"At that time the streets were like bedlam. Soldiers were in control, and while the regulars were almost perfect in their attempts to maintain order the militia men lost their heads. They shot some men without provocation, and never thought to cry "halt" or "who comes there?""
Henry Kohn of Chicago told of a horrible experience he had. "I had a room on the fifth floor of the Randolph Hotel, Mason and O"Farrell streets," he said. "The first quake threw me out of bed. By the time I reached the second floor the building had ceased shaking, and I went back, got my clothes, and went into the street. In the building across the street twelve persons were killed. About 11 o"clock in the morning we were in the public square, with about 1,500 other refugees, when a severe shock was felt. People became panic stricken; some prayed, women fainted, and children shrieked and cried.
"The stream of people going up n.o.b and Telegraph hills all Wednesday was a pitiful sight. Many were barefooted and lightly clad. There was nothing to eat or drink."
Sol Allenberg, a New York bookmaker, was with Kohn at the St. Francis Hotel. "I was sick in my room when the shock struck us," he said, "and my friend helped me out to a boarding house on the hill. There I had to pay $7 for a room for the rest of the day.
"It 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 exaggeration 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 ma.s.s of wreckage that could not be moved. He could not be saved from the flames that were sweeping toward 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."
CHAPTER IX.
THROUGH LANES OF MISERY.
=A Graphic Pen Picture of San Francisco in Flames and in Ruins--Scenes and Stories of Human Interest where Millionaires and Paupers Mingled in a Common Brotherhood--A Harrowing Trip in an Automobile.=
Among the most graphic and interesting pen pictures of scenes within and without the stricken city were those of Harry C. Carr, a newspaper photographer and correspondent of Los Angeles. This is his personal narrative:
I started from Los Angeles for the stricken city on that pitiful first train whose pa.s.sengers were nearly all San Francisco men trying frantically to get back to their wives and children, whose fate they could only imagine.
All one terrible day I walked about through the lanes of the charred ruins that had once been San Francisco. I was one of the hungry who robbed grocery stores for their food; one of the parched thousands who eagerly drank water out of the gutter leakage of the fire engines.
After hours of discouraging failure, of being turned back by the sentries, with the sound of dynamited houses ringing in my ears, I managed at last to join the long caravan of homeless families carrying all the property left to them in the world in sheets.
Sometimes I walked with the daughter of a Van Ness avenue millionaire lugging a bundle over her shoulder, and again with a Chinaman moaning piteously over the loss of his laundry.
I came out of San Francisco on that broken-hearted first train carrying refugees, whose faces streamed with tears as they took the last look from the Pullman windows at the weirdly beautiful red fringe of fire creeping along the ridges of the distant hills, burning the remnants of San Francisco.
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 hurried into the town looking for an automobile.
One of the pa.s.sengers 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 cheerful 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 hammer, the entire building had sunk one story 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 G.o.d.
They were trekking, 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.