Black Fire: The True Story of the Original Tom Sawyer

by Robert Graysmith

  At 5:00 P.M., they laid Simpton’s crumpled body on the floor of the Monumental Six Engine House. As darkness fell, the excited mob viewing the corpse moved to the courthouse and milled outside considering what to do about Ben Lewis. “Criminals had little to fear in merciful, gentle, careless California,” Frank Soule lamented. “Jurors, eager to be at moneymaking again, are apt to take hasty charges from the bench.” If caught, the Ducks shielded one another from arrest, conviction, and punishment. They controlled not only most of the vice, murder, crimping, extortion, and arson within San Francisco but also employed unscrupulous shysters and two-bit politicians to make payoffs for them. They intimidated incapable prosecutors, bribed police and juries, and elected criminals who controlled judges who were corrupt, ignorant of the law, or too timid to mete out just punishment.

  Twice, Ben Lewis was brought before the district court for trial and twice his counsel unearthed judicial flaws in the indictment that quashed the proceedings. Each time, Lewis’s lawyer used loopholes that allowed the ex-con to slip out of town. When the grand jury found the bill against Lewis for arson, the Executive Committee of the Vigilance Committee decided that after such a long postponement, the arsonist’s time had come. They recommended that the General Committee take possession of Lewis and hang him where they had hung Simpton. The motion was tabled so a subcommittee of three could be appointed to superintend Lewis’s trial in the legal courts, or if necessary, arrest and dispose of him. But Ben Lewis was nowhere to be found. With no arsonist in captivity to blame, much less his unknown partner at the Collier House, the papers excoriated the fire companies that had been arguing hotly against the lawlessness of the committee. The Alta alleged that volunteers served only to make money by threatening and extorting shopkeepers. On June 12, the vigilantes organized a rally in the Square. More than ten thousand bloodthirsty citizens gathered to authenticate the hanging men as essentially the new government of San Francisco. One lynching infallibly produces more lynchings. Mark Twain later suggested a brave man be stationed in each affected community to

  bring to light the deep disapproval of lynching hidden in the secret places of the heart.… Where shall these brave men be found? That is indeed a difficulty; they are not three hundred of them in the earth … martial personalities that can face mobs without flinching … such personalities are developed only by familiarity with danger and by the training and the seasoning which come of resisting it.

  A day earlier, Clarke the attorney had spoken up against the lynchers and a jeering mob had roughed him up, threatened him with hanging, and chased him all the way home. An ineffectual puppet named Hoag took the slightly raised podium of the old government adobe standing above the Square and roused the crowd to give the vigilantes carte blanche to hang suspects without trial. Broderick entered the Square leading a phalanx of his big shoulder strikers: Dutch Charley, Moses Flanagan, Activity Burke, Bob Cushing, Terry Kelly, Woolly Kearney, and tiny Billy Mulligan, now the official county jailer. More followed until all his forty-niners, his forty-nine “B’hoys,” carrying ax handles and pry bars—firefighters’ tools, street fighters’ tools—were cutting through the mob in a V-shaped formation. A voice rang out: “Hang Broderick!” Others took up the cry. Broderick’s crash squad linked arms, lowered their heads, and singled out the mob’s most cowardly members first, then cut out the brawniest, separated them, floored them, and turned to do it again. Dutch Charley delivered head butts. Activity Burke gave well-placed kicks. Billy Mulligan intimidated men with a simple look. North, west, south—the crash squad struck, heads lowered like charging bulls. As men dropped like tenpins into the mud, calls for hanging grew fainter, then ceased. The men cut a wide path to the raised platform where Broderick swung himself up over the rail with ease and kicked Hoag halfway down the back stairs. He had studied law, history, and literature but was so angry, his speech lacked its usual eloquence. He was not a speaker but a common man. Not gifted with easy speech, he was given to coarse invective when opposed. Now he lashed the thousands with all the force of his passionate nature. “Come up here, you cravenly cowards!” he roared. “Scoundrels! You that are hallooing—pull me off the stand yourselves. Isn’t this a pretty scene there now—a parcel of hirelings, menials, police officers and their companions—the very stool pigeons I’ve been describing. Abject willing slaves! Slaves by choice.” He spoke firmly and coldly for twenty minutes. When a dozen men tried to pull him over the thin rail into the mob, he kept his balance and snatched up Hoag’s list of resolutions. “These illegal pronouncements supposedly cloaked in law,” he bellowed, “they would make every man here a candidate for the noose or a murderer. This is what I think of them! Evil words for the wind.” He scattered the scraps like so much confetti. One man who believed in justice by law had intimidated the biggest gathering ever held in the city. Broderick drew himself up. “This meeting is adjourned!” he roared, then vaulted the railing and led his men from the Square. The next day cranky Mr. Gilbert condemned Broderick, writing that the people were only “there enjoying their right for peaceable assembled to consult and deliberate upon the best methods of maintaining order, protecting property and life and riding society of the evils which have so long hung upon it like a blight and a curse.”

