A newsgatherer pa.s.sing through Portsmouth square noticed a mother cowering under a bush. She was singing in a quavering voice a lullaby to her baby. The reporter parted the bushes and looked in. Then he saw what she held in her arms was only a mangled and reddened bit of flesh. The baby had been crushed when the shock of earthquake came and its mother did not know that its life had left it thirty hours before.
When law and order were strained a crew of h.e.l.l rats crept out of their holes and in the flamelight plundered and reveled in baccha.n.a.lian orgies like the infamous inmates of Javert in "Les Miserables." These denizens of the sewer traps and purlieus of "The Barbary Coast" exulted in unhindered joy of doing evil.
Sitting crouched among the ruins or sprawling on the still warm pavement they could be seen brutally drunk. A demijohn of wine placed on a convenient corner of some ruin was a shrine at which they worshiped. They toasted chunks of sausage over the dying coals of the cooling ruin even as they drank, and their songs of revelry were echoed from wall to wall down in the burnt Mission district.
Some of the bedizened women of the half world erected tents and champagne could be had for the asking, although water had its price.
One of these women, dressed in pink silk with high heeled satin slippers on her feet, walked down the length of what had been Natoma street with a bucket of water and a dipper, and she gave the precious fluid freely to those stricken ones huddled there by their household goods and who had not tasted water in twenty-four hours.
"Let them drink and be happy," said she, "water tastes better than beer to them now."
Soon after the earthquake San Francisco was practically placed under martial law with Gen. Fred Funston commanding and later Gen. Greely.
The regiment has proven effective in subduing anarchy and preventing the depredations of looters. A detail of troops helped the police to guard the streets and remove people to places of safety.
The martial law dispensed was of the sternest. They have no records existing of the number of executions which had been meted out to offenders. It is known that more than one sneaking vandal suffered for disobedience of the injunction given against entering deserted houses.
There was a sharp, businesslike precision about the American soldier that stood San Francisco in good stead. The San Francisco water rat thug and "Barbary Coast" pirate might flout a policeman, but he discovered that he could not disobey a man who wears Uncle Sam"s uniform without imminent risk of being counted in that abstract mortuary list usually designated as "unknown dead."
For instance: When n.o.b Hill was the crest of a huge wave of flame, soldiers were directing the work of saving the priceless art treasures from the Mark Hopkins inst.i.tute.
Lieut. C. C. McMillan of the revenue cutter Bear impressed volunteers at the point of a pistol to a.s.sist in saving the priceless art treasures which the building housed.
"Here you," barked Lieutenant McMillan to the great crowd of dazed men, "get in there and carry out those paintings."
"What business have you got to order us about?" said a burly citizen with the jowl of a Bill Sykes.
The lieutenant gave a significant hitch to his arm and the burly man saw a revolver was hanging from the forefinger of the lieutenant"s right hand.
"Look here," said the lieutenant. "You see this gun? Well, I think it is aimed at your right eye. Now, come here. I want to have a little talk with you."
The tough stared for a moment and then the shade of fear crept over his face, and with an "All right, boss," he started in upon the labor of recovering the art treasures from the inst.i.tute.
"This is martial law," said the determined lieutenant. "I don"t like it, you may not like it, but it goes. I think that is understood."
John H. Ryan and wife of Chicago after spending their honeymoon in Honolulu and Jamaica reached San Francisco just before the earthquake.
They were stopping at the St. Francis Hotel, which was destroyed partially by the earthquake and totally by the fire following the shock. They lost many of their personal effects, but are thankful that they escaped with their lives.
"When the first shock came," said Mr. Ryan, "I was out of bed in an instant. I immediately was thrown to the floor. Arising, I held on by a chair and by the door k.n.o.b until I could get around the room to the window to see if I could find out what was the matter. I saw people running and heard them in the corridors of the hotel. I also heard women screaming. I hastily called one of my friends and he and myself threw on our overcoats, stuck our feet into our shoes and ran downstairs. I ran back to tell my wife, when I found her coming down the stairs.
"The first shock lasted, according to a professor in the university, sixty seconds. I thought it lasted about as many days.
"At the second shock all the guests piled into the streets. We stood in the bitter cold street for fully a quarter of an hour with nothing about us but our spring overcoats. I said "bitter cold." So it was.
People there said it was the coldest spell that has struck Frisco in years.
"After standing in the streets for a while my friend and myself, with my wife, started back into the hotel to get our clothes. The guard was at the foot of the stairs and he told us that we would not be allowed to go to our rooms. I told him we merely wanted to get some clothes on so we would not freeze to death and he told us to go up, but to come right down as soon as possible, for there was no telling what would happen. We rushed into our rooms and hurriedly threw on our clothes, and started out to reconnoiter. We stopped near a small building. Just then a policeman on guard came up and ordered everybody to a.s.sist in rescuing the persons within. We did not hesitate, but rushed into the building heedless of the impending falling of the walls. We found there a man lying unconscious on the floor. He revived sufficiently to make us understand that his wife and child were in the building and that he thought they were dead. We looked and finally found them, dead.
