Black Fire: The True Story of the Original Tom Sawyer

by Robert Graysmith

  Political patronage to the volunteers dwindled as the city began to contribute its part to the construction of firehouses and oversee a revamping of the fourteen engine companies and three hook and ladder units. Five’s firehouse had been demolished. Their new building on Sacramento Street between Sansome and Leidesdorff streets was a huge improvement. On March 25, the California State Legislature enacted a bill that exempted all volunteers from both jury duty and military service. Years later, when Sawyer and a group of firemen formed the Exempt Fire Company, the grateful state voted them an engine house and their own fire equipment.

  On May 1, the Rassette House, a wooden five-story firetrap on Bush Street, caught fire and Dutch Charley distinguished himself by saving four hundred citizens trapped inside. The Pacific News wrote, “Charley Duane comes forth from the blazing rafters of the Rassette and the old St. Francis, half-drowned and half-roasted, a redeemed man and useful citizen.” The first day of June 1851 came. San Francisco’s gravity-flow reservoir stood at empty after such a dry winter. Only a bare film of moisture coated the tar-sealed bases of the cisterns. Several small fires were set in the outskirts of town and the fire bell tolled at least once each night. “This rascal, this arsonist—I am beside myself with worry,” wailed the mayor on the drizzly morning of June 2. “Will we ever have a clue to who he is?” He was about to get his answer.

  At 9:00 A.M., over on Long Wharf, angry words were being exchanged at the Collier House between the lodger and Henry Stowell, the lower-floor proprietor and bartender. Finally Stowell ordered the lodger to leave his hotel by evening. “And take along those two other parties who had also engaged your room,” he snapped. The lodger shot the landlord a menacing look, surprised that Stowell had known about his companions. How much had he heard of their plans? “I’ll have my trunk out by 5:00 P.M.,” he said.

  At 2:00 P.M. June 2, Lewis Hellman, in room number four, exchanged a few words with the lodger, who had been boarding there longer than he had. According to another second-floor neighbor, Edward Johns, the lodger had moved into the Collier House on May 5, the day after the May anniversary fire, the most costly and deadly of the five fires so far. The lodger told Hellman he was going to the mines. At 3:00 P.M., in front of the house, he spoke to another second-floor neighbor, Joshua Nickerson, who lived above the Contra Costa Market. They had spoken earlier that morning, too. “He had taken a part of his things out, but did not give up the key,” Nickerson said. Earlier he had noticed a burned spot in the lodger’s room. “The place burnt was not quite so large as my hand,” he said. Hellman saw him take his blanket and go off. He was back by 4:00 P.M. and hailed Hellman on Long Wharf. “I don’t believe I’ll go to the mines today,” he told him. “I’ll go tomorrow.” Two hours later he returned and asked Hellman peevishly, “Why won’t the landlord give me a room to live in? He gave you one. He said he did not wish to rent the room, and wanted it himself. Why can I not have it again?” Hellman smiled. “This is probably true,” he said. “The agents did not care about letting it again.” Around 8:00 P.M., George Simmonds visited the Collier House bar to collect rents and saw lamp oil dripping down through the cloth ceiling. He pointed this out to Stowell. “You better go upstairs and see what they are doing,” Simmonds said. Stowell went up and found the door locked. In coming down the bartender met the lodger on the stairs. “What do you want?” he snapped. “I came to see where oil dripping below is coming from. Come down and I will get a light and go upstairs and we will find it.”

  The lodger followed him into the bar, where Stowell pointed to the oil spot. “Does that not come from your room?” “It does not,” he replied. “Well I think it does.” They went upstairs to see if there was any oil in the entry. There was none. “Do you pretend to say that the oil does not come from your room?” Stowell said. “It does not,” the lodger said. “There is no oil in my rooms.” They came downstairs again and Stowell pointed to the oil spot a second time. “It must come from your room.” “It does not.” “Then I let the matter drop,” Stowell said later. “I got a chair, stood on it and felt the spot and said, ‘Yes, it’s oil.’ ”

