Black Fire: The True Story of the Original Tom Sawyer

by Robert Graysmith

  Sawyer, a fair amateur psychologist, had recognized Twain’s competitive nature from the first. After all, he had the same qualities in himself. Sawyer was almost his equal in talking but often had to throw in the towel. “He beat the record for lyin’—nobody was in the race with him there,” Sawyer said, “though I myself was considered a pretty good disciple of Ananias [an early Christian who lied to God and died on the spot]. He never had a cent. His clothes were always ragged and he never had his hair cut or a shave in them days. I should say he hasn’t had his hair cut since ’60. I used to give him half my wages and then he’d borrow from the other half, but a jollier companion and better mate I would never want. He was a prince among men, you can bet, though I’ll allow he was the darndest homeliest man I ever set eyes on, Sam was.”

  The next day Sawyer was fighting fire and Twain had to content himself with exchanging stories with Stahle in the basement cloud land. He left within the hour. He saw Sawyer the next time. It was a stormy day. Rain beat against the Montgomery Block, especially loud in the basement steam room. Nostalgically, Twain recalled for Sawyer and Stahle his own boyhood. “I remember the raging of the rain on that roof, summer nights,” he said, leaning back contentedly in the waves of steam and feeling the sweat drip off his arms, “and how pleasant it was to lie and listen to it and enjoy the white splendor of the lightning and the majestic booming and crashing of the thunder.” There was rarely thunder or lightning in San Francisco.

  On January 31, 1864, Volunteer Billy Mulligan—angry, afraid, trigger finger itching, and a little insane—returned to San Francisco. Haunted by the fear that the vigilantes, who had sworn his death years earlier, were coming for him, he lost himself in extended drinking sprees. After the vigilantes deported him and the rest of Broderick’s men during the San Francisco insurrection in 1856, he settled in New York City, where a newspaper described him as a “refined savage” and “a pugilist of the lowest sort.” Within a year, he attempted to shoot the owner of a Manhattan gambling house, and after refusing to participate in a forgery conspiracy of his friend Senator Broderick’s will, was sentenced to two years in Sing Sing Prison. Pardoned after three months, he returned to California. One night a saloonkeeper bludgeoned him with a champagne bottle and left him delusional. He recovered from his concussion and for several years was a familiar figure drinking brandy in the saloons and gambling dens of San Francisco. The Sacramento Union said of him, “No man was big enough to make him tamely submit to an insult offered either to himself, a friend or even a defenseless stranger. He was an active politician and trained with a class of men who in more recent years have been known as ‘Stalwarts’ or ‘machine men’—those who pat up conventions and manipulate primary elections, but he was gentlemanly in his intercourse with his fellow men, exquisite in the matter of dress, and as brave a little man as ever walked. Those who knew him best have only good words to say of Billy Mulligan.” The Alta said, “Mulligan was one of the best of his kind. Though considered a ‘roach’ he was never a robber.” Yet Mulligan had grafted a fortune as tax collector for the San Francisco County treasurer.

  On April 20, 1864, he challenged Tom Coleman to a duel for six o’clock the next morning. Their first shots fell short. With his second shot Mulligan broke the second finger of Coleman’s right hand. Coleman’s fourth shot went off prematurely. Mulligan’s fifth shot hit the fleshy part of Coleman’s thigh. Six days later, he was wounded again, this time as a bystander. Once, in less than a week, Mulligan was shot five times by three different men.

  Meanwhile, Twain briefly returned to Nevada City, where he was warned he was liable to arrest for demanding a duel with rival reporter and editor James L. Laird. This news sent him rumbling back to San Francisco by a fast stage on May 29. “I left Nevada in 1864 to avoid a term penitentiary,” Twain said proudly. Steve Gillis, news editor of the Enterprise and a close friend, and Joseph T. Goodman, proprietor of the paper, accompanied him. According to the Gold Hill Evening News, Nevada City was delighted to see Twain depart and mentioned his “idiosyncratic eccentricities of an erratic mind.… His face is black before the people of Washoe. The indignation aroused by his enormities has been too crushing to be borne by living man … in short he has vamoosed.” Twain had no overcoat and huddled morose and shivering behind the stage driver during the long ride over the mountains from Virginia City to Carson. Carpenter & Hoog’s stage was “a cradle on wheels.” Twain advised an outside seat if you prepared for it “with two days sleep so you would not fall asleep on the box.” He would have gone to sleep and plunged overboard if the driver of the Concord-type coach had not “enlivened the dreary hours with his conversation.” Whenever Twain got to pitching in his direction, the cigar-chomping driver asked if he was asleep. Upon receiving a negative grunt, the driver related cheerful stories of passengers who had got to nodding by his side and fallen off and broken their necks on the narrow winding road. Cracking his whip over the lead horses, he said he could see those fellows now, “all jammed, bloody and quivering in death’s agony,” and urged his team at a furious speed into deep bends in the black road. Twain knew of a driver sound asleep on the box whose mules galloped unchecked at their usual breakneck speed along the dangerous route and arrived unharmed at the lower elevation. “I intended to go only a little way out on the Geiger Grade,” Goodman said cheerfully, “but the company was too good and I kept clear on to San Francisco.” The trio went the rest of the way by the Pioneer Line to Folsom and Sacramento. In San Francisco, Twain and Gillis settled into the Occidental Hotel. Twain had fallen in love with “the most cordial and sociable city in the Union. After the sagebrush and alkali deserts of Washoe, San Francisco was Paradise to me … the liveliest, heartiest community on our continent.”

