Later on looting took a new form different from that at first shown and was practiced by a different class of people. These were the sightseers, many of them people of prominence, who entered upon a crusade of relic hunting in Chinatown, gathering and carrying off from the ashes of this quarter valuable pieces of chinaware, bronze ornaments, etc. It became necessary to put a stop to this, and on April 30th four militiamen were arrested while digging in the ruins of the Chinese bazaars, and others were frightened away by shots fired over their heads. A strong military line was then drawn around the district, and this last resource of the looter came to an end.
CHAPTER V.
The Panic Flight of a Homeless Host.
The scene that was visible in the streets of San Francisco on that dread Wednesday morning was one to make the strongest shudder with horror. Those three minutes of devastating earth tremors were moments never to be forgotten. In such a time it is the human instinct to get into the open air, and the people stumbled from their heaving and quivering houses to find even the solid earth was swaying and rising and falling, so that here and there great rents opened in the streets. To the panic-stricken people the minutes that followed seemed years of terror. Doubtless some among them died of sheer fright and more went mad with terror. There was a roar in the air like a burst of thunder, and from all directions came the crash of falling walls. They would run forward, then stop, as another shock seemed to take the earth from under their feet, and many of them flung themselves face downward on the ground in an agony of fear.
Two or three minutes seemed to pass before the fugitives found their voices. Then the screams of women and the wild cries of men rent the air, and with one impulse the terror-stricken host fled toward the parks, to get themselves as far as possible from the tottering and falling walls. These speedily became packed with people, most of them in the night clothes in which they had leaped or been flung from their beds, screaming and moaning at the little shocks that at intervals followed the great one. The dawn was just breaking. The gas and electric mains were gone and the street lamps were all out. The sky was growing white in the east, but before the sun could fling his early rays from the horizon there came another light, a lurid and threatening one, that of the flames that had begun to rise in the warehouse district.
The braver men and those without families to watch over set out for this endangered region, half dressed as they were. In the early morning light they could see the business district below them, many of the buildings in ruins and the flames showing redly in five or six places. Through the streets came the fire engines, called from the outlying districts by a general alarm. The firemen were not aware as yet that no water was to be had.
THE PANIC IN THE SLUMS.
On Portsmouth Square the panic was indescribable. This old tree plaza, about which the early city was built, is now in the centre of Chinatown, of the Italian district and of the “Barbary Coast,” the “Tenderloin” of the Western metropolis. It is the chief slum district of the city. The tremor here ran up the Chinatown hill and shook down part of the crazy buildings on its southern edge. It brought ruin also to some of the Italian tenements. Portsmouth Square became the refuge of the terrified inhabitants. Out from their underground burrows like so many rats fled the Chinese, trembling in terror into the square, and seeking by beating gongs and other noise-making instruments to scare off the underground demons. Into the square from the other side came the Italian refugees. The panic became a madness, knives were drawn in the insanity of the moment, and two Chinamen were taken to the morgue, stabbed to death for no other reason than pure madness. Here on one side dwelt 20,000 Chinese, and on the other thousands of Italians, Spaniards and Mexicans, while close at hand lived the riff-raff of the “Barbary Coast.”
Seemingly the whole of these rushed for that one square of open ground, the two streams meeting in the centre of the square and heaping up on its edges. There they squabbled and fought in the madness of panic and despair, as so many mad wolves might have fought when caught in the red whirl of a prairie fire, until the soldiers broke in and at the bayonet’s point brought some semblance of order out of the confusion of panic terror.