Original post made by /u/DyersvilleStLambert on /r/100yearsago.

This one REALLY caught my eye and sent my mind on a fascinating little voyage through time:

Fishing village swamped by tidal wave; 500 people are believed to have escaped.

The news dispatch says “Mexicali” but the event was at San Jose Del Cabo, a thousand kilometers south, via what was then a dirt road through an environmentally hostile desert that goes on like what seems forever.

In those days, both Baja California and Baja California Sur were territories and not states, so I guess the practical choice as the administrative seat for the entire peninsula was the city nearest to a land connection with the mainland, in this case Mexicali being near Sonora. From Mexico City’s point of view, in any case.

This does not sound like an ideal setup for the towns on the southern half of Baja, but they did have quicker access to the mainland via the sea, in ferry routes to and from Guaymas in Sonora and probably Mazatlán in Sinaloa. On the Baja Sur side, the ferry ports must have been La Paz and Santa Rosalía - a thriving mining town back then.

“Tidal wave”. Now commonly referred to as a tsunami.
On September 1 of that month was the catastrophic Kanto earthquake in Japan, which created a tsunami that was still 8 meters high when it reached Hawaii! So it must have been one and the same event.

But the Kanto earthquake was nearly two weeks prior to the date of the dispatch. Two weeks it took for news of the event to be dripping up towards Mexicali. Which goes on to show just how remote and isolated Los Cabos was back then, just how slowly information traveled, how primitive was the infrastructure. And the article makes no mention of the Japanese earthquake. Did they even put 2 and 2 together, make the connection?

Scratch the surface of this news item, and there is so much fascinating context all around it.