Black Fire: The True Story of the Original Tom Sawyer

by Robert Graysmith

  The volunteers exploded buildings to halt the fire’s progress. When they tried to blow up the Sacramento Hotel on Broadway, only one cask of powder ignited. A volunteer, cigar clenched in his jaw, strolled into the already flaming building with two more powder casks under his arms. The fire in the unvented room was rolling over the flax ceiling and starting down the linen wall behind him as he lit the fuses with his cigar. Calmly, he retreated, puffing as he went and adding to the smoke. In the doubled explosion behind him the hotel fell and a fiery belt arched over the street back to the engines. They had to be abandoned. This fire was especially cruel. From the Stockton Street area to Jackson Street lived a poorer class of French, Mexicans, washerwomen, laborers, and mechanics whose homes were the major sources of their income, and now those were gone. At Sacramento and Montgomery streets, Lillie Hitchcock and her parents were roused by the alarms. In the high wind, one house after another went up on the blocks surrounding them. Fire jumped Washington Street, made for Clay and Commercial streets, and then began licking at the Howard House, where the Hitchcocks were staying. Martha rushed to the attic, packed their clothes in a trunk, and with Lillie lugged the trunk downstairs and into a wagon. On the first floor, men tore down the rooms closest to the burning house next door. Dr. Hitchcock ripped up the Turkish carpets and then climbed to the roof and covered the tar with wet blankets. All their efforts proved ineffectual. As the Howard House burned, the Hitchcocks departed for Rincon Hill. From the back of the wagon, Martha studied the burning ships in the cove below with fascination. Images of the Huntington plantation’s burning filled her mind.

  Survivors were already sailing to the East Bay when a second blaze erupted on the outskirts of town. The incendiary had either galloped there on a fast horse or had a partner who had awaited his signal to act. The authorities agreed “that this fire is the work of not one, but two incendiaries.” There had been warnings. The patrol of the Vigilance Committee had lately discovered more kindling fires than ever. As thick black clouds filled the streets, plunderers and looters marched lockstep across San Francisco, taking full advantage of the confusion to loot the gold stores. Because it was Sunday, Captain Coffin and Captain Haskel called onboard the James Caskie for Captain Jones and his wife to join them for church services. They were sitting in the Joneses’ cabin when bells on shore began to peal. They supposed it was for the morning worship, until ships’ bells of all tones, tin pans, and cow horns joined in. On deck they saw heavy smoke and flames rising far up the hill in the western section of the city. Coffin hurried to shore, ran west toward Powell Street, and saw his friend, Dr. Mitchell of the cutter Ewing, fighting fire.

  A Frenchman, John Baptise Durand, aboard the Monte Lambert anchored far out, heard the alarms and rowed ashore to help a friend transport his goods. As he reached a flaming store on Pacific Street, the fire veered toward Ohio Street. He stooped to pick up a live coal to light his pipe. A crowd saw the gesture. Taking him for the arsonist, they beat and stomped him so severely he perished from his injuries later in the county jail. The coroner’s verdict would be that he died from an inflammation of the brain caused by injuries received during the fire. A Mexican man, carrying a bale of goods from a burning building on Washington Street, was cornered by an enraged mob that demanded, “Put down the bundle.” When he either refused or did not understand, he was kicked to death. Another man was luckier. When enraged citizens accused him of starting the fire, a police patrol intervened. “He’s one of us,” they vouched and were believed, though many of the cops were ex-Hounds and former Ducks in league with the thieves or even friends of Ben Lewis. Honest police apprehended some arson suspects, acquitted three on the spot, and held others in custody.