  Ben Lewis was still missing. Dutch Charley was certain he had “shoved out,” but the volunteers waited for the next arson anyway. The last two volunteer fire companies formed—the Rough Diamond Company Thirteen and Tiger Engine Fourteen—were both a distance from the heart of town where the larger fires took place. In fact, the Rough Diamond, which had “grass growing under its wheels,” rarely left its Mission Dolores neighborhood. There was not a dandy, ex-boxer, or regional type among them, just commonplace men. Fourteen’s members sprang from Happy Valley’s butchers and grocers on Second, near Howard Street. They eventually became known as the Millionaire Company because an extraordinary number of them became millionaires. Claus Spreckels, a neighborhood retail grocer, paid regular dues but did little active firefighting and enlisted only because his neighborhood’s social events and politics congregated around Fourteen’s firehouse. He went from his fifty-foot-by-one-hundred-foot sugar refinery at Ninth and Brannan to become the “King of Sugar.” So far Fourteen had never experienced the intense rivalry that existed between Companies Five, Six, Two, Four, and Ten, but their one donnybrook was a blowout.

  When fire bells sounded for a blaze in Waverly Place, Fourteen’s engine was being repaired and they responded only with a hose cart. Four, closer to the fire, pulled with two sets of men to handle a cart and an engine. Fourteen overtook them on Clay Street and the two engines collided when the hubs of the wheels interlocked. Sam McDowell, on the front of Fourteen’s rope, wound the rope of his cart around a basement railing at his side and held the rival engine fast. Four demanded they release its wheels; Fourteen demanded the right-of-way. When Four refused, Tiger’s foreman smashed his trumpet over a rival’s head. McDowell gave one man a bloody nose, the police arrested everyone, and the building burned to the ground. On the way to jail Scannell halted the police and told them, “Release those boys. Boys, man your ropes and return home.” Of the fourteen companies, only two were hook and ladder; the rest were underequipped. “The only difficulty is that the City is so flat-broke that the companies cannot get good engines,” Robert Lammot wrote, “or even have the old ones repaired.”

  As the anniversary of the June 14 fire approached, the fears of an encore increased. Despite threats from the Ducks, the June anniversary came and went without a blaze. There were the nightly brush fires: One hotel burned a little and provided an exhausting night’s work for the volunteers, but even these minor outbreaks became less frequent. Still, the city crouched, poised for action. Had the cycle of costly arson fires beginning with Christmas Eve, 1849, and continuing on May 3–4, June 14, September 17, and May 4, 1851, ceased with the banishment of Ben Lewis? Sawyer realized there was still danger. The identity and whereabouts of Lewis’s partner was unknown, as was t
he whereabouts of Lewis himself.

  Though no one enforced the existing ordinances mandating story pipe and chimney construction, the Council adopted new ordinances regulating construction materials. Washington Square was a waste and trash dump, but the highest danger lay in the thickly settled portions where overoccupied frame houses huddled close together and hand furnaces were commonly used. The town was still on edge. A man writing a letter flung down his pen and ran outside when he heard the Monumental fire bell. “People have learned by sad experience what a terrible thing fire is in San Francisco,” he wrote, “and so, soon as one is known to exist, everything is dropped at once.” Between 1845 and 1851, New Yorkers suffered $30 million in property losses, and fires were so commonplace that the volunteers were celebrated as tourist attractions. It was the same in San Francisco. As they battled flames, crowds bet on which team would extinguish the fire first. In the slums where Broderick had trained, volunteers in competing fire companies traded punches, bloodied knuckles, and fought pitched battles with the tools of their trade. In the end, there was often nothing left to applaud but ashes. One night an alarm sounded for a small fire at Sansome and Pine streets and a heated race between One, Three, Five, and Six took on unusual seriousness. Three was off the mark first. Five got rolling next as Foreman Frank Whitney slipped on his gold cape and with his golden trumpet called his Bostonians to their Hunneman engine. Curly Jack Carroll sang as they pulled old Two-and-a-Half along the dark streets. Big Six was off next and dispatched their Mechanical. “Big George” Hossefross, Dutch bearded and sweet faced, knew Six’s Baltimoreans could pump water higher and faster than any other team. He later became the first man in California to apply hydraulic force to raising large buildings. Six’s torch boys ran alongside the front wheels, and another two boys used their torches to lead forty pulling volunteers through the boggy streets.

