Earthquake Storms

by John Dvorak

  She reached the summit at noon on the second day of her climb. Unfortunately, the view was marred by smoke from forest fires. She ate what remained of her food, not wanting to carry it down, and drank the last of her tea, which she had combined with a little whiskey. Then she began her descent.

  Where possible, she slid down the mountainside. When she did so, she took out a burlap sack and cut two holes for her legs. She cinched the open end of the bag around her waist, tying it tightly with a cord. Then she jumped.

  “I had a slight feeling of fear about the first effort,” she would write, “but I had not more than commenced to slide when the fear vanished.”

  She laid on her back, bumping and gliding over slope after slope, her run finally ending thousands of feet down when she got into wet snow. Then she took to walking the remainder of the way, botanizing as she went.

  Botany was the main passion in her life, followed by mountain climbing. So it was appropriate that she met Gilbert on an ascent of Mount Whitney in 1903, a climb sponsored and arranged by the Sierra Club, founded by John Muir and others in 1892 and of which Eastwood and Gilbert were early members. She was then curator of botany at the California Academy of Sciences and already held a large measure of fame for the many native plants of California she had collected and classified. Gilbert was traveling back and forth between the east and the west coasts and thus was able to see Alice only rarely.

  He was a recent widower. She had had only one serious suitor in her life, a young man who had been too bashful to propose marriage. Gilbert and Eastwood tried to keep their romance private, but friends gossiped about them in letters and expected them to marry. In January 1906, for her 47th birthday, Eastwood received a card from Gilbert, who was then 62. Inside was a note. The note said that he realized she would always be devoted to her plants. It also said that he would “rather [she] be Alice Eastwood than queen or heiress.”

  On the morning of the earthquake, Eastwood was asleep in her third-floor loft apartment on Washington Street on the north side of Nob Hill. “The earthquake didn’t frighten me,” she later wrote, “as it was felt less where I live than in other parts of the city.”******

  At first she remained in bed, but as the shaking intensified, she rose and put on her bathrobe and stood in a doorway, as she had been instructed to do in case of earthquake by one of the other curators at the academy soon after she moved to California. At the end, a few dishes were broken, though only one prized one. She cleaned up the mess, ate breakfast, prepared her lunch, and started to walk to the academy, expecting this would be a normal day.

  The academy building was on Market Street near the corner of Fourth Street, 12 blocks from her apartment. It was while she was walking down the steep south side of Nob Hill that she realized something serious had happened.

  People were passing her walking up the hill carrying bundles wrapped in blankets. A few were dragging heavy trunks. She also noticed there was an unsettling quietness to the city. She did not hear the familiar clop of horses’ hooves on cobblestones, and if anyone spoke it was always in a whisper.

  The full scale of the calamity hit her when she reached Market Street. Electric and telephone wires were down. Not a pane of glass was left in any of the store windows. People were hurrying in every direction, some of them bleeding. And in the neighborhoods south of Market Street, which were then mostly wooden tenements, smoke clouds were rising, indicating that fires had already started.

  Eastwood broke into a run. She reached the door of the academy building, but it was locked. There was an open doorway to the adjoining building where people were already taking things out. She entered there.

  She climbed a few stories to where she knew there was a short bridge to the academy building, but the earthquake had collapsed the bridge so she went back to street level.

  By now she could see a wall of flames a few blocks away. The academy director had arrived and unlocked the door and Eastwood raced inside.

  The botanical collection was on the sixth floor. To reach it, one climbed a central marble staircase, but the earthquake had collapsed the staircase, leaving only the iron banisters intact. With an unbelievable amount of courage and no second thoughts, Eastwood scaled the wrecked staircase, holding onto the iron railing and putting her feet between the rungs.

  The previous year, concerned about the possibility of a fire, she had selected type specimens of the academy’s most prized plants and separated them from others in the collection. She then placed these type specimens in a specially built wooden box with glass doors that she would be able to lower, with a rope-and-pulley system, through an outside window to the ground below. But the rope-and-pulley system had not yet been constructed. When she finally reached the sixth floor and saw the special collection, she found the case had been knocked over and the boxes containing the prized plants scattered across the floor. She would have to improvise.

  She found two large aprons and laced them together using rope and string—she routinely saved rope and string—then made a line sufficiently long to reach the ground floor. With the help of another academy worker, she repeatedly lowered and raised the aprons, each time sending down another bundle of valuable plants, until every specimen in the type collection was safely on the ground. She was back on the ground floor when she remembered she had left out a key plant—a saxifrage, a smallish plant that grows close to the ground and is found in alpine areas—of which she was preparing samples to send to the New York Botanical Garden. So she again climbed the iron banister and retrieved the saxifrage. She took the entire collection outside, and after a long argument with soldiers who were preventing people from crossing back and forth across Market Street—flames were meanwhile literally starting to engulf the academy building as the fires traveled across the city at increasingly alarming speeds—she found a man with a wagon and was able to take her plants back to where she lived and stored them, at least temporarily, in the hall of her house.

