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The city of San Francisco is no more. The Paris of the Pacific, the wealthiest and wickedest of American cities, is now ash and memories. All that remains are blackened wharfs, the iron puddle of a church bell, a mound of cinders where a school once stood, hilly graveyards of charred bricks and melted iron skeletons, an endless scorch mark that was once the grandest boulevard in the West. A city of four hundred and fifty thousand frenetic souls; shaken from its moorings, burnt to a crisp, vanished from the face of the earth.

The fire stopped a block below us, here at the crown of Telegraph Hill, sparing seven houses where once were thousands, seven sullied teeth in the mouth of a black-gummed giant. Seven houses where once sat a raucous Barbary Coast, a majestic Market Street, a teeming Chinatown, seven houses for all of North Beach and Russian Hill and Cow Hollow and the Embarcadero.

I write my story, still floating in a sea of ash. Ash that was once the city of San Francisco: once someone’s mansion, someone’s opera house, someone’s tenement, someone’s bakery. Someone’s someone. My cough sends a fluffy tail snaking across the feathery surface of something that was once precious to someone.

I cringe at the further horror wrought by the lies that Mayor Schmitz and his minions attempt to foist upon us. Let me tell you what really happened here, before deception triumphs and the truth is lost forever. Let me paint for you the Imperial City of San Francisco: part Paris, part Dodge City; literate and boorish, libertine and feudal, a soiled Mecca, a beacon for those who had grown weary of the broken promises. San Francisco had invigorated the dream and become the new America.

I offer my own version of this extraordinary tale, one that began well before the holocaust. It is a personal observation; part history and part memoir, an attempt to add a human face to a most inhumane series of events.
I complete my version of the story, cross-legged in a barren Victorian on roasted Telegraph Hill while the unholy trinity of Mayor Eugene Schmitz and Boss Adam Rolf and Napoleonic General Frederick Funston are meeting at a bakery on Fillmore Street in the Western Addition, just past the fire line, to concoct their account. Their objectives are quite simple: to protect themselves from the hangman’s noose, minimize the totality of the horror lest the sane world recoil from our restoration, and defraud history by convincing us this was all God’s will and not their folly.

The newspapers, printed daily in Oakland, barrage us with tales of their heroics: of the steely resolve of Mayor Schmitz and the unflinching courage of Funston’s square-jawed troops and of the brilliant plans of Boss Rolf to engineer our resurrection. Four hundred and seventy-eight dead, they report. Four hundred and seventy-eight. There were that many bodies in the twisted tenements South of Market, on Howard Street alone. The true number is in the thousands.
I must offer a shifting mosaic of characters and events as no one story could ever render up the heart of this great matter, of a wondrous and dangerous city that is no more. I rely upon a bit of hearsay, tales retold, on points of view disparate and even contradictory. I have used diaries and letters, from both the living and the dead, to construct my story. I must fictionalize, on some accounts, the words and actions of characters who neither I nor my legion of observers could record firsthand. Those instances are quite small in number. The liberties I take are minor.

What transpired here was a war for a city’s heart that merely climaxed on April 18, 1906, at 5:13 A.M., a moment etched in the memories of all who survived. But if earthquake and fire is all that is remembered, then all is lost, for what we truly witnessed was a battle between good and evil the likes of which we have not seen outside of war itself.
Schmitz, Rolf, and Funston will no doubt twist any truth to convince you our demise was merely fate unavoidable, and whatever bad things this noble trio might have done, they did so with our welfare at the fore. Do not believe it. It did not have to happen. Good men and women, the unlikeliest of heroes, might have stopped it. The warning signs were everywhere.

The die was cast, not by the great earthquake but three days earlier, when the true heroes began to assemble. They were an unlikely lot: a runaway Kansas farm girl, a Chinese slave girl, a martyred fire chief, and a group of fearless young cops they called The Brotherhood. Lest anyone question the inspired significance of the cast, God, who loves a wild yarn as much as anyone, sent His voice, the great Enrico Caruso, to preside.

Most of all, there were the Fallons: Byron, a man whose belief in justice consumed him; Christian, his oldest son, a man at war with his own soul; and Hunter, the younger son, who found greatness before our eyes.

The story began, not on April 18, the day the Devil called, but three days earlier, when a remarkable young man named Hunter Fallon came home from Stanford University.

Remarkable indeed, for Hunter alone might have saved us.

— Annalisa Passarelli