SAN FRANCISCO -- San Francisco's streets were still smoldering, its dead still buried in rubble. But for many in the city, the first priority wasn't rescue. It was downplaying the disaster.

The city had to be rebuilt so instead of blaming the mass destruction on sometime as unpredictable and frightening as an earthquake -- another culprit had to be found.

There was a calculated effort to mask the horrors of the 1906 earthquake," said author James D'Allesandro. "They were afraid that people might not rebuild in the city. They were afraid investors might shy away."

Sam Singer, a Bay Area public relations specialist, said the 'great cover-up' began almost as soon as the earth stopped moving.

"The great earthquake really could be called the great cover-up," he said. "The city tried to hide the number of dead. They tried to switch and spin the earthquake into a fire."

There were buried bodies, burned bodies and a proclamation from the mayor that authorized Army troops to shoot to kill. And when looters were found, the Army did shoot to kill. Still the city's official death toll was just 478.

Gladys Hansen, the city's former archivist, has been researching the earthquake and fire for decades. Hansen and other researchers now believe the real death toll was at least 3,000 perhaps as high as 6,000.

"I knew there had to be more," said Hansen of the official death toll. "The mayor of San Francisco's number one priority was to get the city rebuilt. He was not concerned of inaccurate portrayal of the dead."

D' Allesandro is the author of the novel -- "1906". He believes the mayor and business leaders tried to hide the true scope of the doom and gloom to cover up for their own mistakes and to lure back business.

"An earthquake is an unpredictable dangerous thing," he said. "If you say to someone, to a real estate company or a bank or a developer that the ground beneath you is unstable, that is a frightening thing."

"If you say a big fire got out of control and we will build up the fire department and it will never happen again. That is something people can contend with."

Photos were doctored to cover up quake damage and just show the fire. There was no earthquake insurance back then, but there was fire insurance. It was as if an entire city was committing insurance fraud.

"Everybody had a part in this," Hansen said.

Even the newspapers played along. It was not usual for a local paper to carry a headline like "Fire Clears Way For Splendid Improvements."

"We're back, we are rebuilding and nothing is going to stop us," said Hansen of the tone in the local newspapers. "We are going to be a bigger better city."

Critics say the city that came up from the ashes was built on a foundation of deception.

"How did Eugene Smitz (SF's mayor at the time) get away with that lie?" Singer said. "For the same reason that politicians get away with lies everyday. They just repeat the lies long enough and they get their cronies to join into the chorus and eventually the lie becomes the truth."