Black Fire: The True Story of the Original Tom Sawyer

by Robert Graysmith

  New England gold hunter Richard Hale surveyed the damage. “In a very short time,” he said, “only smoking heaps of ashes and charred debris told where San Francisco had stood, for the town had burned to the very sand.” He returned to his home on the hill to find his shack had survived. “The heights had not been swept,” he said as he entered and sat down. His single door and window let in a view of the town and the corner of the bay beyond. “Below us lay a smoking, ashy waste, flat to the sand.” The city lost its expensive new wood-plank roads. An examination showed that cheap pine had been substituted for the pricey redwood planks. More graft in the city of graft. Still deeply in debt for the road’s construction, the Council would have to issue bonds and impose stiff taxes to regain its credit balance so they could replank the streets with more cheap wood. The conflagration had hit the residential section as never before—four hundred major buildings, a four-block-square area, had been consumed at a cost of almost $3 million. The fire was again attributed to incendiarism. “Some of the largest losers by the recent fire,” reported the Alta, will in the end be the greatest gainers. Editor Gilbert estimated that the opening of Commercial Street would enhance the value of the land abutting it, greatly exceeding the value of the buildings destroyed. Much of the property was in the hands of commission merchants and the biggest losses would fall upon New England and New York shippers. The San Francisco merchants had in truth benefited.

  Two days after the fire, the Square resounded with the rap of busy hammers. Men raced from every direction clutching hammers and saws and tripping over smoking timbers. With manic enthusiasm, almost hysteria, these undaunted citizens flew to instantly rebuild as they had done two times before and would do again. “One would suppose our people would become discouraged by such rueful reversals,” John McCrackan said, “but instead of that they seem rather to gain new impulses and energy.” Swarming to work, they duplicated past mistakes. Singing, they attacked the rubble again, nailing smoking boards onto the shells of still-smoldering houses with still-hot hammers. “Onward!” They were working on San Francisco time. The owner of a melted warehouse was already bossing a master carpenter and putting up a new store. The floor of the new El Dorado was laid before dark. At daylight the next morning a frame was raised. In a single week a new establishment of rococo elegance with lascivious paintings on the walls would be up and running. In three days three stores would be occupied and operating.

  Coffin headed back to the waterfront. “The three huge pyramids stood there for three days and nights,” he recalled, “gloating over the general destruction till at last the same devouring element having eaten them off their balance, they toppled and fell in a crash of fire and smoke, the grand finale to a stupendous pyrotechnic exhibition.” Street preachers shuffled through the smoking embers bellowing that God was leveling San Francisco for its debauchery, sharpsters, and thieves. They were probably right, but the noise of busy hammers drowned them out, leaving their dour sermons to hang over the city like another shroud of ashes. Barrels of gunpowder stored in basements over many blocks remained a constant threat, as did the desiccated redwood structures, ignitable ship hulks, discarded goods, dry-as-bone timbers, and oil-drenched buildings. As Coffin tried to sleep on the Talma, he could practically hear the flutter of kerosene, whale oil, and camphene lamps, of fat wax candles and the hiss of open stoves. Another strong wind swept in from the ocean. Howling, it blew away the cinders and dried the living firetrap, making it ready for the next big burning. People were already taking bets on when. In two weeks all would be as it had been except for the Montgomery Street banks, impervious as eggshells, that had burned. Since the fine for refusal to aid firefighters had been ineffective, the Council raised the penalty to $500. No one would pay that either.

  All the volunteers had torn ligaments, scalds, injuries caused by falls, and considerable smoke in their lungs. Sawyer had injured his hand. He and new volunteer Mike Gully argued over the best balms for burns. Kohler commonly used a mixture of nitrate of silver, sulfate of iron, bicarbonate of soda, white paint, and sulfate of zinc to heal burns, but Gully suggested Sawyer hold his burn patiently in cold water so no blisters would form. Good advice.