  The Jackson Street fire had burned as far as Kearny Street when George Hubbard’s friends saved him from his burning sick bed and carried him to the middle of the Square. He perished there in the heat in full sight on a heap of goods that caught fire several times during the day. Higher up on the hillside, tiny one- and two-story buildings “burned like shavings.” When Captain Coffin reached the western side of Powell, three engines were squirting the blaze with leaking hoses. As he stood watching, he perceived something odd. The opposite side of the street, a continuous range of wooden buildings, changed from yellow to the color of burned coffee, then began to smoke. As glazing snapped and shattered, the vacuum sucked heat into the building interiors where cotton linings caught at once. An instant later the whole broadside of the street burst into flames. The volunteers abandoned two of their engines and saved a third at the risk of their lives. Several men were fatally burned. The flames raged farther down Jackson Street. Only half rebuilt, the business district was being destroyed again. The flimsiness of temporary buildings only fed the fire that attacked three storehouses and the new City Hall.

  Coffin, shaken by the explosions, raced down to Stuart and Raines’s Store, where he discovered the Newburyport delegation removing their stock. Captain Raines filled a trunk with treasure, piled it into a wheelbarrow, and charged Coffin to find a safe place to store it. He rolled the wheelbarrow to Front Street, but before he went far, the blaze had careened down between Broadway and Pacific streets. In danger of being trapped between two fires, he wheeled his barrow down to the lower end of Pacific Wharf, where for the next three hours he faithfully guarded Raines’s gold.

  Dutch Charley showed himself a hero again, saving blocks of houses from burning. Abruptly the blaze turned south toward Washington Street and the Alta office in the wooden buildings between Kearny and the Bella Union. The Howard Company tried in vain to save Gilbert’s newspaper by blowing up the California Restaurant adjoining his office. Nor could a private fire engine and a tank of water salvage the building, presses, and the type. Printing on borrowed presses and using type set up in the offices of a competitor, Gilbert bitterly wrote a single line: “We are sick with what we have seen and felt and need not say any more.”

  Sawyer, feeling the wind whistle around him, feared that this time nothing might be left of San Francisco. The cloying smoke was like syrup. He began to cough. Firemen do not eat smoke. Smoke eats them. The fire assumed a celestial quality. Little whirlwinds of hot air spiraled around them and then united to create one huge vortex. The giant ring rose above the firefighters. When it was directly overhead, the invisible ring of superheated air slowly began to turn clockwise. Gradually it took on the hue of the fire and became a golden ring. It spun faster until it created an updraft rising miles into the stratosphere. The center of the ring, hotter still, ate up all the oxygen to create a counterclockwise downdraft of sparks and lethal gases that was forced on the firemen. As the inner ring rotated, it became a dark circle of smoke, wheels within wheels relentlessly turning like a mill.

  Sawyer held a moistened finger aloft. “The wind is altering its course,” he said. “Yes, the gale’s moving northward. We might be spared yet. The main district might not be lost entirely. The next hour will tell.” He looked around. Unbelievably, some citizens still refused to help fight fire unless their own places were on fire. As a team of horses galloped by dragging their harness, he saw a man weeping uncontrollably before his flaming store. The merchant, previously burned out in each of the other fires, trembled, wrung his hands, and wept. He leaped past the firemen pumping water and pulling down walls and, howling, ran headlong toward the flames, arms open to embrace them. The volunteers tried to block him, but he dodged past and in a flash of red was vaporized.

  The men heard a heartless chuckle. Turning, they saw a man who resembled the fugitive Ben Lewis. The laughter continued. “This man absolutely bricked us up,” [silenced them] a volunteer said later. “Stop laughing!” another volunteer screamed. “For the love of God, a man has died.” The stranger went on roaring. He graveled, provoked them. Uneven teeth shone in the firelight as he laughed louder. A few onlookers had tears in their eyes. Were they gazing upon the Lightkeeper or his partner who had burned down their city six times? Who else could be so cruel? All the offi
cial and civilian firefighters ceased work. “Out of respect, stop,” one called, recalling Captain Vincente and all the casualties who had died at the arsonist’s hands, recalling his family that had been lost. Finally a few men threw down their buckets and axes and advanced on the laughing man. Amid the horror, his joviality was monstrous.

