Down at its southeastern end, just south of a formidably unpleasant junkyard of a settlement called Bombay Beach—alive with seismometers and GPS sensors, since the fault runs right beneath it—lies a grassy field, a few yards from a levee that halts the occasional rainstorm-induced flooding of the Salton Sea, allowing farmers to grow a threadbare harvest of soybeans and alfalfa. Not far from the field is a large white building with chimneys that belch a continuous cloud of white water vapor. It is a geothermal energy plant, an electrical generating station that spins its generators with the steam that pours from the ground in unstoppable volumes, scalding hot.
The area is riddled with hot springs and geysers and blowholes—and in the field beside the levee there are scores upon scores of mud volcanoes. The Cerro Prieto Geothermal Area is centered here, and it attracts businessmen who believe they might profit from all this energy that is bubbling up—quite literally—from below. It attracts in addition a small number of the curious. The local chambers of commerce shake their heads in sad acceptance of the fact that, were the area less displeasing, the mud volcanoes of the Salton Sea could be as big an attraction as Old Faithful. But it is not a pleasing corner of the world: It is more than unlikely that the Salton Sea will ever come to rival Yellowstone, not by a long chalk.
This is the southern end of the San Andreas Fault. It vanishes here; it dives underground, heading southward deep below until it reaches the edge of what is left of the Farallon Plate, at the so-called Rivera Triple Junction in the Mexican Sea, off Mazatlán. Its final fate is so very different from everywhere else on the 750 miles of its length that it gives rise to one final big puzzle.
Why the geysers, the bubbling mud, and the streams of superheated water? There aren’t any of significance anywhere else on the fault—so why are there here?
These geological characteristics, of what is officially called the Brawley Seismic Zone, are much like the characteristics of the middle of Iceland, or parts of Hawaii, or northern New Zealand. They are the signature characteristics of a spreading zone—a place where tectonic plates are sliding away from each other, and where new material is welling up in between, all of it hot and volcanic and geothermally interesting.
But what, one might ask, is a spreading zone doing anywhere near a plate boundary where the dominant characteristics have to do with slipping and sliding and thrusting and (in the very far north) subduction?
The answer to this seems to lie in geometry—and in the simple fact that while the overall heading of the Pacific Plate itself appears to be in one direction, that of the San Andreas Fault is very slightly different and, moreover, different in different places.
Relative to the North American Plate, the Pacific Plate is heading in a direction that is 36 degrees to the west of north, and it is doing so at a rate of just a little less than an inch and a half a year. The San Andreas Fault, on the other hand, is generally moving rather more slowly, at about 1.3 inches every year. Moreover, and most important, it is moving on a heading of 41 degrees west of north, which is some 5 degrees away from the direction of the plate movement. This 5-degree discrepancy between plate and fault, and the difference in the relative speeds of plate and fault, brings with it a welter of geophysically created wrinkles—unexpected mountains, additional faults, unanticipated earthquakes—and a host of other features that are all a consequence of the imperfect nature of the world.
But in a couple of places south of Parkfield, the discrepancy is different from this mean. In the Big Bend area, for example, the fault moves in an almost due northerly direction—and so its movement compresses the coast of California and thrusts itself inward in a way that makes mountains rise out of the solid ground. In the area beside the Salton Sea, on the other hand, the fault moves outward in the direction of the sea on a heading of almost 45 degrees west of north. Rather than compressing anything here, the relative heading of plate and fault takes each away from the other—and it causes stretching—extension, in other words—and the kind of phenomena—geysers and mud volcanoes—that are associated with spreading.
North of Parkfield the fault and the plate march along a broadly similar path, which is why the slipping and sliding between the plates is so much simpler to record. It is also why, since all is so firmly locked in place, there is so much devastation when movement finally occurs.
As it did in San Francisco, of course, on the morning of April 18, 1906, and, though generally forgotten, four memorable times before as well: first in 1836, in 1838, then again in 1865, and finally and much more destructively in 1868.
