A Crack in the Edge of the World

by Simon Winchester

  PLUTON Another name for a large intruded body of igneous rock, inevitably younger than the country rock into which it has been intruded.

  RECUMBENT FOLD When the folding of a body of rock becomes so severe that the apex of the fold passes the vertical and the fold bends over upon itself (as in the folding seen from California Route 14 and illustrated on page 192), the structure is known as recumbent. It illustrates the intensity of the orogeny that was involved in its creation.

  STRIKE The line, or the compass direction of this line, that marks where an inclined geological feature intersects with the earth’s horizontal surface.

  TERRANE One of the key components of the New Geology, a terrane is a massive body of rock or rocks that manages to preserve its original identity more or less intact, despite having been moved a long way from where the rocks were first formed. In California and many American states to the west of the Rocky Mountains, a number of readily recognizable terranes have become accreted onto the original continent by the tectonic processes involving the Pacific and North American Plates. Thus, in the Basin and Range region, in states like Arizona and Nevada, immense blocks of very foreign rocks—each a terrane—have been carried thousands of miles east to form the spectacular mountains that so define the region.

  THIXOTROPIC The property of certain solid or nearly solid substances to become fluid when agitated, and then to resume their solid or semisolid state when the agitation ends. Thixotropic reactions in areas of landfill—the marina in San Francisco, Battery Park City in Manhattan—can lead to disastrous consequences in the event of earthquakes: The land turns to liquid under the influence of the shaking, and buildings collapse in great numbers.

  UMBO This knob on the very tip of a bivalved shell, such as a brachiopod (q.v.), represents the oldest, originating part of the shell, and its size and shape is much used in determining the precise type, species, and, thus, the relative age of fossils.

  SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING, WITH CAVEATS

  IN A BOOK CALLED SIXPENCE HOUSE, A WRY AND PLEASANTLY amusing recent account by an American named Paul Collins of his move to Britain’s book-dealing village of Hay-on-Wye, the author tells of finding a long-faded copy of a volume titled The San Francisco Calamity by Earthquake and Fire, written by an equally long-faded writer named Charles Morris. I found a copy in my own collection—it is one of those books with a title page that tries to tell all, breathlessly. (It begins by describing the book as “A Complete and Accurate Account of the Fearful Disaster which Visited the Great City and the Pacific Coast, the Reign of Panic and Lawlessness, the Plight of 300,000 Homeless People and the World-wide Rush to Rescue Told by Eye Witnesses including Graphic and Reliable Accounts …” and so on and so on.)

  Paul Collins notes that the book he bought had evidently been sent as a gift (to relatives in Winnipeg) in October 1906—meaning that the 446-page book had been written, published, bought, wrapped, and mailed no more than six months after the event that it sought to describe. It becomes amply clear to any reader, Mr. Collins among them, that in part as a consequence of this rush to publication, the book is almost entirely fiction.

  The cover illustration sets the tone, dominated as it is by a lurid engraving of a skyscraper busily collapsing itself into a sea of licking flames. The building is easily recognizable as the beehive-domed Claus Spreckels Building (popularly known as the Call Building, because it housed the city’s preeminant newspaper of the day). And true, it did burn, spectacularly. But far from ever collapsing, as the book’s cover suggests, it survived. Moreover it still stands today, remodeled but proudly wearing its well-known beehive roof, on San Francisco’s Market Street.

  The jacket’s fanciful design hints at the myriad other inventions within. Dubious accounts turn out to be legion, all collected and repeated by a writer whom Collins describe as one of the many local hacks all too eager “to make quick bucks off cataclysms.” One passage, which he admits he did find “viscerally affecting,” concerned a man who apparently threw himself onto the body of a woman who he claimed was his dead mother. He was supposedly smothering her face with grief-stricken kisses when a soldier noticed that what in fact he was doing was chewing off her ears, to get to hold of her diamond earrings. The soldier shot him—or, as Morris naturally wrote, “he put a bullet through the ghoul.”

  And all, so far as one can check, total nonsense.

