General Fred Funston of the U. S. Army telegraphed to the Secretary of War for authority, and within three hours was hurrying United States troops into the burning city, and immediately placed it under martial law. The crowds were quickly driven back by the soldiers, fire lines were established, government troops, guards and police all bent nobly to the task of endeavoring to subdue the flames. Buildings were dynamited to shut off the fire’s progress, insubordinate as well as predatory ruffians were shot down without mercy, and thus was order brought out of chaos. But as the hours went by, despite all efforts, the gormandizing flames consumed acres and acres of buildings.
Every wandering automobile was pressed into service and loaded with dynamite. Thus for hour after hour the losing fight with the merciless flames went on.
As the fire burnt its way south on Market Street, the isolated centers crept toward each other with ever widening circles of flame. While there was no breeze to fan them on, yet the flames seemed possessed of some invisible means of progression – an unseen spirit of continued expansion lurked within. The buildings were like so much dry timber, igniting without direct contact of spark or flame, only from the tremendous heat that was generated. Sweeping on and on the different conflagrations at last came together – joined in greater strength, flared up hundreds of feet high, until it looked as if the entire city was one vast molten lake of undulating waves of fire.
The roar of the flames could be heard far beyond the confines of the city – the immense columns and clouds of black smoke continued to sweep upward, until high aloft they spread out into the great canopy as if in shame they fain would hide from angels above the terrible destruction being wrought in this fiery pit below.
As the hours went by, the exodus of people continued. The fascination of it all held the multitudes spell-bound. They for a time were forgetful of hunger, but moved on, this way and that as the burning districts compelled them to go. The public parks began to fill with refugees. The Presidio and the hills overlooking the city were blackened with throngs of people shivering from cold and beginning to suffer the pangs of hunger, the rich and the poor touching shoulders, condoling one with the other in lamentations. This surging mass of famishing humanity were clothed, or partially clothed, in strange and ridiculous costumes.
Household goods littered the outlying streets. Most of the wayfarers who reached the country had little luggage. Many had carried some useless article nearest at hand, selected in their hurry without thought of its value or utility.
One woman held a bird cage under her arm – empty, with the door swinging open. Another carried a carving knife in one hand and a feather-bedecked hat of gaudiness in the other. One man was seen dragging an old leather-bound trunk by a rope – investigation proved the trunk to be without contents.
Notwithstanding the people had lost their all, and in most cases were famishing, yet the great mass were good-natured and tolerant, the strong helping the weak. The chivalry of the West and its rugged manhood abided in their midst There was a common brotherhood in the ranks of these homeless human beings. Distinctions between rich and poor were obliterated – they were all fellow refugees.
No street cars were running in the city. Market Street, into which the greater number of street car railroad tracks converged, was littered with fallen buildings, useless hose and fire fighting apparatus, twisted beams, cinders, heaps of hot ashes and charred bodies of the dead.
It was about eleven o’clock in the morning of the first day of this terrible devastation that the famous Palace Hotel had finally been emptied of its last guest. The rooms throughout were bestrewn with fallen plaster from ceiling and walls, but otherwise, strange to narrate, the structure had suffered but little damage from the earthquake while all around were collapsed and fallen buildings.
At the Mission Street side of the building and on the roof the employees had fought bravely to save this noted hostelry. But as the noon hour approached they gave up all hope. Hurrying through the rooms of the departed guests in an endeavor to save, if possible, abandoned luggage, they gossiped about the “yellow streak,” as they called it, of a world-noted singer – a guest of the hotel – who had been frightened almost to death by the earthquake and developed evidence of rankest selfishness in his mad efforts to save himself.
Then in sadder tones they talked of the impending and inevitable destruction of the magnificent hotel, where most of them had been employed for years. As the heat from the on-sweeping flames began to be unbearable, they hurried away one by one until the famous caravansary was finally deserted by man and in full possession of the ruthless devouring flames.
Great crowds stood on Montgomery Street near the site of the Union Trust Building and watched the burning of the Palace Hotel. Held back by the soldiers in mournful silence, the mass of people watched the angry flames leaping from roof and windows. Soon the fire spread to the Grand Hotel across the street. The flames shot up higher, and then when their task of destruction was finally finished, gradually sank down until nothing but roofless, windowless, bare bleak walls, gaunt, blackened and charred, were left – a grim ghost of the old hotel that boasted of a million guests during its gorgeous days of usefulness, and around which twined a thousand memories of the golden days of the Argonauts of California.
Half a block away a newspaper building had been blown up by dynamite – a similar attempt with the Monadnock Building failed of its purpose.
