Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/300

296 houses in the villages of Manchester and Point Arena, wrecking the magnificent lighthouse of solid masonry on the Point itself. In low ground the rift formed successions of little ponds. On hillsides the lower side of the crack fell away like a drivelling lower lip, leaving an open chasm, ten to twenty feet in apparent depth. On level hard ground the soil like the rock below closed with a snap a little tighter than it was before. Line fences were broken and sheered from sixteen to twenty feet. Lines of trees met with similar readjustments. In Mendocino County the horizontal displacement is about sixteen feet. In Marin County, where exactly measured, it is sixteen feet and seven inches. Southward it becomes less. In San Mateo County it is six to eight feet, and at the Pájaro Bridge at Chittenden, where the open fault ceases, the western pier was moved northward about eighteen inches. This shifting of position, evident along the line of the crack, seems to have included the whole region, mountains and valleys, through which the crack passes. Either the region to the westward with the Santa Cruz Mountains and the mountains called Sobrante de la Punta de los Reyes have been stretched out toward the northward or else the region on the east side, including most of California, has been correspondingly humped up. It is impossible at present to say which is the fact, perhaps both. The vertical displacement is small. To the north of San Francisco the west side has been raised two or three feet. To the southward the slight relative change in elevation—two or three feet—is in favor of the east side.

The rift left the pastures of Point Arena, passing up Gualala River, always in a straight line, making havoc among the redwood