menu_book Chapter 5

V. THE FATEFUL DAY Many there were who awoke that morning to a stern realization of duty to be performed. On the first the day was recognized as one of disorganization and strange responsibilities. Mayor Schmitz hastened to the City Hall, only to find it a labyrinth of fallen walls. The Hall of Justice, damaged but still tenetable, on Kearney Street opposite Portsmouth Square,

was selected for headquarters. The heads of the police department were already there, and an early roll call showed that the entire force of 600 men was intact and available. Soon the men were being told off in various emergency details. With quick intuition of the dread possibilities from excessive drinking on such a day of excitement

and danger, when the police would all be needed for special work, an order was made at once compelling the saloons to close, and officers were dispatched through the city to put it into effect. A few willing workers had gathered around the Mayor, but others were needed. A list of names of men high in civic affairs and deep in the confidence of the people was

made up. Messengers were sent to bring them together. Street cars and telephones were alike unavailable, public utilities had become in an instant a thing of yesterday, dispatch bearers hurried about on foot, on horseback, in automobiles. Many of the latter were soon impressed into the city's service and went scurrying through

the streets on a thousand missions. Fifty men formed the coterie of assistants to the Mayor, and with former Mayor James D. Phelan as chairman, constituted an advisory board called the Committee of Safety. At once the Committee planned and worked for the help of the needy, the suppression of the criminal.

As the situation grew more grave, new tasks became apparent, and new responsibilities had to be assumed. Soon it became an emergency government. Ignorant, as of course they were, of when the end would come or what it would be, these men undertook to work out the city's salvation among themselves.

There is no other case in history where a stricken city held continuous control of its own affairs. The care of the injured had to be provided for, the country at large appealed to, firelines established. Later the hungry would have to be fed, the homeless housed, the half-dressed clothed,

and all the time the machinery of government must be kept moving, organization must be brought out of that first chaos, and life made livable among two hundred thousand helpless people in a city deprived at a stroke of cars, telephones, light, power, all the tools and conveniences on which it had come to rely, and of food and water as well, the very means of existence.

Apart from the ever-present need of fighting the fire, the first thought was for the injured. Temporary hospitals were established in many quarters. All the private sanitariums opened their doors. From the first doctors and surgeons and nurses were racing about the streets in automobiles, binding wounds, dressing burns, and here and there pronouncing the dread verdict to those

who sat by. The harbour emergency hospital on the waterfront, long a factor in the city's care of the victims of accidents and broils, was filled from the first. The injured and sick and dying were taken there in large numbers from the charnel house south of Market.

While the fire was burning hottest all around, the attendants worked away, unmindful of the danger. Ambulances and patrol wagons hurried the patients to the hospital, while others waited to remove them should it become necessary. Patients in the receiving hospital in the ruined city hall, miraculously uninjured themselves,

were quickly taken to the mechanics' pavilion, which was at once converted into a hospital. There, too, were brought scores of those who had been injured. Autos tore madly along Market Street, piled high with cots and mattresses, and bringing precious supplies. Volunteer physicians worked all morning.

While the offices of many, containing libraries and kits of instruments of priceless worth to them, were burning, they remained with those who needed their help. When the pavilion was abandoned, they joined in the exodus to the other hospitals and to the Presidio, where a field hospital had been established, giving freely of their knowledge and experience when there was nothing else left for them to offer.

Many people came to the hospitals to seek lost relatives. The cheery note of welcome and courage rose here and there, where the search ended happily. Repressed sobs, the deep intake of fear-sprung breath, told the story of others, who went from cot to cot without success. Ministers of many denominations busied themselves with the spiritual needs of the dying.

Priests of the Roman Catholic Church administered the Last Sacrament to such of the dying as were of that faith. Many, crushed by falling brick and timbers, died during the morning, in spite of all that could be done for them. Many others had been killed outright, or died before they could be extricated from the wreckage.

A temporary morgue was established in Portsmouth Square. As the fire came near, some distinguishing mark was noted for the subsequent identification of the dead, and a general burial was made hastily in shallow graves, a grim potter's field of the calamity. To assist the mayor came also the troops.

