A Crack in the Edge of the World

by Simon Winchester

  It was a draconian pronouncement, and for years later it was assumed—because soldiers did indeed execute looters on the spot—that martial law had been declared. But it never had been. A city mayor has very limited authority—only the state governor can call in National Guardsmen, and only the president can summon federal troops. And, in any case, the civil courts were still in theory operational in San Francisco in 1906. So, although soldiers were given a free hand for a short while, it was at the behest of the city’s civil authority, which was always in unofficial, though ultimate, control. Later Schmitz explained: “While the orders issued at the time were perhaps without legal authority, and were extraordinary, they were accepted by the people with good nature and good will, and there was a general desire to carry out the suggestions made in my written and verbal messages.”

  But he demanded that the orders be printed. The most controversial of these was rushed out by the Altvater Printing and Stationery Company, whose works down in the Mission District were still functioning, though without electric power. Soldiers commandeered passersby to operate the treadles. The mayor had 5,000 handbills letterpressed, each sternly (and technically illegally) telling the citizens:

  The Federal Troops, the members of the Regular Police Force and all Special Police Officers have been authorized by me to KILL any and all persons engaged in Looting* or in the Commission of Any Other Crime.

  Very few people were actually shot on Schmitz’s order. When General Greely’s train arrived and he reassumed command on the following Monday, he began an inquiry but came to the conclusion that only two men had been executed by soldiers. And in May the Coroner’s Office reported that of the 358 corpses thus far recovered and examined, only one had a gunshot wound. While the figures were probably higher—bodies, it was said, were often thrown into burning ruins in order to be incinerated beyond recognition and forensic inquiry—it does appear that more was made of the intent of Schmitz’s pronouncement than of any employment of its explicit threat.

  Somehow it is indeed quite hard to imagine anyone—no matter how well armed or endowed with authority he may be—feeling anything but the utmost reluctance to carry out a summary execution in the midst of a tragedy like this. William James observed that people involved in the tragedy were awestruck by the unfolding events—their awe compounded by the fact that there was no one to blame, that everyone had suddenly become a victim of a vast natural circumstance. There was neither anger nor envy in the air, just an all-consuming need for survival. How difficult must it have been for a soldier to shoot someone dead, particularly some shabbily dressed thief who was, in all likelihood, a victim of ruin just trying to survive?

  Schmitz’s other proclamations were less contentious. He warned people that the local gas and electrical companies had been ordered to suspend their services until the mayor’s office said otherwise. “You may therefore expect the city to remain in darkness for an indefinite period.” He ordered a nighttime curfew and ended with a warning about broken chimneys and leaking gas pipes. There was no bombastic rhetoric, no call to arms, nothing to inspire or encourage. Mayor Schmitz simply forbade, warned, threatened, and instructed—a strategy that, by all indications, seemed to work well, and quickly.

  He used such military telegraph links as were working to signal both Governor Pardee in Sacramento and the mayor of Oakland, demanding help: food, fire engines, hoses, dynamite. And from all over the state, assistance began to pour in remarkably swiftly: A train from Los Angeles with wagonloads of packaged food and medicine arrived by midnight, a scant eighteen hours after the quake.

  General Funston sent cables to Washington, demanding tents, rations, medicine. William Howard Taft, the secretary of war—and the next American president—responded with exemplary promptitude. An order went out at four the following morning—Congress would pass an emergency enabling resolution the same day, making everything legal and fiscally proper—and 200,000 rations were dispatched immediately from Vancouver Barracks, on the Canadian border in Washington State. The next day more trains were ordered to leave army bases in Texas, Pennsylvania, Nebraska, Iowa, and Wyoming, all loaded with equipment. Before long every single tent in the military’s possession was in San Francisco, and the largest hospital train ever made had been sent out from Virginia. A few weeks later fully 10 percent of the standing army was there as well—an enormous commitment of men and matériel, and an immense expenditure of federal funds.