  Around 10:30 P.M., Hellman was sitting in his room sewing when he became aware of the light step of a man ascending the stairway. He heard the door to the lodger’s room open softly and someone come out soon after, lock the door, and go downstairs. Five or ten minutes afterward, he heard the same soft tread in the hall. Someone had tiptoed up the stairs. When Hellman opened his door a crack to peer into the corridor, he glimpsed the lodger standing with his back to his door. “He stayed in his room, number three, a few minutes,” Hellman said. He “locked his door and went off again—just the same step not to make any noise between five and ten minutes after the same man came up again in the same way as not to make any noise—stepping slowly—I wanted to see what was going on—opened my door and saw the lodger standing before his door. Then I locked my door.” Hellman returned to sewing and then to bed.

  In the room on the other side of the lodger’s, Johns and his roommate were trying to get some sleep. Johns heard someone stealthily ascend the stairs and then the thump and scrape of a trunk being moved. He got up and peeked out and saw the lodger in the passage with a large trunk. Hellman, from his bed, heard the lodger go downstairs. Johns, at his door, heard low whispering and the friction of many matches. When the man came up again, Johns knew it was the same man by the cracking of his boots. He went down again and then was the friction of many matches in the room again. What took so many matches to light? Three visits within an hour. On the man’s last visit someone was with him, whispering. Johns listened but could not make out any words. The lodger closed his door again, locked it, and started back downstairs. Right away Johns smelled smoke.

  Stephen Keith, one of the roomers, knocked on Hellman’s door. “There must be some fire somewhere in the house,” he said. “Is there fire in your room?” “No, there’s no fire in my room,” Hellman said. Keith met the lodger in the hall and asked the same question. “There is no fire in there,” he said. The two went downstairs together to the butcher’s shop and found no fire there. “It must be upstairs and you must go with me to help me find it.” Keith hunted around and left the lodger at the top of the stairs. “Don’t leave,” Keith ordered him. Another boarder coming up met the lodger on the stairs. “Where is the fire?” he asked. “I don’t know,” the lodger said, “but I suppose it is downstairs.” A minute or so later, another boarder ran upstairs and rapped on Hellman’s door. “Is there a fire in your room?” he asked. Hellman shook his head and they looked around upstairs but found nothing. Returning along the hall, they smelled smoke issuing from the lodger’s locked room and began yelling for help.

  Around 10:45 P.M., Police Officer Bryan Donally was walking his beat on Long Wharf when he heard George Simmonds cry, “Police! Come up!” Donally asked what the matter was. “There’s a fire upstairs in the Collier House on Long Wharf and there are some suspicious characters you should look out for.” Donally learned there were three or four persons present when the alarm was given and some sleeping in the rooms upstairs, about ten persons. Donally started up the outer stairs and saw two men struggling at the top. One, Stephen Keith, was preventing a scarecrowlike man in black from coming down with his trunk because there was doubt over who owned it. Donally had reached the fourth step when he spoke to the lodger. “He did not answer me for some time,” he said. “He averted his eyes. There was a light in the sign outside and considerable light in the entry. I noted he was pockmarked and had his boots outside his pantaloons.” He got a good look at the suspect, who was trying to conceal his face. Another man was behind them, also hiding his face.

  “Keep an eye on him,” he ordered Keith. “There’s something wrong here.” He went upstairs to look after the fire. “There was considerable smoke in the entry. I opened the doors of several rooms but could not find the source. Mr. Tufts and Mr. Johns came out of their rooms and wanted to find out where the fire was.” Donally went downstai
rs, returned upstairs, and found the lodger’s room. He could not see a handle or a lock on the door, but it was barred. He put his arm against the door, forced it open, and entered a room boiling with smoke. He looked to his left. There were two mattresses on the floor behind the door. Clothes, wood shavings, a boy’s waistcoat, two empty wooden matchboxes, and a bowie knife were strewn about. The clothes smelled oily, but there was no pot or jug of oil in the room. Donally stooped, saw there was a hole in the ticking of the top mattress where a round object had been inserted. He kicked at the mattresses. There was a pool of oil around them and a larger pool of oil on top. “Here’s the fire,” he cried. When he lifted the top mattress, the lower mattress burst into flame. The catalyst was a smoldering coal. “It began to blaze between the two mattresses. I cried for water and another officer.” He threw the top mattress down the outside stairs just as a roomer brought water in leather buckets from the downstairs bar. Together they extinguished the fire in the calico mattress on the bottom. Donally came downstairs, asked who occupied the room, and was told it was the man he had detained on the stairs. “He went away,” Hellman said. “It was dark, but I saw him run off.” The lodger had escaped and his mysterious companion had vanished.