  Widespread discussion over who had been setting the blazes raged. The leading theory was that the Ducks were igniting San Francisco as part of their protection racket. Some thought the Hounds were using the ensuing confusion to loot stores and rob citizens. “No matter what the answer is,” the mayor said, “we’ve got to improve buildings.” First, he banned the use of highly combustible building materials. Citizens raided the San Mateo hills for thousands of feet of new redwood, filled in ditches that had impeded the volunteers, and dug some artesian wells. There was talk of using corrugated metal and granite blocks for the new buildings, but by now the same old firetraps as before had been erected. Citizens met at the St. Francis Hotel to further organize the unpaid fire department. Local government had little control over the volunteers. They could construct their engine houses wherever they wanted but tended to overprotect some neighborhoods and underprotect others. In July the mayor signed an ordinance to propose the establishment of a charter. Within a week Broderick, who was emerging as political boss of the city, twisted arms and got the charter approved. Another two fire companies were created, not regional but nationalistic departments, which only made friction between the cantankerous volunteers worse. As Sawyer had seen in New York City as the number of companies grew, they became more competitive. In the East, firefighting had become less community service than armed combat. Around Pell Street and in the Bowery residents still spoke of the 1836 battle between Lady Washington Company and the Peterson Engine Company when hundreds of volunteers and bystanders were caught up in a knock-down, drag-out, and bloody slugfest. New York Engine Company Number Two, notorious for its bitter rivalries with companies Nineteen and Twenty-six, was disbanded for brawling, as was the Hudson Company.

  The next new San Francisco company was California Engine Company Number Four. It displayed none of the lavish gold braid of Social Three. Their uniforms were plain as boiled potatoes, though they had them shipped all the way to New York to be cleaned at a cost of $1,300. Their modest dress caused them to be called the Simple Fire Company, or Simple Four. Cook Brothers & Company lent them their first water engine. It was simple, too, but would soon be replaced by a Hunneman pumper. William Hunneman, an apprentice of Paul Revere and Ephraim Thayer, built and designed more than seven hundred manual engines. Simple Four’s procedures for responding to fires, though, were complicated and required two sets of men—one for a cart and one for the engine, which made their response time to a fire slow. Their engine house, a lean three-story building with a white flagpole and Moorish grillwork, stood on Sacramento Street as far east as the edge of Happy Valley. A year earlier squatters had pitched their tents on the eastern portion of the cove and named the sandy level Happy Valley. It was neither happy nor a valley, only an unhappy region of plague. Most of Simple Four’s members lived and toiled there in its planning mills or in the Peter Donahue foundry. One of its rugged laborers, William S. O’Brien, Number Four’s foreman, became one of the Big Four millionaires who controlled interests in the Comstock Bonanza, the richest strike ever. Sam Brannan, who suppressed the squatter movement, had so far been unable to oust the settlers and before long would advocate that the city take violent action. An inordinate number of future detectives and police chiefs sprang from Four’s ranks. Isaiah Wrigley Lees, a machinist in a foundry, became San Francisco’s chief of police and widely known as the greatest detective in the nation.

  Hearing the alarm by day, volunteers all over the city threw aside their cashbooks and ledgers, kicked off their shoes, jumped into their boots, and hit the ground running. Hearing the alarm in the evening, they leaped from their theater seats. Hearing the alarm at midnight, they started from sleep, pulled up their trousers in one motion, and got to the engine house half dressed to wheel their pitiful engines out and pull and push for the fire
. The first heavy strokes of the alarm bell had barely ceased when the brighter peals of engine bells supplanted them. A few minutes’ delay and all San Francisco might be ablaze, and who could stop it this time if not them?

  Knickerbocker Five joined Broderick One and Manhattan Two as a volunteer band composed exclusively of New Yorkers, though mostly of German ancestry. Their first firehouse on Merchant Street had been destroyed by fire. Their new $10,000 three-story brick-and-stone-cut house was on the north side of Sacramento Street between Sansome and Leidesdorff streets. Five’s mahogany Van Ness piano box–type pumper was a small wheezy engine named Two and a Half. When they were not dragging Two and a Half around, they pulled a three-thousand-pound New York piano box type called Yankee Doodle. The local practice of firemen’s singing chanties at the blaze began with Number Five. Their most spirited, deep-voiced songster was John “Curly Jack” Carroll, a man of imposing height. When refugees from the Sacramento deluge were evacuated by riverboat to the steamship company in San Francisco, they were put up at the Sarsfield Hotel next door. Twenty-four hours later, a rainy Sunday at 10:00 A.M., Curly Jack Carroll, dressed in his splendid wedding threads—polished silk top hat and tails—dropped by rival Big Six, so called because the Baltimoreans pulled the biggest engine of all, to discuss the wedding ceremony with his best man, Foreman J. H. Cutter. Two hours before his wedding the fire bell rang for Big Six’s district. A fire in a clutter of wooden tenement houses had leaped to the Sarsfield Hotel and trapped the Sacramento refugees inside.