  There are gentler and more affecting reported scenes in the book, too—a refugee walking his huge Newfoundland dog and carrying a kitten, talking to the kitten all the while. A lone woman pushing an upright piano along the road, a few inches at a time. But then there is the account of a group of soldiers watching three men who were standing on top of the roof of the Hotel Windsor, two blocks from the Call Building, which was blazing furiously. “Rather than see the crazed men fall in with the roof and be roasted alive,” Morris writes, “the military officer directed his men to shoot them, which they did in the presence of 5,000 people.”

  Is there any truth to these stories—to the tale of the earrings, or of the sad lady with her pianoforte, or the assassinated men plunging from the top of a burning hotel? Almost certainly not, say today’s more clinically detached historians. Official records note that a great number of dreadful and memorable things happened in San Francisco—sufficiently numerous, indeed, for one to have little need of invention. Yet many writers of the day, and some subsequently, seemingly found in the San Francisco story such a seductive combination of glitter, sin, and violence that it seemed entirely meet and proper to them to add a seasoning of fiction, to make the spicy even spicier.

  Hence one of the most vexing problems when examining, soberly, reports of the more lurid aspects of the disaster—and in particular those that relate specifically to the fire, which seem to be the most lurid of all. What is to be believed today, and what is more prudent to disregard?

  Charles Morris’s book certainly belongs to the latter category, as do all too many others that were written at the time. Official reports, though they are more staid and not necessarily entirely correct themselves, seem generally to be the better bet. And modern accounts have generally kept well away from the suspect material, such as the ear gnawing, unless there is written proof—a police report, a note in a coroner’s record—that it did in fact occur.

  The bibliography that follows includes many books that consider very specific aspects of the story: the insurance claims, say, or the mechanics behind strike-slip faulting. These are all invariably entirely reliable. But for anyone wishing to read unimpeachably sound accounts of the event itself, books in which the earthquake stands front and center, then the choice, particularly among the older volumes, is necessarily limited. Readers would thus be well advised to choose rather carefully, and to bear in mind that, in the light of the peculiarly flexible and liberal flamboyance that has long been associated with literary San Francisco and its most notable tragedy, one piece of advice rules: caveat lector.

  Aidala, Thomas. The Great Houses of San Francisco. New York: Arch Cape Press, 1987.

  Allen, Terence Beckington. San Francisco Coroner’s Office: A History 1850–1980. San Francisco: Redactors’ Press, 1999.

  Asbury, Herbert. The Barbary Coast. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1933.

  Bailey, Janet. The Great San Francisco Trivia and Fact Book. Nashville: Cumberland House, 1999.

  Bain, David Howard. Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad. New York: Viking Penguin, 1999.

  Bally, Albert W., and Allison R. Palmer, eds. The Geology of North America: An Overview. Boulder, CO: Geological Society of America, 1989.

  Bancroft, Hubert Howe. Some Cities and San Francisco. New York: Bancroft, 1907.

  Barker, Malcolm E. Three Fearful Days. San Francisco: Londonborn Publications, 1998.

  Bartleman, Frank. Azusa Street. New Kensington, PA: Whitaker House, 1982.

  Begich, Nick, and Jeane Manning. Angels Don’t Play This HAARP: Advances in Tesla Technology. 2nd ed. Anchorage, AK:
Earthpulse Press, 2004.

  Behr, H. H. The Hoot of the Owl. San Francisco: A. M. Robertson, 1904.

  Benet, James. A Guide to San Francisco and the Bay Region. New York: Random House, 1963.

  Bogardus, John A. Spreading the Risks: Insuring the American Experience. Chevy Chase, MD: Prosperity Press, 2003.

  Bolt, Bruce A. Earthquakes. 5th ed. New York: W. H. Freeman, 2003.

  Bolton, Herbert Eugene. Outpost of Empire: The Story of the Founding of San Francisco. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1939.

  Brechin, Gray. Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

  Bronson, William. The Earth Shook, the Sky Burned. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1986.

  Brook, James, Chris Carlsson, and Nancy J. Peters, eds. Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1998.

  Butler, Jon, Grant Wacker, and Randall Balmer. Religion in American Life: A Short History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

  Caen, Herb. The San Francisco Book. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948.

  ———, and Dong Kingman. San Francisco: City on Golden Hills. New York: Doubleday, 1967.

  Caughey, John Walton. California. 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1953.

