Black Fire

by Robert Graysmith

  On October 13, 1890, Sawyer organized a society to call for passage of a bill to make the city fire department a metropolitan one with a fully paid force. In the preceding twenty-five years, 1,200 men had been removed or forced to resign from the fire department, and Sawyer intended to lobby the next legislature. On July 17, the discharged firemen met at his saloon. “The fire department is badly managed,” he told them, “and many of the engines in the corporation yard could be repaired at little expense and would do good service for many years.” He complained that many cisterns downtown had not been cleaned for years and caused much of the disease prevalent in the downtown area. “In old times,” he said, “when the Volunteer department was in existence, they were cleaned every three months.” On August 17, his name was suggested as the new fire commissioner. On September 16, 1891, the Veteran Firemen Association made him first vice president of both the Vets and the Manhattans. “Sawyer hails from New York where he did his first fire duty,” the Call noted, calling him “Hale and hearty, ever genial and courteous.” “That big engine—just think of it,” W.D.L. Hall, a veteran, recalled. “How we ever got that over the sand, mud, and planks with her in the early days, and the service we did. It’s simply astonishing to think of it. Newcomers can hardly realize it, but it was so all the same.”

  On June 17, 1894, Sawyer and the other vets who ran with the hose in the fifties told what it was like as they “battled with the flames which destroyed the tumble-down landmarks of a boom town. There was something to being a Volunteer fireman in those good old days when heads were cracked and human claret flowed to taps. There were no nickle-plated steamers or water towers in those days.” That afternoon, a race for fat veterans over sixty years old was held. A one-eyed whiskered gent not “a day under ninety ran like a chief and won a prize of a case of champagne which he fled with.” Sawyer came in fourth and was presented with a bootjack by his large group of lady friends. In mid-March 1895, as president of the Society of Old Friends, he celebrated with the veterans at Sutro Baths by roasting three oxen and a number of sheep and hogs. In May he performed an overture and a vocal solo at a Jolly Ladies’ High Jinks Night at Liberty Hose. The old volunteers told stories, sang, and danced until midnight. In January 1896, Thomas L. Adington, an elderly bartender, swallowed a big dose of morphine in his Ninth Avenue room and left behind a stamped, unsealed letter: “If anything happens to me, I wish you would see Mr. Tom Sawyer, 935 Mission Street and ask him to intercede to have me buried in the Old Friends’ plot … I cannot live this way any longer, and I hope he will forgive me. So goodbye and God bless everybody. PS Friend Tom, Do what you can. I think I am going crazy.”

  On October 20, 1897, the Call wrote, “The surviving eighteen members of the old Volunteer Fire Company, Knickerbocker Five, met and celebrated the forty-seventh anniversary of their organization. Present were Thomas Sawyer and his wife.” Sawyer had briefly served on Lillie’s favorite fire company. On October 23, 1898, Viola Rodgers of the Call decided to interview him. She was intrigued by what Twain had written in postscript to Tom Sawyer: “Most of the characters that perform in this book still live and are prosperous and happy. Some day it may seem worthwhile to take up the story of the younger ones and see what sort of men and women they turned out to be; therefore it will be wisest not to reveal any of that part of their lives at present.” She reached the old-fashioned Mission Street saloon just to the east side of the Mint. “Over the front door hangs a sign ‘The Gotham—Sawyer Proprietor,’ ” she wrote. “To a casual observer that name means no more than if it were ‘Brown’ or ‘Tom Jones,’ but to Twain it meant the inspiration for his most famous work. For the jolly old fireman sitting in there in an old fashioned haircloth chair is the original Sawyer and it was from him that Twain gathered material for his two greatest works, Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. This real-life, up-to-date Sawyer spends his time telling stories of former days while he occasionally mixes a brandy and soda or a cocktail.” The walls were completely covered with helmets, belts, election tickets, badges, hooks, bugles, nozzles, mementos, and other firefighting paraphernalia. A huge frame containing small photos of a hundred firemen hung on the south wall. A mounted stag’s head looked on impassively. “He prides himself on being a member of the first volunteer fire company ever formed in California,” she wrote. “One knows intuitively he is a character the moment one sees him.” He wore a navy-blue cap and on his vest he had pinned an electric diamond that glittered alongside badges of the orders of volunteer firemen. “Next to his badges of his fire company, Sawyer values his friendship with Twain, and he will sit for hours recalling the jolly nights and days he used to spend with Twain.” Sawyer’s parrot, whose companionship he enjoyed for eighteen years, had just died. His voice got shaky and he got teary when he spoke of “old Pol’s” demise, but he soon regained his jolly attitude. Mary Bridget was busy cooking dinner in the rooms above his saloon where they have lived for thirty-seven years. One of his sons, Thomas junior, a former secretary of the Veteran Firemen’s Association, was behind the bar as his father’s full-time bartender.

