Black Fire: The True Story of the Original Tom Sawyer

by Robert Graysmith

  On March 4, 1851, at 4:00 A.M., a cry of fire went up. Two steamboats at Central Wharf between Clay Street Wharf and Howison’s Wharf burst into flame and threatened other vessels at anchor. That evening someone set a fire in a store. A strong wind scattered the cinders and burned down ten other buildings. Other near misses led the volunteers to believe they had the situation under control. Near the end of April, someone set fire to dry grass at the rear of a building. Every day police heard rumors of a plot to burn down the city. On April 23 a false alarm sounded in the dead of night. In the confusion eight prisoners escaped the city prison. During visits, their spouses had smuggled in augers and other tools used to dig a passage through the thin brick wall that formed the foundation of City Hall. “We live in such a cauldron of excitement in this town,” a citizen said, “that it is impossible to collect our ideas to write a letter: thefts, robberies, murders, and fires follow each other in such rapid succession that we hardly recover from the effects of one horrible tragedy before another piece of unmitigated villainy demands our attention.”

  That the May 1851 fire fell exactly on the anniversary of the May 1850 blaze shattered any doubts the earlier fires had been anything but arson and that the Lightkeeper still walked among them.

  DIAGRAM OF THE BURNT DISTRICT, MAY 4, 1851

  The Melting House

  An unrelenting northwest wind whispered between Telegraph and Russian hills, an invisible river, sweeping the city clean of moisture and throwing up clouds of choking dust. The howling failed to keep many awake. Most were already up and pacing, dreading what they knew would come. To reduce their chances of total ruin, vigilant storekeepers cached their merchandise at the edge of town or rented storage by the artesian wells east of Montgomery Street. Citizens kept their valuables neatly piled on their bedside tables for immediate escape. A lawyer left his law books packed in boxes beneath their empty shelves. On the wharves, entrepreneurs moored their boats beneath the piers so that in case of a fire they could sail away at a moment’s notice. A merchant tethered a scow under his waterfront store and had only to drop through a trapdoor and row to safety. Others planned escape into the mysterious Ghost Fleet that had so far remained as impervious as Sydney Town to flame and might even be home to the Lightkeeper.

  From the Ghost Fleet the flickering torches of Sydney Town were plainly visible to the north. The “Coveys” were gathering from Murderer’s Corner at Jackson and Kearny to Clarke’s Point on the outskirts and at the main dives—the Thunderbolt, Cock o’ the Walk, the Coliseum, and the Billy Goat, the most dangerous place in Sydney Town. The Billy Goat’s proprietor and chief bartender, a middle-aged Irishman, kept order with a hickory wagon spoke and a derringer. His customers were certain the arsonist would strike again on the anniversary of the second great fire on May 4. “This fire will be a diversion,” they said, “for the greatest plundering any city ever experienced.”

  James “Yankee” Sullivan

  Meanwhile, San Franciscans were doing all they could to protect themselves. They prayed the prefabricated twelve-by-fifteen-foot metal houses they had bought through the mail would protect them. The iron sheets, grooved so the roof and sides slid into place, were shipped in boxes nine feet long, one foot deep, and two feet wide. “Attractive” one- and two-room metal houses from Boston were sold for $100 and up, touted as cheaper than wood, rustproof, and fireproof. They had their defects. When it showered, raindrops on the roof sounded like a barrage of musket balls. Under the blazing California sun, the highly conductive walls became blazing and the outer unpainted surface blinded neighbors with its reflected light. Sheet metal house builders offered a powerful anticorrosive paint to cover the galvanized iron, but under the sun it emitted a sickening odor. Then one company provided ventilating equipment to lessen the paint odor, but this failed as miserably as the fireproof paint. The brown-painted iron buildings were “the most unsightly things possible.” When night fell, the interiors dropped to arctic temperatures that froze the occupants. A wooden interior insulation was available. All one had to do was build an entire wooden house inside the metal one.

