Black Fire: The True Story of the Original Tom Sawyer

by Robert Graysmith

  Brannan recirculated an old handbill:

  As a protective measure, police surrounded City Hall. Now eight thousand angry citizens jammed the square. Brannan pulled up a crate and began to speak. “I’m very much surprised,” he told the mob mockingly, “to hear people talk of grand juries, or recorders, or mayors. I’m tired of such claptrap myself. Fires, murders, beatings—Sydney Town is a growing hellhole. A decent woman won’t live here—an honest man is doomed. These men are murderers, I say, as well as thieves. I know it, and I will die or see them hung by the neck. The laws and courts never yet hung a man in California and every morning we read fresh accounts of murder and robbery. I want no technicalities! Such things are devices to shield the guilty. Who will help return order?”

  “We will,” roared the mob.

  “Who’ll enlist?”

  “We will!”

  “Five hundred murders since gold was discovered and not one man punished yet.” This was not true. “Not one man!” Brannan, having roused the rabble like a summer storm, jumped down and went up to Mayor Benham, whom he had seen monitoring the situation from his window. “There’s a real crowd out there, three thousand and more and some with ropes,” the mayor said, wiping his brow. “They want action, Mr. Mayor,” Brannan said. “You better go out and tell them what you plan to do with Mr. Lewis before they decide for you. Lewis the arsonist should be turned over to the volunteer police, who would see to it that he is held in custody until he is made to answer for his crimes.”

  At 4:00 P.M., Lewis’s defense attorney reviewed the evidence and declared it insufficient to justify a committal of the prisoner. “It is purely circumstantial,” Colonel James said, “and does not in any manner charge the prisoner with anything that could not be accounted for as an accident.”

  Van Buren leaped to his feet to reply, but a scream of “Fire!” interrupted him. The spectators in the courtroom tried to rush out just as others rushed in, creating a gridlock at the entrance. As a fire engine noisily rattled past the court, Sheriff “Coffee Jack” Hays instantly concluded that Lewis’s friends at Clarke’s Point had set a fire as a diversion and intended to free Lewis in the confusion. He was right. The Ducks had torched a house on the corner of Front Street and Long Wharf. “Hold that man fast!” he said. “Quickly, men, see to the prisoner and look for his friends—they will attempt to rescue him, mark my words.” Dozens of guards ringed the suspect. Though Lewis glared menacingly, his face was pallid with fear. When some of the crowd broke in and grabbed him, police sprang forward and took his arm in a brief tug-of-war. Lewis was thoroughly roughed up and half his clothes were torn off before the cops closed ranks around him. In the fierce struggle they hustled him into the clerk’s room, an inner room. Sheriff Hays hustled Lewis to the station house and locked him up.

  “On the evidence [of the rooming house arson],” Judge Waller said, “I feel I should feel bound to commit the prisoner.” He was afraid that the mob might break in again and attack Lewis but felt it only proper that the defendant be brought back to hear his ruling. “I will commit him and will not admit him on bail.” As the judge sent an officer to return Lewis to court, cries rose outside: “Hang him!” “Lynch the villain!” “Hang the fire-raising wretch!” “Bring him out—no mercy—no law delays!” Though the blaze had been swiftly extinguished, the alarm had drawn together an enormous crowd. The fierce tone of their chant broke up the court’s deliberations. Waller paused, then reconsidered. “It will be best not to introduce the prisoner after all,” he said as another rush was made on the courtroom. Had the impatient mob outside waited a few minutes more, Lewis would have been back in court and they easily could have laid their hands on him and gotten a rope around his neck.

  From an adjacent building, Captain George Coffin observed Lewis and his police captors go up through a trapdoor onto the roof. He descended to the next floor and onto a balcony so he could watch the crowd encircling the courthouse. Below, a sea of excited faces cried, “Bring Lewis out! Bring Lewis out!” Speakers pro and con made appeals to the public. Colonel Jonathan Stevenson, the first speaker, urged prompt action and castigated the laxity of the law and the police. “If the man is guilty, which I firmly believe, he should not be allowed to sleep but should be hung immediately.” As owner of the lodging house that Lewis had torched, Colonel Stevenson had a vested interest. As he left his podium he was loudly applauded. Excited cries for Lewis’s hanging rose louder than ever. Mayor Brenham appeared upon the upper platform to say he was astonished that any man could utter such sentiments. “The prisoner should have a fair trial,” he began, “and if found guilty, punished but until then be safely guarded.” The crowd’s roar interrupted him. “I call upon the police and all good citizens to support the law at the peril of their lives.” The mayor was drowned out again. Coffin observed a tall, pallid man at one end of the portico and a small red-faced man at the other end making speeches. Marshal Robert G. Crozier appeared upon the platform between the two. “The prisoner is no longer in the station house,” he said. “He has been removed by police and is in safe custody. I do not know where he is now. Lewis was delivered into the sheriff’s custody on Wednesday morning, June 4, and that is all I know.”

