You were nowhere near prepared enough.

Oh, sure, you had all your important documents in one place. Your valuables were put away, the car was gassed up, extra water was onboard, and you were ready for whatever happened. Now, of course, you can never totally plan for the worst, though with “The Longest Minute” by Matthew J. Davenport, you can read about it.

There was a reason that Yerba Buena was such a sleepy town: it contained “barely two hundred residents” in the summer of 1821. Indeed, it was small and still under Mexican rule then, until it was claimed by U.S. soldiers and renamed San Francisco in 1847.

Two years later, San Francisco’s population had multiplied by ten, but big change was rolling over the Sierra Nevada mountains. Gold had been discovered in nearby foothills, and hopeful miners flocked to the area to stake their claims.

In 1849 alone, the city grew by more than eighteen thousand residents. By 1880, San Francisco was home to 233,959 people from around the world and many of them worked at the city’s port, a bustling place of commerce partly constructed on land that had been created with sand, rotting wood, abandoned ships, and debris tacked onto the edge of the shore. The extra land was needed to house newcomers and the people who lived and worked in San Francisco, proudly known as “The Queen City of the Pacific.”

But the Queen’s crown was slightly askew.

Several times in its young history, San Francisco had burned nearly to the ground because, more than any other city in America, it was mostly “made of wood.” Furthermore, says Davenport, “The threat of earthquakes hung constantly over San Francisco…” By 1906, with a population approaching 400,000, this was a concern for the city’s mayor.

It would become so much more when, at 5:12 a.m. on April 16, 1906, the ground split San Francisco into many pieces. Nineteen minutes later, “more than fifty fires were burning and spreading and the fate of most of the city was already sealed.”

Chaos. Pure, unadulterated chaos, that’s what a disaster seems to be made of, and author Matthew J. Davenport does an exceptional job of bringing that out in this story. A survivor here, a victim there, a heroic story beneath, a jaw-dropper up top, and “The Longest Minute” makes you breathless with it all.

And yet, this book itself isn’t chaotic.

Davenport also gives readers a good lay of the land through geography and light geology before turning his attention to the history of the settling of one small part of the West. This is widely accomplished as readers meet individuals here, and learn a little about their lives and hopes as well as the discrimination that some of them endured. Learn their stories but beware, because you know what’s coming. Cue the ominous music…

Readers who’ve been through a conflagration should take note: this book could be triggering because of its details. If you’re okay with that, grab “The Longest Minute” and prepare yourself.

“The Longest Minute: The Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906” by Matthew J. Davenport
c.2023, St. Martin’s Press
$35.00
448 pages