When night finally fell, those on the north side of Market Street rejoiced greatly, for it seemed that the fire, at least in the down-town business district, had burned itself into submission. So said a well-known milliner for men, as he ate a huge steak at a famous resort on the ocean shore and indulged heavily in champagne in celebration of the saving of his premises. He celebrated a day too soon – the following morning his business house was in ashes.
To the few who were care-free in the sense that they had not lost relatives or friends, the panorama of the fire when darkness came on will never be forgotten because of the wonderful pyrotechnic display – the magnificent yet appalling splendor and beauty of the burning city.
The scene was set as by a wonder-hand of stagecraft. The fire was raging fiercely in an immense pit – topographically the lowest part of the city. Around this pit the rising ground, like a Greek amphitheatre, stretched up toward the Sutro Estate and Ricon Hill on the one side and toward California Street, Nob and Telegraph Hills on the other. To the east was Alcatraz like a sentinel in the waters; across the Bay the cities of Alameda, Oakland and Berkeley. On every vantage point the people gathered – on the heights of Alcatraz and on the roofs of buildings in the trans-bay cities. In silence they gazed at the awe-inspiring drama of destruction that was being enacted before them.
With the advance of night, the towering flames in this vast sweep of many miles of a circular fire line presented a scene that defies description. The general color effect was of a deep blood red, while the smoke as a background to the picture belched up in rolling black volumes, with here and there long forks of flashing fire shooting above the deep crimson glow of the mighty furnace.
Before the roaring billows of flame the tallest buildings were as tinder wood in their helplessness. The Call Building, lifting its head high above its neighbors, was like an ignited match-box set on end. The living flaming wall behind overtopped it as a giant does a pigmy.
Nine o’clock! Ten o’clock! Midnight! – and those who watched and waited and slept not, with nothing but excitement to stay their hunger, saw in the lurid light that by a flank movement the fire had unexpectedly crept far up Montgomery Street from the Ferry. The trade winds were stirring. The fire, in its pulsing undulations, presented the lure and the sensuous poetry of death. It barred all trespassing on the one side and burnt its way through on the other. It was seen that the entire banking district was doomed. Alas, the feeble protests of feeble men! It was a wild outlaw, untamed and untamable fire, that defied all human interference.
And Chinatown – the world-noted Chinatown of San Francisco – what of that? It too had gone the way of annihilation. They say brutality was practiced, and it is whispered to this day that those in charge of dynamiting the Chinatown section of the city were careless and did not warn the inmates of opium dens – it is said they blew up many buildings that held within them, or in the grottoes beneath, innumerable inmates. Whether or not this is true no one can positively say. If true, there is some excuse. The Chinese dwellings were honey-combed underground with dark and devious passages, and it was perhaps impossible, for lack of time and dearth of knowledge how to penetrate these hidden recesses, to warn the drugged dreamers.
In this district the fire raged as if possessed by a million devils. Over the city’s tenderloin on the edge of Chinatown, it swept with a flame of reckless wrath and purification. Buildings whose very timbers were steeped in vice and immorality burned into ashes of cleanliness. The haunts of the lustful, the wine-bibber and the dope-fiend were consumed in a fashion horrible, terrible, pitiless and final.
The city was burned into scrap iron of contortioned steel beams, ragged chimneys half broken and heaps of blackened cinder. As the hours went by it seemed the fire continually found new fuel to feed upon in its savagery and madness. The accumulation of days and years of human labor crumbled into nothingness. Thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then millions, until the enormous total reached $600,000,000 of wealth that was melted away in this fiery crucible!
Egypt, cursed by Moses and weeping for its firstborn, was in no more pitiable plight than this calamity-visited city of San Francisco shaken by earthquake shock, then swept by fire.
Four and one-half miles one way the fire travelled, then four and one-half miles the other it burned its devastating way. Behind it in its path of ruin were only cracked granite walls, twisted steel girders, crumbling and broken cornices; before it, a scattering field of a few untouched buildings yet to conquer.
A Nero with an evil eye on a city’s undoing, and the power of a wicked tyrant to fulfill his sordid wish, could have been no more ruthless in his dastardly heartless methods of destruction.
When the fire was finally ended the buildings that had been burned, if placed in a row, would have extended for two hundred miles in a straight line.
Never in the world’s history has there been such a fire. The burning of ancient London was child’s play beside it. Chicago’s fire was a mere bagatelle. Never has the world read, never had the world dreamed, of such a conflagration. In days to come, grandfathers will tell of it to their grandchildren, nodding their sage old heads to emphasize the horror of it all, relating to the young people who gather about their knees, how great buildings supposed to be fire-proof crumpled up before the swirling sheets of melting flame and the entire city became a prey to the all-devouring conqueror. And this is the tragic story of proud San Francisco, cosmic-tossed and fire-beleaguered capital of the Occident.