  Later on the day of the earthquake, as the first troops were fanning out and the general was ordering still more from other bases in California and beyond that were in his command district—he had 1,500 soldiers deployed by noon—the mayor moved to set up a formal committee that would reestablish order and good government in the shattered city. The committee was made up of fifty supposedly upstanding citizens, all of them men. Many were political cronies and yet, by all accounts, not nearly as corrupt as might have been supposed. Printers were swiftly set to work issuing pronouncements about the committee’s existence and its responsibilities.

  The body’s very first meeting was something of a shambles: It had to be moved from the Hall of Justice after soldiers outside dynamited a nearby building and all of the hall’s windows blew in. Schmitz, who at the time was in midstream with a powerful piece of oratory further demanding the shooting of “all and any miscreants who may seek to take advantage of the city’s awful misfortune,” asked that everyone immediately move outside to the grass in the middle of Portsmouth Square—the old plaza, in the time when the city was born—and carry on their meeting in relative peace and quiet there. The Committee of Fifty, Schmitz said, would meet twice a day for as long as the crisis lasted—and so they did, though hastily moving their points of rendezvous whenever fires bore down on them or the soldiers’ dynamiting became too deafening.

  Fresh soldiers moved in—the newest from small bases on Angel Island and Fort Miley—and took up positions, on Funston’s orders, guarding the U.S. Mint, the Post Office, and the Appraisers’ Building—all three federally owned, and all survivors of the quake. (The Appraisers’ Building was demolished later.) The National Guard came in as well, though leaderless, as their commander was away in the north of the state. Governor Pardee, at whose behest the National Guard would serve, turned up from Sacramento in the small hours of Thursday morning.

  The U.S. Navy sent in a destroyer, a fireboat, and a number of heavy tugs, together with doctors and nurses from its base on Mare Island. The Coast Guard, called the Revenue Cutter Service at the time, helped with evacuations, taking people on its boats from the Lombard Street slips to safety across in Oakland, Berkeley, or points still farther east along the Bay’s more distant shores.

  And many hundreds of pounds of high explosives were used, most of it brought in on army orders from the California Powder Works in Pinole, at the north end of San Francisco Bay. This company, built by Chinese workers at the close of the previous century, would in due course become the biggest manufacturer of TNT and dynamite in the world: At the time of the earthquake there were six plants, three at Pinole producing black blasting powder, dynamite, and guncotton for the U.S. Navy, and three near Santa Cruz making specialist powder for artillery pieces and breech-loading cannon, as well as a cartridge that was guaranteed never to “hang-fire” in a sportsman’s shotgun.

  Almost everything the company made was pressed into the service of destroying buildings and widening streets to create the desperately needed firebreaks. This sometimes led to more dramatic explosions than had been predicted. Early in the saga some soldiers, using a mysterious granular form of dynamite made for special quarrying tasks, tried to knock down a pair of houses at the corner of Kearny and Clay Streets, but both buildings were promptly set ablaze, then blew up and sent burning wood across the street, setting adjoining buildings on fire, too. Granular dynamite was never used again.

  But in time the soldiers learned how to blow up things properly,* and in due course the fires were damped down and snuffed out. The week
end after the quake was clear but for silvery feathers of steam rising from the ruins. Long trestle tables went up on the cleared streets, and were used for public feeding programs for the displaced and dispossessed. Well-known restaurants, now burned-out shells, opened under canvas awnings and began offering their familiar fare at knockdown prices. And all over the city the homeless were beginning to be settled into their immense wildernesses of tented encampments—which would be home to scores of thousands for many months.

