San Francisco, Oct. 8, 1865.

Editors Review.

Long before this reaches your city, the telegraph will have mentioned to you, casually, that San Francisco was visited by an earthquakeⒶemendation to-day, and the daily prints will have conveyed the news to their readers with the same air of indifference with which it was clothed by the unimpassioned lightning, and five minutes afterward the world will have forgotten the circumstance, under the impression that just such earthquakesⒶemendation are every-day occurrences here, and therefore not worth remembering. But if you had been here you would have conceived very different notions from these. To-day's earthquake was no ordinary affair. It is likely that future earthquakes in this vicinity, for years to come, will suffer by comparison with it.

I have tried a good many of them here, and of several varieties—some that came in the form of a universal shiver; others that gave us two or three sudden upward heaves from below; others that swayed grandly and deliberately from side to side; and still others that came rolling and undulating beneath our feet like a great wave of the sea. But to-day's specimen belonged to a new, and, I hope, a very rare, breed of earthquakes. First, there was a quick, heavy shock; three or four seconds elapsed, and then the city and county of San Francisco darted violently from north-westⒶemendation to south-east, and from south-east to north- [begin page 304] west five times with extraordinary energy and rapidity. I say “darted,” because that word comes nearest to describing the movement.

I was walking along Third street, and facing north, when the first shock came; I was walking fast, and it “broke up my gait” pretty completely—checked me—just as a strong wind will do when you turn a corner and face it suddenly. That shock was coming from the north-west, and I met it half-way. I took about six or seven steps (went back and measured the distance afterwards to decide a bet about the interval of time between the first and second shocks), and was just turning the corner into Howard street when those five angry “darts” came. I suppose the first of them proceeded from the south-east, because it moved my feet toward the opposite point of the compass—to the left—and made me stagger against the corner house on my right. The noise accompanying the shocks was a tremendous rasping sound, like the violent shaking and grinding together of a block of brick houses. It was about the most disagreeable sound you can imagine.

I will set it down here as a maxim that the operations of the human intellect are much accelerated by an earthquake. Usually I do not think rapidly—but I did upon this occasion. I thought rapidly, vividly, and distinctly. With the first shock of the five, I thought—“I recognize that motion—this is an earthquake.” With the second, I thought, “What a luxury this will be for the morning papers.” With the third shock, I thought, “Well, my boy, you had better be getting out of this.” Each of these thoughts was only the hundredth part of a second in passing through my mind. There is no incentive to rapid reasoning like an earthquake. I then sidled out toward the middle of the street—and I may say that I sidled out with some degree of activity, too. There is nothing like an earthquakeⒶemendation to hurry a man up when he starts to go anywhere. As I went I glanced down to my left and saw the whole front of a large four-story brick buildingⒺexplanatory note spew out and “splatter” abroad over the street in front of it. Another thought steamed through my brain. I thought this was going to be the greatest earthquake of the century, and that the city was going to be destroyed entirely, and I took out my watch and timed the event. It was twelve minutes to one o'clock, P. M. This showed great coolness and [begin page 305] presence of mind on my part—most people would have been hunting for something to climb, instead of looking out for the best interests of history.

As I walked down the street—down the middle of the street—frequently glancing up with a sagacious eye at the houses on either side to see which way they were going to fall, I felt the earth shivering gently under me, and grew moderately sea-sick (and remained so for nearly an hour; others became excessively sleepy as well as sea-sick, and were obliged to go to bed, and refresh themselves with a sound nap.) A minute before the earthquake I had three or four streets pretty much to myself, as far as I could see down them (for we are a Sunday-respecting community, and go out of town to break the Sabbath) but five seconds after it I was lost in a swarm of crying children, and coatless, hatless men and shrieking women. They were all in motion, too, and no two of them trying to run in the same direction. They chargedⒶemendation simultaneously from opposite rows of houses, like opposing regiments from ambuscades, and came together with a crash and a yell in the centre of the street. Then came chaos and confusion, and a general digging out for somewhere else, they didn't know where, and didn't care.

Everything that was done, was done in the twinkling of an eye—there was no apathy visible anywhere. A street car stopped close at hand, and disgorged its passengers so suddenly that they all seemed to flash out at the self-same instant of time.

