The San Francisco calamity by earthquake and fire Part 6

The climax in the too free use of the rifle came on the 23d, when Major H. C. Tilden, a prominent member of the General Relief Committee, was shot and killed in his automobile by members of the citizens' patrol.

Two others in the car were struck by bullets. The automobile had been used as an ambulance and the Red Cross flag was displayed on it. The excuse of the shooters was that they did not see the flag and that the car did not stop when challenged. This act led to an order forbidding the carrying of firearms by the citizens' committees and to stricter regulation of the soldiers in the use of their weapons.

Later on looting took a new form different from that at first shown and was practiced by a different cla.s.s of people. These were the sightseers, many of them people of prominence, who entered upon a crusade of relic hunting in Chinatown, gathering and carrying off from the ashes of this quarter valuable pieces of chinaware, bronze ornaments, etc. It became necessary to put a stop to this, and on April 30th four militiamen were arrested while digging in the ruins of the Chinese bazaars, and others were frightened away by shots fired over their heads. A strong military line was then drawn around the district, and this last resource of the looter came to an end.

CHAPTER V.

The Panic Flight of a Homeless Host.

The scene that was visible in the streets of San Francisco on that dread Wednesday morning was one to make the strongest shudder with horror.

Those three minutes of devastating earth tremors were moments never to be forgotten. In such a time it is the human instinct to get into the open air, and the people stumbled from their heaving and quivering houses to find even the solid earth was swaying and rising and falling, so that here and there great rents opened in the streets. To the panic-stricken people the minutes that followed seemed years of terror.

Doubtless some among them died of sheer fright and more went mad with terror. There was a roar in the air like a burst of thunder, and from all directions came the crash of falling walls. They would run forward, then stop, as another shock seemed to take the earth from under their feet, and many of them flung themselves face downward on the ground in an agony of fear.

Two or three minutes seemed to pa.s.s before the fugitives found their voices. Then the screams of women and the wild cries of men rent the air, and with one impulse the terror-stricken host fled toward the parks, to get themselves as far as possible from the tottering and falling walls. These speedily became packed with people, most of them in the night clothes in which they had leaped or been flung from their beds, screaming and moaning at the little shocks that at intervals followed the great one. The dawn was just breaking. The gas and electric mains were gone and the street lamps were all out. The sky was growing white in the east, but before the sun could fling his early rays from the horizon there came another light, a lurid and threatening one, that of the flames that had begun to rise in the warehouse district.

The braver men and those without families to watch over set out for this endangered region, half dressed as they were. In the early morning light they could see the business district below them, many of the buildings in ruins and the flames showing redly in five or six places. Through the streets came the fire engines, called from the outlying districts by a general alarm. The firemen were not aware as yet that no water was to be had.

THE PANIC IN THE SLUMS.

On Portsmouth Square the panic was indescribable. This old tree plaza, about which the early city was built, is now in the centre of Chinatown, of the Italian district and of the "Barbary Coast," the "Tenderloin" of the Western metropolis. It is the chief slum district of the city. The tremor here ran up the Chinatown hill and shook down part of the crazy buildings on its southern edge. It brought ruin also to some of the Italian tenements. Portsmouth Square became the refuge of the terrified inhabitants. Out from their underground burrows like so many rats fled the Chinese, trembling in terror into the square, and seeking by beating gongs and other noise-making instruments to scare off the underground demons. Into the square from the other side came the Italian refugees.

The panic became a madness, knives were drawn in the insanity of the moment, and two Chinamen were taken to the morgue, stabbed to death for no other reason than pure madness. Here on one side dwelt 20,000 Chinese, and on the other thousands of Italians, Spaniards and Mexicans, while close at hand lived the riff-raff of the "Barbary Coast."

Seemingly the whole of these rushed for that one square of open ground, the two streams meeting in the centre of the square and heaping up on its edges. There they squabbled and fought in the madness of panic and despair, as so many mad wolves might have fought when caught in the red whirl of a prairie fire, until the soldiers broke in and at the bayonet's point brought some semblance of order out of the confusion of panic terror.