  The mayor and his team made sure the camps were well set out: All soon had running water, bathhouses, sewers, and drains* and were protected from any further fire. Before long, small green-painted officially issued earthquake cottages, nearly 6,000 of them, replaced the army’s much-needed canvas tents, and so comfortable and cozy were they that many were inhabited for several years to come. The camps—Harbor View Camp and Lobos Square Camp among them—became like small cities, with governments and social stratification and reputations: Harbor View was said to be where the city’s hard men were sent, and there were small outbreaks of crime. But generally there was good order in the camps, and, far from there being any eruptions of contagion (always expected when sewers break and rats run wild and the people are fatigued), the health of the city actually markedly improved. People found that being compelled to live and work in the fresh air, barred from drinking hard liquor, and forced to survive on rationed food and tobacco kept them fitter and leaner than they had been for years. Hardship, to a measured degree, can be beneficial to at least some aspects of society: as with Britain during the Second World War, so with San Francisco after its great earthquake.

  Sympathy for the city’s plight was boundless. Money flowed in from outside, the sums soon amounting to $8 million: The city of Boston gave half a million, the Dominion of Canada wired in $100,000, the Businessmen’s Association of Helena, Montana, sent $6,000, the staff of Barnum and Bailey’s Circus gave up a day’s takings—$20,000, and one hitherto unsung C. E. Wilson of Clinton, Iowa, gave $500, one of the hundreds of widow’s mites, all happily received by the mayor and the governor and everyone in the city who would fain spend it on making things better. “The nation’s heart was wrung,” said Harper’s Weekly. And was it any wonder—the San Francisco people seemed “born for rejoicing,” and they should be permitted to rejoice again, as quickly as possible.

  And slowly and steadily the city began to struggle back onto its feet. Many symbols have been selected over the years to illustrate the city’s unflagging spirit. There is Francis, the St. Francis Hotel wine steward’s faithful terrier, who hid for five days in the cellars and emerged as perky as ever. And eight days after the quake, immense crowds thronged to the city’s one unburned theater to see vaudevillians and burlesques, and to watch a one-act précis of Carmen* for no better reason than pour mémoire. And to further inflate the city’s improving morale, there came the probably poetically enhanced story of a cheerful and fat Irishwoman who suckled an infant for an Italian lady too terrified to produce her own milk—thereby, in the overwrought phrasing of Harper’s magazine, making certain that “Italy drained the milk of human kindness from Erin’s fount.”

  For rising most splendidly of all to the occasion the laurels should go to one federal institution, the U.S. Post Office. For not only did this body manage to recover in double-quick time its ability to function—to collect, transmit, and deliver the mails—but managed to do so without losing one single item that was being handled at the moment the earthquake struck.

  The newly built Main Post Office building, a magnificent Beaux Arts palace close to the Mint on Seventh Street (and that still stands today, though not as a post office, and until lately with a spectacularly quake-cracked terrazzo floor), was saved by the superhuman efforts of the forty-six men who worked there—all of whom refused military orders to leave in advance of the fires. Just like their federal colleagues at the Mint (though without having the luxury of an en suite artesian well), they battled back the blaze, plugging the windows with mailbags soaked with water from the huge iron tank above the freight elevator. It took all day and most of the night to keep the blaze at bay; but, once the worst of it had passed and showed no sign of returning, the soot-stained staff picked up the toppled furniture and returned to vertical the endless racks of sorting pigeonholes. By daybreak on Friday, two days after the San Andreas Fault had ruptured, the U.S. Post Office was open for business once again.

  The city postmaster promptly announced his overarching desire that the citizens of San Francisco who used his service should be able “to tell their friends and loved ones of their condition and their needs.” Since all wires were down, there was no telegraph system worth speaking of, and telegrams inside the city were actually being delivered by the post office, on payment of a two-cent stamp. Clearly the human mail carriers were more reliable than the overhead copper cables. And so a major effort was mounted, to see that outgoing letter mail was collected properly and on time, and that it was sent across the Bay to catch the outbound postal trains for points east, north, and south.

