Black Fire: The True Story of the Original Tom Sawyer

by Robert Graysmith

On May 20, Eliza “Lillie” Wychie Hitchcock asked, “Where are the buildings?” The little girl had just arrived in San Francisco aboard the Tennessee, a wooden side-wheel steamer. The slender seven-year-old with large brown eyes and chestnut hair had made the difficult journey with her parents down the Atlantic Coast, over the Isthmus from the Chagres River to Panama, and along the Pacific coast with a capacity for 150 cabin passengers, 50 children, and 350 in steerage. She surveyed the cove—jammed with decaying ships and fringed by drab slopes of low brush and scrub. On the summit a gray windmill turned slowly. “Then that is not the army fort?” asked Lillie’s mother, Martha, gesturing toward the tent city on the high slopes. “No,” said Mr. Taaffe, who had lost his metal warehouse, “most of the burned-out families are living in tents and everyone is short of supplies.” That night the refugees on Telegraph Hill ate boiled beans for supper, but the Hitchcocks were luckier. Captain Joseph Folsom and homely Henry Halleck drove them in a hired rig to Bill Howard’s old estate at Stockton and Washington. Gilbert, the feisty duel-challenging editor, boarded there, too. Over dinner he discussed the arsonist. A blaze had broken out on the deck of the Tennessee on their way up the California coast and had terrified Lillie. That night she awoke screaming of fire. As San Francisco rebuilt, the little girl rode horseback along the muddied streets, went “fishing for rats” under the raised sidewalks, trotted her donkey cart around Mac-Condray’s grounds, or watched the many daylight fires that volunteers promptly extinguished. One day a bullet whizzed by her head while she was walking in the dunes south of Market. Instead of turning and running, she rushed up the hill to locate the origin of the shot.

  The Hitchcocks swiftly adopted the role of well-to-do aristocrats and Martha became her old grand-mannered self. The arsonist was rarely spoken of, though she wondered whether his motives were anything like her own. “I was heartsick at being forced to burn the house down,” Martha explained, fluttering her eyelashes, “but I had to as the only way to drive the wretched homeless out.” Two years earlier decay had ruined her family estate, the Hunter Plantation in Huntington, North Carolina. Weeds filled the garden; one corner of the mansion was sagging. When the court auctioned off the property, Martha raised money to reclaim it. Taxes ultimately dragged the once grand plantation under. Squatters overran the sweet potato fields, set up shanties under the weeping willows, and swarmed along the creeks. It inflamed Martha that two particularly disreputable vagrants had set up housekeeping in the main house. Rather than endure strangers camping in the rooms she had played in as a child, Martha got out the coal oil. Just after dawn one morning, she torched her family plantation. As “the most Southern woman” in San Francisco, she enticed into her home any local members of Southern aristocracy, though an occasional non-Southern celebrity crept into her parlor. She was not fond of Broderick. “We do not allow among us common people who climb a golden ladder above the herd to which they belong,” she said in her fluttery way. “I include their wives, if they have any.” Broderick had no wife. He was “Nature’s perfect bachelor,” according to historian Kevin Mullen.

  Lillie’s life changed the day Pat Fitzmaurice drove her to a tea party and took a detour to check on the progress of his new hotel, Fitzmaurice House. While he went over the blueprints with his contractor, Lillie and two of the five Fitzmaurice children, Patrick, twelve, and Joanna, nine, crept into the half-constructed building to explore the second floor. Without warning smoke began boiling up the staircase. Patrick and Joanna tore away from Lillie and were halfway down when a falling beam pinned them to the burning stairs. Lillie heard them moaning in the rubble but could not see them through the smoke. Then she heard nothing more. Trapped on the upper floor, she cried for help. Flames rose higher and smoke funneled out the front door, alerting Fitzmaurice. Screaming, he rushed upstairs, but the remaining planks gave way. His men dragged him to safety but could not breach the sheet of flame to reach Lillie. Outside the uncompleted hotel, John Boynton, a tall, handsome, mustached part-time smoke eater for Knickerbocker Five, was passing and heard Lillie’s screams. Flinging his pack containing a fire ax and coil of rope over his shoulder, he scaled the side of the hotel to the unfinished roof. Smoke was billowing from a hole that he chopped wider through which to lower himself. Superheated gases radiating downward from the first-floor ceiling had set fire to stores of lumber. Boynton blindly felt around until he found Lillie and revived her. “It’s too late for your friends,” he said, sweeping her up, “come with me.” Lillie wrapped her arm tightly around Boynton’s neck and he climbed, hand over hand, up his rope. Workers, who had reached the roof by now, hauled them up to safety. The city mourned the loss of the Fitzmaurice children as Boynton, trumpeter Bill Fairman, singing Curly Jack Carroll, and the rest of Five’s volunteers raced to a nighttime fire. Mother Mulcahy’s hog ranch on the Mission Road was ablaze. Lillie was on the piazza holding her mother’s hand when she felt the ground rumble and heard the pad of bare feet and thunder of boots. Martha saw a crowd of whooping and hollering torch boys running before the engines, dogs darting between their legs. Torches lifted, the runners’ eyes darted everywhere at once. Martha shook her head in disgust.

