“Once more they invited him, and he refused. One of the soldiers pointed a gun at him and said:
“‘We need such men as you to save women and children and to help fight the fire.’
“The man was on his way to find his sister, but he yielded to the inevitable. He worked all day with the soldiers, and when released to get lunch he felt that he could conscientiously desert to go and find his own loved ones.”
“Half a block down the street the soldiers were stopping all pedestrians without the official pass which showed that they were on relief business, and putting them to work heaving bricks off the pavement. Two dapper men with canes, the only clean people I saw, were caught at the corner by a sergeant, who showed great joy as he said:
“‘I give you time to git off those kid gloves, and then hustle, damn you, hustle!’ The soldiers took delight in picking out the best dressed men and keeping them at the brick piles for long terms. I passed them in the shelter of a provision wagon, afraid that even my pass would not save me. Two men are reported shot because they refused to turn in and help.”
Many of the dead, of course, will never be identified, though the names were taken of all who were known and descriptions written of the others. A story comes to us of one young girl who had followed for two days the body of her father, her only relative. It had been taken from a house on Mission Street to an undertaker’s shop just after the quake. The fire drove her out with her charge, and it was placed in Mechanics’ Pavilion. That went, and the body rested for a day at the Presidio, waiting burial. With many others, she wept on the border of the burned area, while the women cared for her.
VICTIMS TAKEN FROM THE RUINS.
On Friday eleven postal clerks, all alive, were taken from the debris of the Post Office. All at first were thought to be dead, but it was found that, although they were buried under the stone and timber, every one was alive. They had been for three days without food or water.
Two theatrical people were in a hotel in Santa Rosa when the shock came. The room was on the fourth floor. The roof collapsed. One of them was thrown from the bed and both were caught by the descending timbers and pinned helplessly beneath the debris. They could speak to each other and could touch one another’s hands, but the weight was so great that they could do nothing to liberate themselves. After three hours rescuers came, cut a hole in the roof and both were released uninjured.
Even the docks were converted into hospitals in the stringent exigency of the occasion, about 100 patients being stretched on Folsom street dock at one time. In the evening tugs conveyed them to Goat Island, where they were lodged in the hospital. The docks from Howard Street to Folsom Street had been saved, the fire at this point not being permitted to creep farther east than Main Street. Another series of fatalities occurred, caused by the stampeding of a herd of cattle at Sixth and Folsom Streets. Three hundred of the panic-stricken animals ran amuck when they saw and felt the flames and charged wildly down the street, trampling under foot all who were in the way. One man was gored through and through by a maddened bull. At least a dozen persons’, it is said, were killed, though probably this is an overestimate. One observer tells us that “the first sight I saw was a man with blood streaming from his wounds, carrying a dead woman in his arms. He placed the body on the floor of the court at the Palace Hotel, and then told me he was the janitor of a big building. The first he knew of the catastrophe he found himself in the basement, his dead wife beside him. The building had simply split in two, and thrown them down.”