  Temporary tented post offices were set up in the refugee camps, to ensure that those without either homes or addresses were able to send letters; and William Burke, the postmaster’s secretary, recounted what happened when he took a U.S. Mail sign from a streetcar barn and mounted it on the top of a car he had pressed into service to collect the mail.

  The effect was electrical. As people saw the machine bearing the mail coming, they cheered and shouted in a state bordering on hysteria. We told them where the collections would be made in the afternoon and asked that they spread the news. As we went into the Presidio there was almost a riot, and the people crowded around the machine and almost blocked its progress. It was evidently taken as the first sign of rehabilitation and, as it proceeded, the mail automobile left hope in its wake …

  … when I went back in the afternoon … to collect mail from the camps, the wonderful mass of communications that poured into the automobile was a study in the sudden misery that had overtaken the city. Bits of cardboard, cuffs, pieces of wrapping paper, bits of newspapers with an address on the margin, pages of books and sticks of wood all served as a means to let somebody in the outside world know that friends were alive and in need among the ruins.

  And there was one additional aspect to the marvel that was the San Francisco Post Office.

  The postmaster also decreed that, so far as private letters were concerned, it would not matter one whit if they bore a stamp or not. Maybe it was illegal; maybe it was a violation of a post office decree, or bylaw, or mantra. But, as Burke was to write,

  No man without money and without stamps who trusted to the postal service of San Francisco and dropped his unstamped letter in the mails found he had trusted in vain. Thousands of these unstamped letters, typewritten and bearing well-known return cards, were caught and returned to the firms that sent them. But no unstamped letter that bore evidence of coming from a man who could not afford stamps was delayed in transit.

  The banks, too, performed impressively—working in collaboration with the Mint, which had gold coin untouched and in abundance in its vaults. It was agreed that any bank customer needing money, and who was known as a bank customer, could be given scrip certificates that the Mint would honor in gold (which still backed currency in those days, with America firmly on the gold standard). And, thanks to this cunning device, bank business was just as busy as ever in little more than a month. The week of June 23, just eight weeks on from the disaster, saw more money change hands through the banking system than it had in the equivalent early summer week the year before. Matters were indeed going back to normal.

  So, in terms of cash and communications, San Francisco was rising fast and furiously. And yet overall the task confronting the city was prodigious. The immense scale of the disaster was fully appreciated within days of the quake, and all was made officially clear in the municipal report for the financial year that ended in June, just ten weeks after the event. Items
chosen at random hint at the size of the challenge that the city had to meet:

  City Auditor: All records and data pertaining to the financial condition of the Municipal Government … destroyed.

  County Clerk: Notwithstanding the loss of blanks, books, filing and records, the County Clerk has been continuously open, and has transacted business since the memorable eighteenth of April, without a moment’s inconvenience to the Bench, Bar, litigants or the general public.

  Sheriff: Since April 20, 1906, there are but two jails, the one on Broadway Street having been dynamited and destroyed by fire …

  Department of Elections: All records of this office, save affidavits … which happened to be in fireproof vaults … destroyed. {But there was a ruling made that accepted the profound changes in where many voters perforce now lived. In part it read: “it is the right of an elector to abide in any habitation he chooses. A tent, a cabin, a cave … if it be fixed as the abiding place with intent that it constitutes a home … is permitted for use as a residence.”}

  Public Library: Main library … totally destroyed … irreparable loss to the files of San Francisco newspapers and periodicals dating from the time when California first began to attract the attention of the world …

  Board of Education: Number of Schools Destroyed: 31.

  WITH THE CITY SUDDENLY facing demands like these, it is scarcely surprising that not a few Cassandras expressed their doubts as to the ability of either the city fathers or the citizenry to bring San Francisco quickly back to life. The British consul general, Sir Courtney Bennett, was gloomy in his assessment, made in an official telegram sent “under flying seal”* to London in September. It is a document that also displays, in its closing paragraphs, the remarkable detachment from reality that was an abiding characteristic of many diplomats of the time.