ISOSEISMALS: DISTRIBUTION OF APPARENT INTENSITY. 167 
At Dungan’s Ferry, on the north bank of the Eel River, the ground was full of fissures. 
Every bar on the river had been opened by fissures, and the gravel toppled over leaving 
big ditches, some 6 feet deep and over 500 feet long. Coming up on the mainland the 
road had dropt about 2 feet in one place and was full of small fissures. A 40-acre field 
was entirely ruined. It was heavily fissured, having dropt down in strips from 2 to 6 
feet wide, from 4 to 6 feet deep, and from 5 to 500 feet long, the fissures pointing between 
south and southwest. All the fields were full of quicksand volcanoes, some 1 to 3 cubic 
yards in size. ‘They were perfect miniature volcanoes, every one having a crater. It is 
said they extended 30 miles up the river. 
In Ferndale not a chimney was standing and every brick building was torn to pieces. 
The shock threw two wooden houses sideways. All the plate-glass windows were smashed. 
Near the False Cape it threw the old hill, on which the Oil Creek coast road ran, out 
into the ocean for 0.5 mile. It is estimated that 200 acres were thrown into the ocean. 
Quite a number of cattle went with the hill. The slide is said to have obscured the view 
of Cape Mendocino light from Trinidad heads. 
In Petrolia the shock threw every house off its foundation; in the mountains it opened 
great fissures, ruining many acres of good grazing land. It is said that the McKee ranch, 
near Shelter Cove, is entirely ruined by fissures. About 6 miles below the mouth of the 
Mattole River, at what is called Sea Lion Gulch, the mountains pitched together, entirely 
obliterating this dangerous place. 
The amount of damage thru the county will not exceed $100, 000. In the forests 
thousands of cords of redwood limbs are strewn over the ground and many of the trees 
were twisted off and hurled to the earth. A friend of mine living within 200 yards of a 
large body of redwood at Pepperwood, near Eel River, was in the field when the shock 
came. It lookt to him as if the tops of the trees were almost touching the ground when 
they were swaying back and forth. It made him quite dizzy to watch the trees. Limbs 
came crashing down everywhere, intermingled with an occasional terrible crash telling of 
the fall of one of the giants of the woods. 
Freshwater, Humboldt County. To the east of Eureka. Population 150. — The shock 
is described by Mr. 8. E. Shinn as heavier than the one he experienced in San Francisco 
in 1868. Not a chimney was left whole in the town or Valley, and glassware in houses 
was generally broken. The first part of the quake was from east or a little south of east 
to a little north of west; then came the big wave, like waves of the ocean. The orchard 
was lifted between 2 and 3 feet as if by a big breaker coming in. At the same time he 
thought the house would come down; then it seemed to give a lurch and throw the chim- 
ney straight north, some of the bricks going 15 feet from the porch. He could not keep 
his feet except by hanging on the door knob, after being thrown back and forth. 
Alexander Cceur states that most of the chimneys in Freshwater were thrown northeast. 
About half of the chimneys were thrown and the rest were all more or less shattered. 
Some were twisted from east to west and one was turned halfway around but did not 
fall. The town is at the foot of a hill near a small stream, and is built on gravel having 
a depth of about 6 feet. 
Ferndale, Humboldt County. Population 850. — This town, on the south side of the 
flood plain of the Eel River, appears to have been the most severely shaken place in 
Humboldt County. It is the largest town in the county south of Kureka, and is about 
2.5 miles from the Eel River, as it now flows thru its flood-plain, 0.5 mile from Salt River, 
a tributary of the Eel, and 9 miles from the ocean where the Eel River empties therein 
The valley to the north of Ferndale, and extending east and west from it, is underlain 
by alluvium of probably considerable depth. It is very low and subject to floods almost 
every winter. South of the town are rather abrupt slopes rising to the summit of the 
ridge which ends in Cape Mendocino, These slopes are underlain by soft sandstones of 
