Black Fire

by Robert Graysmith

  On July 8, Sawyer heard about Billy Mulligan’s death and realized that those great and glorious days of firefighting were gone forever, as were his heroic friends. In just a dozen years the volunteers had shrunk. Broderick One now had only fifty-two full-time members, down by more than half. Sadly he went to view Mulligan’s body laid out in an expensive rosewood coffin in the Broderick One firehouse. On August 31, the Niantic Hotel at Clay and Sansome streets, another link with the past, caught fire. Big Six answered the alarm first, but as their brakeless engine rushed from its housing on the hill at Brenham Place, it reeled out of control down the steep Washington Street hill. Careening from side to side, the huge steamer shook off clinging firemen like fleas from a dog. James Washington and Foreman Walter Bohen were thrown under the boiler that kept punching down upon them as the engine ran away. Big George rushed to the still figures, but both had been crushed to death. Charles Rhoades composed a song, “Our Engine on the Hill,” to commemorate them and Big Six sang it at the top of their lungs to the next fire.

  At noon on Sunday, October 8, Twain rose in his bed at the Gillis family rooming house on Minna Street and decided to visit the Dramatic Chronicle (its first issue had only been in January) and get some paying work. He reached the corner of Minna and Third streets, where William Love’s Bakery stood, admired the sign, and then turned right. In the distance a horse-drawn streetcar clopped along Mission Street. Crowds of people passed. As he ambled down Third Street he was shaken off his feet. “The entire front of a tall four-story brick building in Third Street sprung outward like a door,” he wrote, “and fell sprawling across the street.… A lady sitting in her rocking chair and quaking parlor saw the wall part at the ceiling, open and shut twice, like a mouth, and then drop the end of a brick on the floor like a tooth. She was a woman easily disgusted with foolishness, and she arose and went out of there.” Blocks away some of Sawyer’s antique firefighting memorabilia was smashed. As he swept up the shards, he realized he had not seen Twain recently. The writer had tried to borrow money but could not arrange it even though Gillis’s brother was a moneylender. Ten days after the quake Twain had reached a momentous decision. “I have a call to literature of a low order—i.e. humorous,” he wrote Orion and his wife, Molly. “It is nothing to be proud of but it is my strongest suit.” He turned “to seriously scribbling to excite the laughter of God’s creatures. Poor, pitiful business!”

  At 328 Montgomery Street, Harte was editing a new literary weekly, Charles Henry Webb’s Californian. When he arranged for Twain to write four signed articles a month at $50 apiece, equal to the $12.50 per article he received from the Golden Era and the Sacramento Union, Twain quit the Golden Era. “It wasn’t high toned enough,” he explained. Soon after Joe Goodman of the Territorial Enterprise offered him a contract to write a letter a day for $100 each. Things were looking up. “The Dramatic Chronicle pays me,” he said, “or rather will begin to pay me next week—$40 a month for dramatic criticisms. Same wages I got on the Call, and more agreeable and less laborious work.” He freelanced for the Dramatic Chronicle and hung around their office with other Bohemian writers until the paper tired of him and he of them. Because the Chronicle consistently neglected to pay Twain or Harte, it was no great loss.

  After the Civil War ended in April 1865, tempers were raw. Sawyer commonly heard stories of volunteer firemen back east fighting for possession of a hydrant while buildings burned to the ground around them. The last five years had been the most divisive and explosive in the Republic’s history: battles at Antietam, Gettysburg, and Shiloh; the surrender at Appomattox on April 9; and Lincoln’s assassination five days later. The New York City volunteers had fallen under the sway of politicians who promoted the intercompany rivalries that got in the way of honest firefighting. The volunteers cut one another’s towropes, jammed carriage wheels, stole valuable equipment, and laid ambushes for their competitors along the route to the fire. Sawyer’s old volunteer company, New York Number Fourteen, was disbanded for fighting. Company Two’s long, colorful career ended when its steam engine was transferred to Engine Eleven of the new paid New York Fire Department and they were disbanded. Would the San Francisco volunteers meet a similar fate? All fourteen San Francisco volunteer fire companies held divergent views. The regional, ethnic, and national difference of the strikingly disparate companies caused friction. Three in particular held strongly divergent views—Knickerbocker Five embraced all things Northern, Social Three supported all things Bostonian, and Big Six embraced all that was Southern, especially politics and slavery. In fifteen years, discord among the volunteers had grown worse and only escalated after the Civil War. A battle was building between them.

