Black Fire: The True Story of the Original Tom Sawyer

by Robert Graysmith

  As it had on the previous June 14, the firestorm churned hungrily toward the wharves, chasing citizens in bedclothes east along Commercial Street and far out onto the end of Long Wharf. The Great Boston Fire of 1760 had halted at the water’s edge. Most fires usually did. This blaze was different. Long Wharf caught and went, then the Montgomery Street Wharf, and then the next landing. Insatiable, the fire leaped from the piers out onto two hundred abandoned ships mired in the mudflats along the piers. The trapped armada had already suffered casualties. Volunteers cried, “Knock it down.” Working with irons, hooks, axes, and crowbars, they disconnected the remaining wooden wharves from land, saving some of the waterfront and dozens of ships crowded at their moorings. A few seaworthy ships forced their way through the tangled chains holding them in the morass and sailed toward the Golden Gate and safety.

  Unbelievably, the fire urged its way against the wind to Stockton Street and fought its way from there a block over to Powell Street. The gale ran along Powell in a southeasterly direction, crossed Sacramento and California streets, and howled toward Market Street. Stuart and Raines on Jackson Street was lost. The conflagration leaped Jackson and Pacific streets to Broadway, where it licked over the arid high ground and ate its way past Sansome, Battery, and Front streets to Clarke’s Point. Now a gigantic flickering noose of flame encircled the entire town and inexorably began to tighten.

  Flames had surrounded banker James Naglee’s warehouse, an important repository, by the time the St. Francis Hook and Ladder Company reached it. The engine had so little water pressure, its two narrow streams of water vaporized on contact with the hot bricks. Scald cascaded over the men like needle pricks. Soon all were swimming in an ocean of steam. “More men,” bellowed a temporary foreman through his silver trumpet. “For the love of God, more men over here!” In the distance Sawyer heard the clank of fire brakes, another engine coming, and the screams of the burned and dying. Heavy black smoke under great pressure was issuing from the upper-story windows of a hotel across from Taaffe & McCahill’s huge mail-order warehouse at Sacramento and Montgomery streets. From the color and pattern, he knew there was tremendous heat in that smoke. Deep orange meant the temperature exceeded 2000 degrees and white signaled a blaze of 2370 degrees. Dazzling white meant the temperature was climbing beyond the limits of the iron boiler and had to be damped down. The underventilated fire had created a thick mix of accumulated fire gases.

  Dense mushrooms of smoke boiled from the burning hotel at high velocity. There was partial autoignition on the hotel’s exterior as fire gases exited and mixed with the air, but this superheated cloud of fuel was too rich to ignite. Inside, reradiation from ceilings, walls, and objects fed one another. As a backdraft entered the hotel along a thermal runway, there was a total autoignition of superheated fire gases where incoming air met the smoke. A fireball erupted. Energy released from the fire burned uncontrollably and became hotter. A man trying to escape from a neighboring building ran into thick black smoke issuing from the hotel and became enveloped in fire. He ran a few steps, fell, and was consumed before Sawyer’s eyes.

  Inside Naglee’s warehouse, a quartet of nine-to-twelve traders had shut themselves up behind barrels of water they believed would enable them to ride out the inferno. The thin brick walls they confidently relied upon had already begun to crumble. Spirits and chemicals within the warehouse ignited. The lurid colors blinded the traders inside. They still might live if they could endure the next hours of incredible heat. They huddled together behind the cooling water barrels.

  Outside, three firefighters were cut off. Running for their lives, they reached the safety of an alley, only to be crushed by bricks falling directly on them. A whirlwind of sparks spun over the mountain of bricks as if to mark their grave. California Four feared that DeWitt & Harrison’s commodities storehouse in midblock on the north side of Pacific Street might automatically ignite next. The warehouse’s owners had no water, but they did have kegs of vinegar. By the time the volunteers reached the storehouse, Harrison had gotten to the roof and drenched the building with eighty-three thousand gallons of stored vinegar, and DeWitt’s men were beating out the rest of the flames with vinegar-soaked blankets. Ahead, Taaffe & McCahill’s three-story metal store was anchored imposingly on the corner of Sacramento and Montgomery streets, south of the City Hotel and close to the quartermaster’s house. Inside Taaffe’s crouched six stubborn traders as loath to leave their merchandise and gold and silver in the advance of the flames as the four traders huddled inside Naglee’s.

