The Earth Shook, the Sky Burned: A Moving Record of America’s Great Earthquake and Fire: San Francisco, April 18, 1906 [Illustrated Edition]

By William Bronson

The Earth Shook, The Sky Burned is the dramatic, complete account of the San Francisco earthquake of April 18, 1906. In the early morning of that day, the sleeping city was rocked by a violent earth tremor that ravaged buildings, heaved streets, and terrified drowsy residents. But worse was to come: the devastating fire that swept across the city for three days. Nearly 30,000 structures were destroyed, and over a quarter million people were left homeless.

The Earth Shook, The Sky Burned is a blow-by-blow account of the four days of devastation, not only in San Francisco, but in its adjacent communities. Among the huge cast are Enrico Caruso, who vowed never to return after the quake; John Barrymore, reportedly shaken from a tryst with a young actress; General Frederick Funston, who directed attempts to halt the spreading fire; and Amadeo Giannini, who saved the Bank of Italy’s gold reserves in his horsecart and founded Bank of America after the fire.

Illustrated with over 400 on-the-scene photographs, this memorable book reflects the indomitable spirit and vigor of the people who built the West.

“Bronson covers every aspect of the disaster in lucid sinewy prose and the selection of a brilliant gallery of pictures…This must rank as the most moving and comprehensive account of the great disaster ever published.”—Los Angeles Times

“A fascinating book, and the pictures are magnificent.”—Chicago Sunday Tribune

“The Earth Shook, The Sky Burned will make you quake in your boots. The extraordinary story that began on April 18, 1906, has never been told better than what you will find between these covers.”—Michael McCone, Executive Director, The California Historical Society

• Language: English
• Publisher: Papamoa Press
• Release date: Jun 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9781787204645

William Bronson

William Bronson (October 30, 1926 - July 13, 1976) was an American author. Born in Oakland, California, he received his A.B. degree in 1952 from the Berkeley University and his M.A. in 1956 from Stanford University. His other books include Still Flying and Nailed to the Mast: The First Hundred Years of the Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company (1963); How to Kill a Golden State (1968); The Last Grand Adventure (1977); and Homestake: The Centennial History of America’s Greatest Gold Mine (1977). He died in 1976 at the age of 49.

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Text originally published in 1959 under the same title.

© Papamoa Press 2017, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

THE EARTH SHOOK, THE SKY BURNED

A Moving Record of America’s Great Earthquake and Fire: San Francisco, April 18, 1906

BY WILLIAM BRONSON

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

AUTHOR’S NOTES 5

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 7

PROLOGUE: APRIL 17, 1906 10

EARTH IN AGONY 37

SKY ON FIRE 53

THE LONG DAY: APRIL 19-21 115

THE DAMNDEST FINEST RUINS 142

LIFE GOES ON 163

SWATH OF DESTRUCTION 240

To the North 240

To the East 250

To the South 257

ROCKS AND HISTORY 275

FROM THE ASHES 293

EPILOGUE: SMALL SCARS AND MEMORIES 342

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 355

THE EARTH SHOOK, THE SKY BURNED

AUTHOR’S NOTES

I WASN’T HERE in 1906, but as a child, a brilliant, blurred image of the San Francisco earthquake and fire was stirred up again and again by my elders until—as with some dreams—it was almost as if I had been. There is nothing extraordinary in my experience. Because the destruction of San Francisco was the biggest event in the lives of most of those who witnessed it, the story is as deeply etched in the memories of my contemporaries’ families as it is in mine.

My mother and father were too young to be in school in 1906. All Dad can remember is being hoisted up on someone’s shoulder to give him a better view of the burning city at night. The family lived in a shingled house on Monte Vista above Piedmont Avenue in Oakland, and it must have been from there that he saw the bright-as-day sky to the west. He doesn’t remember the uphill neighbor’s chimney crashing into the house when the shock came, leaving a gaping two-story gash in the south wall, but my grandmother remembered it vividly and told me of the thunderous moment more than once. It was all very thrilling and dramatic, she wrote in reply to my questioning last spring, but I’m sure our experience was very ordinary.…

A couple of days after the quake, my grandmother’s brother and his wife, accompanied by Jim, their Chinese cook, and five of their paying guests arrived from San Francisco for a long stay. Their house, which sat across Van Ness Avenue from St. Mary’s Cathedral, had been blown apart by one of the dynamiting teams in the effort to stop the fire’s western progress. Counting all—my grandparents; Dad and his seven brothers and sisters; Aunt Mamie, the housekeeper; and the eight refugees from across the Bay—nineteen people lived several months together, cramped but well, in the damaged house and the barn out in back. Jim, the cook, incidentally, saved nothing of his own when the order came to evacuate. But without anyone knowing, he packed a set of china plates he knew were dear to my great-aunt and carried them to Golden Gate Park that night. Nothing else was rescued from the house.

