And so dawned the second day on stricken San Francisco.”5
Surrounded on three sides by water, the city was dry. The major water distribution mains all over the city had ruptured. As a result, fire hoses couldn’t tap the eighty million gallons of water stored in city reservoirs.6 Hugging the waterfront from Fort Mason to Hunter’s Point, tugboats pumped seawater from the bay into hoses stretched ashore. The other weapon was dynamite, ignited to carve firebreaks between the walls of flame. Charges were exploded along Van Ness Avenue to halt the westward march of the Great Fire. But other explosions ignited by inexperienced hands served only to launch firebrands that spread the blazes.
A drunken munitions man, John Bermingham, carted explosives into Chinatown to demolish the wreckage and ended up starting sixty fires. As witnesses watched in horror, he lurched around setting charges that blew up buildings with people still trapped inside. Bodies flew fifty feet above the rubble, falling back into the flames below.7
Atrocities were rumored—of jewel thieves cutting the fingers and ears from corpses, of bloodthirsty troops bayoneting innocent citizens. As teams of rescuers clawed frantically to free the injured from rubble, some lost a race with the approaching fires. One man, hopelessly pinned down by debris, begged his rescuers to kill him before the flames burned him alive. A gunman stepped from the crowd, gravely confirmed the trapped man’s last wishes, drew a pistol, and fired. He then turned himself in to the mayor, who commended his humane act.8
Tallying losses of such magnitude was almost impossible. In a telegram to Senator George C. Perkins in Washington, Governor Pardee estimated: “Three hundred million taxable property wiped out in San Francisco….”9 Others placed the loss at three times as high.
In the toll of major city monuments, the Chronicle and Call Buildings and the giant Emporium department store were lost. Of the storied mansions of Nob Hill tycoons—Stanford, Hopkins, Flood, Huntington, and Crocker— only scorched and hollow shells remained. Likewise, the Palace, the Fairmont, and the St. Francis also burned.
Tireless bucket brigades and employees beating embers with wet sacks saved the post office, courthouse, and U.S. Mint along Mission Street. Exhausted firefighters preserved the Ferry Building and the Southern Pacific Railroad Terminal, allowing over 200,000 refugees to flee by rail and sea.
The U.S. Army and city officials estimated that about 500 people had died. Later, historians calculated that the true toll of crushed and cremated humanity more closely approximated 3,000 lives.10
By the morning of Saturday, April 21, streams of seawater, favorable winds, and dynamited firebreaks finally starved the fire of fuel. In its wake, 490 blocks were incinerated. The homes of 250,000 San Franciscans were gone, along with libraries, courts, jails, theaters, restaurants, schools, churches, and centers of government and business. Communications and transportation systems were mute and paralyzed. And 10,000 of the city’s gardens were a memory under ash and rubble.11
Over $8 million in relief monies were raised for relief of the place and its people. The actress Sarah Bernhardt gave benefit performances in Chicago and in Berkeley to help the city she loved. Donations ranged from bread to circuses: from loaves baked by students at an Indian school in Oregon to $200,000 in receipts from Barnum & Bailey. The undefeated boxing champion Jim Jeffries, cheered by thousands at the Mechanics’ Pavilion, sold oranges for charity. Some service was compulsory: The actor John Barrymore was among those ordered to stack bricks by bayonet-wielding troops.12
Misery had a million faces. When George Houghton of Boston offered to donate a huge stock of footwear, it seemed a strange form of relief. But Governor Pardee eagerly accepted the gift. It turned out that many refugees had burned clean through their soles while walking across the hot cinders in city streets following the Great Fire.13
Hungry and begrimed, survivors huddled in a kind of democracy. Rich and poor dined from the same menu. The bill of fare included staple bread, canned meat, and potatoes distributed by 150 relief stations. The wealthy folks ate no better, for there was nothing to buy.
