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OUR EARTHQUAKE SPECIAL

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Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, Cal. · May 2, 1906

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 32, No. 18.

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OUR EARTHQUAKE SPECIAL.

By Editor

Why? Why?

AS the journal having the largest circulation in the East of any paper published on the Pacific Coast, the publishers of the SIGNS OF THE TIMES believe it duty to issue a special number devoted largely to the great calamity which has befallen the fairest section of the Pacific Coast.
They have endeavored to secure accurate accounts from conservative eye-witnesses, after the excitement is over, and reason bears sway. From various localities, cities, towns, and villages, typical of many other places, we give the news by pen and camera.
The reader can see to some extent what these cities were and what they are; what they were before the mighty forces of a perverted nature came up out of the earth and seized them in their grasp for a brief one-half minute, and what they are since.
The millions in the East will wish to see and know what the thousands of the West are seeing and feeling, many of them in hopeless despair; many, alas! are beyond the seeing and feeling and knowing, crushed into unrecognizable mass, burned in desolating fires, dying in various forms as result of earthquake and holocaust.
The fearful cataclysm still seems to many a horrible dream from which they wonder if they will ever waken; or waking find it an even more terrible reality, clasping in its appalling agony and crushing tentacles the years of the future.
Many, very many, have no hope in the life or the world beyond this existence and this poor earth; and when the earthquake crushed their building or the fire fiend doomed it, they lost their all.
It is to give these simple, heart-rending, heart-touching, awful facts, which, on every hand, stares one in the face, that this paper is printed by those among the losers.
A view of San Francisco from Nob Hill, taken soon after the earthquake and just when the great fires were gaining headway. All the district covered by this view was subsequently swept clean by the flames. Notice the broken chimneys on the buildings in the foreground.
A view of San Francisco from Nob Hill, taken soon after the earthquake and just when the great fires were gaining headway. All the district covered by this view was subsequently swept clean by the flames. Notice the broken chimneys on the buildings in the foreground.

THE EARTHQUAKE.

TUESDAY night, April 17, the people in one of the fairest sections of the Pacific Coast, stretching, roughly speaking, from San Luis Obispo on the south to undefined regions in the mountains, beyond Ukiah on the north, went to bed as usual, expecting to awake to a usual day on the morrow.
The most of them were awakened with an awful shock which brought from many lips, "The world has come to an end!" "The judgment day has come!"
After the first shock was over, at 5:15, where were prosperous business centers, builded of brick or stone, were ruined walls, and piles of brick and mortar, while everywhere broken and falling chimneys and crushed and toppling water tanks met the eye.
All who could get out-of-doors left the houses, clad or half-clad, often in their night garments and barefooted.
It seemed as tho an infuriated giant demon had reached up from the interior of the earth, buried his steel talons in the fibers of California's heart, and crushed and tore and shook her into the agonies of death.
Short work did the demon make of it,—only a half-minute or less, and the work of destruction was wrought. Never Titan so wrought before in modern western history of which the books tell. And when the paroxysm of his rage was over, the beautiful towns of Santa Cruz, San Jose, Gilroy, Santa Rosa, Sebastopol, and others were in ruins, and San Francisco's entire business portion was doomed.
From east to west some say the convulsion came; others, from north to south. The great temblor's signature on another page will show that the movements were in every conceivable direction, straight impulses, gyratory, circular, twisting, up and down, till exhaustion came and the earth was allowed to rest for awhile.
"Terra firma" we denominate the old earth. Those who experienced the shock of April 18, 1906, will call this planet "firm earth" no longer. They have seen it more restless than the sea, and far less merciful in its abnormal moods.
But the stars still glow in the evening sky, and the sun still shines, and trees still stand, and grass and flowers are still kissed by the sun and dew, and nod in the spring breeze.
God rules still, and is above the storm and the tempest and the earthquake—and from this awful blow will He bring good to those in harmony with Heaven.