  “By God,” said a neighbor. “By God!” The stranger only hooked his thumbs in his belt, spread his legs, drew back his head, and laughed his loudest. The fire was closer. Flames sang on the roofs. A black curtain of cinders and sparks blew over the scene. Crashing timbers and whirling fire rose up at the far end of the alley. The fire had reached them. “Do for him!” said a man, “if nothing less.” In an instant several neighbors and volunteers sprang upon the laughing man—kicking, punching, and slapping him. The stranger, rocked off his feet, only grinned up from the ground. A trickle of blood coursed down his chin. A firefighter kicked him and turned away disgusted. Another did the same. The volunteers heard a tremendous creaking and groaning, a low rumble and a crack like thunder. The wall behind pitched forward and hundreds of bricks dropped right where they had left the supine man, bleeding and moaning. Fire swept over the bricks. No one helped. Everyone had gone back to fighting flames and saving the lives that could still be saved. Where the arsonist had been only a moment before was nothing but rubble.

  Eventually this last conflagration burned itself out—thanks to the torch boys who nailed stores of blankets to the front of Barny and Patten’s building on the southeast corner of Sansome and Pacific streets and kept them saturated with water. The fire, moving east, ran up against the blankets like a wave and died. On Montgomery Street, sheet iron in the windows and doors of Howard and Green’s basement halted the flames there.

  Farther along Montgomery, gratings and solid iron doors melted and ran off in blazing streams, and streets glowed like the inside of a smelter. Burning skeletons of men, horses, and mules crumbled to powder in the wind. A waxworks dissolved, leaving behind a foot-deep walk of colored wax with bits of costume jewelry congealed inside. Jones’s Hotel at the foot of California Street survived, protected by a brick building on one side and an unoccupied iron house on the other side. A lucky alteration of the wind’s course toward Sydney Town kept the fire from crossing Sansome to the south of California Street and spared the Happy Valley and great stores of lumber. After igniting upper Washington, the flames had burned all the houses around the square and any areas that had survived the May anniversary fire. Kearny and Sansome streets burned, as did the entire district between Pacific and Cunningham’s Wharf between Green and Vallejo. The inferno destroyed ten blocks fronted by Broadway, Powell, and Sansome streets and incinerated the last traces of Colonial San Francisco of just two years earlier. Ghost Fleet ships that had transported hordes of forty-niners burned to their keels.

  This time the fire had destroyed the previously untouched northwestern quarter of the city—ten to fifteen blocks bounded by Sansome, Mason, Washington, and Broadway streets and all the buildings between Clay and Powell. Nearly all the northern portion had been incinerated. The foothills were untouched and, after some rains, would be denser than before. Though the sky was still tinted with a lurid glow, the last vestige of the blaze on the other side of the city burned itself out against a barren hillside.

  “Just think,” said Sawyer. “Five hundred more buildings—gone!”

  Stillness fell over the city. Hundreds removed their possessions to the Square and guarded them throughout the night. Piled goods made impressive bonfires. Men rich only a few hours earlier wept and ran their fingers through ashes that had once been splendid fortunes. Women collapsed on steps that led up to only rubble. Others drank from simple tin cups and blankly pondered on fate that had turned the wind at one point and punished the gangs behind the arsons in Sydney Town. Steam condensed and rained over acres of blackened shells. The City Hospital burned and ninety patients were carried to a vacant lot. On the hills at the head of Kearny and Dupont streets, thousands shivered amid chaparral and the few household goods they had saved. Many lives had been lost: A man burned to death on Jackson Street and another perished trying to save his storeroom. Three people in the Square died from flames, the police shot two looters, and four or five other pillagers perished at the hands of outraged citizens, including the unknown man buried by bricks. Sawyer liked to think there had been some justice at the end and never found out anything different. That was good enough for him.