The crowd was in danger from outside influences for a while. A horse was coming down Third street, with a buggy attached to him, and following after him—either by accident or design—and the horse was either frightened at the earthquake or a good deal surprised—I cannot say which, because I do not know how horses are usually affected by such things—but at any rate he must have been opposed to earthquakes, because he started to leave there, and took the buggy and his master with him, and scattered them over a piece of ground as large as an ordinary park, and finally fetched up against a lamp-post with nothing hanging to him but a few strips of harness suitable for fiddle-strings. However he might have been affected previously, the expression upon his countenance at this time was one of unqualified surprise. The driver of [begin page 306] the buggy was found intact and unhurt, but to the last degree dusty and blasphemous. As the crowds along the street had fortunately taken chances on the earthquake and opened out to let the horse pass, no one was injured by his stampede.

When I got to the locality of the shipwreckedⒶemendation four-story building before spoken of, I found that the front of it, from eaves to pavement, had fallen out, and lay in ruins on the ground. The roof and floors were broken down and dilapidated. It was a new structure and unoccupied, and by rare good luck it damaged itself alone by its fall. The walls were only three bricks thick, a fact which, taking into account the earthquakiness of the country, evinces an unquestioning trust in Providence, on the part of the proprietor, which is as gratifying as it is impolitic and reckless.

I turned into Mission street and walked down to Second without finding any evidences of the great ague, but in Second street itself I traveled half a block on shattered window glass. The large hotels, farther down town, were all standing, but the boarders were all in the street. The plastering had fallen in many of the rooms, and a gentleman who was in an attic chamber of the Cosmopolitan at the time of the quake, told me the water “sloshed” out of the great tanks on the roof, and fell in sheets of spray to the court below. He said the huge building rocked like a cradle after the first grand spasms; the walls seemed to “belly” inward like a sail; and flakes of plastering began to drop on him. He then went out and slid, feet foremost down one or two hundred feet of banisters—partly for amusement, but chiefly with an eye to expedition. He said he flashed by the frantic crowds in each succeeding story like a telegraphic dispatch.

Several ladies felt a faintness and dizziness in the head, and one, (incredible as it may seem) weighing over two hundred and fifty pounds, fainted all over. They hauled her out of her room, and deluged her with water, but for nearly half an hour all efforts to resuscitate her were fruitless. It is said that the noise of the earthquake on the ground floor of the hotel, which is paved with marble, was as if forty freight trains were thundering over it. The large billiard saloon in the rear of the office was full of people at the time, but a moment afterward numbers of them were seen flying up the street with their billiard-cues in their hands, like a [begin page 307] squad of routed lancers. Three jumped out of a back window into the central court, and found themselves imprisoned—for the tall, spike-armed iron gate which bars the passage-way for coal and provision wagons was locked.

“What did you do then?” I asked.

“Well, Conrad, from Humboldt—you know him—Conrad said, ‘let's climb over, boys, and be devilish quick about it, too’—and he made a dash for it—but Smith and me started in last and were first over—because the seat of Conrad's pants caught on the spikes at the top, and we left him hanging there and yelling like an Injun.”

And then my friend called my attention to the gate and said: “There's the gate—ten foot high, I should think, and nothing to catch hold of to climb by—but don't you know I went over that gate like a shot out of a shovel, and took my billiard-cueⒶemendation along with me?—I did it, as certain as I am standing here—but if I could do it again for fifteen hundred thousand dollars, I'll be d—d—not unless there was another earthquake, anyway.”

From the fashionable barber-shops in the vicinity gentlemen rushed into the thronged streets in their shirt-sleeves, with towels round their necks, and with one side of their faces smoothly shaved, and the other side foamy with lather.

One gentleman was having his corns cut by a barber, when the premonitory shock came. The barber's under-jaw dropped, and he stared aghast at the dancing furniture. The gentleman winked complacently at the by-standers, and said with fine humor, “Oh, go on with your surgery, John—it's nothing but an earthquakeⒶemendation; no use to run, you know, because if you're going to the devil anyhow, you might as well start from here as outside.” Just then the earth commenced its hideous grinding and surging movement, and the gentleman retreated toward the door, remarking, “However, John, if we've got to go, perhaps we'd as well start from the street, after all.”

On North Beach, men ran out of the bathing houses attired like the Greek slaveⒺexplanatory note, and mingled desperately with ladies and gentlemen who were as badly frightened as themselves, but more elaborately dressed.

