Black Fire: The True Story of the Original Tom Sawyer

by Robert Graysmith

  Between December 24, 1849, and June 22, 1851, San Francisco had been completely burned six times (seven times if one counted the December 14 fire, which Kohler did), with three thousand structures lost. The mayor estimated that a total of $25 million of uninsured real estate had been lost in the eighteen months through the fires. He estimated that San Franciscans had lost $44 million of personal valuables, including great quantities of gold and jewels. Unlike four of the previous conflagrations, which had burned out residents, gamblers, and merchants, and the anniversary fire, which had burned out the business section, the June 22 inferno was the “poor man’s fire,” which hurt the common laborer with a loss of $3 million.

  With the mines playing out and the multimillion-dollar loss of the sixth fire, the future looked bleak. The mayor could not go to the City Hall at Kearny and Pacific streets. That was gone. The prison was transferred to Sheriff “Coffee Jack” Hays’s jail, and he packed eight or nine more men into each of the already crowded cells. So far only seven new cells and a keeper room had been completed. He had no idea how to finish the expansion project. There was a mortgage of $4,000 and a lien of $2,250. An honorable man, the sheriff paid most of it out of his own pocket.

  So much of the city had burned that finding a place to suit Martha Hitchcock’s aristocratic pretensions was difficult. The winds of Rincon Hill where her family took temporary refuge disturbed her. So did the neighborhood’s constant gunfire. Eventually Lillie and her parents moved into the new hotel on Market Street, at Bush and Battery streets. Martha liked the beautiful exterior with its broad verandahs, but because the hotel was built out over the bay, she had to tiptoe across narrow planks to the entrance. The makeshift interior was furnished with French antiques from the William Leidesdorff estate, but the glare of astral lights revealed scurrying rats. Upstairs flammable cotton ceilings stretched above the bedrooms. All over the city tons of scrap metal protruded from the rubble—safes, tools, metal warehouses, and stoves. Workers spent three weeks cutting up the twisted remnants of Howard and Green’s melted warehouse at Clay and Leidesdorff. It cost more than $9,000 to cart it away. All that metal created a new industry. Cheap recovered iron made foundries the city’s newest and biggest industry. From the melted wealth came more wealth as brick and iron replaced the flimsy, comparatively worthless lumber flooding San Francisco. San Franciscans were proud of their fires—grand fires, heroic fires, the greatest ever seen—because they had fire in their veins. They thrived on the blazes because each brought a new and finer city.

  On July 9, Dutch Charley and Broderick spoke at an antivigilance meeting in the St. Francis Hook and Ladder firehouse. On July 21, Lewis’s trial for arson began in the district court. The next day Sawyer heard that he was convicted in absentia and sentenced to two years. Lewis was nowhere in sight. Juror and Vigilance Committee prosecutor and recorder George Schenck speculated in his trial notes that the arsonist had escaped and traveled to New York, where he murdered Dr. Harvey Burdell, a dentist, and killed a second man in New Jersey in 1857. Dr. Burdell, though, had been strangled and stabbed by the mistress of his Bond Street house, Emma Cunningham, and one of her borders, a man named John Eckel. Unless Lewis was Eckel, Schenck was wrong. If Lewis was still alive, he was a very lucky man. Two days after his conviction, a new state statute made arson punishable by death.

  On July 21, Ira Cole reported that Dutch Charley was drinking more liquor in one day than he used to drink in a week. Yet his love of fighting fire, an admirable quality, might yet save him. Who could not admire the dedication and single-mindedness of any man who raged against those who interfered with the honest occupation of firefighting and dealt out dreadful punishment to those who disrespected the volunteers? In spite of his furious tantrums and bullying, he was a fireman at heart, possibly the bravest of all. Always first on the front lines, he was cited numerous times for heroism at the scene of a blaze. He was a bad man to have against you and a good man to have with you. When mobs began to lynch men in the streets, Dutch Charley would stand almost alone against the thousands for the rights of a few. He was especially needed in the worsening rivalry between the volunteer companies that had toiled for the public good so long without reward.