  In spite of all this, several hundred of these sheet metal homes had been erected in 1850. San Franciscans also bought huge metal warehouses from Germany, France, Belgium, Australia, and Britain. For $2,000, John Walker of London and E. T. Bellhouse of Manchester offered preassembled corrugated metal buildings of the finest British sheet metal. Walker shipped a seventy-five-foot-long, forty-foot-wide, two-story counting house with its own front porch and odd convex iron roof. One, of zinc and corrugated iron, served as George Dornin’s restaurant on Montgomery between Jackson and Pacific streets. Another became the Graham House at Portsmouth Square. A sheet iron building became little Trinity Church on Pine Street above Montgomery. Curious iron houses with rounded roofs took up a half block at the corner of Jackson and Battery streets. Some ended up on the hills above the shore, but because they were constructed of one-inch-thick plates, their castings were incredibly heavy. Inevitably, the ground gradually gave way beneath them and they plunged over the cliffs or sank slowly into the ground.

  The first two days of May were cool. People peered nervously over their shoulders as they fried their salt pork and potatoes on portable miners’ stoves and drank thin coffee. The anniversary of the May fire was almost here. Dutch Charley raged, paced, and consulted his calendar. Almost a year earlier the great inferno had occurred at the worst possible time: while everyone slept. Dutch Charley’s hunch was that the next blaze would be kindled on May 4, absolute proof that the fires could not be accidental. He almost found himself hoping it would happen. He listened for the Lightkeeper’s Wind to rise and watched for the signalers on Telegraph Hill to light their fires against the wall of fog rolling through the Golden Gate.

  May 3 was pleasant. That night sleepless San Franciscans began to measure the hours until 4:00 A.M., the exact anniversary of the previous year’s fire. Early risers, breakfasting on fried fish and chocolate, waited breathlessly for the well-known clang of the huge signal bell. Its tone differentiated it from all the other bells in the city. The restless multitude ticked off the minutes, then seconds. They need not have bothered—the blaze had already been kindled. The fifth fire exploded at the very edge of midnight, and so Sawyer always thought of it as the Great Fire of May 3 and May 4, 1851. It was ignited in a Clay Street upholstery shop on the southwest side of the Square. Shortly before the blaze was noticed (it had been slyly licking at the dried-out shingles of the hotel roof), a ragged man recognized as a “habitue of Sydney Town” was seen running from the paint shop. He had barely vanished down the road when the whole upper story filled with flame. The paint shop on the west side of Portsmouth Square, an irresistible morsel, provided a plentiful supply of inflammable paints and oil for a midnight snack. In less than five minutes it collapsed into itself, an implosion that sent flames on droplets of burning oil splashing over two adjacent houses. The wind, which had lulled away at sunset, had returned an hour before the fire broke out. It was high and from the northwest, blowing away from Sydney Town—the Lightkeeper’s Wind. Reenergized by the heat of the conflagration, the gale fanned the flames and gave them life.

  As the cry of “Fire!” echoed across the square, unsleeping citizens boiled out of their rooms. Because an arsonist had already burned the highly combustible town to the ground four times, a fifth time would be unthinkable and so they were stunned. Again the bell of the Monumental Fire Company at Brenham Place clanged. At the fire’s epicenter all three buildings were fully engulfed before Big Six could drag its pumpers the short distance across the Square. Their engines, the Mechanical, the Union, and the Franklin, lacked enough hose and water to do the job properly. Sawyer’s hook and ladder company had the same problem. They rushed to refill their water wagons by attaching a suction pipe to the house and lowering it into one of the cisterns. Down went the pipe and up it came dry. The volunteers raced to the next well, but it was dry, too. Most of the clay cisterns mandated by the
Council were dry, too, as the firefighters discovered over the next minutes.