  “Well, when Tom Sawyer was published Sam sent me a copy,” Sawyer said. “It was as if I was reading my own diary.” His shining morning face lit up. He looked not a day over fifty. Being good-natured kept him young. “Sam got me down to a science, I tell you. He also used some of the things I told him in Huckleberry Finn.” Sawyer told how Twain used to listen to tales of his youthful antics. “Sam, he would listen and occasionally take them down in his notebook. ‘He was just such a boy as you must have been,’ he told me. ‘I believe I’ll call the book Tom Sawyer.’ That’s the way it came about, and you can bet when Mark shows up here in August he’ll bear me out. Have a drink?

  “But he’s coming out here some day, and I am saving up for him. When he does come there’ll be some fun, for if he gives a lecture I intend coming right in on the platform and have a few old time sallies with him. I’ll just ask him right in meeting about a few of those things when he comes to Frisco.” Rodgers ended her full-page interview: “And so Tom Sawyer, who gave Mark Twain the impetus for his famous book, now stands at the bar giving other things to other people.” Another interviewer wrote how Sawyer spoke of Twain “with that feeling which signifies the invisible bond between the old timers and their comrades.”

  On January 26, 1899, Sawyer sang “On the Rocky Road to Dublin” at the volunteers’ banquet and all one hundred guests drank a toast to “our departed members and sang, ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ ” Sawyer had little money, only a building lot at Douglass and Duncan streets, but he had lived a rich, full life. During the Veteran Firemen’s Association’s second annual picnic on June 23, 1901, Sawyer bested Con Mooney in a tree-climbing contest. On December 15, 1905, “Tom Sawyer’s” cave, where Tom and Becky Thatcher were lost, and “Injun Joe” perished, was gone. A manufacturing plant had ground all seven miles into Portland cement.

  On October 1, 1906, the San Francisco Call headlined “Tom Sawyer, Whose Name Inspired Twain, Dies at Great Age.” It continued, “A man whose name is to be found in every worthy library in America died in this city on Friday.… He was Sawyer, pioneer, steamboat engineer, veteran volunteer fireman and vigilante, who in the early days was a friend of Twain. So highly did the author appreciate Sawyer that he gave the man’s name to his famous boy character. In that way the man who died Friday is godfather, so to speak, of one of the most enjoyable books ever written. He was one of the organizers of the volunteer fire department and later was a member of the regular department.”

  The original Tom Sawyer’s Saloon was destroyed that same year—by fire. The memory of the fleet brave lads had always remained in Sawyer’s mind. In the middle of the night, surrounded by mementos of his adventurous past, he frequently returned to memories of those early days when he’d heard the slap, slap, slap of bare feet racing through the mud as a contingent of boys sprinted ahead of the volunteers’ hand-drawn engines. They bore flaming torches over the pitch-black and hazardous
ly pitted roadways of Old San Francisco, lighting the way for the salvation of a great city. The torch boys carried fire to the fire—a very poetic occupation.

  SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The initial spark for Black Fire was Matthew Brady’s October 29, 1990, San Francisco Independent column, “The Torch Boys.” Unfortunately, only the names of a few had survived, and what records the conflagrations of 1850–51 did not destroy, the great quake and fire of 1906 did. A year later I read in Rand Richards’s Historic San Francisco, “It was in the basement steam baths in fact that Twain met a fireman named Sawyer. Twain used the name for his famous novel, and Sawyer, who later opened a saloon on Mission Street … capitalized on his immortality by advertising his tavern as ‘the Original Tom Sawyer’s.’ ” Then I discovered a number of interviews Sawyer had given the press. “He prides himself upon being a member of the first volunteer fire company ever formed in California [Broderick One],” Sawyer said on October 23, 1898. Sawyer was already a hero and worthy of a book when he returned from the sea in 1859. Proof of his earlier experience fighting fire in San Francisco between February 1850 and June 1851 was that upon his return he was appointed fire corporation yard keeper and fire bell ringer in the City Hall Tower, coveted positions held by seasoned firefighters. Articles about the Veteran Firemen’s Association of California prominently highlighted Sawyer in a drawing. As he told his stories of fighting fire and running for the volunteers in front of the firefighters of 1850, he was never contradicted.

