Identifier: historyofearthqu00aitk (find matches)
Title: A history of the earthquake and fire in San Francisco; an account of the disaster of April 18, 1906 and its immediate results
Year: 1906 (1900s)
Authors: Aitken, Frank W Hilton, Edward
Subjects: Earthquakes -- California San Francisco
Publisher: San Francisco, The E. Hilton Co.
Contributing Library: New York Public Library
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

View Book Page: Book Viewer
About This Book: Catalog Entry
View All Images: All Images From Book
Click here to view book online to see this illustration in context in a browseable online version of this book.

Text Appearing Before Image:
led, with greatest fury, leaping across the littleby-ways, and racing pell-mell from street to street. It was an agony of fear. People saved a little,whatever came handiest—needful or useless—andwaited for the moment when they must give up theirlittle remaining hope and flee. Some there were,not strong enough to wait, who gathered up theirpitiful bundles in panic and hurried out into the sub-urbs. Many struggled bravely to rescue the injuredfrom the oncoming flames. From the first all theresaw the coming of Ruin and Death. In addition to the innumerable tumbledownstructures which the earthquake brought to theground as scarce more than kindling—in many ofwhich people were pinioned and burned to death—a number of hotels and lodging houses collapsed,and buried in their ruins many who could not beextricated before the fire reached them. Such werethe Cosmopolitan, the Brunswick, the Denver. Wild rumors of cruelty and greed and murderamong the injured afterward got about; stories of
Text Appearing After Image:
zz OS • 3 O !V2 1 ^ )) THE EARTHQUAKE men who begged to be killed, and others who cursedtheir mothers, of parents who left their woundedchildren unaided, while they, unheeding, made theirselfish way to safety; stories, too, of fiends who cutrings from the fingers of the dead, and of swift pun-ishment by quick-shooting soldiers. But followedout to the end most of these stories have beenproved mere rumors, the weird hallucinations ofoverstrained minds. To the eternal credit of man-kind it is known that here uncountable deeds of big-hearted, unselfish kindness were done; and thatmany who died beyond the reach of help closed theireyes without complaint—stoics to the end. The people who had gone about sightseeingafter the earthquake found much to interest andamaze them. Although the big buildings downtown

Note About Images