  In the cove a ship’s captain retired early, but as worried as the rest of the citizens, he could not sleep. As he lay listening, he heard the first twang of what he called “that infernal bell.” He reached topside and saw the whole northeast side of the Square in flames. The heat had reawakened a furious nor’wester. The Lightkeeper’s Wind rushed down the gully between Signal Hill and the Heights, driving the fire mass directly over the section that had burned last June. He could not leave the vessel but had to stay and stamp out the burning coals raining from the sky. “Those man toys they call fire engines were rattling away to the scene,” he wrote, “with the shouts of the companies and the tinkling of their polished bells, but they are of no more use than a syringe from the medicine chest.… All the fire engines in America cannot stop a San Francisco conflagration.” He watched the engines struggling. “Before them raced the most important members of the company,” one official observed, “the torch boys holding their torches high as they ran, so that the way could be seen through the unlighted streets.” As the fire progressed, a man sprinted ahead of them all and started smaller fires.

  The Lightkeeper was sweating now and taking a chance on being caught. The mostly wooden buildings around the Square were extremely combustible. J. Helm and Company, Gildermeister & De Frenery, and the new El Dorado on Kearny Street were all brick. This blaze would test their invincibility against fire, but how would the new metal fireproof houses fare? Near the Square some townsfolk were jeering the firefighters and declining to help in spite of the stiff new fines the Council had imposed. “Twenty! Forty! Fifty dollars a load—only help me remove my goods!” begged a merchant, down on his knees in the mud. The watchers only folded their arms. “Among the spectators there was generally a great want of concentrated effort,” Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce noted in his California state history. “In short, as one sees, the whole affair was a perfect expression of the civilization of the moment.”

  Horses pulling loaded drays pulled wagons of fire. As a Good Samaritan helped some French lithographers save their parcels, a man carried off their carpet bag. As he sprinted to recover it, a flaming wagon ran over him. This blaze, the swiftest of the five that had already engulfed the city, had come at the worst possible time. The city was between city councils—the old board had adjourned and the new one had not yet been sworn. Nobody was empowered to order buildings blown up to check the path of the flames. Broderick, who had been elected president pro tempore of the State Senate a month earlier, was in Sacramento with Kohler and most of the volunteers who were attending a firemen’s conference. It fell to Sawyer, California Four, the torch boys, a few other companies, and Broderick’s shoulder strikers who had remained behind to save the city.

  The fierce gale spread a broad flame over the city, a flickering roof growing to a half mile in length. Updrafts carried embers for miles. The stiff wind whipped the fire furiously, sending up one block in the flicker of an eye. Riding on the wind’s back, the flames jumped Kearny Street. The wind slackened, gathered its strength, and replenished, then returned as a stiff gale that violently blew flames southeast, north, and then east again. The volunteers retreated to regroup and plan.

  The Lightkeeper’s Wind drove a howling ball of cinders and superheated smoke into Montgomery, Sacramento, and Commercial streets. Albert Bernard de Russailh was halfway to his office on Commercial Street when he saw the fire wheel around his way. He set off running. Breathless, he reached his office and dashed inside. The rear of his building was already on fire. When the ceiling collapsed, he staggered, bleeding from cuts on his forehead and nose, and crawled a few feet before dropping to the floor unconscious. As the fire outside rolled and dived, it simultaneously destroyed houses on both sides of Commercial Street. One house began burning at the top, down slowly, story by story, to the basement. Over the crash of falling timbers the volunteers heard the terrified screams of people inside the structures. The cries were faint. The blaze’s hoarse voice rumbled like a locomotive and drowned out everything. Mike Gully of Broderick One and Barney Cosgrove of California Four had to shout just to be heard. They were the speediest firefighters of the day and toiled to save the old Custom House on Dupont Street. This last relic of Old San Francisco on the northwest corner of the Square held books, ships’ papers, and gold in its vault. Gully and Cosgrove fought with hooks, sacks, axes, and even their scorched hands to rescue the leaky one-story landmark. Their skin was blistered and clothing smoking when the wind momentarily turned southeast and gave them some hope the old adobe structure would be spared. If they were lucky, the fire would now be confined to the hills to the north. But the wind thrashed north, then east, and in a rush of black fire returned with a vengeance to burn the adobe building to its foundation. As the volunteers were driven back, they wondered, “Could anything of value be salvaged from these ruins?”

