Black Fire: The True Story of the Original Tom Sawyer

by Robert Graysmith

  When one newspaper editor tried to transport his press to a safer location to print a fire edition, fire destroyed his press. All the newspaper offices had burned except the badly damaged Alta. At 5:00 A.M., Edward Gilbert, its contentious but cowardly editor, sat down to write: “San Francisco is once again in ashes. The smoke and flames are ascending from several squares of our city, as if the God of Destruction had seated himself in our midst. Here and there a brick building stood like a tomb among a nation of groves, yet even they, in most cases, have nothing but their walls standing.” He considered early estimates of $7 million in property loss too low. The fire was still burning in places. He calculated the loss at $10 to $12 million. Others estimated the loss as high as $17 million, with the possible loss of a hundred lives. Gilbert wrote: “The municipality of this mushroom place was at the moment in debt, for the expenses of the city government, over one million dollars; and this calamity of the great fire was surely a fitting work for such a municipal organization to accomplish over night.” He believed the fires had cleansed the city of evil. “We can and will begin again, fresh and reborn without sin.”

  At 7:00 A.M. the final remnants of the fire reached a sparsely built section of town, ran up against an unfinished brick structure, and died. Hard brick withstands ignition temperatures up to 1000 degrees. When the fog burned away, the city’s tallest structures were a few chimneys shaking against the slate sky. Devastation stretched three quarters of a mile long and a quarter mile wide. Every house on Leidesdorff was gone. Eerily, among acres of devastation, an isolated house or two stood untouched. Coffin stumbled to Sacramento and Montgomery streets to learn the fate of the traders who locked themselves inside Taaffe & McCahill’s iron warehouse. “Their burnt and mangled bodies were found among the ruins near the door,” he wrote. “It is supposed that, finding the building no longer tenable, they had endeavored to escape, but the intense heat had so warped the iron doors and windows that they could not be opened. Their bones were burned to a cinder.” The victims had rushed to the same spot and perished together, their bones indistinguishable from one another. Mr. Wells, the Boston banker, had remained in his fireproof building too long, but he did escape. Wells, dreadfully burned, would carry the marks to his grave. Coffin wondered why the apparently fireproof Wells & Company building had been destroyed and descended into its cellar to find out. When the cellar workers fled, they left a door open and one of the little windows at the rear that provided light, the only window not shuttered by iron. The draft had brought “a perfect hurricane” of flames into a basement filled with liquors. On the first floor contractors were already laying plans to replace the building within weeks.

  At the Naglee warehouse, of the four men shut up in their vault for four hours, James, Noyes, Forst, and Mudge, only Mudge was seriously burned, but Edward Cahill, last seen inside his flaming store, was presumed lost. On the corner of Montgomery and Sacramento streets lay the charred remains of Leon Greenebaum, Reuben Backer, M. Nassbaum, and O. Rossenthall. They would be buried at 2:00 P.M. at the Israelite burying ground. At California and Montgomery streets, by Naylor’s brick building, Heath Davis had lost his four-story brick building, the city’s first, that he had leased as the new Custom House.

  All the warehouses in town but three had been destroyed. Gildermeister & De Frenery’s brick building on Montgomery between Sacramento and Commercial streets was saved by its thick rear walls. Jesse and Joe Seligman’s single-story shop at California and Sansome survived because of its twenty-two-inch-thick brick walls and heavy iron shutters. Immediately the Seligmans, as owners of one of the few business district buildings still standing, gave up being mining supply salesmen and became bankers. When they opened Burgoyne’s safe, they found $1.5 million and all the papers and deposits inside not even singed. Meanwhile, a citizen named Mr. Argenti formed a patrol of guards at his own expense to protect the ruins of his neighbors.