This scene in Portsmouth Square but ill.u.s.trated the madness of fear everywhere prevailing. On every side thousands were fleeing from the roaring furnace that minute by minute seemed to extend its boundaries.

THE FLIGHT FOR SAFETY.

In the awful scramble for safety the half-crazed survivors disregarded everything but the thought of themselves and their property. In every excavation and hole throughout the north beach householders buried household effects, throwing them into ditches and covering the holes.

Attempts were made to mark the graves of the property so that it could be recovered after the flames were appeased.

The streets were filled with struggling people, some crying and weeping and calling for missing loved ones. Crowding the sidewalks were thousands of householders attempting to drag some of their effects to places of safety. In some instances men with ropes were dragging trunks, tandem style, while others had sewing machines strapped to the trunks.

Again, women were rushing for the hills, carrying on their arms only the family cat or a bird cage.

There were two ideas in the minds of the fugitives, and in many cases these two only. One of these was to escape to the open ground of Golden Gate Park and the Presidio reservation; the other was to reach the ferry and make their way out of the seemingly doomed city.

At the ferry building a crowd numbering thousands gathered, begging for food and transportation across the bay. Hundreds had not even the ten cents fare to Oakland. Most of the refugees at this point were Chinamen and Italians, who had fled from their burned tenements with little or no personal property.

Residents of the hillsides in the central portion of the city seemingly were safe from the inferno of flames that was consuming the business section. They watched the towering mounds of flames, and speculated as to the extent of the territory that was doomed. Suddenly there was whispered alarm up and down the long line of watchers, and they hurried away to drag clothing, cooking utensils and scant provisions through the streets. From Grant Avenue the procession moved westward. Men and women dragged trunks, packed huge bundles of blankets, boxes of provisions--everything. Wagons could not be hired except by paying the most extortionate rates.

"Thank Heaven for the open s.p.a.ce of the Presidio and for Golden Gate Park!" was the unspoken thank-offering of many hearts. The great park, with its thousand and more acres of area, extending from the thinly populated part of the city across the sand dunes to the Pacific, seemed in that awful hour a G.o.d-given place of refuge. Near it and extending to the Golden Gate channel is the Presidio military reservation, containing 1,480 acres, and with only a few houses on its broad extent. Here also was a place of safety, provided that the forests which form a part of its area did not burn.

THE EXODUS FROM THE BURNING CITY.

To these open s.p.a.ces, to the suburbs, in every available direction, the fugitives streamed, in thousands, in tens of thousands, finally in hundreds of thousands, safety from those towering flames, from the tottering walls of their dwellings, from a possible return of the earthquake, their one overmastering thought. There were many persons with scanty clothing, women in underskirts and thin waists and men in shirt sleeves. Many women carried children, while others wheeled baby carriages. It was a strange and weird procession, that kept up unceasingly all that dreadful day and through the night that followed, as the all-conquering flames spread the area of terror.

At intervals news came of what was doing behind the smoke cloud. The area of the flames spread all night. People who had decided that their houses were outside of the dangerous area and had decided to pa.s.s the night, even after the terrible experience of the shake-up, under their roofs, hourly gave up the idea and struggled to the parks. There they lay in blankets, their choicest valuables by their sides, and the soldiers kept watch and order. Many lay on the bare gra.s.s of the park, with nothing between them and the chill night air. Fortunately, the weather was clear and mild, but among those who lay under the open sky were men and women who were delicately reared, accustomed all their lives to luxurious surroundings, and these must have suffered severely during that night of terror.

The fire was going on in the district south of them, and at intervals all night exhausted fire-fighters made their way to the plaza and dropped, with the breath out of them, among the huddled people and the bundles of household goods. The soldiers, who were administering affairs with all the justice of judges and all the devotion of heroes, kept three or four buckets of water, even from the women, for these men, who continued to come all the night long. There was a little food, also kept by the soldiers for these emergencies, and the sergeant had in his charge one precious bottle of whisky, from which he doled out drinks to those who were utterly exhausted.