By another selfless act, valuable records belonging to my grandfather were saved from the fire. He had sold his book company in San Francisco a year or so before, but maintained a small office in his successor’s quarters in the Phelan Building. Watching the fire across the Bay spread uncontrollably, he assumed his account books—the only record of a considerable amount owed to him—were consumed with the rest of downtown San Francisco. But fortunately, the young man who had bought the business made his way to the offices. Realizing he could save only a trifling few of the dictionaries and encyclopedias in his storerooms, he made a sling from a piece of rope and carted my grandfather’s immense ledgers, one under each arm, to safety. Everything he left behind was destroyed later in the day.

Stories of the fire were repeated just as readily on the other side of my family. My mother’s recollection is even hazier than my father’s, but her father, Bert Hempstead, helped organize and run the camp for Chinese refugees near Lake Merritt. For more than twenty-five years he served as constable in Oakland, and his experience in the camp was the beginning of a long friendship with the people of Oakland’s Chinese colony. One of his major jobs was to suppress violence between rival tongs, but their affection for him never waned. I remember a long line of Chinese men standing in the afternoon glare on the day of his funeral in 1937, waiting to take a last look at their friend.

All of this is to point out the kind of recollection that has filtered down through a couple of generations in a very average Bay Area family. Some of the myths surrounding the disaster were mixed in with firsthand accounts, but this, too, is typical.

For every tale I heard while rooting around in search of background material, surely a thousand remain untold. But I have seen the earthquake and fire through the eyes of hundreds who were there, and for the sake of objectivity it may be better that I wasn’t there myself. Conflicts in documentation, and there are many, sprang from the fact that a single reporter was physically unable to see more than a tiny part of what transpired, no matter how great his energy.

Like a powerful catalyst, the conflagration quickened the detail of human experience. Simple acts of kindness were framed forever in the City’s memory, and myths of impossible proportion which linger to this day grew out of the chaos. Most important, though, the people of San Francisco carried on with the vitality of youth and rebuilt their town in what even today seems an incredibly short time.

In forming this book, I have tried to catch the temper of the day and to record the events which made up the disaster and its aftermath. If it does this, and if it entertains you in the telling, I will have done what I wanted.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am, of course, indebted to many people for their assistance in the making of this volume. Some lent their aid in the normal routine of their work, and others spent precious hours of their own. All gave their help with great consideration and patience. My sincerest thanks …

TO MY FRIENDS for encouragement and valuable criticism: Nada Kovalik, Frances Coleberd, George Burkhardt, Martin Litton, Peter Waller, Clyde Childress, Rozalia De Kanter, Jack Pierce, Steven Johnson, Robert Cowgill, and Dagmar Johnson.

TO OUR FINE LIBRARIES and the librarians whose quiet, competence makes research a pleasure: the library of the California Historical Society, the Stanford University Libraries, the University of California’s Bancroft Library and main collection, the Reference Division of the San Jose Public Library, the Palo Alto Public Library, the San Francisco Public. Library, the library of the Society of California Pioneers, the Santa Rosa Public Library, and the Oakland Public Library.

TO ROY D. GRAVES, a grand San Franciscan, for his generous work in checking text and captions.

TO MY DEAR GRANDMOTHERS—Mabel Knox Bronson and Alary Jane Hempstead—for their loving help in the early stages.

TO THE PHOTO SOURCES whose files and albums yielded the heart of this book: the California Historical Society, the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, the Bancroft Library, the Bear Photo Service, Edward Zelinsky, the Society of California Pioneers, Mrs. Louise Hilbert, Harry Myers, the Morton-Waters Co., Burton F. Crandall, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco News, the Oakland Tribune, Mrs. T. T. Tourtillott, Roy D. Graves, the San Jose and Palo Alto Public Libraries, the U.S. Navy, Thomas C. Boyle, Stanford University’s Branner Library and Stanford Collection, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, Paul Chaumont, and the Automobile Manufacturers Association.

