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Square, a soldier ordered everyone out and then shot and killed the man standing behind them. They had returned to the wrong store, and the penalty for the mistake was death. A woman told a cadet that a grocer invited the crowd to help themselves before the fire got his store, and a soldier bayonetted one of the invitees who was leaving laden with groceries. A grocer who charged extortionate prices had his goods expropriated by soldiers and “a dozen rifle barrels were leveled at the grocer’s head”—perhaps slightly more just, but not much less violent a response. A National Guardsman yelled at an African American man stooping over something on the ground to “get out but he paid no attention to me, so I up and fired at him. I missed of course, but the shot must have scared him and he started to run. I was just getting ready to shoot again, when a shot was fired from across the street and the fellow toppled over. . . . An officer came along and ordered us to throw the body into the still burning ruins, so in it went.” On April 21, the Bulletin reported that soldiers shot four men breaking into a safe; another story on the same page stated that twenty men on the waterfront were executed for refusing to help with the firefighting effort. The cashier of a bank was shot as a looter while he was trying to open his company’s vault two days after the quake. Many of the executed were incinerated in the fires or dumped in the bay. Their numbers will never be known.
    General Funston later wrote, “Market Street was full of excited, anxious people watching the progress of the various fires now being merged into one great conflagration. A few moments before seven o’clock there arrived the first detachment of regular troops, the men of the Engineer Corps at Fort Mason. Their presence had an instantly reassuring effect on all awe-inspired persons.” And the non-awe-inspired? In a long letter about life in one of San Francisco’s refugee camps, an upper-class woman wrote, “A drunken soldier had pushed his way into a tent full of sleeping women and threatened to shoot them. Hardly a day passed that all camping there were not roughly ordered to leave the ground by some uniformed person who strode shouting over the sands. On the first of these occasions after our arrival, there being only two or three women of us present, we were much distressed.” Mary Doyle wrote a cousin on a scrap of brown-paper bag, “A large number of men and even women have been shot down for disobeying orders of soldiers.” An officer’s daughter wrote a friend, “A good many awful men are loose in the city, but the soldiers shoot everyone disobeying in the slightest, no explanations asked or given.” Henry Fitchner, a nurse, reported, “I saw one soldier on O’Farrell Street, between Van Ness Avenue and Franklin Street, beat with the butt of his gun a woman—apparently a servant girl—who wanted to get a bundle of clothing that she had left on the sidewalk in that block.”
    “The terrible days of the earthquake and fire,” General Greeley reported on May 17, “were neither accompanied nor followed by rioting, disorder, drunkenness (save in a very few cases), nor by crime. The orderly and law-abiding conduct of the people rendered the maintenance of order a comparatively easy task.” Not all authorities were terrified of the people they were supposed to serve—but Greeley had been away during the earthquake, and it is impossible to know what his first response would have been.

The Great Fire
    Early historians chose to emphasize the fire over the earthquake, and in the decades afterward, 1906 was remembered for “the Great Fire.” Some recent historians charge that this was a cover-up, geared toward reassuring investors that San Francisco was not a peculiarly disaster-prone place, since fires, unlike earthquakes, can happen anywhere. It may also be that the public remembered the three days and nights of fiery inferno better than the