  Five large store ships full of merchandise were still burning. One, the Niantic, so miraculously saved in the previous June’s fire, had been enclosed in a wall of sheet iron for protection and might still be salvaged, at least below water. At the foot of the Jackson Street Wharf neighbors saved a big warehouse but nearly lost their lives. All around it, the tops of ten thousand piles in the mud had burned down to the water’s edge. At 8:00 A.M., an hour after the fire burned out, Sawyer, half drowned and half toasted, and smelling of plaster and wood, shambled back to his engine house to sleep. His hair was singed, his eyes red, his lungs sooty, and every muscle in his body was screaming. While he slept, weary survivors wandered glassy-eyed though smoldering streets. A lucky few had salvaged their goods and stored them onboard the British vessel R. K. Hurtley of Liverpool. The unlucky many carried furniture with no place to put it. Shelter on the outskirts of town was costly: $150 for the use of a tent for ten days. One family set up housekeeping in the street, arranging their family portraits around a post. A man ran back into his office, which had suddenly burst into flame again. He perished from smoke inhalation. Monumental Six volunteer James Welch burned to death.

  Over at the St. Francis Hotel, two burned-out men ascended the outside stair to the second floor. Inside, a tall, powerfully built man, dreadfully burned, was standing behind the door, eyes closed, head drooped upon his chest, and wrists crossed as if he were shackled. His beard and all the hair below his hat had been burned off, as if shaven. When he spoke, it was through scorched, mangled lips. His voice was muffled, yet oddly familiar. “Excuse me, but I do not know where I am,” the stranger whispered, “or how I came to be here. Don’t you know me? I am your counselor, Elbridge Gerry Austin.”

  At Kearny and Washington streets, unlucky Tom Maguire stood over more ruins. The previous April, the stocky impresario had added an auditorium on the second floor of his Parker House in recognition of the “Swedish Nightingale,” Jenny Lind, who had won the hearts of the New York volunteers by donating her concert proceeds to them. When she left Manhattan, the firefighters presented her with an elaborately engraved box of pure California gold. The wooden three-story Jenny Lind Theatre, where James Stark directed productions of Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear, cost Maguire and his partner, J. B. Hart, $40,000. Maguire had been counting on income from the theater to pay off their debts within four months. But he was a determined man whose success was amazing, considering he was totally illiterate. He planned to erect a second Jenny Lind Theatre on the same site. The Empire and American theaters and the Adelphi were destroyed; Dutch Charley and his partner, George Baker, lost their new saloon in the Crockett Building; and the five-story Union Hotel pitched into the street, though Williard the bookkeeper, thought to have been burned to death inside, was found alive.

  Sawyer slept until 7:00 P.M. After a light supper, he slept again. When he awoke, refreshed but aching, he returned to the Square, where three thousand people had stacked their belongings and slept all night in the open, lit by flickering light. Others dug through ashes with bare, scalded hands, scrabbling for melted gold and silver. Some were crazed by the tragedy, but most met the fire with the same heroic humor as before. They were always at their finest when it was too late to do anything. “As a whole,” Editor Gilbert wrote, “the community was soon as cheery as ever, and at least a trifle wiser than before, not so much in its immediate following conduct as in its plans for the future.” “Everybody seems in good-humor,” agreed young Frank Marryat, a visiting British adventurer and artist, “and there is no reason why the stranger, who has lost nothing by the calamity, should allow himself to be plunged into melancholy reflections! Planks and lumber are already being carted in all directions, and so soon as the embers cool, the work of rebuilding will commence.… The highest praise that I can accord to the San Francisco volunteer firemen is to … say that they are zealous and intrepid and that their services are gratuitous.” One merchant asked another, “Burnt out?” “Yes,” he replied, “and burst up.” “Flat?” “Flat as a damned pancake!” “Anyway, it’s a great country.” “Not
hing shorter.” San Franciscans were proud of their fires—grand fires, heroic fires, the finest ever seen. They had fire in their veins and each blaze brought a new and finer city.

