ONE writer says the earthquake has written its own history in the cemeteries. While the earth motion was but a little over half an inch, the force behind that motion was so great that the mind can not conceive of its ability to accomplish what it did. A large brick store in Mountain View was thrown bodily twelve feet to the south, and fell, a complete wreck. Two other stores on the opposite side of the street were thrown in the opposite direction.
At Bolinas a large building was moved along the ground twelve feet, directly away from the fence against which it stood, and remained standing. In this vicinity the ground was badly broken, and opened in several places. Springs opened where none had been before, and a lake of mud was formed. At Inverness twenty acres of land slid into the bay, and at Olema a large grove of trees was broken down and partly swallowed by the opened ground.
At Point Reyes the ground has moved ten feet northward. At one place an oak tree has moved ten feet away from a fence it formerly overhung. A pipe line at Olema was broken by the earthquake, and on being repaired, showed an excess length of three feet, indicating the land had been squeezed together that much in three hundred feet.
In the vicinity of Chittenden a mountain seems to have moved four feet, as a railroad bridge which crossed the river there now lacks four feet of reaching across from the farther bank to the edge of the mountain. Near this place sulphur springs that were nearly dry are now gushing forth copiously.
In San Mateo County the shaking of the earth changed the courses of small mountain streams, allowing them to saturate a great quantity of alluvial hillside soil. A great torrent of mud was thus created which rushed down a hill at a speed of ten miles an hour, sweeping through a cemetery, and destroying whatever was in its way.
In many houses all the pictures had their faces turned toward the wall. In one house all the lamps were broken but one. That one sat on the shelf unmoved, and was the only one burning. Had it broken, it might have exploded and set fire to the building. In most cases chimneys which did not go off at the top were cracked or shattered at the bottom, some to such an extent that the whole chimney went straight down through its own opening in the roof into the cellar, carrying mantels, fireplaces, and grates with it.
The bed of the Mokelumne River in the vicinity of Woodbridge has dropped twelve feet as a result of the earthquake. A large lake in the northwestern part of San Joaquin County is drying up from the same cause.
The long tunnel through the Santa Cruz Mountains at Wrights was completely blocked, and so remains.
There is now an island in Bolinas Bay where before were muddy shoals. All along the coast in this vicinity the ground has been rent and disfigured in many ways.
It was reported that hundreds of gushers of boiling mud leaped from the earth near Pajaro the morning of the earthquake.
In all parts of the district affected by the earthquake its footprints have been left upon the land in some form; but in the line of what is called the "fault," extending from San Juan to Point Arena, the greatest disfigurement occurs. This fissure, or fault, is very marked. Scientists claim that the slipping of the portion of the earth's surface which caused this fault was the cause of the quaking of the earth. But it seems more reasonable that the slipping itself had a cause lying deep in the earth, such as the explosion of gases or the release of steam under heavy pressure.