  Eastwood spent the night alone in her loft apartment, unable to sleep. The fire front had stalled about a half-dozen blocks away, though the flames, as she recalled, were still bright enough to read a book by the red glow. Several times during the night her apartment rocked as firefighters dynamited nearby buildings, hoping to form a firebreak. She made use of her time by organizing her most valuable possessions in case she had to make a quick departure.

  She packed her best clothes and extra underwear, her mother’s Bible, a family photo album, and her typewriter. She had two Navajo blankets that she planned to use to cover the plants if they should be exposed to outdoor night weather. She also packed her revolver in case she had to sleep outside.

  By morning, the fire was again advancing. By midday, it had swept through Chinatown and had consumed the mansions at the top of Nob Hill. Unable to stay any longer at her place, Eastwood, with the help of two young men she knew, found another wagon and hauled her plants to the Army post at Fort Mason on the north edge of the city next to the bay, figuring, as many in the city had, that this would be the last place to stand against the fires.

  After that, she tried to return home but was stopped by soldiers. Fortunately, she had taken her packed belongings and, finding other people she knew, hired a local fishing boat to take them across the bay to Oakland. Eastwood spent the night sleeping in the attic of a friend. Several other people who also knew the homeowner joined her. Here it is tempting to imagine that somehow she and Gilbert met up that night—and they might have, though there are no letters or diary entries to support it. (They had always been discreet in their affair.)

  All that is known for sure is that except for the few possessions Eastwood took from her apartment the previous night, she lost everything else—all her furniture, her books, and many treasured items, not to mention the countless plants she was unable to save from the academy before it burned. The only personal item she managed to save from her office was a Zeiss hand lens that she alw
ays wore as a necklace when she went to work.

  And, of course, she saved a rare collection of plants—1,491 specimens, to be exact—which would become the foundation of the academy’s new botanical garden.

  Lawson was able to get a message to the governor soon after the governor’s arrival in Oakland at 3:00 A.M. on the morning after the earthquake to oversee response to the disaster—the governor’s arrival had been delayed many hours due to confusion along the railroad lines. Following the details of Lawson’s message, the governor quickly established a scientific commission to study the earthquake and its effects and signed a number of passes that allowed the bearers to travel anywhere, which included across police or military lines, to carry out such work. Gilbert received one of the passes.

  And so, on Friday, April 20, Gilbert finally made it across the bay to San Francisco. It is known that he walked along Market Street, where the fire had already passed, and at some time during the day made it to Washington Street and may have seen Eastwood’s apartment consumed by flames. He also went to Van Ness Avenue on the west side of the city, where the last attempt to stop the fire was being made.

  “The houses opposite were blistered and had glass broken,” he wrote in his notebook of the scene, “and at one place the fire broke across, to be checked at Franklin St.”

  The plan for fighting—and stopping—the fire was this: Soldiers had set up a line of cannons on the west side of the avenue and firefighters had laid dynamite charges at the bases of buildings on the other side. In one great fusillade, followed by a pattern of directed explosions, a two-mile-long section consisting mostly of elegant Victorian mansions was to be demolished. The hope was this would produce a sufficient firebreak to stop the fire.

  Whether the firebreak worked is still debated because a few hours after the mansions were destroyed along Van Ness Avenue, during the dark morning hours of Saturday, April 21, the wind direction shifted and a light rain fell. No matter what the reason, by midday the fire was finally out.

  In all, three-fourths of the city had been consumed by flames. An official report would list the number of buildings destroyed as 28,188. And over half of the city’s population of nearly 400,000 had been displaced.

  But the people of San Francisco persevered and immediately began to rebuild their city. And the members of the newly founded commission began the task of collecting and compiling information about the earthquake with the intention that earthquakes would not be ignored again.

  By Tuesday, April 24, there was enough information for Lawson to hold the first meeting of the earthquake commission, which met at noon on the university campus in Berkeley. Present were Lawson, Gilbert, astronomer Leuschner, and another astronomer, Charles Burkhalter, director of Chabot Observatory in Oakland. More members would be added later.

  They divided themselves into two committees. Leuschner and Burkhalter would collect all the information that could be used to determine the exact times the earthquake wave had passed through various places in California. Like the timing of the wave passage for the 1886 Charleston earthquake, most of these determinations would come by noting when pendulum clocks stopped and where. And then, using these determinations, Leuschner and Burkhalter might be able to compute the speed of the wave—as was done for the 1886 earthquake—and if possible track the wave’s progress backwards and pinpoint where the earthquake had originated.

  The other committee—Lawson and Gilbert, but since Lawson was chairman of the commission, most of the initial work of this second committee would be done by Gilbert—would search the countryside and talk to local people and determine what surface changes had occurred as a direct result of the earthquake. Gilbert would seek out where cracks had formed, describe the type of damage done to buildings, dams, and roads, and identify where pipelines, water lines, and gas lines had been disrupted. It was recognized early that completing this work would require a small army, so many people were eventually enlisted, in particular a number of students at the university at Berkeley and at Stanford University.

