The San Francisco calamity by earthquake and fire eBook
Charles Morris
At Jefferson Park were camped thousands of people
of every class in life. On the western edge of
this park is the old Scott house, where Mrs. McKinley
lay sick for two weeks in 1901. Three times a
day the people all gathered in line before the provision
wagons for their little handouts. “Yesterday,”
says an observer, “I saw, in order before the
wagons, a Lascar sailor in his turban, about as low
a Chinatown bum as I ever set eyes on, a woman of
refined appearance, a barefooted child, two Chinamen,
and a pretty girl. They were squeezed up together
by the line, which extended for a quarter of a mile.
It is civilization in the bare bones.
“The great and rich are on a level with the
poor in the struggle for bare existence, and over
them all is the perfect, unbroken discipline of the
soldiery. They came into the city and took charge
on an hour’s notice, they saved the city from
itself in the three days of hell, and but for them
the city, even with enough provisions to feed them
in the stores and warehouses, must have gone hungry
for lack of distributive organization.”
COMEDY AND PATHOS IN THE BREAD LINE.
At one of the parks on Tuesday morning a handsomely
dressed woman with two children at her skirts stood
in a line of many hundreds where supplies were being
given out. She took some uncooked bacon, and as
she reached for it jewels sparkled on her fingers.
One of the tots took a can of condensed milk, the
other a bag of cakes.
“I have money,” she said, “’if
I could get it and use it. I have property, if
I could realize on it. I have friends, if I could
get to them. Meantime I am going to cook this
piece of bacon on bricks and be happy.”
She was only one of thousands like her.
In a walk through the city this note of cheerfulness
of the people in the face of an almost incredible
week of horror was to a correspondent the mitigating
element to the awfulness of disaster.
In the streets of the residential district in the
western addition, which the fire did not reach, women
of the houses were cooking meals on the pavement.
In most cases they had moved out the family ranges,
and were preparing the food which they had secured
from the Relief Committee.
Out on Broderick street, near the Panhandle, a piano
sounded. It was nigh ten o’clock and the
stars were shining after the rain. Fires gleamed
up and down through the shrubbery and the refugees
sat huddled together about the flames, with their
blankets about their heads, Apache-like, in an effort
to dry out after the wetting of the afternoon.
The piano, dripping with moisture, stood on the curb,
near the front of a cottage which had been wrecked
by the earthquake.