But there was no panic. The people were calm, stunned. They did not seem to realize the extent of the calamity. They heard that the city was being destroyed; they told each other in the most natural tone that their residences were destroyed by the flames, but there was no hysteria, no outcry, no criticism.

The trip to the hills and to the water front was one of terrible hardship. Famishing women and children and exhausted men were compelled to walk seven miles around the north sh.o.r.e in order to avoid the flames and reach the ferries. Many dropped to the street under the weight of their loads, and willing fathers and husbands, their strength almost gone, strove to pick up and urge them forward again.

In the panic many mad things were done. Even soldiers were obliged in many instances to prevent men and women, made insane from the misfortune that had engulfed them, from rushing into doomed buildings in the hope of saving valuables from the ruins. In nearly every instance such action resulted in death to those who tried it. At Larkin and Sutter Streets, two men and a woman broke from the police and rushed into a burning apartment house, never to reappear.

The rush to the parks and the dunes was followed in the days that followed by as wild a rush to the ferries, due to the mad desire to escape anywhere, in any way, from the burning city.

THE WILD RUSH TO THE FERRIES.

At the ferry station on Wednesday night there was much confusion.

Mingled in an inextricable ma.s.s were people of every race and cla.s.s on earth. A common misfortune and hunger obliterated all distinctions.

Chinese, lying on pallets of rags, slept near exhausted white women with babies in their arms. Bedding, household furniture of every description, pet animals and trinkets, luggage and packages of every sort packed almost every foot of s.p.a.ce near the ferry building. Men spread bedding on the pavement and calmly slept the sleep of exhaustion, while all around a bedlam of confusion reigned.

Many of those who sought the ferry on that fatal Wednesday met a solid wall of flames extending for squares in length and utterly impa.s.sable.

In their half insane eagerness to escape some of them would have rushed into fatal danger but for the soldiers, who guarded the fire line and forced them back. Only those reached the ferry who had come in precedence of the flames, or who made a long detour to reach that avenue of flight. When the news came to the camps of refugees that it was safe to cross the burned area a procession began from the Golden Gate Park across the city and down Market Street, the thoroughfare which had long been the pride of the citizens, and a second from the Presidio, along the curving sh.o.r.e line of the north bay, thence southward along the water front. Throughout these routes, eight miles long, a continuous flow of humanity dragged its weary way all day and far into the night amidst hundreds of vehicles, from the clumsy garbage cart to the modern automobile. Almost every person and every vehicle carried luggage.

Drivers of vehicles were disregardful of these exhausted, hungry refugees and drove straight through the crowd. So dazed and deadened to all feeling were some of them that they were b.u.mped aside by carriage wheels or b.u.mped out of the way by persons.

SCENES OF HUMOR AND PATHOS.

As already stated, the scene had its humorous as well as its pathetic side, and various amusing stories are told by those who were in a frame of mind to notice ludicrous incidents in the horrors of the situation.

Two race track men met in the drive.

"h.e.l.lo, Bill; where are you living now?" asked one.

"You see that tree over there--that big one?" said Bill. "Well, you climb that. My room is on the third branch to the left," and they went away laughing.

Another observer tells these incidents of the flight: "I saw one big fat man calmly walking up Market Street, carrying a huge bird cage, and the cage was empty. He seemed to enjoy looking at the wrecked buildings.

Another man was leading a huge Newfoundland dog and carrying a kitten in his arms. He kept talking to the kitten. On Fell Street I noticed an old woman, half dressed, pushing a sewing machine up the hill. A drawer fell out, and she stopped to gather the fallen spools. Poor little seamstress, it was now her all."

A more amusing instance of the spirit of saving is that told by another narrator, who says that he saw a lone woman patiently pushing an upright piano along the pavement a few inches at a time. Evidently in this case, too, it was the poor soul's one great treasure on earth.

He also tells of a guest berating the proprietor of a hotel, a few minutes after the shock, because he had not obeyed orders to call him at five o'clock. He vowed he would never stop at that house again, a vow he might well keep, as the house is no more.

In one room where two girls were dressing the floor gave way and one of them disappeared.

"Where are you, Mary?" screamed her companion.