  “As we dashed past the Oriental,” Boynton wrote, “I saw the bright-eyed, piquant little girl I’d rescued.… As we swept closely by on the narrow, she cried to us, ‘Hurrah for my dear Number Five.’ ” Five cheered back. “Let me go, Mama,” said Lillie, “and stand while the jackey holds the butt.” Martha was stunned Lillie would want to run with these ragamuffins to a fire. Behind the engines ran other boys who were not above pilfering things at the fires. Lillie rushed to her father, who was more appreciative. When Five, with Lillie running alongside, reached the hog ranch, they learned Mother Mulchay had already died in the fire. By the time Five returned to their fire hall that night, Lillie’s father had a barrel of brandy for Boyton and his men and a thousand dollars toward a new pumper to replace their old piano box engine. “But it was Lillie Hitchcock’s heart which throbbed with eternal love for the members of Number Five,” Boynton recalled. “From then on she belonged to us as much as we belonged to her.” Lillie would stand in the window at night, surrounded by children who lived in the Oriental Hotel—Will and Eugene Dewey, Harry Pierson, Desiree Morse, and Cordelia Dessare—and wave at Five’s volunteers as they returned. Boynton even allowed them to pull Five’s bell cord.

  Later, Lillie, Eugene, Will, and Harry were returning from school one day when they saw Five’s engine pass. As they ran after the volunteers, Desiree and Cordelia joined them. Five, short of hands that day, was gamely struggling to beat Manhattan Two and Howard Three to the summit of steep Telegraph Hill. At the top a small shack was burning near the signal announcing arriving ships. Soon Five fell behind, unable to move the horseless piano box engine another foot with their tow ropes. When Lillie saw them losing the honor of being first, she threw down her books, raced up to the engine, and looked for a vacant place on the rope. “Come on, you men!” she shouted to bystanders along the road. “Everybody pull and we can beat ’em!” “It’s not my funeral,” yawned one man. In reply, Lillie seized the tow rope in both hands and began to drag it as if she could move the heavy water wagon by herself. Eugene joined her, then Harry, and finally a half-dozen shamed men who leaped from the crowd and began to pull with her. Lillie’s encouragement gave Five renewed strength. They went up the slope “like a red streak” and got water on the fire first. From that day on, whenever Lillie saw Five’s men rumbling to a fire, she sprinted alongside them.

  Dr. Hitchcock finally grew frustrated with her trailing the engines. “Lillie,” he argued, “you must stop this foolishness or I will put a stop to your pursuing fires.” After a visit to her father’s inherited plantation on the Georgia coast, Lillie returned to San Francisco, her passion for chasing fire strong as ever. Eventually her parents shipped her to a San Jose convent school where for the first two weeks she lost sleep and stopped eating. The third week a classmate swinging her pencil on a string accident
ally stabbed her eye and fluid leaked out. Lillie took a hack home. Badly injured, her sight began to fail. She spent months in her darkened hotel suite as doctors monitored her health. Each day she grew thinner, more ashen. Boynton and her firefighting friends missed Lillie. “When she doesn’t turn up,” said one, “it’s because of that mother of hers—she’s a snob.” Lillie rallied only when she heard Five’s raised voices singing their way to a blaze. Bouquets of flowers addressed to “our mascot” and “our sweetheart” filled her room. To aid her recovery, Five rose each dawn to spread tan bark on the street in front of her hotel to deaden the sound of passing wagons. Nearby, the Risdon Iron Works would set up a deafening racket, so Five, unionists themselves, talked the ironworks into ceasing their boiler making until Lillie got better. When the bandages were removed, her eyesight returned. Her parents, gratified by Five’s attentions, relented and allowed Lillie to go to them. She slipped into her black skirt and red woolen blouse as her father said, “Give my regards to your gentlemen. They are fine men. There is no way I can deny that.” He watched her splendid little figure running alongside the heavy engine. Fighting fire had healed her.

