THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES has the largest circulation in the East of any journal printed on the Pacific Coast. Its office of publication is in the very heart of the earthquake district, forty miles south of San Francisco, six south of Palo Alto, eleven north of San Jose. Its publishers believe it duty to issue a special number devoted largely to the great calamity which befell the fairest section of the Pacific Coast April 18, and it did so; and, greatly crippled as it was by the earthquake, it was the first weekly in the field.
Eastern journals, notably Leslie's, Collier's, and Harper's followed with fine numbers, but their editions were soon exhausted, while the public demanded more.
Our first and second editions have reached nearly 700,000, and still the sale continues, and the demand comes to us for a third edition.
This Souvenir number is the result. Our former articles have been revised. New ones have been obtained, and the whole field has been better covered by picture and pen. Eye and ear and heart witnesses tell the story.
The reader can see to some extent with his own eyes the damage that was wrought when the mighty forces of a perverted nature reached up out of the earth and seized California and shook her for a brief one-half minute.
RUINS OF THE CITY HALL, SAN FRANCISCO.
The millions in the East will wish to see and know what the thousands of the West are seeing and feeling, many of them with mighty courage still fighting bravely the battles of life, many in hopeless despair, many, alas! are beyond the seeing and the 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, stare one in the face, that this paper is printed by those among the losers.
THE EARTHQUAKE.
TUESDAY night, April 17, the people in one of the fairest sections of the Pacific Coast, stretching, roughly speaking, from old San Juan Mission in the south to undefined regions in the mountains, beyond Ukiah in the north, went to rest 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, so mighty was the shake.
All who could get out-of-doors left the houses, clad or half clad, often in their night garments and barefooted.
It seemed as if an infuriated giant demon had reached up from the interior of the earth, buried his steel talon-fingers 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 from 28 to 48 seconds (the scientists differ) and the work of destruction was wrought. Never Titan so wrought5before in modern Western history of which the books tell. And when the paroxysm of his rage was over, the business portions of the beautiful towns of San Jose, Gilroy, Santa Rosa, Hollister, Redwood, San Mateo, Santa Cruz, and others, were wholly or in part 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, wrenching, pounding like a mad demon, till exhaustion came and the weary, nervous earth was permitted to rest.
"Terra firma" we denominate this rolling sphere; 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 point heavenward, 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.