  At the time the commission first met, it was known that the most severe shaking was not confined to a small region—as Mallet had recorded after an earthquake in Italy in 1857 when damage was reported over an area of more than ten thousand square miles. What was surprising was that the greatest damage from this earthquake had occurred along a long line that ran for a long distance along the California coast and that the most severe destruction had not been in San Francisco, but in the communities immediately north of the Golden Gate. So that is where Gilbert started his investigation. And on at least one of these trips, he was accompanied by Alice Eastwood.

  Her role was much more than that of companion—or to satisfy her own need to understand the earthquake that had nearly destroyed much of her life’s work. She was familiar with the region and Gilbert was not. She had spent many a long weekend when she first moved to California walking the roads and searching the forests and the expansive grasslands for specimens to add to the academy’s botanical collection, making her a little-recognized asset and integral figure in the early years of earthquake science.

  She was staying at a friend’s house close to the university when Gilbert arrived one morning driving a one-horse buggy. They rode to the Berkeley train station, where they took a scheduled train to Sausalito. At Sausalito, they hired a horse and wagon and drove over a low range of mountains to Point Reyes Station at the north end of Bear Valley, a straight and narrow trough that separates the triangular peninsula of Point Reyes from the rest of North America. It was here that they saw one of the first peculiarities created by this recent earthquake.

  A train had been derailed. The 5:15 train for San Francisco was ready to depart on the morning of April 18 and the conductor had just swung himself onboard when the train lurched to the east. That was followed by an even greater lean to the west, so much so that the entire train—a steam locomotive and two passenger cars—was laid on its side without a single person being injured and without a single glass window being broken.

  Gilbert and Eastwood traveled the full length of Bear Valley. At Inverness, a fishing village just north of the valley, they saw a long pier that, originally straight, now had a tight curve to it. Questioning workmen who were repairing the pier, they were told that the ruined segment of the pier had telescoped together so that the pier was now twelve feet shorter than before the earthquake.

  At the southern end of Bear Valley, at Bolinas, they found a line of eucalyptus trees—set up to mark a property line—that now had an abrupt offset of ten feet. Similar offsets were seen elsewhere, along fence lines and across roads. And the direction of the offset was always the same—no matter which side of a fence line or a road one stood, the other side had moved to the right.*******

  They stopped at the dairy ranch of longtime resident Walter Skinner, also located within Bear Valley. Here they found an astounding number of offsets. A row of raspberry bushes in a garden was offset 14½. A path in the garden that Skinner and his wife attested had been opposite the front door of their house before the earthquake was now 15 feet out of place. A fence bounding a cow pen had moved 15½ feet. But the strangest feature was a barn that had broken free of its joists and foundation and moved an incredible 16 feet. And running directly under the barn, as well as between the posts where the fence that formed the cow pen was offset, between the ranch house and its now displaced path, and along the exact line where the rows of raspberry bushes were displaced, was a curious furrow-like ridge that stood about a foot high and was about 3 feet wide, where the ground surface had been torn up and heaved and that looked, for lack of a better comparison, like a giant mole had dug a straight line.

  In fact, this mole-track ridge could be followed for miles. Gilbert and Eastwood had first seen it where the eucalyptus trees at Bolinas were offset. They could trace it through the points where fence lines and roads were offset near and through Skinner’s farm. The ridge ran nearly
continuously the entire length of Bear Valley, a distance of 15 miles, from the marshy land at the head of Tomales Bay in the north to the sandy spit at Bolinas Lagoon in the south. And, as Gilbert noted, the ridge was “remarkably straight.”

  He was traveling that day with his camera and took what soon became several iconic photographs of the effects of the 1906 earthquake. One of these photographs shows the train lying on its side at Point Reyes Station, a man and a young girl looking off in different directions while a white dog seems disinterested in the whole affair. Gilbert also took several photographs of the mole track. One shows Alice Eastwood standing next to it—the mole track is running straight, the sod is overturned—on the slope of a small grass-covered hill.

  It is one of the few photographs of her for which we know approximately when the photograph was taken, in late April or in May of 1906. And so it is worth pausing and considering how she looks. She is wearing a hat decorated with flowers, one of her normal habits, disdaining the current fashion of large bird plumage on one’s hat. She is dressed in a light-colored shirtwaist and a dark ankle-length skirt, both in style at the time. Overall, there is a frumpish look about her because there seems to be a slightly bulging midsection. Is this the same woman who, just weeks before, twice scaled a broken staircase to the sixth floor of the academy building? Who, years earlier, had traversed 40 miles or more a day in forests and brush land searching for rare plant specimens?

  Yes, it is.

  A little investigation shows that Eastwood was an efficient traveler. When she went on a short trip, such as this one, she carried her nightgown as a roll around her middle, accounting for her somewhat stout appearance in the photograph—a fitting image of someone with a practical and passionate mind who had recently saved more than a thousand irreplaceable plants and had forgone the rescuing of her own possessions.

  Gilbert sent preliminary reports of his investigations to Lawson at Berkeley, as did John Branner, head of the geology department at Stanford University, who sent out a small army of students to work much of central California.