  “Justice will be done,” said the lawyers as the case continued inside without the prisoner. The district attorney requested that Lewis be tried in twenty-four hours and summoned witnesses to appear before the grand jury, which the next day indicted the defendant. Judge Levi Parsons quashed the indictment against Lewis and informed the present grand jury that their term had expired. “You are no longer a legal body,” Judge Parsons explained, “and no longer legally constituted. The grand jury is, in effect, abolished. Consequently, you cannot act in the matter of Ben Lewis.” He reasoned that the grand jury had been called on May 26 by a substitute, Judge Robinson, during Parsons’s temporary absence from the bench. Parsons discharged the jury no longer legally constituted to wait for the July term. The Herald had earlier criticized Parsons for practices they felt encouraged crime. Parsons had held its editors in contempt of court and when one editor refused to pay the levied fine, Parsons had had him jailed. Naturally, the Herald agreed with the mob:

  Although strongly opposed, as must every lover of foul play, to the summary execution of even such a character as Lewis, without a patient and impartial trial——yet we must declare that we regard the demonstration of yesterday with the highest gratification that if the man be proved beyond a reasonable doubt to have committed this crime, the citizens will supply any deficiency that may exist in the law. We say this, fully alive to the expectation that we shall therefore be accused of advocating Lynch-law. If this man be guilty of setting fire to the house on Long wharf, and if the law does not adjudge him the penalty of death therefore, we do most unquestionably advocate Lynch-law.

  “Judge Parsons, unless you assume the responsibility of acting in this case,” the state’s attorney warned, “the prisoner will probably walk free.

  “No criminal cases can be tried until a new grand jury is in session,” he said firmly, “and that will be no earlier than July first.” As the recorder referred the case to the district court for another trial, a great cry erupted outside: “Bring him out!” Vigilante prosecutor and record keeper George E. Schenck’s trial notes, pages four through fourteen of the committee papers, stated that Lewis’s trial had led immediately to the organization of the vigilantes and took great pains to secure a complete transcript of the trial record in anticipation of the district court trial sometime in July. “On motion resolved that we recommend the General Committee proceed to the District Court House,” Schenck wrote, “and remain there until the case of Lewis is disposed of—and if necessary to arrest and take Lewis and dispose of him as the People may direct.” Brannan, no friend of the arrogant Judge Parsons, was livid. “This is an example of unpunished, triumphant crime,” he roared. After demanding “no technicalities,” he had gotten them anyway. The lodger’s freedom on a technicality incited the bello
wing crowd to fury.

  The city was without a criminal court when all jails were crowded and escapes as common as down on a duck. At sunset one of the authorities tried to address the crowd and was hooted down. “Hear him! Hear him!” said some. “No, no!” others jeered. When he assured them Lewis would have a speedy trial and be promptly executed, the mob melted away, muttering that because the courts had failed to function, they might take matters into their own hands. Two hours later, the remaining protesters had cooled down and darkness claimed the Square. To be safe, the mayor readied the California and Washington Guards.

  At 2:00 A.M., an on-duty volunteer cop and owner of a new building on Commercial Street saw four men in conversation near his house. As he approached, they moved away. Suspecting something, he went inside and discovered a pile of shavings just bursting into a full blaze under his stairwell. Had he not extinguished it, the city would have been burned again. This was the second attempt in a day to burn the city. “When different fires took place,” wrote the Annals, “persons were repeatedly seen in the act of kindling loose inflammable material in outhouses and secret places. Many of these fires were believed to have been raised by incendiaries, solely for the opportunity which they afforded for plundering.”

  Coffee Jack placed Lewis in irons and rowed him out to a man-of-war in the cove. Because he had not actually been tried yet, Lewis was released on bail soon after to await a future trial. The arsonist was smug. He had little to fear if they found him guilty. The maximum penalty for arson was only two years in jail. The wind that had been brisk during the afternoon lulled at dusk for an hour, then freshened violently—perfect fire weather—the Lightkeeper’s Wind revitalized. Hazy and cool weather with strong wind brought another fire alarm. Another house burned that evening. In the Square, light frame buildings trembled in the gale. As usual there was scarce water to fight fire. The people were more afraid than ever.