  The men presented her with a shiny black helmet bearing the word Five, which she wore every time they answered the tap of an alarm. When garland-bedecked Five’s engine was lifted up on the Platt’s Hall stage, they sat Lillie in the driver’s seat and presented her with a tiny fireman’s cap embedded with a diamond and a gold pin with the numeral 5. She would neither enter a party without her pin nor chase after the engines without sending back home for it. She was overjoyed when Five made her their official mascot. Thanks to the Hitchcocks’ wealth, they soon had a luxurious new three-story fireproof brick station with iron gates and leaded-glass windows. Exquisite wrought-iron work on the second floor framed a golden number 5.

  Lillie always kept a light burning in her window until Five had hauled their engine home and was soon treating the tired, dirty men to an after-fire supper. She dropped everything when she heard the fire bell ring and rushed to beat out sparks with her apron and fill leather buckets as fast as any volunteer. One time a fireman yelled, “Get that girl out of here. This is a man’s job.” In answer Lillie ran to the engine, seized the hose, and directed a stream of water on the fire. “Start her lively, boys!” she cried. “Everybody out! Fire!” She became a familiar sight racing alongside Five’s engine in her blue silk dress, chestnut curls flying behind. Once, Lillie missed a fire because her family was visiting in another part of town. Concerned, Five sent a delegation to see if she was well. When Lillie did not sight Five, she counted the strokes of the fire bell to identify the ward and once beat them to a fire by riding in the hack her father had engaged to take her to a party. Enraptured, she often sat in the Oriental Hotel’s lobby enthralling her audience with stories about the brave firefighters and blazes she had seen. At night Five’s sweetheart cast her eyes toward the dark streets outside the hotel and wondered if somewhere an arsonist was prowling again ready to destroy the city and kill her friends.

  One afternoon Lillie was returning from a wedding rehearsal at Grace Church in her white tulle, star-spangled dress when she heard the fire alarm ring and saw an engine turn onto Market Street. She had the coachman stop her carriage, hailed the fireman father of her classmate, and demanded to be taken along. At the Market Street blaze she saw a sea of red-shirted men up on ladders playing their hoses on the flames and began cheering Five on. The pipeman of Big Six, Five’s rival, up on an adjacent ladder, took one look at Lillie’s Paris dress and taunted, “See, I told you she was only a featherbedder. Look at the sissy member of Number Five.” In response, Five’s pipeman turned the full force of his hose on the beautifully dressed girl, who, shocked at first, saw that a friend had dunked her and only laughed and waved. “Told you she was no featherbedder,” said the Five pipeman. “She’s one of the boys.” After that even rival fire companies included her in their parades.

  The Lodger

  All day Sunday the lodger lay on his back, arms clasped behind his neck. He fell asleep smiling over the regulations posted on the wall that warned about smoking in bed. He awoke thirsty, hefted the big china waterward, and lifted a cover that was only a piece of redwood with a nail in the center for a handle. He took a sip with the coconut-shell dipper, then brewed tea to shake off the chill. “What is it that makes cold in this city so much more freezing than anywhere else?” he thought. Once a century it snowed in San Francisco, he knew. Perhaps it was time again. He heard tapping outside, pushed back his chair, and drew back the curtain. A man was nailing a circular to a storefront. At sunset the lodger crept out to read it. The reward for the arsonist’s capture was $5,000. He shivered. It was colder than ever and he would like a big roaring fire about now. He rubbed his callused hands together to warm himself. His hands smelled faintly of oil. The sinking sun lit up his smile with red—like fire.

  On May 28, T. Butler King, failed banker and collector of customs, assembled his employees, armed them with cutlasses and pistols, and marched them across the rain-soaked Square. “King made an ass of himself generally,” the townsfolk agreed. Holding a bludgeon in one hand and a huge Colt in the other, he marched briskly over puddles from the previous week’s rain. Crowds around the Custom House on Montgomery and California streets watched as the melted vault containing $3 million of gold was lifted to the surface. Hauling a carload of gold and surviving city treasures, King and his rugged guards began the first of several trips to the new vault at the northwest corner of Washington and Kearny streets. Sadly, this suggested that San Francisco was so lawless that it needed an army to move treasure in bright daylight along the city’s most populous streets. En route some jokers bribed the waiters of a public eating house to charge the convoy with butter knives. All the guards ran away except King, who, ass or not, held his ground and raised his cutlass to defend the gold.

