saw people seated on beds on their front lawns, their houses having tumbled. On the front lawn of the Hotel Vendome was a bonfire about which were gathered twenty or thirty people. Every guest of the house had spent the night there with a blanket apiece.
We were just in time to catch the first train to go through to San Francisco. All along the route through such towns as Palo Alto and Belmont, we saw shattered buildings, warehouses with whole sides neatly cut off as though with a knife. One big warehouse of brick had completely buried a freight train standing on a siding.
During the night we could see the dull red glow that came from the burning city. Now we could see the huge copper-colored clouds that almost hid the sun. As we came nearer the city we could hear the distant explosions of the dynamite with which the soldiers were wrecking the buildings. They came to us in dull but quick thumps.
The train got no further than Valencia street. As soon as we got off we saw the first stragglers of the great army of the homeless and ruined.
Sentries stopped us before we had gone a block, so a cheerfuI good-looking young fellow, who had seen first his home and his tailor shop utterly destroyed that morning, offered to be our guide.
He took us past the Hotel Valencia, which was the worst sufferer from the earthquake. The big building had been literally poured out into the street in a stream of splintered wood. No one knows how many people perished in it.
On the corner next the Valencia was a new set of three-story flats, just completed, and most of the flats not yet occupied. As though some one had struck it on top with a giant ham-mer, the entire building had sunk one storv, into the ground; you could walk right in at the second story.
Turning down into Steiner street, we were caught in the flood of the strangest tide the world ever saw. There never was anything like this before.
These were people warned to leave their homes from some district newly doomed to the Fire God.
They were treking, in a long, motley procession, to find some park not already crowded to overflowing.
One of the first that I met was a little family beginning life over again. What they had been able to rescue before the flames came was packed in a little express wagon. The elderly husband was drawing this. Behind him came his wife. With the forethought of a woman, she had either bought or stolen two packages of breakfast food -- all that stood between them and.starvation. They looked drawn and anxious; and were rather peculiar in this regard.
Most of the refugees leaving their homes were cheerful.
I saw a pretty "tailor-made girl" meeting her friend on the street. One of them had a little bundle of things tied in a handkerchief.
"That's everything I own in this world," she said, grinning positively grinning.
"That's nothing," said the other girl, smiling back, "I haven't a rag to my back or a cent of money, and I've lost track of my family somewhere in this crowd."
"Oh, well, what's the use of worrying?" And with that they parted.
Another touching little group was led by the father, who carried a sheet tied up with what he could carry. The young mother was dragging a child's express wagon laden mostly with provisions. Behind her trooped two sweet little girls. One was wrapped up in a big shawl (this was just after sunrise.) A kitten, which she held in her arms, was poking its nose protestingly out from the shawl. Bringing up the rear was the other little tot, hugging a doll under each arm.
A fine looking young fellow in khaki trousers and a fashion- able coat was packing an enormous clothes bundle. His young wife was clinking to his arm. It was everything they had left in the world, probably out of years of hard saving, but they were both almost going along with good spirits.
A little further up the street, I saw a refined looking young girl cooking breakfast in the gutter. She wore a handsomely made but badly torn skirt and had a remarkably fine bracelet on one wrist. Her oven was made of two bricks and a toasting grill. A young man was bringing her bits of fire wood and they were consulting together over the frying of bacon.
Further on were two other women doing the same thing.and having fun out of it between themselves.
"Is it so very much farther?" was the only complaint that came from one tired little woman who.looked ready to faint. She was staggering under the weight of a huge bundle. She looked unused to work and her lips were white and trembling with exhaustion. She rested just a minute, then staggered on without: another word of complaint.
Men spoke kindly to her, but none offered to help her, because Woe was the great leveler and all were on the same footing. All the day I spent in San Francisco, I only heard one person speak unkindly to another. I wish I had that young man's name, just as a curiosity. He had been hired by a woman to drag a big Roman chair filled with treasures up the street.
"There," he said, insolently, "I have earned all the money I got for that; now take it along yourself."
Without a word, the woman took the chair from him and: wheeled it on herself.
One rather amusing group was wheeling an immense and very handsome dining-room table. The young man who was pulling from the front was protesting vigorously; but the two young girls who shoved from behind, digging their stubby fashionable little oxford ties in the dirt for foothold, urged him peremptorily on. Following them was a half-grown hobbledehoy boy, strong enough to have packed an ox, who was doing his heavy share by carrying a little glass vase.
In a doorway halfway up the hill, I saw an old Chinaman sitting with his bundle, which was all he had been able to save. He was just saying, "Oh, oh, oh," in a curious, half-sobbing moan that never seemed to cease.
The young tailor with me said the Chinaman had lost his: laundry and was terror-stricken lest the white people should make him pay for their clothes.
While his own tailor shop was burning, the young tailor said that he was out trying to rescue the trapped victims in the burning Hotel Brunswick.
He could only get hold of one living man. He seemed to be caught in the wreckage, the smoke being too thick to permit one to see just how. Strong hands caught his feet and pulled desperately. When they dragged him out at last, they found that he had been caught under the chin. In pulling him out they cut his throat almost from ear to ear.
As we gained the top of the hill on Steiner street, a San Francisco man who came in with me on the train stopped dead still. "My God; look there" he said, his voice catching with a sob.
Through the rift of the buildings we caught our first glimpse of the dying city. "That was Market street," said the San Francisco man, softly. He pointed across a vast black plain, hundreds of acres in extent, to a row of haggard, gaunt specters that did seem to be in two lines like a street.
"There's the City Hall," he said, tremulously, pointing to a large dome surmounting a pile of ruins and surrounded like some hellish island with vast stretches of smouldering ashes and twisted iron girders.
The San Francisco man found a tottering, blackened pile of wall that he said was Mechanic's Pavilion, and a sort of thin peak of brick that he said was the new Bell Theater. He would go over the town from the top of the hill and torture himeslf trying to locate San Francisco's splendid landmarks in these acres of ash heaps.
Down in the middle of the city I found two young men in a violent argument over the location of Market street in the ashes.
At the pretty little park, Fell and Steiner streets, we came upon one of the strange little cities of refugees. I should pronounce this one of the most select residence districts of San Francisco now. It is the only home of hundreds upon hundreds of once well-to-do San Francisco people now ruined.
It was heart-rending to see the women tidying things up and trying to invent new ideas for attractive homes trying to make their homes look better than their neighbors', just as they did before.
Some women made odd little bowers of two blankets and a sheet tent.
I passed one tent where a young mother was lying at ease with her little girl, under a parasol. Just as I was going by, the little girl demanded "another." The mother laughed happily and began, "Well, once upon a time--"
As though one of the stories of all the ages was not going on down the hill below her!
The California Reader
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