THE EARTHQUAKES IN CALIFORNIA.

Grey River Argus, Volume XII, Issue 1208, 12 June 1872, Page 3

THE EARTHQUAKES IN CALIFORNIA.

[SAX FBAVCISCO BULLETIN, APRIL 4.] The first detailed . statement of the terrible earthquake at Inyo was given by Colonel Whipple, a resident delegated by a meeting of the citizens with authority to proceed to this place for the purpose of procuring aid for those who suffered by the catastrophe. He arrived in this city lost evening, and from his lips we have the following statement. Everything pertaining to an occurrence attended with such fatal consequences, a disturbance of the earth's surface so violent, and which was felt over such a vast area, must be interesting at the present time, and will become historical. Colonel Whipple prefaced his narrative with the assurance that he wished to give » plain, straightforward, and truthful account of all that he had witnessed and heart?. The half had not been told, and it would be hard to exaggerate in describing the Bufferings, the terror, and the afflictions of the people of the valley, and particularly of those living at Lone Pine. He had felt earthquakes before— JMvere ones— but this one exceeded them lU in every feature. Even if he had been disposed, he said, to color his story, he would not dare to do so, for it would be sore to be contradicted by people who had the same means of knowledge which £ad unfortunately been afforded to him. tte suggested that he is here on a raisuon of chanty, and a mission of that kind should be one of truth and honesty. Colonel Whtpple said • 1 was sleeping in the second story of my house, which was a strongly built adobe one, two stories ' high. I was not frightened, not because . an earthquake could frighten me, but it gave me no time io be afraid. I had just time to spring from my bed, catch hold of mjr pantaloons, and get into the hall at the head of the stairs, when the house ■' went I thought of my wife and children ■who were in Vallejo, and said to myself, " This is death." I knew nothing more for some time ; I know not how long, but when I recovered my senses, I lay on my face, and could feel rubbish, timbers, and adobe on my body. I did not feel hurt, and turned my face upwards. Then I could see the moonshine. I put my hands out and felt the ground. With considerable effort I extricated myself from the ruins, and sat up to listen for Frank Austin, a young 'man who slept in my house. I could not hear him. Then I got up on my feet. My face wab wounded, and the blood was , streaming over my body. I heard the screams and cries of the people in the main portion of the town, about sixty rods from my house. I ran were as fast as I could, and found all ' who were not dead or too badly injured, in the streets, and not a brick or adobe "house in the place standing. We went to work as well as we able to extricate the dead and the wounded from the ruins of their houses. In every qnarter were heard groans and agonising cries for assistance. IJLU the harm was done by the first terr^rible shock, but the earth was almost constantly vibrating, and shock followed shock in quick succession. We could distinguish four distinct ipecies of movements and three kinds of i noised or explosions. One shock seemed to lift us up gently and shake us as if the earth under our feet was a sieve. No noise preceded or accompanied this kind of shock, a quiver of the earth. Then we would hear a noise as of a mortar discharged at a great depth under our feet. Another explosion louder than the first, and then another still louder with a vertical bump from below, closing with the swinging motion. There was another sound like the beating of the long roll, or more properly, like the rumbling of a carriage over a bridge, and as the noise died away a shock would follow. The last andmostterrifying werethe ".Hundred pound-Parrotts from the Sierra;" but the reports were as much louder than that of a hundred-pound Parrott as the discharge of such a gun is louder than a pop gun. When this sound came re looked , towards the Sierra west of us, and even by the moonlight could see thousands and thousands of zockß shooting, tumbling, and crashing down its sides with a thundering noise ; and then great clouds of dust for four or five miles along the range and in the foothills which separated it from the valley. All the people killed, so far as known, were killed by falling houses. Not a frame house was thrown down, but all were terribly shaken. I built our house, not to sell, but for our home, and it was built strong. The walls were heavily bolted at the four corners, and .the roof held firm by timbers from the rafters, spiked to the partition, It went to pieces in a twinkling. All that fell seemed to have been pushed to the north-east. I got out oi the ruins of my own house about twentyfive or thirty feet*to the north-east oi where it stood. Some of the brick and adobe buildingß were not Btrong, but the strongest could not withstand the shock. The people want lumber. You could nol give any man an adobe or a brick house in all that valley now. Bight alone the front of my farm and those belonging to my neighbors Plummer, Johnson and others living, south of me, for a distance of several miles to Blact Lake, and north of Lone Pine several miles, the valley seems to have sunk, o] the hills have risen, leaving an abrupi perpendicular wall six or seven feet high all along, for a distance of four or nv< miles. Close to Black Lake two creeki have -taken this crevice for a channel and just above the lake a new stream hai appeared, which flows oat and is loa in the sage-brush and alkali plain. Thii wall runs nearly north and south, ant all the sCams and fissures take tha direction generally, . although in som<

places there are cross-seams and fissures, The valley looks as if an immenst harrowhad been dragged over its surface from north to south. On the day follow ing, and when we were riding in the stage near the head of Owens' Lake, we were obliged several times to stop and look foi a safe road across places where the eartl had sunk two cr three feet in strips aboul fifty or sixty feet wide. We had to hunl a road also in the vicinity of Passamore'f Reach, below the foot of Owenß* Lake. When riding along the west side of the lake we could look across to the Inyc mountain side of the valley, and there Baw another abrupt wall, apparently six or seven feet higher, but which I concluded from the distance must be much higher than that. It also ran north and south, with the direction of the lake and valley. At the north end of Owens' lake there was a spring about two feet above the lake's surface. After the earthquake it was found that the spot where the spring had been was about two feet under water. This and other indications induced the belief that the bed of the lake had risen about four feet. Colonel Whipple said several persons spoke of having seen fires during the shocks, and one man whom he met at Passamore'd, south of Owens' Lake, told him he saw flames along the eastern or Inyo range. The next day he went to some of the places, but could find no fire. It was Colonel Whipple's opinion that the names might have been burning gas, forced through fissures in the earth during the shake. He said— "At Passamore's, the stage party stopped for dinner when a shock came which drove us out of the house. I finished my dinner outside on a log. At that time we saw streams of immense boulders shooting down the Sierra after the 'ParrottGun' was fired. They raised enormous clouds of duat in their descent, and the crashing was indescribably awful. % He says that all accounts agree that the shocks were most severe at Lone Pine and in that immediate vicinity. On the morning of the shock James Brady, of the Swansea mine, sent 20 men to Lone Pine, and 20 came also from Cerro Gordo to assist in taking care of the injured and burying the dead. Frank Austin, who was in Colonel Whipple's house, was not killed, but received very severe and possibly fatal injuries, although the physician in attendance seems to think he would recover.