SH Archive Mud flood, dirt rain, and the story of the buried buildings

[landofwa]

I thought this would fit here. Go to illustration #185 from the book “Annals of San Francisco” (1855) titled “Muddy Streets.” I’ll post links once I get moderator approval to this post.

Perhaps it’s just me, but this illustration is NOT what I’d picture if someone said “muddy street” to me. I get my shoes and pants cuffs dirty on a muddy street. I don’t need someone to pull me out having been buried waist deep. I don’t see waves of sediment rising to the tops of the first floors as you see here on a couple of buildings. If you look to the upper right, you see what looks like rivers of mud flowing in from somewhere. If this illustration constitutes a “muddy street”, I would hate to see what an actual flood looked like.

 

[landofwa]

Here’s a link to “Annals of San Francisco” that I cited above in post #21 and the illustration I mentioned:

Annals of San Francisco • The McCune Collection

 

[landofwa]

Something occurred to me about the “Muddy Streets” illustration I posted above. As part of the general theory goes, at least as far as I understand it thus far, it may have become “forbidden” somehow to reference some of the traumatic events of the 1800s. How this would have been accomplished and who would have been the enforcing authority I have no idea, but it occurred to me our illustrator here from “Annals of San Francisco” may have slipped one past the censors by simply having titled his depiction as “Muddy Streets” and not, I don’t know, something that better describes a catastrophic liquefaction event.

 

[landofwa]

This suggests the “Muddy Streets” above were just the way it was then:

State of Streets 1849 - FoundSF

"The streets of early San Francisco were turned into a quagmire which swallowed carts and pack animals.

…

The site on which the town is built was then still covered with numberless sand-hills. The streets were therefore uneven and irregular. By the continued passage of men, and of horses and drays with building materials and goods, while the rainy season (which commenced earlier than usual, and was remarkably severe) was shedding torrents from the clouds, the different thoroughfares were soon so cut up as to become almost, if not quite impassable. Indeed both horse, or mule and dray were sometimes literally swallowed up in the mud, while their owner narrowly escaped a similar fate."

I wonder. I guess I’m stuck on the sentence saying the streets were turned into a quagmire. Certainly possible, but that doesn’t explain (to me, in any case) the walls of mud pictured in the background. Then again, “torrents from the clouds” means flooding on the way. I wonder. California’s “Great Flood of 1862” was just a bit later, so weather was getting volatile.