On this day in 1872, a massive deadly earthquake hit the California area. Approximately 30 people died.

The San Andreas Fault is a transform boundary that runs through the entire state of California. It is a prime area for earthquakes. At around 2:30 a.m., the quake hit in the Inyo County in the Owens Valley of central California. The epicenter was at Lone Pine, where 52 of the town’s 59 homes were destroyed, killing 27 people in their sleep. An area of ground moved exactly 7 feet downwards.

Tijuana, Mexico felt the quake, despite being hundreds of miles away from the epicenter. It proved how big the quake was, at a 7.8 magnitude. Explorer and scientist, John Muir, who helped establish Yosemite National Park, was a caretaker at a hotel in the area at the time of the quake and witnessed the destruction of the park.

Muir reported, “The shocks were so violent and varied, and succeeded one another so closely, one had to balance in walking as if on the deck of a ship among the waves, and it seemed impossible the high cliffs should escape being shattered… feared that the sheer-fronted Sentinel Rock, which rises to a height of three thousand feet, would be shaken down… suddenly, out of the strange silence and strange motion there came a tremendous roar. The Eagle Rock, a short distance up the valley, had given way, and I saw it falling in thousands of the great boulders… an arc of fire fifteen hundred feet span, as true in form and as steady as a rainbow, in the midst of the stupendous roaring rock-storm.”

Two months after the 7.8 magnitude earthquake, there were 1,000 aftershocks, though none were deadly.