California experienced a serious earthquake shock-that is to say, one
attended by any considerable loss of life or property. Nor was the
earthquake of April last so terrible as it may seem to some. Apart from
the fire there was not so very much of it, and no great damage was done.
The official figures are: 266 killed by falling walls, 177 by fire, 7
shot, and 2 deaths by ptomaine poisoning-452 in all. The property damage
by the earthquake is scarcely worth speaking of, being no more than
happens elsewhere in the world from other causes nearly every day; it
would have been quickly made good and little thought of it but for the
conflagration that followed.

Compare San Francisco casualties with those of other cities. Two hundred
and sixty-six deaths as the result of the greatest calamity that ever
happened in California! Not to mention the floods, fires, and cyclones
common to St. Louis, Chicago, Galveston, and all mid-continent America,
the yellow fever at New Orleans and along the southern shore, or the
25,000 deaths from cholera in New York and Philadelphia in less than
twenty-five years, or the loss of 1,000 ships on the Atlantic coast in
the hurricane of August, 1873-not to mention the many extraordinary
displays of vindictive nature, take some of the more commonplace
calamities incident to most cities except those along the Pacific coast.

Every year more people and more property are destroyed by lightning,
floods, and wind-storms on the Atlantic side of the Rocky mountains than
are affected by earthquakes on the Pacific side in a hundred years.
Every year more people drop dead from sunstrokes in New York, Baltimore,
Philadelphia, and other eastern cities than are killed by earthquakes in
San Francisco in a thousand years, so far as we may know. Yet men and
women continue to live and build houses in those cities without thought
of running away.