"We saw ambulances and undertakers" wagons by the score racing down Market street. They were filled with the bodies of the injured and in many cases with dead. The injured were piled into the wagons indiscriminately without respect for any consequences in the future of the patients."
R. F. Lund of Ca.n.a.l Dover, O., was asleep in apartments when the shock rent the city. "I awoke to find myself on the floor," said Mr. Lund.
"The building to me seemed to pitch to the right, then to the left, and finally to straighten itself and sink. I had the sensation of pitching down in an elevator shaft--that sudden, sickening wave that sweeps over you and leaves you breathless.
"I got into my clothes and with some difficulty wrenched open the door of my room. Screams of women were piercing the air. Together with a dozen other men, inmates of the apartments, I a.s.sembled the women guests and we finally got them into the streets. Few of them tarried long enough to dress. We went back again and then returned with more women.
"In one room particularly there was great commotion. It was occupied by two women and they were in a state of hysterical terror because they could not open their door and get out. The sudden settling of the building had twisted the jambs.
"Finally I put my two hundred and thirty pounds of weight against the panels and smashed them through. I helped them wrap themselves in quilts and half led, half carried them to the street.
"While pa.s.sing through a narrow street in the rear of the Emporium I came upon a tragedy. A rough fellow, evidently a south of Market street thug, was bending over the unconscious form of a woman. She was clothed in a kimono and lay upon the sidewalk near the curb. His back was toward me. He was trying to wrench a ring from her finger and he held her right wrist in his left hand. A soldier suddenly approached.
He held a rifle thrust forward and his eyes were on the wretch.
"Involuntarily I stopped and involuntarily my hand went to my hip pocket. I remember only this, that it seemed in that moment a good thing to me to take a life. The soldier"s rifle came to his shoulder.
There was a sharp report and I saw the smoke spurt from the muzzle.
The thug straightened up with a wrench, he shot his right arm above his head and pitched forward across the body of the woman. He died with her wrist in his grasp. It may sound murderous, but the feeling I experienced was one of disappointment. I wanted to kill him myself.
"Along in the afternoon in my walking I came upon a great hulking fellow in the act of wresting food from an old woman and a young girl who evidently had joined their fortunes. No soldiers were about and I had the satisfaction of laying him out with the b.u.t.t of my pistol. He went down in a heap. I did not stay to see whether or not he came to."
"Strange is the scene where San Francisco"s Chinatown stood," said W. W. Overton, after reaching Los Angeles among the refugees. "No heap of smoking ruins marks the site of the wooden warrens where the slant-eyed men of the orient dwelt in thousands. The place is pitted with deep holes and seared with dark pa.s.sageways, from whose depths come smoke wreaths. All the wood has gone and the winds are streaking the ashes.
"Men, white men, never knew the depth of Chinatown"s underground city. They often talked of these subterranean runways. And many of them had gone beneath the street levels, two and three stories. But now that Chinatown has been unmasked, for the destroyed buildings were only a mask, men from the hillside have looked on where its inner secrets lay. In places they can see pa.s.sages 100 feet deep.
"The fire swept this Mongolian section 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 h.e.l.ls 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.
"These were the men and women of the surface. Far beneath the street levels in those cellars and pa.s.sageways were many others. Women who never saw the day from their darkened prisons and their blinking jailors were caught like rats in a huge trap. Their bones were eaten by the flames.
"And now there remain only the holes. They pit the hillside like a mult.i.tude of ground swallow nests. They go to depths which the police never penetrated. The secrets of those burrows will never be known, for into them the hungry fire first sifted its red coals and then licked eagerly in tongues of creeping flames, finally obliterating everything except the earth itself."
"The scenes to be witnessed in San Francisco were beyond description,"
said Mr. Oliver Posey, Jr.
"Not alone did the soldiers execute the law. One afternoon, in front of the Palace Hotel, a crowd of workers in the ruins discovered a miscreant in the act of robbing a corpse of its jewels. Without delay he was seized, a rope was procured, and he was immediately strung up to a beam which was left standing in the ruined entrance of the Palace Hotel.
"No sooner had he been hoisted up and a hitch taken in the rope than one of his fellow criminals was captured. Stopping only to secure a few yards of hemp, a knot was quickly tied and the wretch was soon adorning the hotel entrance by the side of the other dastard."
Jack Spencer, well known here, also returned home yesterday, and had much to say of the treatment of those caught in the act of rifling the dead of their jewels.
"At the corner of Market and Third streets on Wednesday," said Mr.
Spencer of Los Angeles, "I saw a man attempting to cut the fingers from the hand of a dead woman in order to secure the rings. Three soldiers witnessed the deed at the same time and ordered the man to throw up his hands. Instead of obeying he drew a revolver from his pocket and began to fire without warning.
"The three soldiers, reinforced by half a dozen uniformed patrolmen, raised their rifles to their shoulders and fired. With the first shots the man fell, and when the soldiers went to the body to dump it into an alley eleven bullets were found to have entered it."