  Among the toppled iron posts and tottering chimneys, street preachers bellowed, but their sermons, in spite of being weighty with doom, were carried away like feathers in the updraft. People moved from the center of town to the north end. Their new neighbors were the gangs of Sydney Town, who had been burned out when the wind suddenly turned. While San Francisco mourned and nailed hot boards together, refugees in the north end had to go about armed, sleep with pistols under their pillows, and wake to the constant sound of gunfire. The inferno had been “set by an incarnate fiend for the purpose of robbery.” The Herald wrote: “It appears now beyond doubt that the recent conflagration … was the work of an incendiary.” There was no shortage of suspects. Senator Broderick believed a gang of ex-convicts had ignited the devastating series of conflagrations to provide diversions allowing toughs to loot the ample stores of gold. Careful merchants, aware that looting was the aftermath of every fire, had locked up their merchandise onboard vessels in the harbor. When folks heard Ducks might have buried the looted $200,000 on Goat Island, hundreds set sail to dig it up. One enterprising volunteer did make a fortune. He galloped to the next town before news of the blaze reached there and cornered the building supply market before prices went up. He had been canny—within ten days the indefatigable San Franciscans would have rebuilt three hundred structures. The blaze had consumed between 2,000 and 2,500 homes this time. Complete ruin and partial ruin spread for twenty-two city blocks westward and northeastward. Sixteen blocks had burned in the first two hours. Between seventeen and eighteen square blocks had been completely vaporized and six other blocks had been damaged. Three-quarters of the business district between Pine and Pacific, from Kearny to Battery on the water, disappeared. Except for two forlorn buildings at the corner of Vallejo Street, the fire devoured everything east of Sansome Street. Colonel Poore’s new building built out over the bay marked the northernmost limit of the conflagration. From Clarke’s Point, the cessation of fire in that direction, to Happy Valley, nothing remained except foundations standing over water. Half the new wharves had been incinerated, a loss accounting for half the cost of the fire. Of the five great blazes, the anniversary fire was more costly than all the previous fires combined: $12 million. The mayor estimated the cost higher: $20 million. The total number of structures destroyed by the arsonist over the last year now stood near 4,000, the most disastrous series of fires ever inflicted on a major American city. How many lives were lost will never be known. Estimates ranged from three hundred to a thousand. Trampled corpses lay deep under the muddy ooze and no one was doing any digging, only building over them.

  On May 5, J. Goldsborough Bruff, a local artist, topographer, and historian, took a walk through the smoking streets. Temporary structures were rising like weeds among the charred rubble. “Forty-eight hours since, what a difference!” he wrote.

  Compact streets, of neat, and very lofty and elegant houses; stores of every description, well filled with goods and thronged with the gay and busy bustle of pleasure and business! Now black and shattered walls, and heaps of smoking and burning ruins; confused piles of goods and chattels, and multitudes of houseless people! My bedding was burnt—Mr. Thomas McCalla of Washington City died.

  Next day he noted that many enterprises had resumed operations on a reduced scale. At the Washington and Kearny corner, the Council had set up a tent by the Verandah Saloon to aid survivors and worked under the din of the Verandah’s slightly mad one-man band. He had a drum strapped to his back and fastened to his elbows, pipes tied to his chin, and cymbals attached to his wrists. His iron-soled boots kept time. Holding their ears, the Council members drew up plans to erect $2.5 million worth of the same “inflammable” businesses and homes at the base of Telegraph Hill as before. Had they learned nothing? Not quite. The Council had a clue. One out of five brick structures on Market Street had not burned. Workmen were contracted to rebuild the Union Hotel as a $250,000 brick building, refit the Adelphi Theater now at Dupont Street, and build a new fireproof Parker House. The Council located several privately owned fire engines to facilitate the establishment of Clarke’s Point’s own efficient fire station because much of the city’s private wealth was stored in highly flammable houses there.