  “We’ll sit the fire out,” said one. “Of course,” agreed another. “Our new building is corrugated iron and fireproof.” The men slammed the massive iron doors, one-inch-thick metal plates and castings of insurmountable weight, and bolted the thick shutters. Secure, they crouched behind double sheets of iron. They listened to the dull thud of falling debris against their metal fortress and tensed as the inferno rumbled up to the doors and covered the metal warehouse like a fiery blanket. Sawyer and other volunteers arrived out front but were driven back. Shielding his face, he could only watch as the fire began to curl the iron. The cheap metal began glowing. Conduction directly transferred heat through the wall and made the inhabitants of the warehouse sweat. By now they doubted their decision to ride out the firestorm. If things got bad, they knew they could always fling open the strong metal shutters or slide back the thick iron doors and escape.

  A fringe of thin smoke quivered along the window casements, gave a puff, and in an instant the windows became perfect rectangles of woollike smoke. Heavy black smoke issued from the upper story under great pressure. It was perfect for black fire: boiling smoke, underventilated fire, and a heavy rich mix of fire gases accumulating within. The fog frames blackened as the six traders watched. They heard the volunteers outside crying for them to escape. Long tongues of bright yellow flames belched from small rents in the metal coffin. Outside, the volunteers screamed louder for the men to evacuate. By then it was too late. While white signaled a blaze of 2370 degrees, dazzling white meant the temperature was climbing beyond the limits of the cheap iron. The exterior of the metal building and the ore inside was melting and flowing into white-hot puddles at the firefighters’ feet. As the smoke around the window frames darkened, the six men inside ran to the shutters to open them. They would not budge.

  “What’s wrong?” one asked. “Pull harder.”

  The twin sheets of bolted metal trembled and grew cherry red—too hot to touch. The great double-layered iron shutters, as advertised, did not melt. Instead, they expanded in the heat and sealed the windows permanently. Next the men raced to the huge iron doors, but the fire had welded these to the building. The double sheets of bolted iron began to tremble. The traders, who were suffocating, pounded miserably on the door, burning their fists, and then ran back to the shutters. The color of the flames altered to orange. Flashovers of superheated gases radiated across the ceiling and downward, setting crates of merchandise afire. Radiation raised the temperature of objects to their ignition point. Their ledger books were already burning. Glass became molten. The traders’ lungs filled with fluid; their throats closed in spasm. They were being roasted alive in a huge furnace. The moisture was sucked from their lungs and their skin began to bubble. Fiery explosions of smoke began consuming the available oxygen. Smoke turns to carbon when it reaches a temperature of 1000 degrees. The traders’ lungs were black by now. Carbon monoxide killed the merchants mercifully quick at this point.

  Outside, the volunteers observed the heaving red and white sea brooding at the iron windows and smelled sulfur and charred meat. More of the impervious “fireproof” iron structure collapsed into heaps and puddled into glowing slag. Twisting, groaning, and glowing, Taaffe & McCahill’s warehouse grew suddenly white hot—so incandescent it blinded their eyes. The volunteers said nothing. The iron warehouse inflated to unimaginable size. The strain was unbearable. It had to blow at any moment.

  “Get back, boys,” Sawyer called. Retr
eating as far as they could, they took refuge in a burned-out lot. The iron building expanded to its limit, shook violently, once, twice, and exploded its fastenings. Red-hot bolts scattered like bullets, puncturing men and structures alike. Shutters burst out. Long-tongued flames twisted the iron into monstrous shapes. Gold and silver inside melted, flowed among the twisted black iron, and created one grotesque piece of metal. The doors coalesced into a caricature of their former shape. The bulging storehouse, having lost its integrity, shriveled. It collapsed before their eyes to become a dripping, molten metal coffin. Chastened, the volunteers left the warehouse and mechanically went on pulling down houses in the path of the fire. Whirlwinds of flames and smoke columns walked alongside them, running clockwise and counterclockwise and creating additional whirlwinds that carried sparks miles away. Sawyer now knew smoke could roar. He held his ears as timbers dropped in his path. Escape seemed impossible. In the choking smoke the volunteers’ breathing came in gasps as they rushed blindly looking for safety. All were exhausted. The blaze rumbled westward and northeastward at the same time. Fresh air was blown in as the wind changed and filled the fire with oxygen. Other torch boys led firemen through shortcuts and down seldom-used alleyways until they reached salvation.

