THE CARE OF THE WOUNDED.
Through all the streets ambulances and express wagons were hurrying, carrying dead and injured to morgues and hospitals. But these refuges for the wounded or receptacles for the dead were no safer than the remainder of the city. In the morgue at the Hall of Justice fifty bodies lay, but the approach of the flames rendered it necessary to remove to Jackson Square these mutilated remnants of what had once been men. Hospitals were also abandoned at intervals, doctors and nurses being forced to remove their patients in haste from the approaching flames.
There is an open park opposite City Hall. Here the Board of Supervisors met, and, with fifty substantial citizens who joined them, formed a Committee of Safety, to take in hand the direction of affairs and to seek safe quarters for the dying and the dead. Strangely enough, Mechanics’ Pavilion, opposite City Hall, had escaped injury from the earthquake, though it was only a wooden building. It had the largest floor in San Francisco, and was pressed into service at once. The police and the troops, working in harmony together, passed the word that the dead and injured should be brought there, the hospitals and morgue having become choked, and the order was quickly obeyed, until about 400 of the hurt, many of them terribly mangled, were laid in improvised cots, attended by all the physicians and trained nurses who could be obtained.
The corpses were much fewer, the workers being too busy in fighting the fire and caring for the wounded to give time and attention as yet to the dead. But one of the first wagons to arrive brought a whole family—father, mother and three children—all dead except the baby, which had a broken arm and a terrible cut across the forehead. They had been dragged from the ruins of their house on the water front. A large consignment of bodies, mostly of workingmen, came from a small hotel on Eddy Street, through the roof of which the upper part of a tall building next door had fallen, crushing all below.
FIRE ATTACKS THE MINT.
To return to the story of the conflagration, the escape of the United States Mint was one of the most remarkable incidents. Within the vaults of this fine structure was the vast sum of $300,000,000 in gold and silver coin and a value of $8,000,000 in bullion, and toward this mighty sum of wealth the flames swept on all sides, as if eager to add the reservoir of the precious metals to their spoils. The Mint building passed through the earthquake with little damage, though its big smokestacks were badly shaken. The fire seemed bent on making it its prey, every building around it being burned to the ground, and it remaining the only building for blocks that escaped destruction.
Its safety was due to the energy and activity of its employees. Superintendent Leach reached it shortly after the shock and found a number of men already there, whom he stationed at points of vantage from roof to basement. The fire apparatus of the Mint was brought into service and help given by the fire department, and after a period of strenuous labor the flames were driven back. The peril for a time was critical, the windows on Mint Avenue taking fire and also those on the rear three stories, and the flames for a time pouring in and driving back the workers. The roof also caught fire, but the men within fought like Titans, and efficient aid was given by a squad of soldiers sent to them. In the end the fire fiend was vanquished, though considerable damage was done to the adjusting rooms and the refinery, while the heavy stone cornice on that side of the building was destroyed. The total loss to the Mint was later estimated at $15,000.
Late on Wednesday evening the fire front crept close up to Mechanics’ Pavilion, where a corps of fifty physicians and numerous nurses were active in the work of relief to the wounded. Ambulances and automobiles were busy unloading new patients rescued from the ruins when word came that the building would have to be vacated in haste. Every available vehicle was at once pressed into service and the patients removed as rapidly as possible, being taken to hospitals and private houses in the safer parts of the city. Hardly had the last of the injured been carried through the door when the roof was seen to be in a blaze, and shortly afterward the whole building burst into a whirlwind of flame.
At midnight the fire was raging and roaring with unslacked rage, and at dawn of Thursday its fury was undiminished. The work of destruction was already immense. In much of the Hayes Valley district, south of McAllister and north of Market Street, the destruction was complete. From the Mechanics’ Pavilion and St. Nicholas Hotel opposite down to Oakland Ferry the journey was heartrending, the scene appalling. On each side was ruin, nothing but ruin, and hillocks of masonry and heaps of rubbish of every description filled to its middle the city’s greatest thoroughfare.
Across an alley from the Post Office stood the Grant Building, one of the headquarters of the army. Of this only the smoke-darkened walls were left. On Market Street opposite this building the beautiful front of the Hibernian Savings Bank, the favorite institution of the middle and poorer classes, presented a hideous aspect of ruin. At eleven o’clock of Wednesday night the north side of Market Street stood untouched, and hopes were entertained that the great Flood, Crocker, Phelan and other buildings would be spared, but the hunger of the fire fiend was not yet satiated, and the following day these proud structures had only their blackened ruins to show. On both sides of Market Street, down to the ferry, the tale was the same. The handsome and gigantic St. Francis Hotel, on Powell Street, fronting on Union Square, was left a ruined shell. This was one of the lofty steel structures that bore unharmed the earthquake shock, but quickly succumbed to the flames. Among the other skyscrapers north of Market Street that perished were the fourteen-story Merchants’ Exchange, and the great Mills Building, occupying almost an entire block.