The City Hall which is a large building, was so dismembered, [begin page 308] and its walls sprung apart from each other, that the structure will doubtless have to be pulled down. The earthquakeⒶemendation rang a merry peal on the City Hall bell, the “clapper” of which weighs seventy-eight pounds. It is said that several engine companies turned out, under the impression that the alarm was struck by the fire-telegraphⒺexplanatory note.

Bells of all sorts and sizes were rung by the shake throughout the city, and from what I can learn the earthquake formally announced its visit on every door-bell in town. One gentleman said: “My door-bell fell to ringing violently, but I said to myself, ‘I know you—you are an Earthquake; and you appear to be in a hurry; but you'll jingle that bell considerably before I let you in—on the contrary, I'll crawl under this sofa and get out of the way of the plastering.’ ”

I went down toward the city front and found a brick warehouse mashed in as if some foreigner from Brobdignag had sat down on it.

All down Battery street the large brick wholesale houses were pretty universally shaken up, and some of them badly damaged, the roof of one being crushed in, and the fire-wallsⒶemendation of one or two being ripped off even with the tops of the upper windows, and dumped into the street below.

The tall shot towerⒺexplanatory note in First street weathered the storm, but persons who watched it respectfully from a distance said it swayed to and fro like a drunken giant.

I saw three chimneys which were broken in two about three feet from the top, and the upper sections slewed around until they sat corner-wise on the lower ones.

The damage done to houses by this earthquakeⒶemendation is estimated at over half a million of dollars.

But I had rather talk about the “incidents.” The Rev. Mr. HarmonⒺexplanatory note, Principal of the Pacific Female Seminary, at Oakland, just across the Bay from here, had his entire flock of young ladies at church—and also his wife and children—and was watching and protecting them jealously, like one of those infernal scaly monsters with a pestilential breath that were employed to stand guard over imprisoned heroines in the days of chivalry, and who always proved inefficient in the hour of danger—he was watching [begin page 309] them, I say, when the earthquake came, and what do you imagine he did, then? Why that confiding trust in Providence which had sustained him through a long ministerial career all at once deserted him, and he got up and ran like a quarter-horseⒶemendation. But that was not the misfortune of it. The exasperating feature of it was that his wife and children and all the school-girls remained bravely in their seats and sat the earthquake through without flinching. Oakland talks and laughs againⒺexplanatory note at the Pacific Female Seminary.

The Superintendent of the Congregational Sunday School in Oakland had just given out the text, “And the earth shook and trembled,” when the earthquake came along and took up the text and preached the sermon for him.

The Pastor of Starr King's church, the Rev. Mr. Stebbins, came down out of his pulpit after the first shock and embraced a woman. It was an instance of great presence of mind. Some say the woman was his wife, but I regard the remark as envious and malicious. Upon occasions like this, people who are too much scared to seize upon an offered advantage, are always ready to depreciate the superior judgment and sagacity of those who profited by the opportunity they lost themselves.

In a certain aristocratic locality up-town, the wife of a foreign dignitary is the acknowledged leader of fashion, and whenever she emerges from her house all the ladies in the vicinity fly to the windows to see what she has “got on,” so that they may make immediate arrangements to procure similar costumes for themselves. Well, in the midst of the earthquakeⒶemendation, the beautiful foreign woman (who had just indulged in a bath) appeared in the street with a towel around her neck. It was all the raiment she had on. Consequently, in that vicinity, a towel around the neck is considered the only orthodox “earthquake costume.” Well, and why not? It is elegant, and airy, and simple, and graceful, and pretty, and are not these the chief requisites in female dress? If it were generally adopted it would go far toward reconciling some people to these dreaded earthquakes.

An enterprising barkeeper down town who is generally up with the times, has already invented a sensation drink to meet the requirements of our present peculiar circumstances. A friend in [begin page 310] whom I have confidence, thus describes it to me: “A tall ale-glass is nearly filled with California brandy and Angelica wine—one part of the former to two of the latter; fill to the brim with champagne; charge the drink with electricity from a powerful galvanic battery, and swallow it before the lightning cools. Then march forth—and before you have gone a hundred yards you will think you are occupying the whole street; a parlor clock will look as big as a church; to blow your nose will astonish you like the explosion of a mine, and the most trivial abstract matter will seem as important as the Day of Judgment. When you want this extraordinary drink, disburse your twenty-five cents, and call for an ‘earthquake.’ ”

Mark Twain.