TΟ THE PHOTOGRAPHERS whose careful work in copying and printing brought the old photos to life: Tom Bogardus, Bear Photo Service, Richard T. Blake, Harvey Willis, the U. C. Library Photographic Service, Morton-Waters Co., Burton F. Crandall, Charles E. Stelling, Moulin Studios, and Keeble & Lohman.

TO THE MEN WHO TOOK THE PICTURES which fill this book. I will be grateful always for the record they left.

TO LAURENCE J. KENNEDY for use of his 1908 M.A. Thesis (U.C., Berkeley) on the progress of the fire.

TO THE FOLLOWING for a miscellany of warm favors: Tanya and Bronson Butler, Chief Rudolph Schubert, Stanleigh Arnold, James de T. Abajian, John Barr Tompkins, Edward F. Braunschweiger III, Charles O’Connor, Rev. Arthur D. Spearman, S.J., George Thompson, Clyde Arbuckle, H. Ross Smith, William Eisner, Jack Plotkin, David Myrick, Rev. Harry B. Scholefield, Rabbi Alvin I. Fine, the San Francisco Examiner, the San Francisco Call Bulletin, the office of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Leo S. Levy, Edward O. Scharetg, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, the California State Bureau of Mines, Edward D. Bronson, Mrs. William Bark, Lillian M. Church, Ruth Scibird, Aubrey Drury, Dr. Edward Tsui, members of the San Francisco Fire Department, Laurence M. Klauber, Ivan S. Rankin, Frank B. Putnam, the U.S. Coast Guard Information Office (S.F.), the Library of Congress, and the U.S. Geological Survey.

TO THE DOUBLEDAY EDITORS who wrestled the book into print: Mary Lou Mueller (now Mrs. Leslie Dorking), who got the thing off the ground, and William Kelley, who brought it home. Special thanks to Art Director Joseph P. Ascherl and Managing Editor Walter Bradbury.

TO PAUL C. JOHNSON and H. LLOYD CHURCHILL, my old mentors, for putting me on this road.

TO KNOX, MEGAN, AND NATHAN, my children, for their understanding patience.

AND TO MY WIFE, MARILYN, without whose criticism, labor, and love I could not have finished this book—although, God knows, there were moments…

WILLIAM BRONSON

Palo Alto, California

January, 1959

West on Market Street from Sutter, before the fire.

(California Historical Society)

PROLOGUE: APRIL 17, 1906

SAN FRANCISCO was booming right along with the rest of the nation in spring of 1906. Ten years of increasing prosperity which followed the depression of the mid-1890s had left a vivid mark on the City. Her silhouette was changing, filling out. San Francisco was riding the top of the boom, and optimism colored all levels of city life. It was a lively time for a lively town.

Early photograph of one of San Francisco’s most distinguished features—the cable car. Loved now, but only tolerated then, the cable lines crossed the City’s hills in a complex pattern in 1906. Picture taken on Clay from Kearny looking west, Portsmouth Plaza on the right. (California Historical Society)

If you had opened the morning paper April 17, you would have read, among other things, that the critics didn’t think much of the Metropolitan Opera Company’s opening performance at the Grand Opera House the night before, and that Teddy Roosevelt was raising hell again—this time with the insurance trust.

There was nothing new about Roosevelt’s crowding the headlines. He had something to say, usually controversial, every day. Only a couple of days before he had blasted away at the muckrakers—those writers who exposed the evils of such diverse institutions as John D. Rockefeller, child labor, and the meat-packing industry. Roosevelt’s ire was up because one of the writers attacked Congress in an article titled The Treason of the Senate.

On the local scene, failure of the Met to come up to expectation was disappointing. The second annual visit of the New York company had been eagerly awaited. More than $100,000 worth of tickets—$10 tops—had been sold in advance, and San Francisco wanted the best. The performance of Carl Goldmark’s Queen of Sheba unfortunately combined, as one critic put it, ...the wrong opera and the wrong singers.

That night, the seventeenth, Enrico Caruso was to sing Don José in Bizet’s Carmen. The celebrated tenor’s appearance was anticipated as the real opening of the season. Madame Olive Fremstad, a Wagnerian soprano, was to take the title role for the first time in her career.

The old Grand Opera House, built in 1876 on Mission between Third and Fourth streets, was one of the few buildings located South of the Slot important to the social life of the City. South of the Slot was the name given then, and still is by some, to the area that lies south of Market. The Slot was exactly that—a slot in the street