COMPARISON WITH OTHER SEVERE 
Corner Mission and Third Streets. Upper half of 
front of 4-story brick building fell; poorly con- 
structed. 
Northeast corner Battery and Washington Streets. 
Old Merchants’ Exchange ruined. 
Beale Street, near Market. 
Kearney Street, near Sutter. 
Jackson Street and Stout Alley. 
Mission and Fremont Streets. 
EARTHQUAKES IN SAME REGION. 449 
Corner Kearney and Washington Streets. City 
Hall had front wall badly cracked and entire 
building rendered unsafe. 
Washington Strect, near Sansome. 
Market Street, near Sansome. 
Pine Street and Front Street. 
Market and Pine Streets. 
Sacramento and Battery Streets. 
Sacramento and Webb Streets. 
Battery and Union Streets. 
On the marshy lands in the vicinity of Howard and Seventh Streets the ground was 
heaved in some places and sank in others. Lamp-posts were thrown out of perpendic- 
ular, gas-pipes were broken, ete. 
It appears probable from these scant records that the seat of the earthquake of 1865 
was somewhere in the Santa Cruz Mountains, between San Jose and Santa Cruz. If 
this conclusion be accepted, it seems further probable, in the light of recent events, that 
it was due to a minor movement along the San Andreas Rift. It was probably a some- 
what less severe earthquake than that of 1868. The earth movement which gave rise 
to the shock extended neither so far south as in 1857 nor so far north as in 1906, but 
appears to have pertained to that portion of the Rift affected in 1906 rather than to 
that affected in 1857. 
The only other earthquake which can definitely be referred to a movement along the 
San Andreas Rift was that of April 24, 1890, which, according to Messrs. F. Abby and 
Charles Bigley, of San Juan, opened a fissure at that place on the line of the Rift. The 
railway bridge at Chittenden was displaced, as it was in 1906. 
THE EARTHQUAKE OF 1857. 
Information regarding the earthquake of 1857 is scant and generally unsatisfactory 
as to details. California at that date was very sparsely populated, particularly in the 
southern Coast Ranges, where the seat of the disturbance was. The only records that 
have come down to us are those of Trask, in the Proceedings of the California Academy 
of Sciences, Vol. I, 1873; a note by J.S. Hittel in his ‘‘ Resources of California,’ 1863, p. 42, 
and some notes in Holden’s Catalogue of Karthquakes. These brief notes are supple- 
mented by the statements of a few old residents who recall the event, some of whom 
were in the zone of acute disturbance at the time. The data, while insufficient for a satis- 
factory account of the earthquake, warrant the statement that it was due to a displace- 
ment or fault in the San Andreas Rift, along its extent from Cholame Valley to the San 
Bernardino Valley, a distance of about 225 miles. 
According to Dr. Fairbanks, who has recently been over the course of the Rift in the 
southern Coast Ranges, the residents along that line have either very vivid recollection 
or very strong tradition regarding the rupturing of the ground at the time of the earth- 
quake; and Dr. Fairbanks’ field observations confirm the probable truth -of their state- 
ments. It appears to have been generally recognized by people familiar with the southern 
Coast Ranges that the shock was due to or associated with the rupture of the ground, 
and the line of rupture is commonly referred to by the country people as the ‘“earth- 
quake crack.” This crack, as opened in 1857, with differential displacement of unknown 
extent and direction, is still pointed out as a remarkable phenomenon from Cholame 
Valley southeastward along the northeast side of the Carissa Plain, through the Tejon 
Pass, thence along the southwest side of the Mojave Desert, past Lake Elizabeth and 
Palmdale, to the Cajon Pass and thence to the south side of the San Bernardino Range. 
The shock was felt from Fort Yuma to Sacramento, and the total area sensibly affected 
was probably not much less than in the earthquake of 1906. It was severe both at Los 
Angeles and San Francisco. At Los Angeles shocks continued at intervals during the 
26 
