SAN FRANCISCO EARTHQUAKE
After the address at the Robert Fulton Fund meeting, June 19,
1906, Mr. Clemens talked to the assembled reporters about the
San Francisco earthquake.
I haven't been there since 1868, and that great city of San Francisco has
grown up since my day. When I was there she had one hundred and eighteen
thousand people, and of this number eighteen thousand were Chinese.
I was a reporter on the Virginia City Enterprise in Nevada in 1862, and
stayed there, I think, about two years, when I went to San Francisco and
got a job as a reporter on The Call. I was there three or four
years.
I remember one day I was walking down Third Street in San Francisco. It
was a sleepy, dull Sunday afternoon, and no one was stirring. Suddenly
as I looked up the street about three hundred yards the whole side of a
house fell out. The street was full of bricks and mortar. At the same
time I was knocked against the side of a house, and stood there stunned
for a moment.
I thought it was an earthquake. Nobody else had heard anything about it
and no one said earthquake to me afterward, but I saw it and I wrote it.
Nobody else wrote it, and the house I saw go into the street was the only
house in the city that felt it. I've always wondered if it wasn't a
little performance gotten up for my especial entertainment by the nether
regions.
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