  The blaze swept past them—a momentary darkening, then a gush of sparks followed by superheated air, gases, and a broad column of red shrouding everything with glare and the sound of a locomotive rumbling over broken tracks. An umbrella of dark smoke projected a reflection of the blaze on the underside of clouds. On the outskirts of town, people saw the ghastly light above San Francisco. As far as Monterey the fire cast an unearthly light below. The vast sheet of flame was so bright it attracted flocks of birds from surrounding marshes. Against the black smoke the birds were specks of burnished gold. Drawn to the flames, they flew into them and vanished one after another in tiny puffs of steam.

  Former convicts robbed and assaulted citizens fleeing the city. Gangs of Ducks, principally members of Jack Edwards’s gang, began robbing and assaulting people on the outskirts of town. As looting began in the suburbs, thieves in the city bided their time. The Coveys could not loot properly until the fire burned out. A few, eager to begin pillaging, pulled wet bedsheets over their heads and dashed headlong into burning stores. Few came out again. The ones who did dragged steaming valuables to the road, pulled them to a secure spot, and rushed back for more. While they were gone, their fellow Coveys robbed them. Empty strongboxes littered the smoldering ground like mortar shells. Any fireproof safe that had burst open was now empty. Merchants kept moving their valuables ahead of the fire, but it was a losing battle.

  A half block away, men cried out in agony, but the inferno’s trainlike bellow drowned them out. In a deserted hollow on the northwestern corner of Jackson and Montgomery was a shallow basin of weeds that was a pool in summer. The depression was stacked with rescued merchandise: a jeweler’s plate-glass showcase, velvet lined and overflowing with sparkling rings, stickpins, bracelets, and brooches belonging to Hayes & Lyndall’s Clay Street store. It lay unprotected while its owner had gone back to salvage more goods. A band of drunken Ducks trotted down the slope of Montgomery Street and sprang upon the case.

  Heinrich Schliemann, the future discoverer of the lost city of Troy and archaeological excavator of Mycenae, was in San Francisco that night. “The roaring of the storm, the crackling of the gunpowder,” he wrote, “the cracking of the fallen store walls, the cries of the people and the wonderful spectacle of an immense city burning up in a dark night all joined to make this catastrophe awful in the extreme.” “Not all great fires are started by Greeks hiding in Trojan horses or mad Roman emperors with fiddles,” a survivor complained. “Some are Ducks with tapers.”

  The city burned all night. At dawn the boom of the firefighters’ explosives rumbled like the dirge of funeral drums. The Ghost Fleet lost the Callao, Byron, Galen, Roma, Autumn, the General Harrison, a store ship, and two other converted vessels. Flames damaged the seemingly impervious Niantic and Euphemia. The Apollo and the Georgian ship warehouses shimmered with fire as did the catwalks and wharves connecting them to the city. Many more iron buildings failed—the City Hotel, Captain Folsom’s building, and an adjoining brick building were gone. So were the U.S. Assay Office, Dodge’s Express, the California Exchange, the Union Hotel, Gregory’s Express, Delmonico’s, two adjoining buildings—the Starr and Minturn—the Courier and Balance offices, and Moffat’s Lab, which was brick. Sawyer knew that on the east side of Montgomery, between Washington and Jackson, stood three stories of a supposedly fireproof building. “The fire will halt its march here,” he predicted. “It can never get through these thick walls and iron-bolted shutters.” No sooner had he said this than the fire reached the buildings and he was proved right. Meanwhile, crowds forced north by the fantastic heat had halted at the corner of Jackson Street and saw other walls melting like snowdrifts. A change came over the crowd for the first time. They had been afraid before; now they were angry.

  The people had lost their last bit of faith in a fireproof house or that anyone could stop the Lightkeeper, who set his blazes with impunity, greater frequency, and obvious relish. It was no coincidence that the fifth all-encompassing fire had broken out on May 4, 1851, the anniversary of the second city-destroying fire and the same day as the Firemen’s Parade. Systematic pillaging by organized gangs of army deserters and ex-convicts during the confusion and in every one of the devastating fires so far suggested the presence of a profit-motivated Lightkeeper. The gangs had been waiting. “The conflagration had to be the work of an incendiary,” citizens said. There is no doubt now. Their fury mounted against the arsonist’s “brazen chaos.” An investigation pinpointed the genesis of the blaze to the Clay Street upholstery shop. The space above Bryant’s Hotel was occupied by Baker & Meserve’s shop and should have been fireproof. According to the owners, residents had taken the lanterns out of their rooms at 10:00 P.M., no fires had been used about the house “for any purpose whatever,” and the fireplace had not yet been damped down to ash and coals to restart for the morning fire.

