The San Francisco calamity by earthquake and fire eBook
Charles Morris
While multitudes escaped from toppling buildings and
crashing walls in the dread disaster of that fatal
Wednesday morning of April 18th in San Francisco,
hundreds of the less fortunate met their death in the
ruins, and horrifying scenes were witnessed by the
survivors. Many of those who escaped had tales
of terror to tell. Mr. J. P. Anthony, as he fled
from the Ramona Hotel, saw a score or more of people
crushed to death, and as he walked the streets at
a later hour saw bodies of the dead being carried
in garbage wagons and all kinds of vehicles to the
improvised morgues, while hospitals and storerooms
were already filled with the injured. Mr. G.
A. Raymond, of Tomales, Cal., gives evidence to the
same effect. As he rushed into the street, he
says that the air was filled with falling stones and
people around him were crushed to death on all sides.
Others gave testimony to the same effect. Samuel
Wolf, of Salt Lake City, tells us that he saved one
woman from death in the hotel. She was rushing
blindly toward an open window, from which she would
have fallen fifty feet to the stone pavement below.
“On my way down Market Street,” he says,
“the whole side of a building fell out and came
so near me that I was covered and blinded by the dust.
Then I saw the first dead come by. They were
piled up in an automobile like carcasses in a butcher’s
wagon, all bloody, with crushed skulls, broken limbs
and bloody faces.”
These are frightful stories, exaggerated probably
from the nervous excitement of those terrible moments,
as are also the following statements, which form part
of the early accounts of the disaster. Thus we
are told that “from a three-story lodging house
at Fifth and Minna Streets, which collapsed Wednesday
morning, more than seventy-five bodies were taken
to-day. There are fifty other bodies in sight
in the ruins. This building was one of the first
to take fire on Fifth Street. At least 100 persons
are said to have been killed in the Cosmopolitan,
on Fourth Street. More than 150 persons are reported
dead in the Brunswick Hotel, at Seventh and Mission
Streets.”
Another statement is to the effect that “at
Seventh and Howard Streets a great lodging house took
fire after the first shock, before the guests had
escaped. There were few exits and nearly all the
lodgers perished. Mrs. J. J. Munson, one of those
in the building, leaped with her child in her arms
from the second floor to the pavement below and escaped
unhurt. She says she was the only one who escaped
from the house. Such horrors as this were repeated
at many points. B. Baker was killed while trying
to get a body from the ruins. Other rescuers heard
the pitiful wail of a little child, but were unable
to get near the point from which the cry issued.
Soon the onrushing fire ended the cry and the men turned
to other tasks.”