The event that struck so savagely on October 21 in that particular year—when a neighbor fault called the Hayward unlocked itself and suddenly moved—had long been known as the Great San Francisco Earthquake. It was a name that survived until the event was obscured in its notoriety by what was to happen, as all had been well warned it one day would, nearly forty years later.
EIGHT
Chronicle: City of Mint and Smoke
IN A HALF-HIDDEN COVE IN THE NORTH OF WHAT WAS then called Alta California, in a bay six miles inshore from the Pacific Ocean, on the eastern side of a bluff that was protected from the cold sea frets by ranges of hills and sand dunes, there was once a patch of fertile grassland in which grew a particular profusion of a bright green herb. It was a kind of mint, its leaves highly aromatic and its tiny flowers attractive enough for a nosegay. Now properly called Clinopodium douglasii, it was given this name by the nineteenth-century Scots botanist David Douglas, the man who also gave us the Douglas fir and many types of primrose. He had been commissioned by the Royal Horticultural Society to collect plants to bring back to London, and he traveled widely along the Pacific Coast searching for specimens; but he met an early and inapposite death in Hawaii after falling into a hole and being gored by a bull that had fallen into it first.
In 1776, when a party of Spaniards journeyed north from their local capital of Monterey and came across this fertile and sheltered spot, they thought of the pretty green plant as little short of miraculous. They took their cue from the local Miwok Indians, who seemed to use the plant for all sorts of cures, and by all accounts were delightfully healthy as a result. The Indians infused it into teas and decocted it into tisanes, they prepared poultices, munched it as a breath freshener, rubbed it on their skins to ward off wild animals, or wore it in their hair for cosmetic effect. The Spanish settlers followed suit (aside from the skin rubbing, which they found distasteful) and named the fragile little plant yerba buena, the “good herb.” And more than that: They named the well-sheltered bay beside these herb-rich meadows Yerba Buena, too, which might well have been the name it still enjoys today but for those vicissitudes of Californian history that ensured that it ended up as San Francisco.
Before settling civilians there, the Spaniards had already dispatched to the neighborhood the two essentials of their rule, the soldiery and the clergy, and constructed the kind of dwelling houses they thought appropriate to their respective needs. A fort was built on the southern side of the main entrance to the harbor,* and the detachment of military men who had constructed it was ordered to remain there on sentry duty. Three miles southeast of the fort (and, as it happened, three miles southwest of Yerba Buena, too), in a valley filled with fruiting manzanita trees, a modest adobe mission house was thrown up, a Father Palou was appointed abbot, and a ceremony was held with, as the cleric noted, rifle fire taking the place of organ music and gunsmoke “supplying the want of incense.”
Ever since the Franciscans had taken over the Spaniards’ missionary work in California from the Jesuits (the latter order was banned in Spain), there had been pressure to name something, somewhere, after their patron saint back in Assisi. None of the previously founded California missions—San Diego, San Juan Capistrano, San Luis Obispo, and San José most prominent among them—had apparently proved worthy. But in 1776, both by chance and design, there were two happy coincidences. The fort that had been set down beside the Bay was formally founded on Sept
ember 17, which happens to be the day that Catholics commemorate the impression of Saint Francis’s wounds; and the nearby mission was consecrated a month later, on October 9, shortly after Saint Francis’s feast day. There was ample reason, then, to name both structures after the much-esteemed saint—one the Presidio San Francisco and the other Misión San Francisco, although the latter was more familiarly given the name Dolores, in commemoration of the suffering of the Virgin Mary. Both buildings still stand today, with the white adobe structure of the Mission Dolores the oldest surviving structure in the city that eventually spread and grew around it.
