A Crack in the Edge of the World
Page 47
Everyone who survived remembered: there was at first a shocked silence; then the screams of the injured; and then, in a score of ways and at a speed that matched the ferocity of the wind-whipped fires, people picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, took stock, and took charge.
“People picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, took stock, and took charge.”
Golden Gate Park, 1906.
A stentorian army general named Frederick Funston realized he was on his own—his superior officer was at a daughter’s wedding in Chicago—and sent orders to the Presidio military base. Within two hours, scores of soldiers were marching into the city, platoons wheeling around the fires, each man with bayonet fixed and twenty rounds of ball issued; they presented themselves to Mayor Eugene Schmitz by 7:45 A.M.—just 153 minutes after the shaking began. The mayor, a former violinist who had previously been little more than a puppet of the city’s political machine, ordered the troops to shoot any looters, demanded military dynamite and sappers to clear firebreaks, and requisitioned boats to be sent to the Oakland telegraph office to put the word out over the wires: “San Francisco is in ruins,” the cables read. “Our city needs help.”
America read those wires and dropped everything. The first relief train, from Los Angeles, steamed into the Berkeley marshaling yards by eleven o’clock that night. The navy and the Revenue Cutter Service, like the army not waiting for orders from back East, ran fire boats and rescue ferries. The powder companies worked overtime to make explosives to blast wreckage.
Washington learned of the calamity in the raw and unscripted form of Morse code messages, with no need for the interpolations of anchormen or pollsters. Congress met in emergency session and quickly passed legislation to pay all imaginable bills. By 4:00 A.M. on April 19, William Taft, President Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of war, ordered rescue trains to begin pounding toward the Rockies; one of them, originating in Virginia, was the longest hospital train ever assembled.
Millions of rations were sped to the city from Oregon and the Dakotas; within a week virtually every military tent in the army quartermaster general’s stock was pitched in San Francisco; within three weeks some ten percent of America’s standing army was on hand to help police and firefighters (whose chief had been killed early in the disaster) bring the city back to its feet.
To the great institutions go the kudos of history, and rightly so. But I delight in the lesser gestures, like that of largely forgotten San Francisco postal official Arthur Fisk, who issued an order on his personal recognizance that no letter posted without a stamp and clearly coming from the hand of a victim would go undelivered for want of fee. Thus did hundreds of the homeless of San Francisco let their loved ones know of their condition—a courtesy of a time in which efficiency, resourcefulness, and simple human kindness were prized in a manner we’d do well to emulate today.
Originally published in the New York Times on September 8, 2005. Copyright © 2005 The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.
“William Taft, President Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of war, ordered rescue trains to begin pounding toward the Rockies; one of them, originating in Virginia, was the longest hospital train ever assembled.”
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PRAISE
“IF THERE’S ANYONE QUALIFIED TO WRITE A BOOK ABOUT THE 1906 SAN FRANCISCO EARTHQUAKE AND FIRES, IT’S SIMON WINCHESTER.”
—Entertainment Weekly
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“Winches
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“Highly readable, brilliantly researched.”
—Hartford Courant
“[A] near-novelistic narrative … puts the tremendous earthquake into a planet-wide context, while still illuminating the characters at the center of the story.”
—San Francisco Weekly
“Superb.”
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“A magnificent testament to the power of planet Earth and the efforts of humankind to understand her. A master storyteller and Oxford-trained geologist, Winchester effortlessly weaves together countless threads of interest, making a powerfully compelling narrative.”
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OTHER WORKS
ALSO BY SIMON WINCHESTER
The Meaning of Everything
Krakatoa
The Map That Changed the World
The Fracture Zone
The Professor and the Madman
In Holy Terror
American Heartbeat
Their Noble Lordships
Stones of Empire
Outposts
Prison Diary: Argentina
Hong Kong: Here Be Dragons
Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles
Pacific Rising
Small World
Pacific Nightmare
The River at the Center of the World
CREDITS
Maps on pages x–xiii and 276–77 by Laura Hartman Maestro
Maps on pages 168, 183, and 260 by Nick Springer
COPYRIGHT
A hardcover edition of this book was published in 2005 by HarperCollins Publishers.
P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.
A CRACK IN THE EDGE OF THE WORLD. Copyright © 2005 by Simon Winchester. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST HARPER PERENNIAL EDITION PUBLISHED 2006.
The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows: Winchester, Simon.
Acrack in the edge of the world: America and the great California earthquake of 1906 / Simon Winchester.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-10: 0-06-057199-3 (alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-06-057199-3 (alk. paper)
1. San Francisco Earthquake, Calif., 1906. 2. Earthquakes—California—San Francisco—History—20th century. 3. San Francisco (Calif.)—History—20th century I. Title.
F869.S357W56 2005
979.4'61051—dc22
2005046009
ISBN-10: 0-06-057200-0 (pbk.)
ISBN-13: 978-0-06-057200-6 (pbk.)
EPub Edition © FEBRUARY 2013 ISBN: 9780062277459
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*Richter, who spent most of his career in Pasadena, at the California Institute of Technology, was a somewhat unusual man; an avid nudist and vegetarian who, to judge from his correspondence and his diaries, enjoyed a prodigious sexual appetite. More detail on his famous scale, together with an explanation of earthquake magnitudes and intensities, can be found in the appendix.