  Friday, May 9, dawned bleak. High winds blew suffocating ashes throughout San Francisco. At the northwestern corner of the Square workmen cleared the ruined walls of the old adobe Custom House to dig down to the melted gold in its vault. Editor Gilbert was gratified by the demolition of this “last sad relic.” “Possession was held by Palmer, Cook & Company under a lease for three years from Colonel Collier,” he wrote. “The lot forms part and parcel of the Square, and no individual should be permitted to occupy so formidable a notch.” On May 15, someone tried to burn down the Verandah Saloon on the corner of Washington and Kearny streets. The brick house had been closed for several hours when the arsonist set his fire. It burned through the upper part of a door to a small storeroom that he had soaked with oil and filled the passage and upper-story rooms with flames. An alert watchman saw the smoke at 1:00 A.M. and exhausted himself putting it out by carrying buckets back and forth. A minute more and casks of brandy in the basement would have ignited, trapping those sleeping upstairs. That the arsonist had brought oil to the fire scene was a clue to his identity, but no one saw it yet. The next day someone attempted to torch the City Hospital. When a firebug set another fire on Pike Street, the Alta suggested more alarms of fire could be expected anytime because “we have a band of desperadoes in our midst who have long gone unwhipped by Justice.” A shipload of Australian ex-convicts had arrived in May. Seven hundred more were due in weeks.

  At heart the public appreciated each volunteer for his self-sacrifice. Enthusiastic fans trailed behind their neighborhood or ethnic favorites, cheering them on as if they were a sports team. As they clapped, chanted, and sang, everyone was thinking the same thing: “Why can’t someone catch the arsonist?”

  All roads led to the waterfront but did not stop there. Piers extended from the tips of all principal roads—Market, California, Sacramento, Clay, Washington, Jackson, Pacific, and Broadway streets—and as new wharves walked on stilts out over distant tidal flats, the existing streets rode their backs. On Sunday afternoon a lone, skeletal figure strode on long legs southeast along the mudflat waterfront. The bedraggled scarecrow with black tousled hair, pockmarked face, and soot-blackened hands reached a run-down waterfront flophouse on Long Wharf, Stuart and George Simmonds’ Collier House, and climbed the outside stairs to his second-floor room. He paused at the door and looked around. His neighbors were always watching. He had the rough appearance of a Hound, but his Australian accent and his companions, all ticket-of-leave men from Van Diemen’s Land, betrayed him as a “Sydney Duck of notoriously bad character.” Born in London, in his youth he had been transported on charges of arson and robbery to the New South Wales penal colony for life. Possibly his mother had been an ex-convict, too, but he never knew for sure. Deported like other Australian convicts, he arrived in San Francisco in November 1849, about the same time as notorious gang leader English Jim Stuart, and gravitated toward the waterfront and the base of Telegraph Hill.

  He was frequently seen around town: Sam Brannan had seen him come up in court a dozen times and get off as often, and had glimpsed him around the wharves, where he was a sometime lighterman on the Whitehall Bay taxies. When the Lightkeeper’s partner, a member of English Jim Stuart’s gang like himself, provided Stuart with a tip about the gold shipments of a wealthy waterfront merchant, the Lightkeeper and the rest of the gang met at Mrs. Mary Ann Hogan’s rooming house to plan the robbery. It was their common meeting place, though Stuart sometimes roomed at Mrs. Hogan’s hotel, which was used by criminals who needed a place to hide.

  People stopping at the Collier House noticed something odd about the
lodger: He frequently smelled of oil. Edward Johns and his roommate, Henry Tufts, lived in number two on the second floor directly over the butcher’s shop and next door to the Lightkeeper, who lived in number three. William Hellman occupied the room on the other side, number four, and of all the neighbors, he was most curious about him. The lodger sometimes left in the middle of the night and often returned lathered with sweat. His midnight forays suspiciously coincided with three or four failed attempts to burn down San Francisco again.

  The lodger spent the afternoon in bed surveying his meager belongings—a bowie knife, two wooden boxes of matches, some boys’ clothing, jars of oil, lumps of coal, and some wooden shavings—which fit comfortably into a battered trunk. The miserable bed with two mattresses, a cook stove, a pine table, an oil lamp, and some flowered curtains belonged to the Collier House. The lodger yawned. He was content. He had work to do. A summer fire perhaps.