  He passed the rubble of a brick warehouse and a melted iron building. He pawed through the ruins of a brick warehouse, examining the flaws that had allowed air to spread the fire into the interior. Last, he trudged to the empty, jack-legged house on Pacific where the fire had originated. Though the abandoned home had been the catalyst for widespread destruction, it had survived with only two walls gone. As wind cut though the shell making an eerie howl, Sawyer could almost hear the mirthless laugh of Ben Lewis. Possibly the arsonist had surrounded himself with fire to warm a cold heart. At least the devil had returned to the flames and he was not going to look for him any further. As in the anniversary fire, the fire was doubtless the work of an incendiary. No fire had been used about the empty, makeshift house for any purpose whatsoever. Sawyer wondered what they would find when they removed the pile of charred rubble by the merchant’s store. Would the arsonist still be there or had his body vanished into the warm earth? Was it even him? Perhaps he had escaped to burn again. “Ben Lewis,” he thought, “the man who burned San Francisco to the ground.” The Lightkeeper was dead, if not at the hands of an infuriated mob then as a casualty of his own blaze. The fires should now be at an end. He had only walked a few feet when he halted. “If Ben Lewis was the Lightkeeper,” he asked himself, “then who had started the second blaze that had simultaneously erupted on the outskirts of town?” Lewis could not have been in two places at once. The Lightkeeper had to have a secret partner, and he was still out there.

  The June 22 fire reawakened arson fears. Four days after the Vigilance Committee advertised a reward for “the capture and conviction of anyone guilty of such a crime.” At one time, a strong suspicion of arson rested upon a black man known as Ben Robinson. In spite of an antislavery clause in the state constitution, he lived in abject subjection to a depraved white woman, Margaret Robinson, who habitually beat him if he disregarded her wishes. When police arrested him on suspicion of starting the fire, he confessed he had done so in obedience to Mrs. Robinson, who had a grudge against the man in whose house the fire originated. With unusual negligence, officers allowed him to escape, but vigilantes immediately seized him and took him to headquarters on June 30, when he repeated the same story. Mr. and Mrs. Robinson were arrested the same night; thereupon Ben withdrew his whole confession and accused a cop of bribing him to tell the story. Uncharacteristically the Committee unraveled a plot to incite the vigilantes to take action against Mrs. Robinson, “whose evil life made credible any tale that might be told about her.” The Robinsons were discharged on July 12.

  According to the Annals, four of the conflagrations had been started by gangs of former convicts from Australia led by Ben Lewis and his partner. Further proof the arsons were organized came from two more feeble attempts. A man tried to fire the Pacific Street Wharf and was arrested. Someone set fire to the rear of Marvin & Hitchcock’s building but was foiled. Police discovered where the arsonist had broken a glass pane in the door sash leading into the yard and had set fire to the window curtain. The match was still on the floor. “More than ever,” wrote the Alta, “we are convinced by this there is in this city an organized band sworn to destroy it.”

  Kohler had had enough. “We should abandon this site and find a place that won’t burn down with such damnable regularity,” he said passionately. “Perhaps Benicia or Sacramento.” “Will these fires never end?” other townsfolk lamented. “We can take no more.” Hundreds of San Franciscans loaded their goods into wagons and ferried them to the East Bay, where their only neighbors were the Gon
zales Ranch, a sprinkling of Spanish ranches, the tiny town of Oakland, a wilderness stretching all the way to the Benicia settlement, and an army garrison at the far eastern end of the bay. In the emptying streets the preachers bellowed that the city was a Sodom and Gomorrah, referring to wicked cities reviled in the Bible and destroyed by fire from heaven. “These six horrendous disasters are God’s great retribution to an evil city,” the local prophets said. The churches filled and people begged for forgiveness. Perhaps the chastened multitude was heard at last. After June 1851 there were no more city-destroying fires. The persistent volunteers and their valiant torch boys had won.