Brigadier General Frederick Funston, temporarily in command of the Department of the Pacific, was quick to see the magnitude of the emergency, and ordered out his men. Within two hours after the earthquake, 1,500 men were marching cityward from the Presidio to place themselves under the orders of the mayor. When the troops appeared on the streets, the impression went out that the city had been

placed under martial law. No more erroneous report of affairs gained a general credence than this, but its denial has had such publicity as to require only a brief repetition here. The army, and later the navy, the National Guard, and the cadets from the state university, throughout the entire time of their service in the city, were affiliating forces only,

subject to orders from the mayor, never did the city pass out of the hands of the municipal authorities. General Funston, a man of action, first put his troops in the field, and afterward reported what he had done to the Department of War at Washington, asking Secretary Taft for the proper authorization.

The closing sentence of one of his messages is unique. It reads, I shall expect to receive the necessary authority. Soon the soldiers had separated into many detachments and gone off on a thousand duties, some to form an impassable cordon along the fire line, some to fight hand to hand with the flames beside the firemen, some to rescue and care for the injured and bury the dead,

all with strict orders to enforce order at any price and to shoot looters at sight. They helped to shut up the saloons of recalcitrant liquor dealers and poured their stock into the street. They arbitrarily reduced the price of goods where merchants had made advances. They opened some stores and confiscated the goods.

They helped some tradesmen who were distributing food to the hungry without price, and assisted other dealers to keep in check the anxious buyers who feared a famine and tried to stock their larders sufficiently to meet it. They policed the streets and guarded the houses. Perhaps they were sometimes domineering, even harsh, where they should have shown the greatest

patience and lenity, but in the main they deported themselves with admirable restraint. Newspaper men were among the first in evidence. They saw great scoops in what was going on. They must get out some extras right away. There was small thought of printing facilities.

Surely some typesetting machine and press could be found in the city when it came time to use them. Reporters hurried from one stirring scene to another and wrote great copy. When the hope of their extras was shattered by the discovery that no large press was to be had, a few went to Berkeley and issued a combination paper under the title Call

Chronicle Examiner. The paper told what the men who made it knew about the earthquake and fire and what they heard was happening elsewhere. The proprietors of the papers knew nothing of the undertaking. There was too much news going to waste to bother about authorization.

The operators of the great telegraph companies stayed at their instruments all day. While anxious thousands all over the country watched the bulletins, these men remained at their keyboards, ticking off the story of the catastrophe with quiet heroism. For most people the day was one of waiting and watching only. But to some it was a time of exceptional bustle.

Wagons and push carts, backed up to the curb in the threatened districts, were being filled with business records to be taken to places of safety. Pressmen made from twenty to fifty dollars a load. Those automobiles, still in the hands of their owners, hurried along on various strange duties. Photographers were snapping their cameras everywhere.

Bank clerks busied themselves, stocking the vaults with their bank records and papers and the valuables of many merchants. Downtown, the busy and the curious were alike gradually driven back by the fire or the soldiery. Through the day the line of guards continually reformed and shifted, stretching itself to surround new blocks within the doomed circle.

Within squads of dynamiters began to appear. Everywhere they hurried, charges were set, the men scurried away, and with a roar and a cloud of dust a building would fall. Unfortunately many charges were set by unskilled hands and the fire was scattered. At this time, too, most of the dynamiting was being done with ordinary black powder,

the only explosive available. Often it set fire to the ruins it had made, or hurled burning brands in all directions. During the morning the raising of buildings, with but few exceptions, was confined to the neighborhood of Washington and Jackson, Sansaume, Battery, and Front Streets, with a few explosions in Upper Montgomery Street.