  Chang, Iris. The Chinese in America. New York: Viking Penguin, 2003.

  Chase, Marilyn. The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco. New York: Random House, 2003.

  Chen, Young. Chinese San Francisco 1850–1943. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.

  Clarke, Thurston. California Fault: Searching for the Spirit of a State along the San Andreas. New York: Ballantine Books, 1996.

  Cleland, Robert Glass. California in Our Time. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947.

  ———. From Wilderness to Empire. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1944.

  Cohen, David, Doug Menuez, and Ron Grant Tussy, eds. Fifteen Seconds: The Great California Earthquake of 1989. San Francisco: The Tides Foundation, 1989.

  Cohen, Stan. 8.6: The Great Alaska Earthquake. Missoula, MT: Pictorial Histories Publishing, 1995.

  Collier, Michael. A Land in Motion: California’s San Andreas Fault. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

  Conrad, Barnaby. San Francisco: A Profile with Pictures. New York: Bramhall House, 1959.

  Dalessandro, James. 1906. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2004.

  Dana, Richard Henry. Two Years Before the Mast. Penguin Classics. New York: Penguin Books, 1986.

  Davis, Mike. Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. London: Picador, 2000.

  Decker, Robert, and Barbara Decker. Volcanoes. 3rd ed. New York: W. H. Freeman, 1997.

  Delehanty, Randolph. The Ultimate Guide to San Francisco. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1989.

  Dickson, Samuel. San Francisco Is Your Home. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1947.

  Dillon, Richard H. . Embarcadero. New York: Coward-McCann, 1959.

  ———. Shanghaiing Days. New York: Coward-McCann, 1961.

  ———. The Hatchet Men. New York: Coward-McCann, 1962.

  Downs, Tom. San Francisco. Victoria, Australia: Lonely Planet Publications, 2002.

  Eames, David B. San Francisco Street Secrets: The Stories Behind San Francisco Street Names. N.p.: Gem Guide Books, 1995.

  Elliott, James Welsh. Taylor & Taylor: A Reminiscence. San Francisco: The Kemble Collections, 1985.

  Erickson, Jon. Quakes, Eruptions, and Other Geologic Cataclysms. New York: Checkmark Books, 2001.

  Fallows, Samuel. Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror. [Chicago?]: Hubert O. Russell, 1906.

  Feldman, Jay. When the Mississippi Ran Backwards: Empire, Intrigue, Murder and the New Madrid Earthquakes. New York: Free Press, 2005.

  Field, Maria Antonia. Chimes of Mission Bells. San Francisco: The Philopolis Press, 1914.

  Fortey, Richard. The Earth: An Intimate History. London: HarperCollins, 2004.

  Fradkin, Philip L. Magnitude 8. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

  Fritz, William J. Roadside Geology of the Yellowstone Country. Missoula, MT: Mountain Press, 1985.

  Fuller, Myron L. The New Madrid Earthquake: A Scientific Factual Field Account. 4th ed. Marble Hill, MO: Gutenberg-Richter Publications, 1995.

  Gagey, Edmond M. The San Francisco Stage: A History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1950.

  Gentry, Curt. The Madams of San Francisco. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964.

  Gere, James M., and Haresh C. Shah. Terra Non Firma. Stanford: Stanford Alumni Association, 1984.

  Gilliam, Harold. The San Francisco Experience: The Romantic Lore behind the Fabulous Façade of the Bay Area. New York: Doubleday, 1972.

  Greer, Andrew Sean. The Confessions of Max Tivoli. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.

  Gudde, Erwin G. 1,000 California Place Names: The Story Behind the Naming of Mountains, Rivers, Lakes, Capes, Bays, Counties and Cities. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959.

  Hansen, Gladys. San Francisco Almanac. San Rafael, CA: Presidio Press, 1980.

  ———, and Emmet Condon. Denial of Disaster: The Untold Story and Photographs of the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906. San Francisco: Cameron, 1989.

  Harris, Stephen L. Agents of Chaos. Missoula, MT: Mountain Press, 1990.

  Hartman, Chester. City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

  Heizer, Robert F., and Alan F. Almquist. The Other Californians: Prejudice and Discrimination under Spain, Mexico and the United States to 1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.

