m, from one vantage point to another, before its
resistless power--failed to depict in its entirety the horrors, the
tragedies that followed in the wake of the crumbling walls, the
crackling flames that licked up alike palatial mansions and the squalid
homes of the poor, not content to feast upon the products of the forests
of California and the Eastern States alone, but, with the strategy of a
warrior, surrounded and penned within four walls hundreds of human
beings, stalwart men, delicate women, and babes at the breast, who were
then slowly roasted to death upon the funeral pyre of San Francisco.

Upon the minds and hearts of the survivors, alone, who walked between
the walls of fire those days, who escaped the frightful holocaust but by
a miracle while loved ones perished before their eyes, are written, are
recorded, too complete, too vivid, those terrible scenes, and fain would
they efface from their mind's negative those pictures of horrors which
now turn their dreams of the night into such a frightful nightmare that
they dread to close their eyes in slumber.

While the horrors of the earthquake and fire were so terrible, yet there
was something far worse, for the earthquake and fire were beyond human
control, but the still worse acts of the soldiers into whose hands the
control of the city were delegated could have been restrained by the
authorities had they so chosen; now that the world is being made aware
of the fact that the soldiers ruthlessly shot down men and women--yes,
women as well as men; in one case a woman was shot down by a soldier
because she dared to light a match to see where to lay her little sick
baby down--and that without any justification other than the order of
their superiors who likewise were so ordered by the authorities--a
natural result of governmental control--hence they are doing all they
can to controvert the facts regarding the brutal murders and worse of
the soldiers. In one case they went so far as to threaten the
confiscation of a printery if the editor did not call in and suppress an
issue in which was printed an article by a marine telling of seeing the
soldiers shoot down the inmates of a hotel so surrounded by fire it
seemed they else must be burned up--the excuse the soldiers gave for
shooting them--and so the soldiers shot them down to save (?) them. The
marine in this article did not tell how many of those thus shot down by
the soldiers were only wounded and writhed in agon