A notable exception was the early attempt to blow up the uncompleted Monodnock Building on Market Street, just across a small alley from the Palace Hotel. This attempt failed, as did also another made in the afternoon, at the time the palace was burning. One place where the dynamiting of nearby buildings helped in a successful fight with the flames was at the Appraisers Building on Battery Street, between Washington and Jackson, where

the struggle began early in the day. General John T. Dare, the appraiser, had reached the building at about eight o'clock and watched the fire approach from the rear on Washington Street. He realized that the building must inevitably ignite unless stringent means were adopted to save it, and gathering his few men together, distributed among them buckets and pans, anything

that would hold water, then he stationed them at the windows. On the top of the building was a tank containing five thousand gallons of water. From this they drew their supply, and all day long, while the fire raged around them, and while Washington Street was being dynamited, they and the soldiers who had come to help them, drenched the hot embers as they fell, and wet down the windowsills and casings when

they began to smoke, dealing out the precious water sparingly, almost grudgingly, but well. The building was saved. At the same time a similar struggle was going on at the Mint, far away to the southwest. Here there was water, but the machinery that pumped it from an artesian well had been broken by the earthquake.

The building was of heavy stonework, with iron shutters. The chief menace was in its tarred roof. Everything that could be drawn to the edge was thrown into the courtyard, and while the pumping engine was being repaired, mops to fight the fire with were wet in the vitriol tubs.

A sail on two sides at close range, and on the other two at the width only of the streets, across which were tall wooden buildings, the Mint, with its treasure store of two hundred millions, was the scene of one of the hardest and best fought battles of the conflagration. It lasted seven hours. Here too soldiers had come to help.

In the end the building was saved unharmed except where the fierce heat had scaled off part of the stone of the walls. At the post office, which was almost isolated and had only flimsy shacks for neighbors, the danger was less. Once however the fire entered one corner of the building, and the clerks who were there

turned aside from their work to subdue it and save the structure. Even on the waterfront the harbor commission was at work saving the wharves. The fire boats, Active and Leslie, with several thousand feet of hose, had come down from the Navy Yard at Vallejo and were pouring salt water on the flames as fast as their engines could pump it up.

From the Howard Street Wharf five hose lines were carried far along the front of the fire. Marines had arrived from Goat Island and were hard at work wherever there was fighting to be done. Fire engines were stationed along the eastern side of East Street, the other side was too hot for them, and were wetting down the wharf buildings and ferry houses.

A boat made frequent trips to Goat Island for fresh water for the boilers. This fight at the waterfront was the first made where water in sufficient quantities was obtainable, and it was the first place where the fire was beaten back from inflammable material. During a few small buildings East Street south from Market was saved.

The wharfage was in danger almost continually during the fire, but water and heroism saved it intact. At one time a line five thousand feet long was carried from the fire boats up the side of Telegraph Hill, but it had to be abandoned there later and a thousand feet of hose was lost.

The fire south of Market traveled fast toward the mission district far to the southwest. Except in the manufacturing district near the bay there was little to stop it. The buildings were mostly frame affairs and none too well put up. Many had been shaken down or badly shattered by the earthquake. The flames rose higher and higher and wove themselves into a leaden pall of smoke that

hid the sun as they went on their uncheckable course. At the Southern Pacific Depot and Freight Sheds, third in Townsend streets, were three men watching and waiting, armed only with a puny garden hose. Men would laugh in calmer moments at the antics those men went through. The fire came, they fought it as best they could, dragging their little toy hose around

and turning loose a few drops where the roof was catching or a door began to smoke, and giving up as much as a bucketful to a red tongue that shot out at them from some blank wall. Here they were at the front, there at the back, around the sides, on the roof, everywhere that they and their hose were needed, anywhere that there might be danger.

The kind of work that makes men mad-raving maniacs forever, or deities for a spell. The fire around them gave it up at last, and away they went to see if they could do something to help elsewhere. Such episodes, however, were all too few. In general, the fire's course went unchecked and irresistible, and those whose possessions

were threatened could only await the inevitable. As the day advanced, it became more and more evident that no one could foretell what the end would be. The need of more stringent measures for the protection of life and property also became evident as the day passed.

Lawless elements were beginning a carnival of crime. There was some looting. It was reported that there had been a murder. Special policemen were sworn in. Soon a thousand men wore special stars.