  On October 4, just as Zeke Wilson erected Wilson’s Exchange, the first five-story on the Pacific Coast, Sawyer finally shipped out for the first time as a coal pusher on the ill-fated Independence under the colorful Captain Wakeman. It was only the second visit of the new steamer to San Francisco. That same day the tireless promoter Tom Maguire reopened his latest Jenny Lind Theatre on the same site where his earlier Jenny Lind Theatres had been destroyed by fire. Poor Tom Maguire. He had opened one of the city’s first theaters above his saloon only to see it burned in the anniversary fire, worked hard to raise another $100,000 to rebuild, even labored as a bartender to earn money. He reopened his Jenny Lind Theatre at Kearny and Washington streets on June 12, and by June 22 it was ashes. “The next Jenny Lind,” he vowed, “would be of fireproof brick, yellow-toned sandstone facings shipped from Australia, grander with gilded trim, an orchestra pit and a dress circle.” He kept his promise. The handsome new three-story neoclassical structure, shipped in sections around the Horn, had a gorgeous gold and pink interior capable of seating two thousand people that rivaled the best theaters in the Atlantic states. Sadly, the sorely put upon entrepreneur had built too well. The Council cast its coveting eyes on the palace and demanded it as a replacement for the destroyed City Hall. In August, Maguire sold it to them for $200,000, an exorbitant price brokered by his friend Broderick. The cash was diverting but hardly fulfilled the thwarted promoter, who would rather have had his beloved theater. If Maguire could not win on land, then he would triumph on water. He would outfit a floating “Jenny Lind at Sea” from a rebuilt stern-wheel steamer. Within two years the seaborne theater would be throbbing past Pulgas Ranch off San Francisquito Creek when her boiler steam pipes would burst, explode through the dining room bulkhead, and kill thirty-one aboard. Scalded passengers leaped over the side as flames enveloped the Jenny Lind, which drifted onto the riverbank and sank. Tom Maguire would die a pauper.

  On October 21, Dutch Charley led his men to the St. Francis Hotel fire on Dupont and Clay streets. Seeing the upper two stories in flame, he ran hoses through the ground-floor doors to fight the fire from the inside, an efficient, effective way to fight fire. The flames were out in twenty minutes. The Alta wrote, “Mr. Duane … regardless of the flames, heat and danger, placed himself in the second story of the frame building using his energy and brawn to save it.” His redemption was happening just as Sawyer had predicted. On December 5, Pacific Eight helped reelect him as the volunteer companies’ chief engineer. Dutch Charley, reformed and reforming, enforced the ban on hazardous stored explosives by going from house to house enforcing the “powder ordinance” by seizing kegs of explosives and arresting the owners. One day he came to a small, empty shack in the Mission, saw an unsafe stovepipe encased in wood on its roof, entered and discovered a trapdoor in the floor. Prying it up, he located a stamping machine, a press, tools, coins, and dies—a counterfeiting operation. Police confiscated the equipment but not the counterfeiters. He never retired before the first light of dawn. “I told Mr. Yale [who needed his aid] that I made it a rule since the firemen of the city had so honored me with the highest position in their gift never to go out of hearing of the fire alarm bell. The city had been burned to the ground and had been almost wholly destroyed nearly every time there was a fire before I was elected Chief Engineer and I did not propose to let such a catastrophe occur through any neglect of mine.”

  On Tuesday, November 9, a small fire broke out near the Square. When the flames butted up against a hard brick wall at Washington and Montgomery streets, they went out. The value of the new brick buildings was proved again when a fire on Merchant and Clay streets was restricted to the loss of thirty wooden buildings. Five days later San Francisco adopted a new seal, a large bird with red and gold feathers, rainbow-hued wings
, and scarlet feet: a Phoenix, a fabled creature that rose from its ashes after setting itself ablaze on a pyre of cinnamon branches and myrrh. Broderick thought the image far more fitting for a great American city than the odious third eye of the cowardly vigilantes who had dishonored the volunteers by their use of the Monumental fire bell to call forth bloody deeds and bloodier hands.

  Merchants begged the Council not to pass a proposed ordinance restricting building of frame houses within fire limits. “Such a measure,” they argued, “might drive away many who are now hesitating to risk another trial of their fortune in the city.” The Council, convinced of the need for fireproof buildings, passed the measure on December 6, forbidding the future erection of any frame houses within dense areas of the town, prohibiting rags within the fire limits, and mandating slate, tile, or other fire-resistant roofs. New city ordinances demanded that all downtown commercial structures were to be either stone or brick. The three-story Custom House at Battery, Washington, and Jackson, under construction to house federal departments and the post office, had deep-set windows like a fortress. The new cast-iron buildings had their own peculiar beauty—stamped ornamental motifs and caryatids, iron floral friezes, and painted glass. Within two years, 626 brick or stone buildings would stand within the limits of Broadway and Bush streets, Stockton Street, and the waterfront. Three hundred and fifty of the buildings were two stories high, 154 were three stories, 34 were four stories, and 3 were five stories. Impressive brick and stone hotels, shops, theaters, and banks began to fill downtown as Montgomery Street became lined with durable structures of granite block.

