History of the big bonanza

by Dan De Quille

When it was seen that the fire was wholly beyond control, that it must take its own course and burn its way out through the city, the wildest confusion ensued. It was as when a beaten army begins its retreat. All took what they could conveniently carry in their hands, those things they most prized, and fell back out of the track of the fire. Men, women, and children thus leaving their homes, and house after house being thus deserted, a great human wave was pushed back on all sides toward the suburbs of the city. Hundreds moved their goods again and again, each time losing something, until at last they found themselves driven far up on the open face of the mountain, empty-handed, panting for breath, and parched with thirst. While the whole face of the mountain seemed a sea of fire, with great billows tossing to and fro, the sounds that reached the ear were as fearful as the scene spread before the eye. From the armories of the various military companies, from the gunsmith shops and from many of the variety-stores, there came a constant roar of exploding cartridges, guns, pistols, fire-crackers, bombs, rockets, and all manner of fireworks, sounding like the steady discharge of small arms in a great battle. Amid and above all this din were heard the frequent and startling discharges of giant-powder, gunpowder, and Hercules powder, as building after building was blown up in various parts of the town.

As the fire began to approach the great mining-works these heavy reports became more frequent and terrific. The miners carried into buildings, not a few cartridges only of the powerful explosives they were using, but whole boxes of them, and when these[these] were fired they seemed to shake Mount Davidson from base to peak. By the blowing up of buildings, and by almost superhuman exertions at carrying water and wetting the roofs and sides of houses, the progress of the fire was stayed at a few important points, and a great amount of valuable property saved that would otherwise have been destroyed; yet, in the main, the flames held their course through the heart of the town.

Thus in a few short hours was swept away the best part of what at dawn had been a fair city—a city filled with elegant and comfortable homes, handsome and costly public buildings, large stores, packed with all manner of valuable goods, and mills and mining-works the most complete of the kind in the whole world. All these were licked from the face of the mountain, and but a wilderness of toppling walls and smoking ruins showed where they had been.

This great fire was started in a low lodging-house kept by a woman known as “Crazy Kate”—Kate Shea—by the breaking of a coal-oil lamp in a drunken row, as is asserted by those who occupied the adjoining houses.

In its march to the eastward down the slope of the mountain, the Court-house was the first large public building that was destroyed; the building and rooms of the Washoe Club, filled with elegant furniture and costly paintings, was the next to fall. Devouring at a gulp a score of smaller buildings, the International Hotel, the principal hotel of the city and a huge brick structure, filled with stores, saloons, and other places of business on its first floors, was soon reached by the flames and became a volcano of fire. About the same time, further to the southward, the Bank of California, the Enterprise (newspaper) building, and many large brick and stone structures, from three to five stories in height, were vomiting fire from every window and door from roof to basement. Soon Piper’s[Piper’s] Opera House, a huge frame building, like some great fire-ship was spreading terror through the neighborhood; while to the right and[and] southward the Methodist, Catholic, and Episcopal Churches were towering pillars of fire, with seas of fire below and about them. To the left and northward the freight and passenger depôts of the Virginia and Truckee Railroad Company, with many smaller buildings, were pouring great streams of fire to the eastward into the hoisting-works of the Consolidated Virginia Mining Company, which in turn, with over a million feet of lumber, sent a broad river of flame into and over the big mill of the company—a mill the most costly and complete then in operation in any part of the world. Not only this mill, but also the California stamp mill, near at hand, was here swept away. The buildings of the new “C and C” (California and Consolidated Virginia) shaft were saved through the most strenuous exertions of many miners, and after blowing up many houses.

To the northward at this time, the City Hall and scores of large and costly private residences were wallowing in a lake of flames, which lake overflowing on the east, inundated the several buildings constituting the works of the Ophir Mining Company, sweeping them from the face of the earth. Building after building was hurled hundreds of feet into the air to prevent the fire reaching these works, but nothing stayed its advance. Shattered buildings seemed to burst into flames in mid-air and their wrecks served but as trains laid to lead the fire more surely to the doomed works.

At times great whirlwinds came down the side of the mountain and waltzed about in the midst of the burning buildings, carrying spiral columns of flame and fiery missiles thousands of feet into the air. The tops of some of these pillars of fire were seen by persons fifteen or twenty miles away. An Indian who was on the opposite side of Mount Davidson, and on the west side of Washoe Valley, at the foot of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, fifteen miles distant, observed one of these whirlwinds of fire, which he said “looked like an augur,” and started for the city to see what had befallen it. Jonah-like he wanted to see whatever trouble there might be in store for the place. He reached the top of Mount Davidson in time to see the churches all aflame. A grand view of the burning town he must have had from the top of the mountain!

At first, while but a few houses were on fire, there was heard some wailing among the half-dressed women and children, but as block after block became involved, the ruin being wrought was on a scale so grand that the excitement and terror of the scene forbade all thought of anything so small that tears could prove a solace for its loss.

When all was over, the people for a time seemed stupefied[stupefied], or rather drunk, with the excitement of the day, and it was almost night before many of them remembered that they were without homes. All the houses left standing were soon filled; many young men, who could do so, went by rail to neighboring towns, while, for one or two nights, persons camped out on the sides of the hills—the school-houses and other public buildings remaining being filled to overflowing. The next morning after the fire, relief came pouring in from all quarters, for over two thousand buildings were destroyed, and hundreds of people were left homeless and destitute. Carson City sent two or three car-loads of provisions, ready cooked, early the next morning after the fire, to supply the immediate wants of the sufferers, and San Francisco and other towns and cities of California, at once telegraphed money and started clothing, blankets, bedding, and provisions over the Sierras, by express. A Relief Committee was organized in the city, and similar committees in San Francisco and other towns and cities of the Pacific Coast, and soon all the sufferers were made as comfortable as shelter, food, and clothing could make them. All the towns of Nevada and California contributed as generously as though their own people had been in distress, and San Francisco was untiring in her efforts for the relief of the sufferers as though the people of Virginia were her own sons and daughters. But two persons are known to have perished in the flames, though there were scores of narrow escapes. After the fire two or three men were killed by falling walls.

The insurance on the property amounted to $2,500,000, and this, with what many had left in money, stocks, and other kinds of property, joined with stout hearts and unlimited faith in the inexhaustible wealth of the mines, gave all courage to set to work at re-establishing themselves.