When Salt Lake City was ‘said to be lost’: Plus, more history

                                Salt Lake City today.

THE great San Francisco earthquake of April 18, 1906 caused extensive damage and hundreds of deaths in California. However, what is not commonly known about the estimate 7.9 magnitude quake are the many wild rumors that circulated after the natural disaster.

For example, the Inter-Mountain Republican newspaper of April 22, 1906 published a story with the headline, “Salt Lake City said to be lost. Robeson P. White tells Y.M.C.A. experiences in San Francisco. Wild rumors circulated. Story that Zion was buried under lake sample of reports making bad worse.”

White, a construction superintendent, was in S.F. staying at a hotel when the early morning quake struck.

He assisted many injured people and later moved out of the fire zone, caught a ferry and returned to Salt Lake.

With outside communications wiped out, rumors spread. White heard “a story in San Francisco to the effect that the Salt Lake Valley had been lowered and inundated by the lake drowning every inhabitant of the city, and another to the effect that Los Angeles had been wiped off the map.”

MORE HISTORY:

-The Salt Lake Mining Review of Jan. 15, 1903 carried an extensive story about “The old Spanish mine in the Grand Canyon.”

                                      The North Rim of the Grand Canyon.

The tale revolved around an old prospector, Jake Smith, from Missouri, who wandered around the North Rim area of the Grand Canyon, south of the Arizona-Utah line. He fell of a cliff, broke a leg and was saved from starvation and nursed back to health by and old Indian, named Rabbit Tail.”

In short, Smith later saves the Indian’s wife from a mountain lion and is promised if he returns in one year he will be led to an ancient gold mine in the area.

Smith returns a year later, with a cousin, Mike Smith. The two are blindfolded at one point by the Indian, but area taken to on a precarious trail to a narrow mine full of chunks of gold. They are allowed to take out what they could carry and are blindfolded again. The two return to Salt Lake City and sell their gold, but are later unable to ever find the mine.

-“Lagoon bear killed” was a May 14, 1901 headline in the Deseret Evening News. “Nero,” a huge cinnamon bear that Lagoon in Farmington kept for two years as a visitor attraction, had to be shot.

The bear became “irrepressible” and kept escaping into other enclosures. He at one point got into a poultry area and devoured many hares and pigeons. His last act was to remove all the braces from his latest cage, while gnawing on the woodwork.

-“You’re lucky it wasn’t a moose or cow, Sid” was an Oct. 24, 1941 headline in the Salt Lake Telegram newspaper. Two Salt Lake deer hunters, Sid Hemstreet and M.C. Sant, were leaving their hunting area, about 35 miles west of Richfield, empty-handed.

They were coming down the mountain on a narrow road with cliffs. “Just as we turned a corner, a large doe came floating out of the air and lit squarely on top of the hood of the car,” Hemstreet told the Telegram.

He stopped and jumped out of the car just as the deer rolled off and down a cliff in the canyon. He figures the doe was chased or frightened above by another hunter and leaped over the edge.

The two men remained and did bag two deer before returning home with some $50 damage to the hood of the vehicle.