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London and New York
A House destroyed by an Earthquake
This was Senator Stanford's house at Palo Alto, about 25 miles from San Francisco, which is situated on a fault or ancient fracture of the earth's surface.
The Mississippi seemed to recede from its banks, and its waters gathered up like mountains, leaving boats high up on the sands. "The waters then moved inwards with a front wall fifteen to twenty feet in height, tearing the boats from their moorings and carrying them closely packed up a creek for a quarter of a mile. The river fell as rapidly as it had risen, and receded from its banks with such violence that it took with it a grove of cotton-woods which hedged its borders. These trees were broken off with such regularity that it was hard to persuade people who had not witnessed the catastrophe that it had not been brought about by human agency." During all the greater shocks the earth's surface was reported to have been raised in great crumplings, the crests of which opened into fissures. Some of these were six hundred to seven hundred feet long and twenty to thirty feet wide, and water and sand and even coal[13] were spouted out of them to a height of forty feet. Many craters and holes in the ground were formed, surrounded by rings of sand; and traces of them remain to this day, a century-old monument of the destruction wrought. Notable changes in the level of the country were effected; new lakes and new islands came into existence; some lakes disappeared; some of the lakes then formed remain to this day. On the eastern bank of the Mississippi a lake a hundred miles long, six miles wide, and ten to fifty feet in depth was formed; and another lake, known now as Reelfoot Lake, which came then into existence, is twenty miles long, seven miles broad—larger than Windermere, and deeper. The fishermen's boats to-day float over the top of eighteenth-century cypress trees. In addition to sections of country which were depressed and submerged, an area of some twenty miles in diameter was elevated into a low dune twenty to twenty-five feet above the level of the plain of the Mississippi. Many years after the great shocks, smaller ones were felt; and even now scarcely a year passes without slight tremors in this region, and small fissures are still formed in the ground.
[13] Or "lignite," a form of hard pitch.
It must be repeated that the great earthquakes are not those of which most is heard. The earthquake of San Francisco which did such widespread damage because it took place in the neighbourhood of a thickly populated city was, after all, less in magnitude than the Sonora earthquake of 1887, which took place in a great expanse of desert country in which few people lived and few towns had been built. But this earthquake was felt all over the countries of Mexico and the State of Arizona; and a range of mountains, the Sierra Teras, was uplifted between faults which opened upon either side. Millions of cubic feet of rock were thrown down from the slopes of the mountains into the deep cañons and water-courses, and cliffs of hard rock were shattered and split as though by a charge of giant powder. The Yakutat Bay earthquake in Alaska changed the whole face of the country over thousands of square miles during September, 1899; and along the shore of the bay the shore showed that in some cases it had been lifted from five to thirty and in some cases even fifty feet. New reefs and islands were formed; and a study of the country and the coast-line seems to show that from time to time this neighbourhood, like the beaches south of Valparaiso, is being lifted by some agency, perhaps the gradual elevation of a continent, perhaps by continuous earthquake action.
Stereo Copyright, Underwood & U.