Shuddering under the memories of what seems more like a nightmare than actual reality to the survivors of this frightful calamity, they have tried to picture in words far from adequate the days of terror and the nights of horror that fell to the lot of the people of the Golden Gate city and their guests.
They recount the roar of falling structures and the groans and pitiful cries of those pinned beneath the timbers of collapsing buildings. They speak of their climbing over dead bodies heaped in the streets, and of following tortuous ways to find the only avenue of escape—the ferry, where men and women fought like infuriated animals, bent on escape from a fiery furnace.
These refugees tell of the great caravan composed of homeless persons in its wild flight to the hills for safety, and in that great procession women, harnessed to vehicles, trudging along and tugging at the shafts, hauling all that was left of their earthly belongings, and a little food that foresight told them would be necessary to stay the pangs of hunger in the hours of misery that must follow.
We give below an especially accurate picture from the description of the well-known writer, Jane Tingley, who, an eye-witness of it all, did so much to help the sufferers, and who, with all the unselfishness of true American womanhood, sacrificed her own comfort and needs for those of others.
“May God be merciful to the women and children in this land of desolation and despair!” she wrote on April 21st.
“Men have done, are doing such deeds of sublime self-sacrifice, of magnificent heroism, that deserve to make the title of American manhood immortal in the pages of history. The rest lies with the Almighty.
“I spent all of last night and to-day in that horror city across the bay. I went from this unharmed city of plenty, blooming with abounding health, thronged with happy mothers and joyous children, and spent hours among the blackened ruins and out on the windswept slopes of the sand hills by the sea, and I heard the voice of Rachel weeping for her children in the wilderness and mourning because she found them not.
“I climbed to the top of Strawberry Hill, in Golden Gate Park, and saw a woman, half naked, almost starving, her hair dishevelled and an unnatural lustre in her eyes, her gaze fixed upon the waters in the distance, and her voice repeating over and over again: ‘Here I am, my pretties; come here, come here.’
“I took her by the hand and led her down to the grass at the foot of the hill. A man—her husband—received her from me and wept as he said: ‘She is calling our three little children. She thinks the sounds of the ocean waves are the voices of our lost darlings.’
“Ever since they became separated from their children in that first terrific onrush of the multitude when the fire swept along Mission Street these two had been tramping over the hills and parks without food or rest, searching for their little ones. To all whom they have met they have addressed the same pitiful question: ‘Have you seen anything of our lost babies?’ They will not know what has become of them until order has been brought out of chaos; until the registration headquarters of the military authorities has secured the names of all who are among the straggling wanderers around the camps of the homeless. Perhaps then it will be found that these children are in a trench among the corpses of the weaklings who have succumbed to the frightful rigors of the last three days.