  Yes, the blaze had been a diversion to allow strong-arm toughs to loot the great stores of gold dust that miners had in safekeeping awaiting transportation back east. Prospectors keenly missed the presence of any secure banks in the mining regions. While they panned and shored up tunnels, they had to leave their ore unguarded and stood pickaxes in their holes so no one would meddle with their claims. Astonishingly, the markings were commonly honored. An El Dorado gambler lost $45,000 at the turn of a card but said only, “I left my tools in the hole and I’ll get plenty more gold when I get back and the water falls.” Ethics in these uncommonly dishonest times were confusing.

  Just before dawn, Mayor Geary announced that $200,000 worth of gold was missing. Later he would leave the city with an unexplained $200,000 fortune he had somehow accumulated on the job during his three years in office. Yet his wealth had not been derived from trade—he had none—or from illegally buying city lots or any of the other doubtful city transactions in which both Brannan and Broderick indulged.

  Red Davis and Curly Bill sailed from Rincon Point at the height of the conflagration to bury looted gold. Lit by the burning city, the two Sydney Town Ducks felt the Lightkeeper’s Wind at their backs and heard the California Engine Company bell ringing on Market Street and the odd cadence of the Monumental firehouse bell in the Square. As they progressed on their two-mile journey, a low white fog crept across the bay and covered over the red waters surrounding the burning city. Sheriff John “Coffee Jack” Hays, a tough customer, might be hot on their watery trail. He once led his volunteers against fifteen-to-one odds to smash a Comanche war party. The former Texas Ranger, greatest of them all, could outride and outshoot almost anybody except Billy Mulligan, who scared even the Ducks. Between the Ducks’ present position and Sand Island was Goat Island, to the south. Abruptly the 140-acre island rose steeply from the water silhouetted against a bank of white fog.
Using Goat Island as a seamark, they lined up its north end with a grove of redwoods on the East Bay hills, which guided them safely past the sunken ledge of Blossom Rock, a secret and deadly obstacle to ships northwest of Goat Island. They saw a fifty-foot-high cliff and summit of trees and pulled hard for a curving white beach on the eastern side. Cautiously they circled to the island’s tiny cove. Along the coastline was a peaceful stretch of beach and beyond that tangled thickets. Smugglers often buried opium and contraband there until their confederates could row out to the island to retrieve it. They heard a flutter of wings and raucous cries as a pelican flock flew up the island slope. They beached their boat, hauled out bags, and went to bury their stolen gold. Goat Island, a perfect temporary bank for miners, Spanish pirates, wise chiefs, and medicine men (there was a sweat lodge there), offered the additional interest of more gold to discover. If only some of the wealth reported buried on Goat Island was intact, it deserved the name Treasure Island. The Ducks saw a bark moored off Goat Island, one of the rival Hounds’ ships, and went ashore to hide their treasure. Meanwhile, a government vessel parted the fog and pursued the bark, which outran the federal ship. Later authorities found some of the stolen loot in Sydney Town.

  In San Francisco the dawn gave the shell-shocked survivors their first good look at the devastation caused by the deadliest arson in San Francisco’s history. “So many whirlwinds of destruction had swept over the devoted city at short intervals, and with such fearful strides,” survivor Ralph Andrews wrote, “that the whole community was as excitable as if they had stood on the brink of a crater.” Captain George B. Coffin rushed to Stuart and Raines’s lot to see if his nautical equipment had survived the fire. “Not a piece is left large enough to make a clothespin,” Stuart told him, then turned away, already contracting with a builder for a new store. “I need it to be ready for occupancy in one week,” he ordered. Disheartened, Coffin went to see the rest of his beloved city. “A space of a hundred acres which at sunset stood thickly studded with buildings,” he wrote in his log, “was cleared away at 4:00 A.M.” The metal homes and warehouses the Gold Rush Society had placed such faith in had failed miserably. They had been nothing more than tinderboxes. Thirty-six to sixty-eight of the so-called fire-resistant buildings had melted. Only seventeen of the structures could be salvaged. “They are little more than a woodpile enclosed in noncombustible walls,” a survivor said.