  Captain Hante of the Revenue Cutter Service, on the cutter Polk, had another way of battling fire. He stationed thirty guards around the new brick Custom House on the northwest corner of Montgomery and California. Working feverishly, his men saved a million dollars of specie by tossing it down a well, and preserved practically all the vault gold, $3 million worth, and naval department papers. Any record more than two years old was at the old Custom House. Nearly two thousand tons of merchandise inside the U.S. bonded warehouse were rescued. A brick and iron building north of the Custom House, on Montgomery Street, was aflame. On Sacramento a brick bank crumbled in an explosion of fire. The new raised planked sidewalks, dry and flammable as tinder, rested above hollows that acted as funnels to channel superheated air along the length of the street and from thoroughfare to thoroughfare. People leaped for their lives as sudden blasts of flame erupted through cracks in the sidewalk. In some places the raised planking broke through and plunged them into the fire. Agonized, a man rolled in the mire to extinguish his flaming clothes and died.

  In the choking smoke Sawyer’s breath came hard. As young and fleet as he was, he had to fight to stay on his feet. Across the street flames curled seductively along the walls lining the burning sidewalks. The planked wooden road itself was burning, its surface crackling and flickering as one immense fiery field. The flaming street shriveled all the new frame houses on both sides of Clay Street. Every structure between Clay and California streets ignited. On the floor of his office, Albert de Russailh slowly regained consciousness. Smoke and flames were swirling around him. He felt the earth shake. Firemen were blasting firebreaks to take away the fire’s fuel. Then he heard sharp, well-defined retorts in the distance as firefighters pulled down timbers and walls. In a minute he heard another rumble: the muffled roar of more buildings exploding. Merchants were voluntarily blowing up their businesses. Unforced destruction, the unchallenged dynamiting of a building, remained the volunteer fire companies’ most effective means of halting a fire’s march. Not much had changed since the Christmas Eve fire. Stored barrels of gunpowder were exploding, quaking the ground and hurling houses into the red sky. As the thunder of explosions marched closer, Russailh rose, escaped down the stairs, and ran along the planked road for a block until he realized the street was on fire and so were his boots. Covered in sweat, he turned and, exhausted, collapsed on the floor of the Hotel de l’Alliance where he slept unaware of flames licking within inches of him and choking smoke drifting over his head.

  All around the sleeping man people became insane through panic, heat, greed, despair. One man shot and killed a Mexican woman. A man on Washington Street lost his house, and then blew out his brains with a revolver. A merchant, burned out five times since he had been in San Francisco, slaughtered his family in madness, then shot himself, too. A former millionaire, his high silk hat and clothes ablaze, revolved in the gutter while laughing insanely and beating his lion-headed cane against blackened bricks. Carriages and wagons jammed together in a tangle of reins and locked wheels. Horses broke loose and charged along the flaming roa
ds.

  A powerful wind whipped around to blow a blanket of black smoke out over the bay. Washington, Sansome, and Bush streets flared into roaring furnaces. Frame houses vanished like frost on a windowpane. Flames spread rapidly north of Portsmouth Square, consuming buildings in no particular order, randomly knocking at every other back door. Timbers crashed in showers of burning splinters. Forced back by the flames, the crowd trampled everything before it. Severely burned men clawed their way to safety. Terrified horses bolted from blazing liveries. Wagons carrying the injured to makeshift hospitals overturned in the deep mud of the unburned area. The copious provisions of whiskey the thirsty town so prized propelled curtains of blue fire skyward. The glare was blinding. California Four and Broderick One and a few citizens fought on, rudderless without the chiefs and engineers.