  Outside in the darkness Simple Four was just responding from Happy Valley with their red and gold pumper. Donally was joined by three other officers. Collier House residents had earlier reported the taciturn lodger as suspicious and had mentioned his late-night trips. In half an hour Donally tracked the lodger to a four-story brick building with an iron balcony, the gilded El Dorado. Donally entered into the upper stories where miners, gamblers, and women of the halls held court. He looked around. Standing at a monte table to the right of the dealer was the lodger with both hands in his pockets. When he saw Donally, he rested his foot on a bench and put his right hand to his face.

  Donally, not certain this was the man from the Collier House, did not want to identify himself as a policeman in such a crowded room. He took his badge off his coat and slipped it in his pocket. He moved closer and asked the man to walk down on Long Wharf with him for company. They walked in the cool night listening to the rushing water. “I was down on Long Wharf at the time of the cry of fire,” the lodger said. “Are you not the man who stopped me on the stair?” Donally said nothing. “I was going up to bed and smelled the smoke and came away. At the alarm of fire I went downstairs and took a drink.” The lodger pretended to be drunk as they walked, but at times, forgetting his role, he walked perfectly straight. “I asked the proprietor and he said there must be some fire in the house. He knocked at my door, said there was fire in my room.”

  “Why did you leave the scene?” Donally asked. “I was burnt out at the last fire and I did not want to be burnt out again,” the lodger said. “If you roomed in the house when the fire was discovered, why did you not stay there?” Donally asked. “I did not wish to get burnt,” the lodger replied. “I have no doubt now you are the man I first arrested,” Donally said and frog-marched his prisoner back to Stowell, who also identified him as the man. “What you spill some oil up in your room for?” Stowell said, looking above where it had come through and stained the cloth ceiling. The lodger looked up at the stain but said nothing. Stowell continued, “As for the other man, I know him as a boatman and that he came from Australia. Although they were on good terms they often fought.” From there Donally directed his prisoner toward the station house.

  Ned Wakeman left shipping magnate Charles Minturn’s office at the foot of Geary Street and began walking in the dark along Powell Street. A month earlier he had raced his stolen steamboat New World down from Sacramento in five and a half hours dock to dock and set what seemed an unbreakable record. On his way he met bluff Sam Brannan, an old friend. Before they could speak, they saw torch boys leading Simple Four’s engine. It was jolting up the rutted street towed by exhausted firefighters headed back to their barn. A squad of frock-coated city policemen were running closely behind them jostling and shoving a tall, thin man in black with tousled hair. A trail of blood ran down his soot-blackened face. His eyes were wide and curiously pale. As the police squad advanced down Geary Street, Wakeman saw a dour-faced Scotsman, Captain Frederick W. Macondray, leading the volunteer police. Macondray, a mercantile, a Mexican War veteran, and an alderman who had been burned out in the last fire, had a stake in catching the arsonist. He looked plenty mad.

  “It looks like they’re going to have it out with those brass-buttoned pickpockets at last,” Brannan cried with glee. Macondray’s men marched the prisoner past them and in the torchlight Brannan got a good look at the lodger. “I recognize him; it’s Ben Lewis! He’s been questioned for half a dozen fires and turned loose every time.” Brannan called to the police, “What do you plan on doing with him this time, Captain Ben Ray? Pin a medal on him? It’s Ben Lewis!”

