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he gathered information on seismic events in living memory. His findings
sufficed, he believed, “to correct some of the misapprehensions and state-
ments which have appeared from time to time relating to the severity of
earthquake shocks in this country during the earlier periods of its history.”
indeed, he learned of “but one shock that has proved in the slightest de-
gree serious,” and that was the Southern California earthquake of Septem-
ber 1812, which was reported to have killed between thirty and forty-five
people.
22
Trask went on to publish annual lists of earthquakes observed
throughout the state and a catalog of tremors in California since 1800. Al-
though he rarely cited sources, he was reported to have interviewed “old in-
habitants and foreign traders.” What his “statistics” showed, Trask claimed,
was that “even in the mountain districts, where during the day there is much
less of turmoil and noise arising from business than in the populous city, of
all these noticed, none have been of sufficient intensity to attract the atten-
tion of the inhabitants during the hours of daylight. These facts, though few
in themselves, are of importance, to disabuse the public mind in relation
to the danger to be apprehended from the occurrence of these phenomena.
The reputation which we sustain both at home and abroad, of being in
constant danger of being swallowed up by these occurences [
sic
], and the
idea that our country is but a bed of latent volcanoes, ready to burst forth at
any moment, spreading devastation over the land, is a very needless source
of alarm.”
23
Trask never paused to consider that perhaps his data were incomplete.
24
By his reckoning, if California's earthquakes “possess[ed] that severity so of-
ten attributed to them, the attention of the people would much more often
be directed to them. Yet we find that their first knowledge of such an occur-
rence is usually its announcement by the daily press.” Trask thus preferred
to interpret his empty mailbox as a sign of the insignificance of California's
earthquakes—not of the shortcomings of his network.
After a decade of this work, Trask abruptly turned his back on the acad-
emy and returned to full-time medical practice. Without him, research on
California's earthquakes languished for two decades. This was not for a lack
of shakers, to be sure. in 1865 San Francisco newspapers reported the most
violent quake since the city's founding. “every door, of every house, as far
as the eye could reach, was vomiting a stream of human beings,” wrote the
young journalist Mark Twain. “Thousands of people were made so sea-sick
by the rolling and pitching of floors and streets that they were weak and
bed-ridden for hours, and some few for even days afterward.—Hardly an
individual escaped nausea entirely.”
25
Just three years later, on 21 October
1868, San Francisco was hit by an even stronger upheaval, which tore apart