  Senator Broderick had been behind a recent water lot grab involving the former head of the City Hospital, Dr. Smith. In such an imperfect city, but one filled with such promise, Broderick’s little faults seemed minor. In such a metropolis of cruel men and arsonists, kindness and goodness were relative things. As the new year was rung in, Broderick continued pursuing his ethic that the end justifies the means. So far his strategy had worked to good ends, but he had made political enemies who were out to kill him and do it legally.

  On December 12, George Oakes suddenly died.

  By now the foot of broad California Street had been substantially planked, the city’s first horse-drawn streetcar line was operating, and the California Street Wharf was being extended farther into the cove. Grading and planking stretched from the junction of Battery and Market streets diagonally to Sacramento and Dupont streets, and from Dupont and Broadway to the bay. A flight of planking nullified the steep pitch of the grade leading to Vallejo Street, and a three-mile-long plank road out Folsom Street was built. With planking almost universal, the job of the volunteers and torch boys became much easier. The Council ripped down the last canvas buildings, improved the fire watch at the new City Hall, mandated the placement of more water tanks, and ordained a fire-free zone, bounded by Union, Powell, Post, and Second and Folsom streets. Within this area vacant lots and open fires were forbidden and laborers had to use enclosed lanterns around hay. The city tore down the last wall of the white adobe relic, rooted up the foundation, and graded the site level with the street. The previous winter’s rains had affected its stability and it was feared it might “suddenly fall and overwhelm the neighbors in its ruins.” The Casa Grande had seen San Francisco rise from a few fishing hamlets to a city of great commercial wealth and seen the greater portion of it in ashes six times and as often rebuilt with renewed grandeur. “The day of the gay and merry fandangos is over,” the Alta reported, “the music that once resounded through its halls is hushed.” The city filled in the tidelands between the shores and piers with sand removed from towering dunes downtown. Gradually the crescent-shaped cove, with all its secrets, was plowed over. They filled in the land between the piers and the piers became streets stretching to the waterfront, and upon them homes began to rise.

  THE BURNED DISTRICT FROM THE JUNE 22, 1851, FIRE

  “It now came out,” said George E. Schenck, record keeper for the Vigilantes, “that [English Jim] Stuart was a leader of a gang of nine, who had been concerned in various robberies and assaults, composed of T. Belcher Kay, who was port warden at the time, John Morris Morgan, [Sam] Whittaker, [Robert] McKensie, Jack Edwards, Jim Stuart, Benjamin Lewis, Jemmy-from-Town and one other.” English Jim’s gang agreed that if their men were hung, “which we expected they would be,” Sam Whittaker said, “we would fire the town on Sunday night in several places.” He had heard that another member of their gang, “Billy Sweetcheese, whose real name is [Billy] Shears,” had assisted in setting the United States Gambling Exchange on fire on the Square “at the time it was vacant.” Thus two men had accomplished the May 1850 fire that destroyed San Francisco. Of T. Belcher Kay, historian H. H. Bancroft wrote, “He is said to have been the instigator of the great fire of the 22nd of June.” Kay’s assistants in the June fire were Whittaker, Jemmy-from-Town, and George Adams. English Jim Stuart, Sam Whittaker, and McKensie were lynched in July 1851. Kay escaped to South America.

  Sawyer finally learned the name of Ben Lewis’s confederate: Jack Edwards, another Duck, a member of English Jim Stuart’s gang, and leader of a gang who robbed and assaulted people on the outskirts of town. Edwards was also the man seen on the staircase with Ben Lewis when he torched his Collier House room. When Edwards was brought to trial after a long delay, like Lewis he was freed by venal judges under the sway of politicians in the Ducks’ pocket. When Edwards was searched, police found in his belongings what could have been a small lamp scorched almost beyond recognition but which made Sawyer certain that Edwards had been the second Lightkeeper and that the horror was finally over.

  STEAMING WITH TWAIN AND SAWYER

  May 26, 1863–December 16, 1866

  Billy Mulligan

  TWAIN AND HARTE PROWL THE SAN FRANCISCO DOCKS

  Investigations showed clearly that at least four of the conflagrations had been started by a gang of firebugs led by two former convicts from Australia—Jack Edwards and Ben Lewis.