  In this atmosphere, on Sunday, June 8, Chief Engineer Kohler presented an alarming review to the Council. Due to the May fire, he explained, many of the engine houses had been destroyed, their engines damaged and hose burned. “The apparatus of the Hook and Ladder Companies are likewise in a generally damaged, inadequate and unusable condition,” he reported. “The cisterns are either empty or so out of repair as to render them useless.… Should a fire occur while the Department remains in its present crippled condition, nothing but the waters of the bay and the naked sand hills … could check its course.” The city treasury was hopelessly empty with no prospect of immediate relief. “Our generous firemen have already expended their private means for the public good in organizing the Department, furnishing apparatus and keeping it in repair, to an extent that could not have been expected from them anywhere but in San Francisco. Not a dollar has ever been refunded to them—except in script—and to expect them to make still further sacrifices is unreasonable and unjust. What, then, shall be done? Must the Fire Department go to ruin, and the city to destruction, for the want of a few thousand dollars?” The frequent alarms spurred the Alta to ask, “Were a fire to break out there, what means could be used to extinguish it?” Because the reservoir in the Square had not been filled since the May fire and contained little or no water, the paper suggested a reservoir be built near the junction of Montgomery and Green streets capable of holding two million gallons of water. Pipes should be laid from the reservoir passing along all the streets exposed to fire, and hydrants installed at the corners of each square. Somehow the Council must make a provision for these expenses.

  Before noon San Francisco had declared an open war of extermination on all arsonists. “Let us set about this work at once,” the Council said. “Without this or some similar plan, the evil cannot be remedied, and if there is not spirit enough among us to do this, then in God’s name, let the city be burned and our streets flow with the blood of murdered men.” That afternoon, Robert Lammot visited Brannan in his office at Bush and Sansome to organize an efficient volunteer police patrol along the lines of the successful fire patrols on the city’s outskirts. First they sent notes to one hundred men who could be trusted to keep their mouths shut. The next afternoon they convened at the California Engine Four engine house at Market and Bush to appoint a committee to draft a constitution for a crime-eradication group. That night one hundred men entered their names on the rolls of the newly named Committee of Vigilance. Volunteer William Coleman, a wealthy twenty-seven-year-old fresh from the goldfields, proposed that the vigilantes string up anyone even suspected of a crime. Captain Frederick Macondray was made captain of night patrols that would operate in shifts to guard the business district. Under Ned Wakeman the water police would safeguard the Embarcadero.

  At midnight, Brannan, on his first informal patrol, kept a sharp eye out for arsonists. Cursing the unlit and cumbersome streets, he stopped to shake the mud from his boots and spied a shadowy figure. “Now what’s he up to?” he thought. “Isn’t that a pile of shavings at his feet?” He pounced on the figure, knocked the match from his hand, and dragged him struggling into the moonlight. “Haven’t I seen you before?”

  “Let me go,” he said. “I’m a Mormon like yourself. I was only lighting my pipe.”

  “You lie. You’re no Mormon. Mormons don’t smoke! And where’s your pipe?” The man felt about in his pockets. “I—I—I must have lost it.” Brannan lit one of the man’s matches. His white face shone in the flickering light. “No! You’re one of Roberts’ thievin’ friends. You’re a Hound. I remember you rightly enough, friend!” The man squirmed loose and sprinted into the darkness. Brannan tugged out his pistol as he ran, fired one shot but missed, and the suspect escaped. Was this one of Ben Lewis’s friends trying to clear him with a decoy arson? Nonsense. Lewis was an Australian Duck from Sydney and this man was a New York Hound. The two gangs hated each other.

  An enormous third eye surrounded by a sunburst and incised on a metal disk carried the words “Organized 9th June, 1851” and “12.” “One of the new symbols to identify our group,” Coleman said and recited the inscription Fiat Justitia Ruat Coelum: “ ‘Let justice be done, though the heavens may fall.’ It’s an old motto with a new symbol—a giant open eye.” The vigilantes had painted the symbol on one entire wall of their Committee of Vigilance headquarters. They had united into “an association for the maintenance of the peace and the preservation of the lives and property of the citizens of San Francisco.” George Oakes, now a member of California Four, had helped form the unlawful committee with Brannan and James Neall and pledged to watch, pursue, and try “the outlaws infesting the city, through the regularly constituted courts, if possible. Through more summary process, if necessary.” This meant lynching. The vigilantes agreed to meet upon the single strokes of the Monumental bell. The hanging men had only hours to wait before the death bell tolled for the first time.

  A furious Senator Broderick, now president of the State Senate, immediately galloped to San Francisco. “I have always stood against any form of vigilantism,” he said. “I do not think people should take the law into their own hands.” He placed Vi Turner and several of his men inside the Vigilance Committee as spies to report back. With every increase in power he had become less corrupt—more a statesman, responsible leader, and lover of freedom. “He worships freedom above all things,” said John W. Forney, Broderick’s friend, “and I never saw him intolerant except when he doubted the integrity of those who refused to see the truth as he saw it, and he finally believed that all men must not be wicked themselves who could not or would not reject the wrong as he did.”