The volume of refugees numbered three hundred thousand on the night of April 18, when most of the city slept outdoors. By June, the population of refugee camps was down to fifty thousand. In the days to come, the census of refugees ebbed slowly as the city rebuilt itself. Still, there remained thousands in tents and dugouts, lean-tos and shacks, for many months.14 The shelters barely kept out the elements. Blanket lean-tos were replaced by forests of military tents. Later, the city built thousands of two- and three-room wooden cottages. Occupants of the shelters cooked in communal kitchens and used earthen trenches or latrines for toilets. Flies bred and swarmed about the camps, and kitchens were hastily screened to prevent epidemics. Notices in English, Spanish, and Italian urged people to boil their water and milk.
In some people the temblor sparked a strange exhilaration. The philosopher William James, a visiting professor at Stanford University, was awed by its animal power. “Here at last was a
Indeed, the earthquake shook thousands of rats from their hiding places. From fractured walls and ruptured sewer pipes, rats and fleas poured fourth, joining the river of refugees moving through the crumbled city. Like the human refugees, they too were fleeing the shattered remains of their homes.
Resourceful camp followers, the rats slowly made their way to the refugee camps. They flourished in the ruins, feasted off the garbage, and bred in abundance. The rodent diaspora set the stage for a new and unexpected aftershock of the earthquake.
As the telegraph machines in Washington chattered to life on the morning of April 18 with reports from San Francisco, Surgeon General Walter Wyman thought of Rupert Blue.
Blue was then in Washington to tackle a most unheroic temporary assignment: sanitary inspection of buildings in the nation’s capital. It was an era when the halls of government had too many cockroaches and too few spittoons. But now there was a more urgent need for his services. While the Great Fire still smoldered, Blue boarded a train for the Pacific coast to assess the disaster.
On a ferry from Oakland, approaching the San Francisco waterfront, Blue scanned the shattered skyline for landmarks. As the shoreline came into focus, he could see the Ferry Building with its flagpole knocked askew and its clock hands frozen at just past five o’clock, the hour when the quake had hit. When the ferry docked, he emerged into streets that were buckled and filled with rubble. Mounds of bricks and masonry lay warped and blackened in the wake of the firestorm. Hills once terraced by houses and offices now bristled with jagged shells of scorched ruins. The dusty air smelled of pit latrines.
Prodigal and proud San Francisco now looked chastened, a town clad in sackcloth and ashes. The city he knew so well from its waterfront to its hilltops, Chinatown to the Latin Quarter, was a smoke-stained desert. Its features were scoured away, leaving a plain of blowing ash and sand. His father had witnessed cities leveled by the Civil War. What General Sherman did to the South, the earthquake did to San Francisco.
His first task was to visit refugee camps in the Mission district. With the streetcars stranded on their twisted rails, it was hard to find a buggy to navigate the debris-choked streets. On the slow, rocking ride, Blue saw Market Street with its grand hotels and shopping emporia hollowed out like a ghost town. South of the Market Street slot, he traversed a zone of smashed boardinghouses, slanted crazily on their foundations. But nothing prepared him for the spectacle of homeless masses camped out in the Mission district.
“Deplorable,” he breathed under his mustache. “There must have been more than 30-thousand people living in shacks, tents, and other temporary abodes in this district. Those whose homes were spared have to cook in the streets, as all chimneys, water and sewer connections have been destroyed by the earthquake.”16 All through the city, the miserable scene was repeated ten times over.
Nothing stood between these refugees and disease outbreaks. Contaminated water, bad food, and overflowing latrines practically guaranteed an outbreak of “enteric,” as Blue called typhoid fever.
In Dolores Park, refugees huddled in a hellish parody of summer camp. In a case of bad timing, city planners had planned a new lawn and spread the park soil with manure just before the earthquake hit. Now families with nowhere else to go built shanties and carved dugouts atop the malodorous mulch. There, they bedded down and cooked their rations.
And what rations. Cold mush and bad coffee were the morning bill of fare. Evenings, the lucky got stew and tea. The unlucky Larsen family in Fort Mason camp was issued a slab of flyblown meat, a bruised head of lettuce, withered radishes, and four potatoes stained with coal oil. Mrs. Larsen marched to the camp commander and complained that it was unfit for her brood of seven. The army officer in charge of city sanitation declined