  Tensions as furious as those back east exploded into bloodshed in San Francisco toward the end of 1865. Always competitive, the local volunteers’ races took on a new seriousness in the war’s heated aftermath. On Sunday afternoon, December 17, an alarm sounded for a fire from a box at Fourth and Mission streets. A heated race between Big Six, Knickerbocker Five, and Social Three began. Three, with 35 to 40 volunteers running on the rope, rumbled along Sansome Street at a fast clip, turned onto Market and Second streets, and saw Five gaining. Fearful of an oncoming fight, the extra men dropped off and gave a slack rope as Three turned onto narrow Jessie Street, made narrower by wagons and carts lining both sides. Five, 125 strong, attempted to run Three’s engine onto the sidewalk and capsize it. Two of Three’s men jumped on top of their engine and, armed with nozzles, successively fought off Five as Three’s engine turned onto Third Street. They made up time on the steep downhill grade toward Mission Street. Reaching Mission, Three drew their rope across the street to keep Five from passing, but they beat their way through and dashed along Mission. As Five passed them they jeered, “A nice lot of fellows you are!” and rumbled toward Fourth Street with Six right on their tail. Five passed between Six and Three in the direction of the alarm and now all three engines were running neck and neck.

  They all collided at the corner and quit their engines with cries of “Johnny Reb,” “Billy Yank,” and “Blue Belly.” Dropping their ropes, Six and Three jumped on top of their engines and attacked Five with crowbars, spanners, and blunderbusses. A crowd gathered. Five fled, leaving behind their engine and a few officers. The remaining volunteers beat one another with ax handles, billets of wood, and stones. Pistol shots rang out. Ed Flaherty, Five’s assistant foreman, was shot in the head and back. Six’s George Stanton was wounded. Twenty-eight men were shot. Many others had broken bones, blackened eyes, and bloodied noses. As the volunteers battled, the blaze died out and the building collapsed in ashes around them. Three of the twenty-five policemen watching arrested Stanton of the Monumentals; Charles McMann, Knickerbocker assistant foreman; and two of Five’s men. The winning unit celebrated joylessly amid smoldering ruins and bloodied bodies as in the distance the fire bell tolled. It was the volunteers’ death knell. The battle between Three, Five, and Six concluded the crucial period of the volunteer firemen who had served so bravely and now ended so tragically.

  On December 30, the Californian announced Harte’s withdrawal. Twain quit, too, after producing only eight pieces for them, and returned to slinking from creditors. Angered by Twain’s unrelenting criticism of their brutality and racism, the police wanted to arrest him. He grew morose in the damp. It had rained from December 11 through December 16, then intermittent showers continued to the end of the year. “One hundred and twenty days in varying succession of rain is the norm,” he wrote. “If it is Winter it will rain—and if it is Summer, it won’t rain.” He slumped in his window box, smoked his long nines, and watched the rain streak down his window and citizens slog through the mud outside. What was the point of it all? It seemed so hopeless. The new year was no better. Twenty days into 1866, he informed his mother and sister he would write for the New York Weekly Review and possibly for the Saturday Press. “I am too lazy to write oftener than once a month, though I sent a sketch by yesterday’s steamer which w
ill probably appear in the Review along about the middle part of February.”

  One night in the first days of 1866 he got out his pistol, put it to his head, and slowly began to tighten the trigger. Sweat beaded on his forehead. He gritted his teeth and grimaced. He shook all over. Finally he put the gun down. He did not know why. “Many times I have been sorry I did not succeed,” he wrote of the attempt, “but I was never ashamed of having tried. Suicide is really the only sane thing the young or old do in this life.” He had not shaken the idea, though, and wrote Orion, “If I do not get out of debt in three months—pistols or poison for one—exit me.” He laid out a text for a sermon called “Self Murder.” “Twain later said he never saw a dead man whom he did not envy ‘for having had it over and done with it.’ ”

