by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Having covered some of the coverage and discussion of earthquakes in Los Angeles newspapers for some two decades between the mid-1850 and mid-1870s, including admonitions to potential settlers in the region to not be afraid of temblors, we turn to reporting and commentary for a shaker that hit the Angel City and environs on 11 June 1878.
Of the three major daily sheets in town, the Star was the most nonplussed about the seismic event, merely stating, perhaps in a reference to the ongoing economic malaise the followed a financial crash in late summer 1875 that included the failure of the Temple and Workman bank, that “times have been quite dull here for some time but we are compelled to note two movements in real estate last night.”
At about ten minutes after eleven, the earthquake hit and “sounded like an explosion, shaking windows and doors.” Ten minutes later, an aftershock struck during which “a more violent shake occurred, sounding like the rattling of heavy doors” and which “brought most of our citizens to the streets where some of them remained for hours.”
Given how many structures were made of red brick and how likely walls are to fall outwards in a quake, experts have long warned people to avoid heading outdoors in these incidences. In any case, the Star concluded its sanguine observations in a strange manner, commenting that “we have needed some reviving influence and it has come at least” as it suggested, “let us rejoice over the earthquake.”
The Los Angeles Herald offered more coverage with the writer of the piece noting that he was in his office writing, when, at 11:07, “a pronounced shock” came and “the sensation was precisely as if three or four heavy sacks of grain had been thrown on the tin roof of the HERALD building” on the west side of Spring Street across from the Temple Block.
The journalist continued that “we called out to know who was on the roof” and, realizing no one was up there (and why would someone be there at all, much less that late?) understood “that we had witnessed a thorough ‘quake.'” It was common for press accounts to denote in which direction the shaking took place and a look at the flagpole and its vibrations meant that it could readily be discerned that the quake moved from northwest to southeast.
It was another eleven minutes later that the stronger aftershock hit and “by this time the streets were crowded with people who had hurriedly donned their clothes and sought the protection of open thoroughfares. A judge staying in the Pico House hotel reported the structure “shook like an India rubber blanket,” while merchant Adolph Portugal, whose quarters were above his store in the Temple Block “says the vibrations of the building were so great that he could hardly dress himself.” Judge Oliver S. Witherby, an old-timer from the Gold Rush era, pronounced it the strongest tremor in nearly a quarter-century.
The Herald colorfully continued that,
Los Angeles was a thoroughly aroused city last night. Ladies, in a pronounced deshabille [careless or partial dress], were frequently to be encountered in the open roadways, clinging to male protectors. We shall not be at all surprised to learn of a tidal wave or other casualty before the HERALD goes to press again.
As we saw in part one, with other accounts of local seismic events, the paper ended by noting that the only “terrible earthquake in the history of Los Angeles county” was the 1812 quake that leveled much of the Mission San Juan Capistrano church, killing many parishioners there for Sunday mass and it was observed that visitors nearly seven decades later could still see masonry tossed 100 feet away.
The Los Angeles Express went into greater detail than its rivals. It stated that most Angelenos were deep in “the sleep of the just” when “the usual rumbling sound was first heard and then came a short upheaval and a trembling motion.” It was only about a second, the paper recorded, “but it was so positive and unmistakable” as not only send people stumbling out of their slumber but to “leave no doubt upon their minds as to what was up.”
The larger shaking “had three or four quick, sharp motions,” strongest with the second and third before tailing off while “each shake was accompanied with its complement of trembles.” Those who were jolted upright in their beds by the first event “now poured out upon the streets in the greatest consternation” as the Express exclaimed, “what a scene was there my countrymen!”
One observer looking down Main Street from the Pico House to the Rowan Building near the Temple Block reported that the thoroughfare “was filled with people in various stages of dress and undress” and “all were frightened half to death, and all wondering what was next to happen.” That correspondent told the paper that he scooped up his two children in a blanket and, with his spouse in her night dress, “ran for some less dangerous locality.”
After noting the pell-mell rush to vacate buildings for the streets, the Express heard from one man evicted from his bed and who insisted that the quake was a strong as one which did much damage in San Francisco in 1869 [it was actually October 1868 along a fault on the East Bay]. Damage seemed to be limited to the tumbling of household items indoors, though, as to the direction of the shaking, there much difference of opinion, leading the paper to suggest the procuring of an apparatus to properly measure this.
Unlike its contemporaries, the paper reported on further aftershocks at 2:30 and 6:15 that morning and it was added that the tremor “was purely local” as no telegraphic reporting found that the shaking was felt in San Fernando or Wilmington. Notably, one man opined that “the shock may have proceeded from some subterranean explosions of gas in the brea fields northwest of the city,” this seeming to indicate the La Brea Tar Pits, more westward.
As to reports of damage, some that indicated cracks were found on the walls of brick structures were “purely sensational” and the Express believed no damage of significance was done. As was often the case, there was speculation as to atmospheric conditions (a heaviness, or humidity, in the air was sometimes cited) as some sort of premonition, such as a smell of brimstone or one woman’s discovery of a crack in her stovepipe before the quake. The unidentified gent who effected an escape with his family “moved his residence to other quarters this forenoon” as the paper concluded,
Meantime there is no alternative left the good people of Los Angeles but to contain themselves in patience and await the pleasure of Mother Earth. It is to be hoped that she will not make such an example of our town as she did of Pompeii or Herculaneum [though those disasters were from volcanic eruptions.]