  Historian H. H. Bancroft identified Ben Lewis as “a hardened ex-convict, a Sydney rascal” like English Jim Stuart, and number nine in the hierarchy of Stuart’s twenty-member gang of murderers and robbers. That placed Lewis very high in the ranks of villainy. To paraphrase Bancroft, Ben Lewis was a villain—a great villain, an audacious villain, and every inch a villain. He achieved villainy, and if villainy was not thrust upon him, he had no hesitation in thrusting it upon others.

  In the flickering light, Brannan turned back to Wakeman. “Thugs, thieves and shysters, and the law have joined forces and the time has come for honest men to take the law into their own hands! Arson. Some poor devil’s store set on fire so the Ducks can move into the back door and move the loot while the owner’s running out the front. Four times in the last year the town’s been burned to the ground as a convenience to thieves and murderers. Not a single arsonist has been convicted.”

  The strange caravan crossed through the dirty Square to the City Hotel. Brannan, temper rising, caught up with them and forced his way to the hotel door, crying to Ned Wakeman, “It’s time for action and I’m hoping we can count on you as one of us.” “I’m with you,” said Wakeman, a powerful, intimidating man who knew his Bible by heart and was ready to quote it. Twain characterized him as normally “hearty, jolly, boisterous, good-natured,” but now he was itching to string up Lewis and recite a few passages over his corpse. Brannan and Wakeman saw Lewis slumped in an ornate chair close to the entrance. Brannan grabbed the prisoner’s long hair, jerked his lean face into the light, and crowed, “Ben Lewis! I was right. He’s done a half-dozen fires, Captain, just as I said.” Brannan looked around angrily. “The police seem more concerned for Lewis’s safety than the burning of innocent people.”

  Word of Lewis’s arrest reached Mayor Calhoun Benham. To the handsome, black-haired Mexican War vet, the expertness of the waterfront room fire suggested Lewis was an arsonist, possibly the arsonist they had sought. He studied the reports of the last city-destroying blaze, the anniversary fire, and found what he was looking for. A few minutes before eleven o’clock a man recognized as a habitué of Sydney Town had been seen running from the paint shop on the southern side of the Square. It troubled Benham that simultaneously other fires were kindled at various points downtown. This suggested that Lewis had an unnamed partner, possibly the stealthy man who had helped him move his trunk from his hotel room and then vanished. He read Donally’s police report that night. According to the Collier House tenants, the two companions had openly boasted they would one day burn San Francisco to the ground. As in the earlier fires, the anniversary fire had been set on a night when the wind was blowing from the east and north—the so-called Lightkeeper’s Wind that carried the flames away from Sydney Town, the only section not burned. The Duck’s enclave suffered damage only when the wind unexpectedly changed direction.

  That evening the Council convened to figure out how to approach Ben Lewis’s arrest and agreed to meet the next day. A hearing was held in the Recorder’s Court. At first there was little interest, but in late morning witnesses from the lodging house entered the court. Brushing rain from their drab
pantaloons and dark green coats, they stomped mud from their short boots and were sworn in. Their testimony produced a strong implication of Lewis’s guilt in setting fire to the house on Long Wharf. The case against Lewis, an ex-convict, was strong. More information was gathered. Lewis was now suspected of starting four of the major conflagrations that had razed the entire city. The hunt for the second and unseen man began quietly.

  Colonel James was the defendant’s counsel. “Who is present to prosecute?” Judge Waller asked. “No one is,” said Colonel Stevenson, who owned the house on Long Wharf that Lewis had set fire to. The judge appointed the Honorable T. B. Van Buren of San Joaquin as prosecuting attorney. With few people in court, Van Buren summed up the case by noon. “A fire alarm was raised in the upper rooms of a lodging house on Long Wharf,” he began. “This man, Lewis, was caught in the act of stealing a trunk from a room, and his room was found to be on fire.” Lewis offered no evidence at all. News of the hearing circulated. By 1:00 P.M. Lewis had become the threatening symbol of lawlessness in San Francisco. In minutes a crowd gathered around the City Hall. At 2:00 P.M., while Lewis was still being arraigned, four thousand people rushed to Portsmouth Square. A cry swept the city: “Judge Lynch is holding court! They’re going to hang a Sydney Covey!” Newsboys called on corners: “Come out and see the hanging.”