  Curly Jack threw off his top hat, pulled on his helmet, and in his hundred-dollar tux raced to the scene with Big Six. As a torrential downpour beat at them, Six pushed and pulled their Philadelphia-style, 4,200-pound double-decker up slick, steep hills and still beat the other fire units to the hotel. The trapped refugees had panicked, the wooden window casements had caught fire, and many were leaping from the balcony into the front street. A woman was ready to toss her infant to the crowd below when Curly Jack threw back his head and spontaneously burst into song. “Oh, we’ll hunt the buffalo,” he sang, a song he had carried with him from New York. His deep bass voice rose melodically above the cries of the trapped and calmed them. This respite gave Manhattan Two time to arrive. As the volunteers beat at the flames and set up ladders, all the men began singing. Their song gave rhythm and order to their methodical pumping. Curly Jack only stopped singing when he spied a trapped woman on the top floor and plunged into the smoking building after her. He fought fire for five hours and then stumbled home late Sunday afternoon, fortified himself with a tumbler or two of whiskey, and collapsed on his bed. As he slept, his prospective father-in-law showed up at Sarsfield Hall brandishing a six-shooter and looking for him. On Monday, sixteen hours later, Curly Jack awoke, realized he had slept through his wedding, and rushed to his bride. No one knows what she said to her soot-covered groom, but when he did marry, it was ten years later and not to her.

  In San Francisco, fire and music went together perfectly, like fire and arson. Five sang their way through supper and sang while they fought blazes. They sang their way to fires and sang their way back. As they cleared rubble with their fire hooks, they sang—“Oh, we won’t be home until morning.” Soon these lusty, boisterous, musical volunteers made Five the singing fire company. While Social Three had the best singers, Five sneered at them as sentimental fellows who relaxed between pumpings to sing “Suwannee River.” All his life Big Six’s assistant foreman, Steve Bunner, found intense delight in singing “Hunt the Buffalo,” which became the anthem at the volunteers’ funerals. When Five’s volunteer Cherry was dying, he asked his fellows to give him a grand funeral because he had no money. At his funeral all the firehouses flew their flags at half-staff and filled the sky with rockets. Residual sparks from the pyrotechnics set a building afire.

  The volunteers went on sweating, singing, and straining over steep hills and rough terrain, the only light provided by boys and teens with torches. Broderick One, Manhattan Two, Social Three, California Four, and then Knickerbocker Five and Big Six became unrestrained in their desire to be first at the scene. The honor of putting out a blaze first became the ultimate mark of pride and a goal worthy of any transgression—including bloodshed and, potentially, murder. This new discord disrupted what little harmony had been achieved recently between the volunteers. Big Six’s Charley “the Bone-breaker” McMahon punched a rival fireman so hard he broke a bone in his own hand. Three’s obsessive drinking made them belligerent and it would grow worse over the years until one morning every member woke up with a hangover and decided never to suffer through another such New Year’s Day, swore total abstinence on the spot, and dashed their liquor bottles into the street below. Their foreman, Franklin Whitney, organized the Dashaway Club, the first temperance league in San Francisco. Whitney was unhappy that they were forced to use Free’s toy mining pump as an engine, so he had Volunteer Tom Battelle speak to Bill Howard, who brought a beautifully painted $4,000 pumper in from Boston on his ship, Windsor Fay.