  In the late afternoon of Tuesday, June 10, a week after Ben Lewis’s arrest, a huge, slightly deformed man with coarse red hair and beard emerged from the Ghost Fleet, furtively tied his boat beneath Long Wharf, and crept along the central wharf. Dressed in a full suit of black, Covey John Simpton was nearly invisible against the charred timbers. He reached a two-story shipping office at the end of Commercial Street on the Washington Block on Long Wharf and moved into the
shadows to wait. For several days he had been casing George W. Virgin’s shipping office. Simpton was so low, brutal, and foul that both the police and his Sydney Town cohorts knew him as “the Miscreant.” Fourteen years earlier he had been transported for life for arson and attempted murder to New South Wales but had escaped and reached San Francisco in late 1849. The Miscreant, a confederate of the master criminal English Jim Stuart, had adopted his alias, John Jenkins, from a notorious Australian bushranger hanged in 1834. Simpton sold the Uncle Sam, his disreputable crib on Dupont Street, to Mr. Connally, who died a few days later. Immediately Simpton began consoling Connally’s widow. At 8:00 P.M., sailing time, Simpton watched Shipping Agent Virgin leave his second-floor office and go downstairs with some money from his strongbox to deposit with the bartender. Simpton came up the outside stairs, barged into the unattended office, shoved a small safe containing $1,500 into a sack, and went out. As he was escaping, Virgin returned and raised an alarm. Several volunteers chased Simpton along Long Wharf and captured him after a watery chase.

  As volunteer policeman David Arrowsmith escorted Simpton toward the station house, George Schenck, the Vigilante Committee secretary, intercepted them and talked openly of his suspicions that Simpton was involved in setting the anniversary fire. The Miscreant was unworried. A number of dishonest judges and lawyers and unscrupulous officials were in the Ducks’ employ. Had they not just set Ben Lewis free? “You’re a member of the Committee of Vigilance,” Schenck told Arrowsmith, “why not take him to the committee rooms!” They dragged Simpton to a large storeroom in Brannan’s building on Bush Street, near Market. Just before 10:00 P.M. Oakes rang the great bell with a billet of wood: two measured taps, a pause, two taps, another interval, and then silence, and again two notes. He tapped the bell some twenty times. The Monumental bell echoed the call, two strokes, then silence, two and two and two! Two centrally located firehouses a half mile apart, California Four and Big Six, repeated the message at intervals of one minute. A third company at the head of the square picked up the strokes. Their combined tolling summoned the vigilantes to hang whomever they thought guilty. The secret password, “Lewis,” hissed among the vigilantes. “Lewis, Lewis, Lewis, Lewis.” That hated name brought action from men who craved to shed the blood of the wicked. Coleman got to headquarters within half an hour. Most of the hanging men were already there. The Vigilance Committee’s huge blue and white flag covered one brick wall. To one side Simpton stood defiantly inside a large holding cell. Above him were two stout beams to support hangman’s ropes if needed. Bill Howard rushed in behind Coleman and placed his pistol on the long table. “As I understand it we are here to hang someone,” he said, and because the defendant was an Australian, convened a kangaroo court. Simpton would be hanged at 2:00 A.M. in the Square. Throughout his “trial” Simpton had been so defiant and insulting it suggested that he expected momentarily to be rescued by his fellow Ducks. By torchlight a pack of heavily armed vigilantes escorted him a half mile to the west side of the Square. While still forty feet from the flagpole, the vigilantes gave the condemned man a glass of brandy and lit him a cigar that he smoked on the way to the southern end, where a jutting beam could serve as a gibbet. Simpton’s arms were pinioned. Wakeman fitted the noose around the prisoner’s neck. At the gable end of the City Hotel, Broderick, his Bully “B’hoys,” and Officers Noyce and North and Captain Ben Ray appeared and charged the hanging men. Mayor Brenham, Sheriff “Coffee Jack” Hays, and Marshal Crozier were conspicuously absent. Broderick leaped atop a barrel and pleaded, “Come to your senses! Are you not Christians?” The scar on his cheek was livid. Now other rescuers, Sydney Ducks set on rescuing their confederate, began pulling on the prisoner’s feet. The vigilantes won the tug-of-war, threw the rope over a joist projecting from the banking house of Palmer, Cook & Company. Brannan thundered, “Up. Up. Up! Let every citizen be a hangman at once.” Twenty vigilantes gripped the slack end of the hemp, ran backward, and yanked the unrepentant robber off the ground. Oddly, his legs, scarred and callused from the long wear of shackles in the penal colony, never kicked. His face contorted no more than usual. Now Noyce knew why Simpton’s cigar had gone out. He had been strangled during the tug-of-war. The vigilantes had hanged a dead man.