  Heppenheimer, T. A. The Coming Quake. New York: Times Books, 1990.

  Herron, Don. The Literary World of San Francisco and Its Environs. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1985.

  Hicks, Geoff, and Hamish Campbell. Awesome Forces: The Natural Hazards That Threaten New Zealand. Wellington: Te Papa Press, 1999.

  Hillenbrand, Laura. Seabiscuit: An American Legend. New York: Random House, 2001.

  Holbrook, Stewart H. The Story of American Railroads. New York: Crown Publishers, 1947.

  Hough, Susan Elizabeth. Earthshaking Science: What We Know (and Don’t Know) about Earthquakes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.

  ———. Finding Fault in California: An Earthquake Tourist’s Guide. Missoula, MT: Mountain Press, 2004.

  Howard, Arthur D. Geologic History of Middle California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.

  Jeffers, H. Paul. Disaster by the Bay. Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2003.

  Jenkins, Olaf P., ed. Geologic Guidebook of the San Francisco Bay Counties. San Francisco: Department of Natural Resources Division of Mines, 1951.

  Kahn, Edgar M. Cable Car Days in San Francisco. Oakland: Friends of the San Francisco Public Library, 1976.

  Kemble, John Haskell. San Francisco Bay: A Pictorial Maritime History. New York: Cornell Maritime Press, 1957.

  Knox, Ray, and David Stewart. The New Madrid Fault Finders Guide. Marble Hill, MO: Gutenberg-Richter Publications, 1995.

  Konigsmark, Ted. Geologic Trips: San Francisco and the Bay Area. Gualala, CA: GeoPress, 1998.

  Kovach, Robert L. Early Earthquakes of the Americas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

  Kurzman, Dan. Disaster! The Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906. New York: HarperCollins, 2001.

  Leach, Frank A. Recollections of a Mint Director. Wolfeboro, NH: Bowers and Marina Galleries, 1987.

  Lockwood, Charles. Suddenly San Francisco: The Early Years of an Instant City. San Francisco: San Francisco Examiner Division of the Hearst Corporation, 1978.

  Longstreet, Stephen. The Wilder Shore. New York: Doubleday, 1968.

  McDowell, Jack, ed. . San Francisco. Menlo Park, CA: Lane Publishing, 1977.

  McGroarty, John S. California: Its History and Romance. Los Angeles: Grafton Publishing, 1911.

  McLe
od, Alexander. Pigtails and Gold Dust. Caldwell, ID: The Caxton Printers, 1947.

  McPhee, John. Assembling California. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993.

  ———. Annals of the Former World. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.

  Mader, George G., et al. Geology and Planning: The Portola Valley Experience. Portola Valley, CA: William Spangle, 1988.

  Martin, Don, and Kay Martin. Hiking Marin. San Anselmo, CA: Martin Press, 1999.

  Marty, Martin E., and R. Scott Appleby. The Glory and the Power: The Fundamentalist Challenge to the Modern World. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.

  Morris, Charles, ed. The San Francisco Calamity by Earthquake and Fire. Philadelphia: Geographical Society of Philadelphia, 1906.

  Morris, Jan. The World: Travels 1950–2000. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003.

  Neville, Amelia Ransome. The Fantastic City: Memoirs of the Social and Romantic Life of Old San Francisco. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1932.

  Nuttli, Otto W. The Effects of Earthquakes in the Central United States. 3rd ed. Marble Hill, MO: Gutenberg-Richter Publications, 1995.

  Oreskes, Naomi, ed. Plate Tectonics: An Insider’s History of the Modern Theory of the Earth. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001.

  Orme, Antony R., ed. The Physical Geography of North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

  Page, Jake, and Charles Officer. The Big One. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

  Penick, James Lal. The New Madrid Earthquakes. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1981.

  Pollock, Christopher. San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park: A Thousand and Seventeen Acres of Stories. Portland, OR: West Winds Press, 2001.

  Reisner, Marc. A Dangerous Place: California’s Unsettling Fate. New York: Pantheon Books, 2003.

  Richards, Rand. Historic San Francisco: A Concise History and Guide. San Francisco: Heritage House Publishers, 2003.