  I relied upon the original hardcover 1850–51 volumes from my personal library, including The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft: History of California, 1849–1859, volumes 4 and 23, with two foldout maps and diagrams of the vigilante cells in proximity to the cage holding Yankee Sullivan. Bancroft’s volume 37, Popular Tribunals, discusses Billy Mulligan on pages 604–8, and on page 7 it is the primary source for Sullivan’s invention of the false-bottom ballot box. Of equal importance is Frank Soule, John H. Gihon, and James Nisbet’s The Annals of San Francisco, which mentions on page 244 the muddy streets and children who ran with the fire engines.

  Mary Floyd Williams’s History of the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance of 1851, volume 12, lists minutes of the Executive Committee for July 21, 1851, and comments by George E. Schenck on the apparent fate of Ben Lewis. I relied upon the June 3, 1851, handwritten depositions given by the residents of the Collier House to the police in The People v. Ben Lewis. These documents are part of the H. H. Bancroft Collection, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley. Captain George B. Coffin’s A Pioneer Voyage to California and Around the World, 1849–1852 provided firsthand accounts of the great fires. The San Francisco Fire Department’s Historical Review, with résumés of its personnel, was written while Tom Sawyer was still alive. Pages 100–101 include his biography as a volunteer firefighter. “He arrived in San Francisco Bay in February, 1850 … and immediately went to steam shipping, running as a fireman between this port and San Juan and Panama. He continued at this occupation for some years during which time his vessel, the steamer Independence, was wrecked on a reef off the Southern coast and burned to the water line and sunk.” The piece implies that Sawyer left for the sea immediately, but the Independence was not launched in New York until Christmas Day, 1850, and did not reach San Francisco Bay for the first time until September 17, 1851, three months after the great fires ended. Sawyer may have done some sporadic work on the Sacramento River or on a freighter between fires, but he remained in San Francisco, with its clogged harbor, and used his fleetness to save a great city.

  The Fire Department History states of Sawyer: “Through his ingenuity and heroism he saved the lives of ninety people aboard.… When nearly exhausted with the great task of swimming ashore with each passenger on his back, his great mind came to his rescue. By putting the rest of them in life preservers he towed them ashore and landed in the boiling surf safe and sound.” The history includes a Lillie Hitchcock piece by Frederick J. Bowlen, battalion chief, San Francisco Fire Department. I consulted period newspaper accounts of the fires and central figures in Sawyer’s story from the San Francisco Library microfilm collection and the California Digital Newspaper Collection, a repository of digitized California newspapers from 1846 to the present, including the Daily Morning Call, 1863–64; the Californian, 1864–67; San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle, 1865–66; Sacramento Daily Union, 1865–66; Daily Hawaiian Herald, 1866; San Francisco Bulletin, 1866; and the Daily Alta California, 1867–69.

  Sources for Henry Clemens’s death in an explosion in 1858 onboard the steamer Pennsylvania are a Memphis Eagle and Enquirer article, June 16, 1858, on the arrival of Twain at his dying brother’s bed. Sunday magazine, March 19, 1908, printed an illustrated article on Mark and Henry. Twain’s precognition of Henry’s death appeared in his Notebooks and Journals, volume 2, Notebook #20. Margaret Sanborn’s Mark Twain: The Batchelor Years relates Twain’s dream of his brother Henry in his casket on pages 124–129. Twain in his autobiography and in his Mississippi Writings, chapter 20, “A Catastrophe,” writes of his brother Henry’s death and the fatal steamboat explosion.

  I reviewed the San Francisco Fire Department Museum for lists of SFFD firehouses, volunteer companies of 1850–66, and notable people; consulted 1850s diaries and letters, birth and death records, coroner’s reports, and census reports of 1856–66; looked at city maps of 1852, 1853, 1873, 1896, early city views of 1837–55, city directories for 1850, 1852–53, 1863, 1864, city street guides for 1861 and 1882; and read weather reports, San Francisco County voting records, ward maps and the voter register for 1867, fire insurance maps, ships’ passenger lists, descriptions of arrivals, marriages at sea, and shipwrecks; and studied fleets lists, pictures, journals, immigration reports, and the San Francisco Delinquent Tax List, 1867. I used the San Francisco History Center, the San Francisco Public Library, the Historical Abstract of San Francisco for 1897, Vigilance Committee trial transcripts, hundreds of books on the Gold Rush and the adventurers who sailed to San Francisco, tide and wind charts, survivors’ accounts of the Independence sinking, and San Francisco and Bay Area histories. As a longtime San Francisco resident, I walked all the sites over many years. In 1968–69, as the San Francisco Chronicle’s political cartoonist, I sat at my desk during reconstruction on the southwest corner of Mission and Mary streets, directly above the site of Sawyer’s saloon at 935 Mission.

