For a few months I enjoyed what to me was an entirely new phase of
existence—a butterfly idleness; nothing to do, nobody to be
responsible to, and untroubled with financial uneasiness. I fell in love
with the most cordial and sociable city in the Union. After the sage-brush
and alkali deserts of Washoe, San Francisco was Paradise to me. I lived at
the best hotel, exhibited my clothes in the most conspicuous places,
infested the opera, and learned to seem enraptured with music which
oftener afflicted my ignorant ear than enchanted it, if I had had the
vulgar honesty to confess it. However, I suppose I was not greatly worse
than the most of my countrymen in that. I had longed to be a butterfly,
and I was one at last. I attended private parties in sumptuous evening
dress, simpered and aired my graces like a born beau, and polked and
schottisched with a step peculiar to myself—and the kangaroo. In a
word, I kept the due state of a man worth a hundred thousand dollars
(prospectively,) and likely to reach absolute affluence when that silver-
mine sale should be ultimately achieved in the East. I spent money with a
free hand, and meantime watched the stock sales with an interested eye and
looked to see what might happen in Nevada.
Something very important happened. The property holders of Nevada voted
against the State Constitution; but the folks who had nothing to lose were
in the majority, and carried the measure over their heads. But after all
it did not immediately look like a disaster, though unquestionably it was
one I hesitated, calculated the chances, and then concluded not to sell.
Stocks went on rising; speculation went mad; bankers, merchants, lawyers,
doctors, mechanics, laborers, even the very washerwomen and servant girls,
were putting up their earnings on silver stocks, and every sun that rose
in the morning went down on paupers enriched and rich men beggared. What a
gambling carnival it was! Gould and Curry soared to six thousand three
hundred dollars a foot! And then—all of a sudden, out went the
bottom and everything and everybody went to ruin and destruction! The
wreck was complete.
The bubble scarcely left a microscopic moisture behind it. I was an early
beggar and a thorough one. My hoarded stocks were not worth the paper they
were printed on. I threw them all away. I, the cheerful idiot that had
been squandering money like water, and thought myself beyond the reach of
misfortune, had not now as much as fifty dollars when I gathered together
my various debts and paid them. I removed from the hotel to a very private
boarding house. I took a reporter’s berth and went to work. I was
not entirely broken in spirit, for I was building confidently on the sale
of the silver mine in the east. But I could not hear from Dan. My letters
miscarried or were not answered.
One day I did not feel vigorous and remained away from the office. The
next day I went down toward noon as usual, and found a note on my desk
which had been there twenty-four hours. It was signed “Marshall”—the
Virginia reporter—and contained a request that I should call at the
hotel and see him and a friend or two that night, as they would sail for
the east in the morning. A postscript added that their errand was a big
mining speculation! I was hardly ever so sick in my life. I abused myself
for leaving Virginia and entrusting to another man a matter I ought to
have attended to myself; I abused myself for remaining away from the
office on the one day of all the year that I should have been there. And
thus berating myself I trotted a mile to the steamer wharf and arrived
just in time to be too late. The ship was in the stream and under way.
I comforted myself with the thought that may be the speculation would
amount to nothing—poor comfort at best—and then went back to
my slavery, resolved to put up with my thirty-five dollars a week and
forget all about it.
A month afterward I enjoyed my first earthquake. It was one which was long
called the “great” earthquake, and is doubtless so
distinguished till this day. It was just after noon, on a bright October
day. I was coming down Third street. The only objects in motion anywhere
in sight in that thickly built and populous quarter, were a man in a buggy
behind me, and a street car wending slowly up the cross street. Otherwise,
all was solitude and a Sabbath stillness. As I turned the corner, around a
frame house, there was a great rattle and jar, and it occurred to me that
here was an item!—no doubt a fight in that house. Before I could
turn and seek the door, there came a really terrific shock; the ground
seemed to roll under me in waves, interrupted by a violent joggling up and
down, and there was a heavy grinding noise as of brick houses rubbing
together. I fell up against the frame house and hurt my elbow. I knew what
it was, now, and from mere reportorial instinct, nothing else, took out my
watch and noted the time of day; at that moment a third and still severer
shock came, and as I reeled about on the pavement trying to keep my
footing, I saw a sight! The entire front of a tall four-story brick
building in Third street sprung outward like a door and fell sprawling
across the street, raising a dust like a great volume of smoke! And here
came the buggy—overboard went the man, and in less time than I can
tell it the vehicle was distributed in small fragments along three hundred
yards of street.
One could have fancied that somebody had fired a charge of chair-rounds
and rags down the thoroughfare. The street car had stopped, the horses
were rearing and plunging, the passengers were pouring out at both ends,
and one fat man had crashed half way through a glass window on one side of
the car, got wedged fast and was squirming and screaming like an impaled
madman. Every door, of every house, as far as the eye could reach, was
vomiting a stream of human beings; and almost before one could execute a
wink and begin another, there was a massed multitude of people stretching
in endless procession down every street my position commanded. Never was
solemn solitude turned into teeming life quicker.
Of the wonders wrought by “the great earthquake,” these were
all that came under my eye; but the tricks it did, elsewhere, and far and
wide over the town, made toothsome gossip for nine days.
The destruction of property was trifling—the injury to it was wide-
spread and somewhat serious.
The “curiosities” of the earthquake were simply endless.
