The Treasure of Hidden Valley

by Willis George Emerson

When night finally fell, those on the north side of Market Street rejoiced greatly, for it seemed that the fire, at least in the down-town business district, had burned itself into submission. So said a well-known milliner for men, as he ate a huge steak at a famous resort on the ocean shore and indulged heavily in champagne in celebration of the saving of his premises. He celebrated a day too soon—the following morning his business house was in ashes.

To the few who were care-free in the sense that they had not lost relatives or friends, the panorama of the fire when darkness came on will never be forgotten because of the wonderful pyrotechnic display—the magnificent yet appalling splendor and beauty of the burning city.

The scene was set as by a wonder-hand of stagecraft. The fire was raging fiercely in an immense pit—topographically the lowest part of the city. Around this pit the rising ground, like a Greek amphitheatre, stretched up toward the Sutro Estate and Ricon Hill on the one side and toward California Street, Nob and Telegraph Hills on the other. To the east was Alcatraz like a sentinel in the waters; across the Bay the cities of Alameda, Oakland and Berkeley. On every vantage point the people gathered—on the heights of Alcatraz and on the roofs of buildings in the trans-bay cities. In silence they gazed at the awe-inspiring drama of destruction that was being enacted before them.

With the advance of night, the towering flames in this vast sweep of many miles of a circular fire line presented a scene that defies description. The general color effect was of a deep blood red, while the smoke as a background to the picture belched up in rolling black volumes, with here and there long forks of flashing fire shooting above the deep crimson glow of the mighty furnace.

Before the roaring billows of flame the tallest buildings were as tinder wood in their helplessness. The Call Building, lifting its head high above its neighbors, was like an ignited match-box set on end. The living flaming wall behind overtopped it as a giant does a pigmy.

Nine o’clock! Ten o’clock! Midnight!—and those who watched and waited and slept not, with nothing but excitement to stay their hunger, saw in the lurid light that by a flank movement the fire had unexpectedly crept far up Montgomery Street from the Ferry. The trade winds were stirring. The fire, in its pulsing undulations, presented the lure and the sensuous poetry of death. It barred all trespassing on the one side and burnt its way through on the other. It was seen that the entire banking district was doomed. Alas, the feeble protests of feeble men! It was a wild outlaw, untamed and untamable fire, that defied all human interference.

And Chinatown—the world-noted Chinatown of San Francisco—what of that? It too had gone the way of annihilation. They say brutality was practiced, and it is whispered to this day that those in charge of dynamiting the Chinatown section of the city were careless and did not warn the inmates of opium dens—it is said they blew up many buildings that held within them, or in the grottoes beneath, innumerable inmates. Whether or not this is true no one can positively say. If true, there is some excuse. The Chinese dwellings were honey-combed underground with dark and devious passages, and it was perhaps impossible, for lack of time and dearth of knowledge how to penetrate these hidden recesses, to warn the drugged dreamers.

In this district the fire raged as if possessed by a million devils. Over the city’s tenderloin on the edge of Chinatown, it swept with a flame of reckless wrath and purification. Buildings whose very timbers were steeped in vice and immorality burned into ashes of cleanliness. The haunts of the lustful, the wine-bibber and the dope-fiend were consumed in a fashion horrible, terrible, pitiless and final.

The city was burned into scrap iron of contortioned steel beams, ragged chimneys half broken and heaps of blackened cinder. As the hours went by it seemed the fire continually found new fuel to feed upon in its savagery and madness. The accumulation of days and years of human labor crumbled into nothingness. Thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then millions, until the enormous total reached $600,000,000 of wealth that was melted away in this fiery crucible!

Egypt, cursed by Moses and weeping for its firstborn, was in no more pitiable plight than this calamity-visited city of San Francisco shaken by earthquake shock, then swept by fire.