  Broderick One started last. Their boys snatched their torches from the wall rack as Kohler cried, “Start her lively, boys,” to Daingerfield, Scannell, and Dutch Charley. “Onward! Pull her along and jump her, fellows.” They rolled out their battered old engine. As torch boys ran alongside the Mankiller, torches cast the water engine’s shadow against hastily raised three-stories along Montgomery. All the units reached the burning waterfront building on Pine Street at the same time; all turned the corner at once. Immediately there was a collision—metal bent, spokes broke, and men were jolted into the road. One’s engine veered off into the mud and was least damaged. Three’s water machine overturned. So did Six’s. All the divisions rushed into an intersection scattered with fallen ladders and axes as the northwest wind sent a shower of sparks over them. A two-fisted free-for-all began. Three landed the first punches. A crowd gathered to applaud each of the various skirmishes. Five’s pipemen abandoned the fight first, got up their ladder, and let their hose down into the bay. When Six righted their engine and rolled it closer to the fire, they began to battle again. Two of Five’s men working the hand pump failed to notice the tide was out and their nozzle was pointed through the window of the Chinese laundry next door. They pumped a stream of mud onto baskets of freshly ironed shirts. The others brawled until the clatter of bricks and falling beams shocked them to their senses. The building had burned to ashes. It was an omen. It seemed that things could not get much worse, but they did.

  A STREET SCENE ON A RAINY NIGHT

  Davey Scannell

  The Golden Ring

  On June 22, 1851, an arsonist struck again—the sixth great fire in eighteen months. Either he had been waiting until plenty of gold was on deposit or the need for a fire to warm his cold heart had seized him again. Wisely he had waited until the cisterns in the business part of the city were even lower than in the May fire. At 7:00 A.M. he stalked among the dwelling houses where, in spite of the Council’s six-bucket rule, most homes had no water. On this Sabbath, the Alta announced that dancing by Senorita Abalos and a laughable farce, The Widow’s Victim, were to be staged at a downtown theater. But hours before the show, that theater would be a heap of hot ashes, as would the Alta office. At 7:57 A.M. the air barely stirred. At 8:00 A.M. the wind began to rise. The gentle sea breeze that usually filled everyone’s eyes with sand became a strong northwest gale that whipped through Spring Valley. When the wind was blowing like a hurricane, the arsonist set a fire inside a two-story wooden building on a hill.

  Bennett and Kirby, the owners, occupied the kitchen with a friend, Lippincott, but let the bankers Delessert, Ligeron & Company use the front rooms. The fire, breaking out under the eaves, might have easily been extinguished if a supply of water had been at hand. None was nearer than the bay. At the rear of the building stood an empty house on the north side of Pacific. Next door, Morriss & Reynolds’ carpenter shop was packed to the rafters with wood. Sparks from Bennett and Kirby’s burning house set the woodshop afire. Conveniently for the arsonist, a well-stocked lumberyard was also just across the street. The flames stretched hungrily toward it. A few neighbors tried to check the fire by ripping down houses in its path, but no one can tear a house to pieces faster than a fire can burn it.

  The lumberyard caught and drove off the neighbors as the fire spread along Pacific Street snapping up wooden homes until it reached Barroilhet’s Gambling House. A huge warehouse of corrugated iron sheets nailed to a wooden frame caught fire. A considerable quantity of gunpowder was stored inside. The volunteers and torch boys scattered and were well back when the explosion leveled the ground over a vast area, but the force still knocked them off their feet. The four-story Graham House on the northwest corner of Pacific and Kearny streets was already ashes. At 10:30 A.M., just as church bells were tolling, the fire leaped Pacific Street. In minutes the block from Broadway to Stockton Street was aflame. Citizens ran to an alley near Stockton, ripped down a building in the flames’ path, and slowed the blaze. The flames moved east from Stockton over onto Jackson Street. The powerful wind blew the fire to the intersection of Stockton and Jackson streets where Lieutenant McGowan and twenty-two other men were ripping down the corner houses. As it crossed the intersection, shouts of “Fire!” sent early risers racing back home to save what they could. Late sleepers scurried from their beds, pulled on clothes, and rushed outside where strong prevailing winds nourished the flames. The intense heat sucked the moisture from their lungs, singed their hair, and blistered their lips. The blaze then licked along Dupont Street, burning frame buildings at the rear of the ruined adobe. Up went the popular La Polka. The blaze made no distinction between gambling halls and churches, because it next targeted the Reverend Albert Williams’s First Presbyterian Tabernacle on Stockton between Pacific and Broadway streets.

  “At the first bell-ringing for the eleven o’clock service,” the Reverend Mr. Williams recalled, “I was looking out my north study window from my residence [five blocks away] on California Street. I saw a dark cloud of smoke rising from the region of the church.” The large New York Gothic edifice, an expensive prefab affair, had arrived in the fall and was ready for dedication. Freight, labor, and the funds to buy the lot had cost Williams’s congregation $16,000. The worshippers had been on the way to the church services while the choir made special preparations for that day’s choir music. “I reached the church in time to assist members of the congregation in saving the books, organ, and other moveable articles,” Williams said. The fire had already burned the west pulpit end. “Last of all, I helped to detach the pulpit and bear it to a place of safety. The eastern Stockton Street front, supporting the belfry, last gave way, and the bell loosened from its loft height fell into the street and was broken … in so brief a time the church which we had waited so long, and in the use of which so much gratification had been derived, was entirely destroyed.” Just below Pacific and Broadway, the blaze gobbled up the French Church on the west side of Stockton Street. The First Baptist Church should have been the next tasty morsel, but it was the only church out of five to survive.