  Sawyer knew with dread certainty that the Lightkeeper would strike. The question was when. He would not stop of his own accord. He would have to be stopped, but how could they when getting to the fire was just as dangerous as fighting it? He worried that during the next blaze the planked streets themselves might catch fire, and then what would they do? With no gutters, the gold-hungry townsfolk assigned the plentiful winter rains the task of carrying filth down the east and west streets into the cove. In summer the garbage remained where it had been dumped, drying hard in the sun and forming a crusty, sticky patina that, to Sawyer’s surprise, assisted horses to gain their footing. Tons of unclaimed cargo were stacked on shore. No one was interested enough to buy or steal it and highly paid ferrymen had no time to track down the rightful owners. When formerly valuable items became a glut, auctioneers chucked perfectly good merchandise into the pits along Clay and Jackson streets. When the cost of storing merchandise was greater than its value, merchants used the items as landfill. Downtown street foundations were composed of barrels of flour and sugar, cement, spoiled beef in barrels, tins of lard, tin cheese boxes, chests of coffee, rolls of sheet lead, crinolines, revolvers, bales of hay, and crates of patented gold-washing machines designed by men who never saw a placer mine. The sidewalk running along Leidesdorff Street from Montgomery to the Pacific Mail Office was made of one-hundred-pound boxes of first-class Virginia tobacco. The day the price of four thousand pounds of chewing tobacco dropped to three cents per pound, the owners buried fifty large casks. The next week tobacco was valuable again. One landfill consisted of two shiploads of Spanish brandy dumped over two acres of waterfront ground.

  South of Market, bounded by Folsom and Mission and Fourth and Tenth streets, was a quicksand bog that sucked anyone crossing out of sight. Each spring the city did maintenance on the single road to the cemetery that cost $15 per square inch. Because the city was flat busted, all the roads remained quagmires and a hazard for the volunteers and their torch boys. Here and there nestled a small refuge, but immense dunes still covered much of San Francisco. The town’s hills had always presented a predicament. No level ground existed beyond the narrow crescent rim forming the beach. The shore itself was a coastal desert of windblown sand, bare tawny hills, and formidable granite mountains. At times Sawyer thought Broderick One’s job was impossible. Their ancient engine, the Mankiller, was barely functioning. Because there were still no new fires, the movement toward fire safety declined and the pursuit of business again took precedence, and as time went on, harmony among increasingly competitive volunteer units grew discordant and then vanished altogether.

  As for who the arsonist was, Broderick believed the long-sought fire fiend was a member of the gang clustered around Telegraph Hill. With his ties in Sydney Town and a secret undercover informant, he continued to narrow the field. Riding the swells alongside the deserted hulks, Captain Coffin eyed the cove. The tough river trader kept track of the comings and goings in the city of desert
ed ships around Long Wharf, and it was here that the answer to Broderick’s riddle lay. The fog was working its way across the bay’s nearly four-hundred-square-mile surface and enveloping the ship buildings that entrepreneurs had connected to city streets by narrow docks, fragile catwalks, and massive wharves. Coffin watched a man float his skiff beneath a portion of Long Wharf and remain there. There was the flicker of a lantern, the glint of a knife. Thieves sometimes tunneled into storehouses on the wharf above by sawing away the floor planks beneath safes and letting the gold drop into their boats. The shadowy figure had come from the direction of Sydney Town and might be planning the next city-leveling fire. Coffin lost the man in the fog but was certain he had gone away with three men. He thought he recognized the first man as English Jim Stuart, the leader of the most vicious gang of thieves, grafters, and murderers in town.

  Meanwhile, the Council had decided to plank east-to-west streets, such as California and Sacramento, from the waterfront to Stockton Street. Only Nob Hill’s steepness halted planking in that direction. As the city grew, workers built new roads but did not bother leveling lots down to street level. The hills above Stockton Street had been too steep for wagons to climb without ending up in a tangle at the bottom, so the city planners decreed Stockton be laid out as much as fifty feet lower than the existing topography. This made for some decidedly odd homes. Houses constructed before the grade of the street was fixed suddenly found themselves perched high above Stockton Street, which now cut through the hillside. The torch boys had to run through narrow ravines with high cliffs on either side with rooftop lots that might be on fire. The potential to be crushed by an avalanche of fire was a real issue. Sawyer, running in the wide trench of Stockton Street, dodged pebbles and avoided fine sand showering on both sides. Earth sometimes gave way beneath a stranded house and sent it tumbling down into the road. He studied houses above on both sides. Cliff-dweller families climbed ladders to their front doors—now twenty-five to forty feet above street level—drew up all their food, wood, and water by rope, or climbed rickety wooden stairs. By night they crouched in front of their camphor lamps and pondered why they had so few callers.