A separate editorial expanded upon the strange phenomenon of locality as the paper commented that “not every community can have the distinction of an earthquake gotten up for its especial benefit” and it was “most singular” that “this convulsion of nature” was such that “its effects were almost entirely local.” Up to around four miles out of town, the shaking was minimal and, while some in Santa Monica reported feeling some movement, no one did at San Gabriel. A report from Florence, south of the city where the Florence-Graham community of South Los Angeles is today, was that “it tore off lath and plastering in some houses and, Oh Lord! gave us such a fright!”
The Star of the 13th made several references in its “City and County” column of brief reports to the seismic event, including a joke that the quake was not caused by fruit dryer George B. Davis, who was a large figure, tumbling out of his bed. It did relay the report that some plaster fell from the building of merchant Charles Brode on Spring Street next to the Turn-Verein Hall. It repeated beliefs that the “atmospheric phenomena” present in town was like that of the Bay Area in that quake of a decade prior.
Reflective of the rising anti-Chinese sentiment that animated the political ascent of the Workingmen as a new state constitution was being developed, the paper also claimed to report the feelings of the residents of Chinatown, along the Calle de los Negros, where Los Angeles Street is to the southeast of the Plaza and where a horrific massacre of seventeen Chinese men and a teenager occurred seven years earlier, during the quake.
It stated that a Chinese man ran into the house of his Anglo employer and “with a wild look, exclaimed, ‘my housee all shakee up!” In the Chinese quarter, were purportedly such outbursts as “muchee shakee! Hell, dam!” and when one resident was asked what he thought of the shaking, he uttered “me no savvy him, me feel like policeman shakee me.” Finally, it was claimed, as “dirt was rattling down the walls of one of the adobe houses,” a recently settled Chinese resident was said to have burst out, “thisee lodger house no good! Too muchee, Josh savee Chinaman!”
Also on the 13th, the Herald indulged in some merriment over the “humors of the shock,” including its recording of a five-month old terrier, Bruin, the “ferocious watch-dog” of the paper, who went back to sleep after the momentary excitement of the first shaking, but, with the second larger one, was “wholly disgusted.” Having, however, “the most luxurious padded chair in Los Angeles” for his bed, Bruin “soon relapsed into that blissful slumber which seems an incident of puppydom which just verges on dog-hood.”
With respect to those “humors,” the paper asserted that,
Probably nowhere in Los Angeles did the comedy of the occurrence develop itself more strikingly than in Los Angeles street. In the lady of easy virtue [read: the prostitute] there is an element of deep though latent piety. We very rarely ever pass over this street ourselves, but we learn that, between the first and second shocks, quite a goodly number of female figures, in robes de nuit [nightgowns], were to be seen in the middle of this thoroughfare, on their marrow bones [knees], and praying most audibly.
One female denizen of the notorious red light district was seen decamping with a cage containing a pair of parrots; call-bells went off at the St. Charles Hotel [formerly the Clarendon and, before that, the Bella Union); a kitchen door shook open; “plastering in flakes a half foot square [rained down] on some Angeleños;” and “quite a number of our people were quite sea sick all day long.”
The Herald did note that “fortunately we are able to dismiss the incident without a fatal or even a serious casualty,” but if the shaking had lasted longer than these brief shocks, “there would have been a different result.” The piece ended with the observation that it was “amazingly gratifying” that greater Los Angeles did not have to experience what took place, as noted in part one of this post, the Lone Pine quake of 1872, which, “in the space of twenty-four hours” involved “five hundred and sixty shocks.”
A few later reports were forthcoming, such as the Express of the 14th stating that “a number of citizens” reported “two earthquake shocks this morning between five and six o’clock” and in the same direction as the event of the 11th. The paper on the 17th corrected the previous report that San Fernando did not feel the quake, as it was stated that it was “severely felt” there, while the 2:30 aftershock was barely noticed at Anaheim. It was added that “as a general rule, earthquakes are felt much more severely where the bed-rock is within a few feet of the surface of the ground than where the soil is alluvial.”
The edition of the 23rd in the Star made light of the report from Merced Garcia Abbott, whose husband was the builder of the still-standing Merced Theatre building next to the Pico House, that she felt a series of three shakers the prior afternoon, this corroborated with others in the Plaza area. As Señora Abbott raced down from the family’s third-floor abode, “astonishing the neighborhood by her alarm, and creating quite an earthquake furore [sic],” the paper offered that the temblor may have been “the thunder of the artillery in honor of the Workingmen’s victory” in an election held to elect delegates to the convention for the drafting of the new state constitution.
Given that there was little damage and no reported major injuries, much less deaths, the insouciance of the local press was captured poetically (sort of) in a piece of versification published in the Express on the 12th and titled “Was it the Ague or an Earthquake?”:
And it shook him, shook him, shook him;
Shook his coat and shook his pants off;
Shook him down upon his pallet;
Shook his teeth out; shook his eyeballs,
Till they gingled [sic] from their sockets;
Shook the nails from toes and fingers;
Shook his hair and whiskers from him;
Shook his very eyebrows also;
And his ears it shook asunder;
Shook the breath from our his body;
Shook the body in its coffin;
Shook the coffin and the grave clothes;
Shook them all, and shook the sexton;
Who essayed to put him under;
Shook the very hole he dropped in;
Shook the earth that fell upon him;
Shook him, shook him, shook him, shook him!
There are other “Shake, Rattle and Roll” posts concerning regional earthquake history to share on this blog, so look for those future installments!