  By January 20, he was no longer disposed to commit suicide but enthusiastically laying out long-term literary projects and wishing he were back piloting up and down the river again. He loved piloting more than writing. He held those old river friends above all others. In “genuine manliness,” he wrote, “they assay away above the common multitude, the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived on earth … all men—kings and serfs alike—are slaves to men, save, alone, the pilot—who comes at no man’s beck or call, obeys no man’s orders and scorns all men’s suggestions.” The papers got wind that he was working on his first book, “a pet notion of his of about three hundred pages, probably about the river,” but they were only guessing. “Nobody knows what [the novel] is going to be about but just myself,” he said. “I am slow and lazy and the bulk of it will not be finished under a year.… If I do not write it to suit me at first I will have to write it all over again, and so, who knows? I may be an old man before I finish it. I have not written a line in it for three weeks, and may not for three more. I shall only write when the spirit moves me. I am the Genius of Indolence.” In February, his public feud with Colonel Albert S. Evans, a city editor for the Daily Alta California, bore poisoned fruit. Twain had fired the first verbal shot. Evans, in the Gold Hill Evening News, called him “a bail-jumping, alcoholic deadbeat who rolled in whorehouses and probably had a venereal disease.” Next, the Chronicle reported that Colonel Evans was making “physical threats against Twain.” “I have but one definite purpose in view,” Twain replied seriously, “that is, to make enough money to insure me a fair trial, and then go and kill Colonel Evans.” Because the Chronicle had advised that he leave the state, he decided to travel to the Sandwich Islands [Hawaii] to file some stories as a freelancer. He would miss Sawyer’s stories of fighting fire but had already heard most of them in the Turkish bath, the Blue Wing Saloon, or at the Bank Exchange Bar. So he steamed and played cards, crammed his pipe with Bull Durham, or smoked one of his lethal cigars, and passed the time planning his novel. As he listened to more of Sawyer’s youthful adventures with the first volunteers, he began to construct a more ambitious work than one based on Lillie’s life as a torch girl. God, he enjoyed the firefighter spinning stories as steam drifted around them like a five-alarm fire. Gradually the mist blotted out everything but their cards, and it was as if he were there in the heat with Sawyer and the oddest assortment of rogues and heroes who ever lived, fighting fire against a deadly arsonist.

  He loved the San Francisco climate, but if folks were out to kill or jail him, he didn’t love it that much. Before Twain left for a five-month trip to the Sandwich Islands, he thought about the volunteers’ inglorious ends. Fifteen years earlier San Francisco had trembled daily on the edge of destruction. These brave men had been the only obstacles fending off complete destruction, yet they had been murdered, crippled, run out of the state, and shot down in the streets. Many factors had contributed to the final cataclysmic result. Not one would have happened without the other. In mid-February 1866, he ambled over to Stahle’s for a steam and a few hands of poker. He hoped to break his writer’s block with some stimulating conversation. He marveled at what a talker Sawyer was, gesturing with his hands and arms as he spun his history of the last of six great fires. On March 5 he wrote his mother and sister that he was to depart for the Sandwich Islands in two days. “We shall arrive there in about twelve days. I am to remain there a month and ransack the islands, the great cataracts and the volcanoes completely and write twenty or thirty letters for the Union for which they pay me as much money as if I stayed at home. Goodbye for the present.” He left San Francisco onboard the Ajax, the newest, fastest ocean steamer in America, the first regular steamship service between the Islands and the United States. While there, Twain produced twenty-five letters on trade prospects in the Islands. By April 3 he had ridden horseback all over Oahu, visited ancient battlefields, and enjoyed a five-course banquet. On July 19, he steamed back to California and reached San Francisco on August 13. He stayed again at the Occidental Hotel, encumbered by work on a book revising his Sandwich Island letters to the Union that might prove both a literary and a pecuniary success. Orion and his wife were in the city and he visited them. After they sailed for the East Coast, he decided to join the lucrative lecture circuit. On October 2, he presented a comic lecture on the great volcano of Kilauea at Maguire’s Academy of Music on Pine Street, near his old Montgomery Street stomping grounds.

  “The doors,” he advertised, “open at 7:00 P.M. The trouble to begin at 8:00 P.M.” The trouble began the instant he set foot on stage. He suffered an attack of stage fright so intense that he felt he “saw the face of death.” Gradually he realized that he could make the audience laugh and control them. Before their eyes he gained confidence. He revealed that the object of his talk was to obtain funds to publish a book on the Islands with illustrations by local French artist Ed Jump. The Islands book was doomed from the beginning, so to clear his mind he visited the Turkish baths to see Sawyer. As he sweated his worries away, he studied the round-faced young firefighter. This exceptional young man had found happiness, married, and with a prosperous, popular bar, was still fighting, saving lives, and helping build a great city.