  —Herbert Asbury, The Barbary Coast

  Steamers

  Subsequent confessions of criminals on the eve of execution, implicated a considerable number of people in various high and low departments of the executive.

  —Frank Soule, The Annals of San Francisco

  More than a decade later, in clouds of rolling steam, Mark Twain studied Tom Sawyer, foreman of Liberty Hose and the new San Francisco customs inspector. Sawyer reminded him of the rugged platoon of volunteer smoke eaters, mostly New Yorkers, in the Bowery B’hoy tradition in Virginia City. Virginia, as he called the Nevada town where he currently worked as a reporter, was only a small town, about three times as large as Hannibal, Missouri, his hometown since age four. He visualized their foreman, Big Jack Perry, leaning against the six-foot-high wheels of the town’s hand-drawn fire cart and concluded that Sawyer compared favorably. Later he patterned Buck Fanshaw in Roughing It on Perry.

  Twain, Sawyer, and Ed Stahle, the proprietor of the Turkish baths at 722 and 724 Montgomery, played cards, drank cold bottled beer, and listened to the rain pounding on the street outside. It was May 5, 1863, and Twain was three days into his first visit to San Francisco to “wildcat on Montgomery.” He had learned that Sawyer was a former policeman, Fire Corporation yard keeper, and Liberty Hose’s foreman. Twain luxuriated in the hot mist and surveyed his cards. The poker deck displayed full-length, single-ended court figures but no numbers. All three men loved to steam, Twain most of all. Stahle’s Turkish baths had been part of the Montgomery Block at the intersection of Montgomery and Washington streets for a decade. The ground floor on the northwest corner housed the Bank Exchange saloon (home of Pisco Punch), where Twain and Sawyer had met—drinking, of course. Twain had liked him immensely. Almost everyone did. Bret Harte, a frequent visitor to the bar, wrote “The Luck of Roaring Camp” in the Montgomery Block, the most important literary site of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American West. It was a hub of creative expression that magneti
cally attracted talent. Former torch boy Charles Dormon Robinson (later called the dean of San Francisco artists) worked out of his upstairs painting studio opposite Ambrose Bierce’s old apartment. Robinson and his fellow artists frequented the Occidental Hotel. Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, Gelett Burgess, Frank Norris, George Sterling, Joaquin Miller, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Ralph Stackpole, who would paint murals within Coit Tower, kept their offices there. Sun Yatsen wrote the first Chinese constitution there.

  Steam baths had been a fixture in the area long before the Gold Rush. Two blocks away, on the southwest corner of Montgomery and Sacramento streets, an Indian sweat house had once stood. The temascal, a combination hot-air bath and place of spiritual purification, was merely a six-foot-deep hole in the ground tightly covered with brush. A hole in the center allowed smoke to exit from the fire within. A narrow stream, now gone, coursed east down Sacramento Street to form a small freshwater pool known as Laguna Dulce (Sweet Water). After a half hour of steaming, the Native Americans, dripping with sweat, plunged into this chilly slough and emerged physically refreshed and spiritually revived, the same way the sauna affected Twain.

  He and reporter Clement T. Rice, affectionately dubbed “the Unreliable” during their mock reportorial feud, were living high in a prestigious new tour-story hotel on Montgomery, at Bush, and had grown accustomed to dining on salmon and cold fowl. “I live at the Occidental House,” he bragged, “and that is Heaven on the half-shell.… In a word, I kept the due state of a man worth a hundred thousand dollars.” Sawyer envied him. He lived frugally while saving to buy a saloon on Mission Street. He and Twain discussed steamboats that they had in common. On February 28, 1857, Twain departed from Cincinnati for New Orleans as a passenger aboard the steamboat Paul Jones. “One of the pilots,” he recalled, “was Horace Bixby. Little by little I got acquainted with him and pretty soon I was doing a lot of steering for him in his daylight watches.” Twain got his pilot’s license in September 1859 and worked the Mississippi until April 1861, when the Civil War disrupted river traffic and the Confederates purposely sank the first steamboat he ever piloted as a blockade at Big Black River. Piloting was the realization of one of Twain’s two powerful ambitions in life. His unrealized goal was to be a minister of the Gospel. Unfortunately, he lacked the necessary stock-in-trade: religion. He found it remarkable that his older, luckless brother, Orion (accent on the O), unmistakably heard the voice of God thundering in his ears yet aspired to be a lawyer. “It is human nature,” Twain said, “to yearn to be what we were never intended for.”