The impact of that April dawn a century ago was as impossible to foresee as the cataclysm itself.
After the ground stopped convulsing at 5:12 a.m., a messenger hurried off in a railroad handcar with orders to keep pumping his way south until he could deliver to San Francisco a shocking dispatch and a plea for help.
"Earthquake. Santa Rosa in ruins and burning. Many injured and probably many killed."
One day, Santa Rosa was a market town of 6,700 pushing into a new century with the same pluck as the electric car line cutting through its bustling business district.
The next -- April 18, 1906 -- some 20 square blocks in the center of Luther Burbank's "chosen spot of all the earth" had been laid to waste by a 7.8 temblor. Only an occasional church spire could be seen rising upward from the heaps of brick and crumbled mortar.
"The destruction was so bad," one survivor would recall, "you could scarcely see where the streets were, as the debris from the buildings filled the streets and covered the car tracks."
At least 100 people perished; some laid to rest in the old Rural Cemetery in anonymity, including an entire family. Apocryphal stories bespoke the terror: a young lady pinned under the timbers of a collapsed hotel, her hair turned instantly gray; dairy cows "gone dry" from fright; a man trapped beneath rubble crying out for someone to shoot him -- a merciful death compared to being burned alive by advancing flames.
But news that a massive earthquake had leveled a small farm country town to the north would get little attention in the shadow of a city grappling with its own disaster. San Francisco itself was on fire.
The Gold Rush Town just beginning to blossom into a powerhouse of West Coast culture and commerce caught the horrified eyes of the world. What still stands as the second fiercest temblor in U.S. history and one of its greatest natural disasters would indelibly be inscribed as "The San Francisco Earthquake."
Writer Jack London made his way down Sonoma Mountain from his Beauty Ranch in Glen Ellen to what he called "the doomed city," describing a once cosmopolitan place where "all the shrewd contrivances and safeguards of man had been thrown out of gear by thirty seconds twitching of the earth's crust."
But for all the words he devoted to the conflagration in San Francisco, London dashed off to a relative this often overlooked historical footnote: "Santa Rosa got it worse than S.F."
Historians and geologists agree. In the history of The Big One, Santa Rosa suffered more death and destruction per capita and square block than San Francisco, where more than half the population was left homeless, 28,000 buildings destroyed and, by contemporary estimates, at least 3,000 died.
A century later, the two vastly dissimilar cities 50 miles apart commemorate the same crucible with a kinship of survival and a shared story of resurrection.
A San Francisco newspaper headline after the quake said it all: 'Waterfront destroyed. Business to resume at once.'
The earthquake of 1906 would shape the future, the face and, one might argue, the spirit not only of the Bay Area, but of an entire state balancing precipitously on the shaky ledge of the Western Frontier.
