As the hours went by, the exodus of people continued. The fascination of it all held the multitudes spell-bound. They for a time were forgetful of hunger, but moved on, this way and that as the burning districts compelled them to go. The public parks began to fill with refugees. The Presidio and the hills overlooking the city were blackened with throngs of people shivering from cold and beginning to suffer the pangs of hunger, the rich and the poor touching shoulders, condoling one with the other in lamentations. This surging mass of famishing humanity were clothed, or partially clothed, in strange and ridiculous costumes.
Household goods littered the outlying streets. Most of the wayfarers who reached the country had little luggage. Many had carried some useless article nearest at hand, selected in their hurry without thought of its value or utility.
One woman held a bird cage under her arm—empty, with the door swinging open. Another carried a carving knife in one hand and a feather-bedecked hat of gaudiness in the other. One man was seen dragging an old leather-bound trunk by a rope—investigation proved the trunk to be without contents.
Notwithstanding the people had lost their all, and in most cases were famishing, yet the great mass were good-natured and tolerant, the strong helping the weak. The chivalry of the West and its rugged manhood abided in their midst There was a common brotherhood in the ranks of these homeless human beings. Distinctions between rich and poor were obliterated—they were all fellow refugees.
No street cars were running in the city. Market Street, into which the greater number of street car railroad tracks converged, was littered with fallen buildings, useless hose and fire fighting apparatus, twisted beams, cinders, heaps of hot ashes and charred bodies of the dead.
It was about eleven o’clock in the morning of the first day of this terrible devastation that the famous Palace Hotel had finally been emptied of its last guest. The rooms throughout were bestrewn with fallen plaster from ceiling and walls, but otherwise, strange to narrate, the structure had suffered but little damage from the earthquake while all around were collapsed and fallen buildings.
At the Mission Street side of the building and on the roof the employees had fought bravely to save this noted hostelry. But as the noon hour approached they gave up all hope. Hurrying through the rooms of the departed guests in an endeavor to save, if possible, abandoned luggage, they gossiped about the “yellow streak,” as they called it, of a world-noted singer—a guest of the hotel—who had been frightened almost to death by the earthquake and developed evidence of rankest selfishness in his mad efforts to save himself.
Then in sadder tones they talked of the impending and inevitable destruction of the magnificent hotel, where most of them had been employed for years. As the heat from the on-sweeping flames began to be unbearable, they hurried away one by one until the famous caravansary was finally deserted by man and in full possession of the ruthless devouring flames.
Great crowds stood on Montgomery Street near the site of the Union Trust Building and watched the burning of the Palace Hotel. Held back by the soldiers in mournful silence, the mass of people watched the angry flames leaping from roof and windows. Soon the fire spread to the Grand Hotel across the street. The flames shot up higher, and then when their task of destruction was finally finished, gradually sank down until nothing but roofless, windowless, bare bleak walls, gaunt, blackened and charred, were left—a grim ghost of the old hotel that boasted of a million guests during its gorgeous days of usefulness, and around which twined a thousand memories of the golden days of the Argonauts of California.
Half a block away a newspaper building had been blown up by dynamite—a similar attempt with the Monadnock Building failed of its purpose.