  Twain puffed his cheap cigar and settled back as Sawyer related how most of the heroic volunteers came to tragic ends. The steam in the Turkish bath gathered until they were sitting in a country of the clouds, cigar smoke and water vapor lifting them up. Twain left the baths refreshed, inspired, and thinking over the tragic story as he prepared for his lecture tour. His comic timing grew masterful as he toured in Sacramento, Marysville, Grass Valley, Red Dog, and You Bet in California. In Arizona he repeated his success in Carson City, Gold City, and (most triumphantly) in Virginia City, where no one shot at him. He returned to the Golden State and lectured in San Jose; in Oakland on November 27; and finally in December, in San Francisco, which was changing before his eyes. Fifteen years earlier San Francisco, thirsting for fresh spring water, had contracted with Arzo Merrifield’s Mountain Lake Water Company to lay pipes to the city. Merrifield put down a $50,000 bond to ensure the works would be completed by January 1853. They were not. Drinkable water finally became available from a lake, supplied by drainage and several springs, three and a half miles west. The city installed thirty-eight cisterns at every major intersection to guard the flourishing boat, flour, and saw mills, following the New York plan of more than a decade earlier. By spring, San Francisco’s first serious depression was on the horizon. The post–Gold Rush letdown emotionally affected everyone because the mines had not made everyone rich, as had been expected. Buying power plummeted and merchants’ warehouses bulged with surplus commodities. Over the next year, one-third of the city’s thousand shops would lie vacant and two hundred men would go bankrupt. If the city’s economy was to be improved, San Francisco needed better roads for commerce and fire protection, a serious problem from the beginning. Only Battery Street really connected the central business district with warehouses at the north end of the city.

  With the economy in free fall, San Francisco fell back on its old, indifferent, indolent ways. Streets in the city—worn, pitted, and rutted from iron wheels and horseshoes—wer
e not repaired, so the volunteers could no longer roll their engines below Davis Street. Cisterns built five years earlier had not been maintained. Half, filled by dray and hose with salt water from the bay, became cracked or leaky, though the city now had 175 windmill-driven artesian wells. During a small fire a volunteer was asked if there was any water in the cistern. “It’s full at the bottom,” he said, “but there isn’t any at the top.” There were still only thirteen engines and three hook and ladder companies with 950 certificate members. Many engine houses were inconvenient to fighting fire. Almost all were within one area—bounded by Broadway, Bush, Stockton, and Front streets. Only two companies lay south of Market or in the distant countryside near Mission Dolores. Homes burned long before the volunteers reached them. One day a fire broke out at a suburban slaughterhouse near California and Larkin streets. The nearest fire company was on the other side of Nob Hill. The alarm sounded and the intrepid volunteers set off at a dead run, dragging their massive engine up the California Street hill. The steep incline down to Larkin Street so exhausted the men that the engine, weighing several tons, whipped away and thundered downhill, firemen clutching at the tail rope. Hitting a bump, the machine rolled over, injuring several men, and tumbled to the bottom of Larkin Street. The race had been for nothing: The slaughterhouse burned to ashes. Hand-operated fire engines constructed in New York, Rhode Island, and Baltimore began to be shipped to the West. In San Francisco a yearlong economy drive reduced the volunteers’ effectiveness. Company Five and Company Three were given defective replacements for their worn-out hoses and were temporarily evicted from their firehouses.

  Sixteen years earlier J.B.M. Crooks, a whale oil dealer, had been awarded a lucrative contract to light the blocks bounded by Battery, Kearny, Jackson, and California streets with oil lamps. The few light posts he erected were too dim to see by. “Crooks only accomplished a way to render darkness visible, having gone about his work in true San Francisco style,” the press reported. Now the city manufactured gas inside brick structures at the corner of First and Howard streets for its own limited-area lighting system. At midnight on February 11, 1854, the gas had officially been turned on and eighty-four gas lamps mounted along Montgomery, Bush, Jackson, Sacramento, Kearny, Dupont, Commercial, and Washington streets flickered with a feeble light. A glow lit Dupont Street to the water and from Jackson to California Street. Down Washington Street a line of Chinese shops, restaurants, and saloons were drenched in green light. To Kearny and north to Broadway beamed a cheerful light. The city kept the lights lit until 2:00 A.M., even on bright moonlit nights or sometimes only part of the night or not lit at all. When gaslight finally extended to unhappy Happy Valley in 1856, the usefulness of the torch boys was ended.