Ed Rouzer ran the Copper Queen Hotel, a stately little resort in the mining town of Bisbee, Ariz. He was the son of a respected hotel administrator, so he must have been naturally interested in fancy hotels. It makes sense that the eager 27-year-old would want to spend at least part of his honeymoon at Hotel Del Monte, among the most luxurious resorts on the West Coast in 1906.
Rouzer married Mary Smith in Los Angeles on April 11, 1906. It was a small mid-week wedding at the home of the bride's mother. An account of the ceremony noted that Mary Smith “was handsomely gowned in a grey pongee traveling dress with bodice of lace.” Friends showered them with rose petals instead of the customary rice. Originally from Phoenix, where her father operated a flour mill, Mary had graduated from Pomona College 10 months earlier; she was, according to the Pomona Daily Review, "a particularly engaging young lady."
Ed and Mary had originally planned to travel directly to San Francisco, but he managed to score a room at Hotel Del Monte for a couple of days so of course they took advantage of the opportunity to indulge in the resort’s magnificence. En route to the hotel, the newlyweds first drove Seventeen Mile Drive, a new and stunning novelty through Del Monte Forest. When they arrived at the hotel, they were given the choice of one of two available bridal suites. Ed left the choice up to Mary. She picked Room 97.
They were in bed at 5:12 a.m. on April 18, 1906, when the floors began to shake violently. A wild earthquake lasting about 45 seconds ruptured the northernmost 296 miles of the San Andreas fault. It was the earthquake that devastated the city of San Francisco. The quake itself destroyed city blocks, but the resulting fires roared out of control for several days. More than 3,000 people were killed and about half of the city’s 400,000 residents were left homeless.
By comparison, damage in Monterey County was minimal. The twisting shockwaves damaged the Spreckels’ sugar processing facility south of Salinas. The wharf and warehouse owned by the Pacific Coast Steamship Co. in Moss Landing dropped into the surf. Bricks were loosed from buildings around downtown Salinas. The only deaths recorded in Monterey County as a result of the quake were the slumbering newlyweds in Room 97 of the Hotel Del Monte. Most of the massive chimneys in the main building crashed through the ceiling, and the one above Room 97 landed directly on Mr. and Mrs. Rouzer of Bisbee, Ariz.
Even by 1906, the grand Hotel Del Monte had a storied and strange past. Charles Crocker, the railroad baron, somehow had seen potential in the drear and lifeless outpost that was Monterey in 1879. He built the resort — and the railroad spur that connected Hotel Del Monte to the rest of the world — in spite of skeptics who had seen Monterey and who were not impressed.
Critics referred to the resort as “Crocker’s Folly,” but the place quickly caught on with the swells from big cities lured by its lavish botanical gardens and carriage excursions to what is known today as Pebble Beach. The place quickly became a favorite for the “leisure class,” especially after a visit by President Rutherford B. Hayes, who wrote that he and his wife would “never forget that lovely hotel among the trees and flowers.”
With that sort of endorsement, the place developed a reputation as one of most elegant seaside resort in the world; its visitors were referred to as “fashionable and fastidious” by one promoter. Certainly, Hotel Del Monte changed Monterey’s reputation as a murky and lifeless village with a rickety historical past. And as we know by now, the Monterey Peninsula has been an international tourist destination since the hotel's construction.
That’s not to say the place didn’t have its dramatic moments. In 1893, for instance, several young men employed at the stately hotel were goofing around on the forested grounds, attempting to pull a practical joke on another worker, but the frightened worker pulled a gun and shot one of his assailants in the head.
In April 1887, a devastating fire forced nearly 350 visitors fleeing in panic in their nightclothes. “People went wild in trying to escape,” according to one dispatch, quoted in newspapers throughout the country. “The guests had no time even to dress themselves, and thousands of dollars worth of diamonds and jewelry were consumed in their trunks.”
The resort’s reputation preceded itself, so the burned-out shell of a building was replaced, bigger and sturdier than before.
Earthquake damage to Hotel Del Monte
When news of the terrible San Francisco Earthquake first spread across the country, the Rouzer and Smith family had been concerned about Ed and Mary, but were relieved initially to hear that damage on the Monterey Peninsula was minimal. Word reached Bisbee within a day that the Rouzers had not survived.
“The unfortunate couple, in all probability, never knew what happened,” according to an account carried in The Monterey New Era. “Mr. Rouzer was killed outright, being horribly crushed and mangled, while his wife, though not mutilated, sustained a fracture of the skull and never recovered consciousness.”
Hotel and rescue workers rushed into the room soon after the quake, but were initially pushed back by the blinding steam rising from the broken heating pipes. They eventually evacuated the couple. Ed had died immediately, but an ambulance from the Presidio hospital arrived for Mary. Attendants ultimately determined that Mary was too “hopeless” to be moved, so she was moved to another hotel room, where she died within the day.
James Bell, a former Bisbee resident who was acquainted with the Rouzer family and who now lived in Pacific Grove, rushed to the hotel after learning of the toppled chimney. Bell worked for Western Union, and dispatched the bad news to friends and relatives in Bisbee, located in southeast corner of Arizona, near the borders of Mexico and New Mexico.
Bell reported that the Rouzers had been given a choice of rooms the night before. He also noted that the second suite — the room Mary Rouzer didn't pick, had been undamaged. “I guess that was fate,” Bell wired to a friend.
News of the fatalities spread through Bisbee and “plunged this city in gloom and sorrow,” according to the Bisbee Daily Review. Though Mary Smith was from Los Angeles, her sister lived in Bisbee and the sister “has been almost prostrated” since hearing the news. At the Copper Queen Hotel, the pool room and the buffet were immediately closed and the house draped in mourning while “clerks, stewards, waiting girls, porters and all attachees shoot about with tears in their eyes.”
After attending their wedding in Los Angeles earlier in the month, the Rouzer and Smith families gathered In Phoenix a week after the San Francisco Earthquake to bury the couple. The Rev. J.E. Fry, who had united the couple in matrimony only two weeks earlier, presided at their funeral. Ed and Mary were interred, side by side, in the Masons' Cemetery in Phoenix.
"The funeral was one of Territorial importance, to the hundred of local attendants being added scores of friends from Bisbee and other points," reported the Los Angeles Times. "The double grave was banked deep in flowers, tributes of affection to the only Arizonans known to have perished through the California earthquake."
The bodies were later moved to nearby Greenwood Cemetery in 1914 and reburied in the Smith family plot.
Sources:
The National Archives
The Bisbee Daily Review
The Pomona Daily Review
The Monterey New Era
The U.S. Geological Service
The Los Angeles Times