Yerba Buena, though only two and a half miles from the mission, was to remain uninhabited for nearly sixty years. But in 1835, by which time Alta California had become Mexican territory, an English sea captain named William Richardson broke its isolation, and became the first man to build a home there. Right beside the herb meadow, far enough from the shoreline to guarantee he would keep dry, he drove four long redwood posts into the ground and covered them with a foresail. He then moved in with some supplies, and ran this lonely and wretched outpost as a trading station, for the sole convenience of the owners of a pair of shallow-draft schooners that plied the upper reaches of what was fast coming to be known as San Francisco Bay. These little ships collected the hides and the tallow produced by the farms on the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers and brought it all back to the seagoing transport ships whose masters liked to lay up in Yerba Buena Cove. For the management of this station, the solitary Captain Richardson was paid a modest fee.
He had to wait only a year for fixed company. The shelter afforded by the cove quickly proved tempting for what was to become a harborful of other mariners and traders. It fast became a popular stopping-off place, and the hide trade expanded rapidly. The Russians called in often, and so did British vessels on their way to the Sandwich Islands—now Hawaii. There were French sloops, too, and American survey vessels making the first tentative explorations of a shore that, though currently Mexican, would before long be entirely their own.
Eventually one of these visiting Americans decided to join Richardson, and stay. He was named Jacob Leese and came from Ohio. Richard Dana remembered him later as a wild fellow who liked to shoot at wine bottles he had suspended from the ends of the topgallant stunsail booms (just hanging the bottles would be quite a feat).* Leese negotiated with the Mexican alcalde for land and was granted a lot directly across from Richardson’s tent; he imported boards and building materials. By Independence Day, 1836, he was able to stage a block party—the section of land between his own house and his neighbor’s theoretically constituting a street—and invited the mission settlers, Mexican infantrymen from the Presidio and farmers from the Sacramento River Valley, to join him in celebrating America’s sixtieth birthday. It was the very first party to be given by the first settlers—and from that day the tiny settlement never looked back, becoming renowned as a place for saturnalia, jollity, and drink. (And on April 15, 1838, Leese, who had married a sister of a Mexican general, became a father: His daughter, Rosalie Leese, thus became the first child to be born in the steadily expanding settlement.)
Ten years later, when the Mexican War broke out, President Polk ordered a Captain John Montgomery of the sloop-of-war USS Portsmouth to sail into the bay and seize what had by now grown from a settlement into a well-established trading village of fifty houses with a population of about 200. On July 9, 1846, Montgomery raised the American flag on the field the locals called its plaza and installed an American military governor in the Presidio. Six months later one of his officers, a lieutenant named Washington Bartlett, who had been appointed chief magistrate of the town, posted this notice in the January 30, 1847, issue of the California Star:
An Ordinance
Whereas, the local name of Yerba Buena, as applied to the settlement or town of San Francisco, is unknown beyond the district; and has been applied from the local name of the cove, on which the town is built; Therefore, to prevent confusion and mistakes in public documents, and that the town may have the advantage of the name given on the public map,
IT IS HEREBY ORDAINED that the name of San Francisco shall hereafter be used in all official communications and public documents, or records appertaining to the town.
Wash’n. A. Bartlett
Chief Magistrate
The city grew at an exuberant, almost irrational rate. Will Rogers once remarked that it was “the city that was never a town.” At the time of its renaming it already had two newspapers, and a census conducted by one of them found that in only the first six months of American governance it had more than doubled in size. The paper noted the presence among its 459 inhabitants of a minister, three doctors, and three lawyers, together with two surveyors, a teacher, eleven farmers, seven bakers, six blacksmiths, a brewer, six brickmakers, seven butchers, two cabinetmakers, three innkeepers, four tailors, eleven merchants, a morocco-luggage maker, a weaver, a watchmaker, and no fewer than twenty-six carpenters. Less scrupulously counted were a number of “Indians, Sandwich Islanders and negroes.” The Hawaiians, said the paper, generally acted as pilots and navigators, since they had the uncanny ability to grope their way around the skerries of San Francisco Bay, no matter how thick the frequent fog. And men outnumbered women in the earliest settlement by almost three to one—a condition that would dog the city for years and lead to its later reputation as a place where most of the inhabitants would misspend their days in one kind of abandon or another.