A proclamation drafted by a member of the Committee of Safety was signed by the Mayor and ordered to print. It was sent to a printing plant at 22nd and Mission, where it was soon in the forms ready to be run off, but there was no power. News stationed at the door impressed passing citizens in relays to work the press until

5,000 copies had been run off. It was posted everywhere and warned people that the troops and the police, regulars and specials, had full authority to kill anyone found looting or committing any other crime. Citizens were asked to stay at home during the hours of darkness and were warned of the dangers of fires from broken chimneys.

It was sought to lessen in this way the possibilities of new fires in the residence districts and to suppress all forms of vice and crime. The proclamation was wholly without legal basis, in a way the assumption of a dictatorship, but the iron note of necessity rang through it and few dared to violate a mandate so sweeping and yet so reasonable.

In one respect, though, the proclamation was but a grim mockery. In its admonition to the people to stay at home at night, when thousands upon thousands of them had no homes left, and of the others none knew when his home too would go. All day pitiful groups of them had fled from the burning districts, abandoning their homes to the flames.

The whole district south of Market was a desolate field of dying embers. The people from there had early formed a weary army that had trudged through many streets to the Presidio or Golden Gate Park or the beach or the San Bruno Hills. From the first they had poured out from the burning region that had been their home. Later when the Hayes Valley fire started on its ruthless course, the people there took

refuge in Jefferson Square. They rasped trunks over the sidewalks, set up shelters as best they could, tacked cards upon their stuff that it belonged to so-and-so, and then went back to see the fire as it neared their homes. In the early evening, when the fire suddenly came upon the hotel and apartment house district

adjacent to Union Square, another hurried exodus began. One block and then another was abandoned. Before the night was far advanced, Chinatown, too, was in the grasp of the destroying flames, and the Chinese joined the throng. It was a motley procession sprung from many places, its ranks ever filling with homeless

foot-sore legions, orderly and nearly silent. Out-sutter bush and pine streets, densely built up with apartments, hotels, flats and office suites, the flames advanced, and the residents there were forced to flee. All day they had harbored no idea that the fire would ever reach them. Even then, with the flames only a block off, they did not realize that their block, too,

was doomed. They waited with unreasoning confidence that, in some way, they knew not how, and by some hand, caring little whos, the tide of destruction would be turned back. They made no preparation for flight. Not until the flames were almost upon them did they leave.

Then, burdened down, they took up their retreat from the monster that was laying desol at their fair land of promise. Quickly filled trunks grated up the hills. Wagons, most of them pulled by men, rattled over the rough cobbles. Baby carriages and toy express wagons rolled along packed full with the things the fear-seized

people had snatched up in their flight. Pianos were bumped along the sidewalk. Some went to pieces in the process. Sewing machines slipped along on their rollers, with stacks of bedding and the like lashed to them.

Women hid their valuables upon their persons, or carried trinkets gypsy-wise in handkerchiefs. Men wore columns of hats five high. Some carried only a book. Parrots jabbered and scolded from many cages. Some people had blankets.

Girls usually had band-boxes. They stretched poles between them and carried suspended there bundles of clothing and provisions. Once it was only a ham. A few had the courage to smile. Friends met and made a pitiful show of cheerfulness.

Perhaps they prayed, but it was without show. None cursed. It was too desperate a time for visible emotion. Many people sat down to rest, and such a state of exhaustion had come that they slept. A doorstep, or a car track, or a curb for their pillow.

Indomitable, others continued the pathetic march. To these outcasts of the flames, the night was unending. Those that had not already lain down in the streets to rest made quick camps in the parks and open lots. Jefferson Square was thick with people who stretched blankets or rugs or overcoats, over

or between trees, anything to have a roof over their heads, and tried to call it home. Some slept. The lawns were hidden beneath the close-lying ranks of exhausted people. Many women sat alone, guarding the little horde of rescued chattels, while their menfolk went from camp to camp in a vain search for their children, for families had been separated

and loved ones lost in the migration. In fitful dreams babies cried out, and their mothers whispered bravely that it was all right. Under a tree in Golden Gate Park a child was born. Over all hung a cloud, impenetrable, gold-fringed, with a dancing lace of flame that careened

and folded and flared, deep cardinal, against the smoke above. End of Section 5.