Gentlemen and ladies who were sick, or were taking a siesta, or had
dissipated till a late hour and were making up lost sleep, thronged into
the public streets in all sorts of queer apparel, and some without any at
all. One woman who had been washing a naked child, ran down the street
holding it by the ankles as if it were a dressed turkey. Prominent
citizens who were supposed to keep the Sabbath strictly, rushed out of
saloons in their shirt-sleeves, with billiard cues in their hands. Dozens
of men with necks swathed in napkins, rushed from barber-shops, lathered
to the eyes or with one cheek clean shaved and the other still bearing a
hairy stubble. Horses broke from stables, and a frightened dog rushed up a
short attic ladder and out on to a roof, and when his scare was over had
not the nerve to go down again the same way he had gone up.
A prominent editor flew down stairs, in the principal hotel, with nothing
on but one brief undergarment—met a chambermaid, and exclaimed:
“Oh, what shall I do! Where shall I go!”
She responded with naive serenity:
“If you have no choice, you might try a clothing-store!”
A certain foreign consul’s lady was the acknowledged leader of
fashion, and every time she appeared in anything new or extraordinary, the
ladies in the vicinity made a raid on their husbands’ purses and
arrayed themselves similarly. One man who had suffered considerably and
growled accordingly, was standing at the window when the shocks came, and
the next instant the consul’s wife, just out of the bath, fled by
with no other apology for clothing than—a bath-towel! The sufferer
rose superior to the terrors of the earthquake, and said to his wife:
“Now that is something like! Get out your towel my dear!”
The plastering that fell from ceilings in San Francisco that day, would
have covered several acres of ground. For some days afterward, groups of
eyeing and pointing men stood about many a building, looking at long zig-
zag cracks that extended from the eaves to the ground. Four feet of the
tops of three chimneys on one house were broken square off and turned
around in such a way as to completely stop the draft.
A crack a hundred feet long gaped open six inches wide in the middle of
one street and then shut together again with such force, as to ridge up
the meeting earth like a slender grave. A lady sitting in her rocking and
quaking parlor, saw the wall part at the ceiling, open and shut twice,
like a mouth, and then drop the end of a brick on the floor like a tooth.
She was a woman easily disgusted with foolishness, and she arose and went
out of there. One lady who was coming down stairs was astonished to see a
bronze Hercules lean forward on its pedestal as if to strike her with its
club. They both reached the bottom of the flight at the same time,—the
woman insensible from the fright. Her child, born some little time
afterward, was club-footed. However—on second thought,—if the
reader sees any coincidence in this, he must do it at his own risk.
The first shock brought down two or three huge organ-pipes in one of the
churches. The minister, with uplifted hands, was just closing the
services. He glanced up, hesitated, and said:
“However, we will omit the benediction!”—and the next
instant there was a vacancy in the atmosphere where he had stood.
After the first shock, an Oakland minister said:
“Keep your seats! There is no better place to die than this”—
And added, after the third:
“But outside is good enough!” He then skipped out at the back
door.
Such another destruction of mantel ornaments and toilet bottles as the
earthquake created, San Francisco never saw before. There was hardly a
girl or a matron in the city but suffered losses of this kind. Suspended
pictures were thrown down, but oftener still, by a curious freak of the
earthquake’s humor, they were whirled completely around with their
faces to the wall! There was great difference of opinion, at first, as to
the course or direction the earthquake traveled, but water that splashed
out of various tanks and buckets settled that. Thousands of people were
made so sea-sick by the rolling and pitching of floors and streets that
they were weak and bed-ridden for hours, and some few for even days
afterward.—Hardly an individual escaped nausea entirely.
The queer earthquake—episodes that formed the staple of San
Francisco gossip for the next week would fill a much larger book than
this, and so I will diverge from the subject.
By and by, in the due course of things, I picked up a copy of the
Enterprise one day, and fell under this cruel blow:
NEVADA MINES IN NEW YORK.—G. M. Marshall, Sheba Hurs and Amos H.
Rose, who left San Francisco last July for New York City, with ores from
mines in Pine Wood District, Humboldt County, and on the Reese River
range, have disposed of a mine containing six thousand feet and called
the Pine Mountains Consolidated, for the sum of $3,000,000. The stamps
on the deed, which is now on its way to Humboldt County, from New York,
for record, amounted to $3,000, which is said to be the largest amount
of stamps ever placed on one document. A working capital of $1,000,000
has been paid into the treasury, and machinery has already been
purchased for a large quartz mill, which will be put up as soon as
possible. The stock in this company is all full paid and entirely
unassessable. The ores of the mines in this district somewhat resemble
those of the Sheba mine in Humboldt. Sheba Hurst, the discoverer of the
mines, with his friends corralled all the best leads and all the land
and timber they desired before making public their whereabouts. Ores
from there, assayed in this city, showed them to be exceedingly rich in
silver and gold—silver predominating. There is an abundance of
wood and water in the District. We are glad to know that New York
capital has been enlisted in the development of the mines of this
region. Having seen the ores and assays, we are satisfied that the mines
of the District are very valuable—anything but wild-cat.
Once more native imbecility had carried the day, and I had lost a million!
It was the “blind lead” over again.
Let us not dwell on this miserable matter. If I were inventing these
things, I could be wonderfully humorous over them; but they are too true
to be talked of with hearty levity, even at this distant day. [True, and
yet not exactly as given in the above figures, possibly. I saw Marshall,
months afterward, and although he had plenty of money he did not claim to
have captured an entire million. In fact I gathered that he had not then
received $50,000. Beyond that figure his fortune appeared to consist of
uncertain vast expectations rather than prodigious certainties. However,
when the above item appeared in print I put full faith in it, and
incontinently wilted and went to seed under it.] Suffice it that I so lost
heart, and so yielded myself up to repinings and sighings and foolish
regrets, that I neglected my duties and became about worthless, as a
reporter for a brisk newspaper. And at last one of the proprietors took me
aside, with a charity I still remember with considerable respect, and gave
me an opportunity to resign my berth and so save myself the disgrace of a
dismissal.