  On May 30, a nighttime arson attempt was made on Pike Street. Robberies resumed and the dull thudding of slungshots echoed through the city. “Can we not catch these rascals,” lamented the Alta. “There is a flagstaff in the Square with a block for a rope to run through,” Gilbert wrote of a 110-foot fir flagpole, a gift to the city from Portland, at the gable end of the old adobe City Hotel. “To what better use could it be put than to run up to its very truck, some of those who infest the city, setting fire to the buildings.”

  “San Francisco has continued to grow broader and deeper and more substantial,” Captain George Coffin observed. When he sailed there in July 1849, the city limits extended to the west only a mile and a half beyond the Square and to the south only two miles as a city of tents. Now the Montgomery Block, the first buildings impervious to fire, was being constructed and Montgomery Street rebuilt with fireproof buildings with brick walls two to three feet thick and no exposed woodwork. The doors and windows had iron shutters. The roofs were slated with partition walls rising six feet above them. John Parrott, former U.S. consul at Mazatlan and the top banker in town, ordered a Georgian-style three-story structure built with granite from China, San Francisco’s most accessible quarry. His Parrott Block would serve as a bank on the northwest corner of Montgomery and California. The granite was imported, but the foundation was local—Yerba Buena Island blue rubblestone. As they laid the last tier in June, the granite blocks arrived, each “trimmed to the T-square,” cut to intersect and marked with a chiseled Chinese character to designate its place. When Bernard Peyton, the contractor, opened the instruction booklet, he was stumped. The directions were in Chinese. Unable to assemble the bank, he sent to China for Cantonese stonemasons to solve the puzzle. When the bark Dragon arrived, the Chinese foreman unrolled a key sheet from a length of bamboo and put his men to work. As coolies in their native garb with bare feet silently matched the blocks, the building lifted prettily. With only an hour’s break, the Chinese labored from dawn to dusk for a half pound of rice, half a fish, and a dollar. Having contracted for ninety days, the coolies finished on time and sailed
for home on the next tide.

  “It makes no sense,” Broderick complained. “We send for bricks from the Atlantic states and Australia instead of making our own.” The discovery of large clay deposits where Mission Creek empties into the bay would permit the opening of several local brickworks to manufacture sixty thousand bricks a day. With plentiful bricks, merchants began to construct two-to-three-foot-thick brick warehouses using lava from Hawaii as foundations. Builders cemented on slate roofs and screwed double sets of iron shutters over the doors and windows of the best fireproof, burglarproof buildings yet seen. During the day they folded the shutters back and at night closed them. Intense radiant heat from a fire, conducted inside by the iron shutters, still might ruin inventories, so one owner erected water tanks on his roof to flood the interior if an alarm rang out. Around the outside of the central district genteel wooden cottages with iron fences enclosing front gardens flourished. Buildings demonstrated a magnificent improvement in strength and grandeur with their Gothic spires, mansard roofs, octagonal structures, and cast-iron grillwork. It took droves of northeastern architects to fireproof the city’s construction—new brick buildings with double iron shutters and large tanks of water on the roofs. The first granite-faced building of the Parrott Block, a cluster of handsome fireproof structures of brick, granite, and iron, would be completed by late December. Henry Halleck, the prominent lawyer, drafted plans for a completely fireproof building on the southeast corner of the intersection of Montgomery and Washington streets. He got his $3 million worth—a Florentine facade closed at the back, framed stone columns and artesian wells, deep groundwork, and metal bulkhead doors packed with asbestos. Deep-set windows of French and Belgian glass covered with heavy double iron shutters locked out any fire. Two-foot-thick walls made up of two million bricks rested on a raft of ship planking. It stood on redwood piles dovetailed into tiers bolted, anchored, and tied with earthquake-resistant cables in a deeply excavated basement. The whole shebang floated on water. Halleck did not get his open courtyard in the center. It would create a vacuum to draw in flames if a fire should sweep in from hillside or waterside. He settled for a light well. Behind its heavy firewalls, the building would survive every big quake for the next hundred years, and only then be replaced by a modern pyramidal skyscraper. In 1853, the Montgomery Block would provide quarters for Colonel Joe Lawrence’s Golden Era; Ed Stahle’s steam baths, where Sawyer would meet Twain; and rooms for dozens of professional men, scientists, lawyers, and artists. Gold from the diggings arriving on carts clattered up from the docks under a dozen musket guards. A Chinese bookkeeper called the count as gold in nugget and cornmeal form was unloaded and trundled to Adams and Company’s offices on the Merchant Street side. Their foot-thick outer iron doors kept out fire but also kept it in. Inside, gold was melted, refined, and cast into ingots in their red-hot furnace in a brick-lined cellar. The bars were lowered into the coolness of a deep, iron-shafted vault.