  At every opportunity I tested the validity of Sawyer’s claims. He recalled in an interview that on September 28, 1864, he and Twain went on a bender. “Me and Jack Mannix, who was afterwards bailiff in Judge Levy’s court, was walkin’ down Montgomery Street.” A man named John E. Mannix lived at 829 Mission Street close to Sawyer at 935 Mission. “Mark caught sight of us from a window across the street in the Russ House.” Twain should not have been at the Russ House. During that time he was one of two lodgers with a well-to-do private family on Minna Street and preparing to take rooms farther along Minna only two blocks from Sawyer. But I learned that three days earlier, Twain had written his mother and sister that his comrade of two years, Steve Gillis, was getting hitched to Emeline Russ, daughter of the late Christian Russ, who owned the Russ House. Twain was going to stand up for his friend at the nuptials. Sawyer was correct and there was no other way he could have known this. The same day as their bender, September 28, 1864, Twain wrote Orion and Mollie Clemens to say, “I would commence on my book, but (mind, this is a secret, & must not be mentioned), Steve & I are getting ready for his wedding, which will take place on the 24th Oct. He will marry Miss Emmelina [sic] Russ.” So Sawyer’s mention of a book on that day and Twain’s presence at the Russ House was not only true but a secret.

  “The next day I met Mark down by the old Call office,” Sawyer continued. That Twain worked at the Call was not known, because his articles were not signed. He was later fired from the Call, something he never spoke about, but Sawyer knew. “He walks up to me and puts both hands on my shoulders. ‘Tom,’ he says, ‘I’m
going to write a book about a boy and the kind I have in mind was just about the toughest boy in the world. Tom, he was just such a boy as you must have been.’ ” Twain was working on his first book, “a pet notion” of his of about three hundred pages, probably about the river. “Nobody knows what [the novel] is going to be about but just myself,” Twain said.

  Twain was more definite about the real-life model for Huckleberry Finn than Tom Sawyer. He admitted he had based Tom Sawyer’s Becky Thatcher on Laura Hawkins, who lived opposite the Clemenses on Hill Street and modeled Sid Sawyer, Tom’s well-behaved half brother, on his late lamented brother Henry. John Briggs, the Joe Harper of Tom Sawyer’s gang, was based on one of Mark’s closest boyhood friends. Twain’s friends from San Francisco were always on his mind. In Tom Sawyer, Injun Joe murders Doctor Robinson, the name of torch boy Charlie Robinson’s famous father, Doc. Years later, Twain and Harte in their disastrous play, Ah Sin, would name Broderick a villain and use the character Shirley Tempest.

  Mark Twain’s eighty-one-year-old mother, Jane, might have known who the real Tom Sawyer was. On April 17, 1885, a Chicago reporter decided to ask. She was living with Twain’s brother, Orion, and his wife, Mollie, in an unpretentious two-story brick house at the intersection of High and Seventh streets in Keokuk, Iowa. Twain was the sole support of the crippled household: a widowed mother, Jane; a widowed sister, Pamela; and Orion, now a lawyer who still trod a long road of foreclosure and bankruptcy. Nearly deaf, Twain’s mother needed an ear trumpet to hear the reporter’s questions. She painted Mark as “always a good-hearted boy” who was also very wild and mischievous and often skipped school. “Often his father started him off and in a little while followed him to ascertain his whereabouts,” she said. “There was a large stump on the way to the schoolhouse and Sam would take up a position behind that, and as his father went past would gradually circle around in such a way to keep out of sight.” He asked if Twain in his boyhood days resembled his Tom Sawyer. Was he the immortal character? “Ah, no!” replied the elderly lady firmly, “he was more like Huckleberry Finn than Tom Sawyer. He was always a great boy for history and could never get tired of that kind of reading, but he hadn’t any use for schoolhouses and textbooks. This used to trouble his father and me dreadfully, and we were convinced that he would never amount as much in the world as his brothers because he was not near so steady and sober minded as they were.” Molly added that Twain had gotten all his humor and talent from his mother. “Tom Sawyer’s ‘Aunt Polly’ and Mrs. Hawkins in Gilded Age,” she said, “are direct portraits of his mother.” And that’s where the matter lay. The reporter did note that the old lady could not discuss the death of her son Henry onboard a steamboat without sobbing uncontrollably.