The temptation for quite another kind of abandon began in the spring of 1848, with the event that more than any other would come to define early San Francisco. This, of course, was when gold was first found at Sutter’s Mill, and, though it would later result in the explosive expansion of the town, the immediate initial effect was one of true abandonment—for, as the Annals of San Francisco put it, “Gold was the irresistible magnet that drew human souls to the place where it lay, rudely snapping asunder the feebler ties of affection and duty.” In an instant almost all of the 500 men who were then living in town at the time dropped everything and headed out to the goldfields, leaving the city, and their women, to fend for themselves. “Day after day the bay was covered with launches filled with the inhabitants and their goods, hastening up the Sacramento … leaving San Francisco like a place where the plague reigns, forsaken by its old inhabitants, a melancholy solitude.”
In the summer of 1848 both of the town’s newspapers suspended publication—but only briefly, because by early autumn came the first harbingers of the social revolution that was to come: The local government agreed to accept gold dust, to fix a price for it ($16 an ounce), to establish a mint and to manufacture coinage. Almost overnight everything changed. From the goldfields 100 miles away to the east poured gold dust worth hundreds of thousands of dollars—almost a million dollars in the first eight weeks alone—and all of it to finance the purchase of the goods that the miners needed, the shovels and trowels, the picks and knives, the bags of flour, the bottles of cheap whiskey, the tents, the boxes of eggs, and the vials of laudanum with which they would negate the effects of their otherwise untreatable ailments.
Prices for all of these goods swiftly began to skyrocket—a 500 percent rise in the price of beef, a fourfold increase in the price of flour, apothecaries making certain that a single droplet of laudanum would go for as much as $40. Merchants found they could charge more or less what they wanted: There were men out there desperate to find the wealth that they knew was waiting for them in the hills, and who would pay almost anything for the wherewithal to find it. Corruption and violence, cheating and envy, started to become a feature of everyday life. The papers began printing again, though only fitfully at first. The town’s single school, which had closed briefly for want of gold-hungry teachers, reopened in October when more dedicated replacements arrived. The docks began to bustle with activity, first with crates of imported goods bound for the diggings and then with people, who suddenly and in prodigious numbers began to pour
into the city from almost every corner of the hemisphere.
Earlier in the year a messenger had taken a tea caddy filled with gold dust to Washington, showing it to the country’s leadership to convince them of the worth of the strike in the Sierra. The sight of it prompted President Polk to make formal mention to Congress of the discoveries—even though most of the country was already fully aware of them, and had packed its bags and organized its westbound travel accordingly. So now, with the president of the United States acting as cheerleader, the influx began—and the briefly moribund town promptly sprang back into lusty and exuberant life, assuming in a matter of weeks the role of gateway, outfitter, and comprador for thousands who were lining up on faraway quaysides, readying themselves for the one-way journey to Northern California to find their fortunes.
One sees in those few short months at the start of the gold fever a city that was made hurriedly, almost as though being assembled from a kit. First a town council was appointed; then justices of the peace; and then a settler with some experience of planning was asked to create a grid of streets along which the shanties might be put up in some kind of order, with duckboards laid down outside the houses to keep down some of the dust, or the mud, and keep it off the boots and the skirt hems of the tidier citizens. A bank was built—Naglee and Sinton’s Exchange and Deposit Office. Small and primitive churches sprang up, hastily built, and small wooden halls were set aside for arriving Freemasons and Oddfellows, too. A concert was given in the local schoolhouse. A New York newspaper opened a correspondent’s office. The first Chinese settlers found their way from Canton and introduced a small slew of service shops—a laundry, a café or two, a hardware store. A ship arrived from Panama with a U.S. postmaster aboard, a man federally charged with providing post offices and deciding on local mail routes (and he also brought with him the first regular mail that had been sent from New York to this newly won corner of the country).
A Crack in the Edge of the World Page 20