  Around June 6, the two flat-busted writers began working on the Morning Call, a newspaper known as “the washerwoman’s paper.” Housed in a new brick building at 612 Commercial, the Call, a single sheet folded in half to create four printed pages, sold for a “bit” (twelve and a half cents) every day but Monday. Gillis labored during the day as a printing room compositor, while Twain, an unreliable and generally untruthful reporter, wore all the other hats for forty dollars per week. By ten o’clock each morning, the paper’s sole reporter was at his desk gathering local gossip, and in his silk hat and frock-coated black suit, doing general assignment, rewriting and scanning the blotter at police court before moving on to the higher courts. Twain spent all his evenings at the six theaters where he stayed just long enough to gather enough information to write a review of the rapid-fire plays being produced every day. Coroner Sheldon held his inquests at night. He had to attend those. Afterward he returned to the Call to write up his copy for the 2:00 A.M. deadline, put the paper to bed, and then turned in. Every day Twain craved at least twenty-five licorice-flavored cigars, an amalgam of firecracker paper, sawdust, and “who knew what else,” selling in bundles of one hundred for two dollars.

  He made it a strict rule never to smoke more than one at a time and never while asleep.

  “Sam and me was the greatest chums,” Sawyer continued, “and Sam and me used to meet at the Blue Wing, kept by Dan Driscoll.” The Blue Wing Saloon stood next to the Russ House, which, while only a year old, occupied the entire block on Montgomery between Pine and Bush streets. Gambler Charles Cora had been drinking there minutes before he murdered U.S. Marshal General William Richardson for an imagined slight against his whore, Belle Cora, and outraged all of San Francisco in 1856. “Many a night we’d sit there telling stories till the stars went out and the sun was staring down in our faces.

  “Sam was workin’ on the Call in those days.” Call stories were not signed and few knew he worked there. “They’d send him out down at the paper to write something up and he’d go into the Blue Wing [or the Hays Saloon, the Cosmopolitan, the Capitol, or the Bank Exchange] and sit around telling stories and drinking all day.” It was heaven. The rowdy saloons had “purer liquors, better segars, and prettier courtezans” tha
n anyplace else. While Twain was at the Occidental, hotel bartender Jerry Thomas invented the first martini. “Then he’d go back to the office and write up something. Many times it was all wrong, but it was mighty entertaining, anyhow. Sam came near getting fired two or three times and then he’d brace up for a day or so and square himself with the fellers that run the paper.” As the paper’s only beat reporter, he raked the town from end to end, prowling the Police Court and the bleak line of cells beneath City Hall on Kearny and intimately inspecting the county prison on Broadway. Twain described the Police Court space as a twenty-four-by-forty-foot room blocked on all sides by brick walls. It is “the infernalest smelling den on earth,” he reported. “Once you enter the Police Court, you get yourself saturated with the fearful combination of miraculous stenches that infect its atmosphere.… You cannot imagine what a horrible hole that Police Court is. If there is anything more absurd than the general average of Police Court testimony, we do not know what it is. Witnesses stand up here, every day, and swear to the most extravagant propositions with an easy indifference to consequences in the next world that is altogether refreshing.” The evening of July 7, Twain, bones aching and fingers ink stained, finished up at the odoriferous booking desk with little to write. The previous night Coroner Sheldon had held an inquest into the death of John McGowan, an ex-cabdriver shot to death in a cellar saloon by a soldier named John Barrett. As Twain deciphered his notes (he made his lowercase e’s like uppercase E’s), he steeled himself to make the theater rounds.

  At the steam baths the next day, he was miserable with a cold, sneezing and snuffling. Sawyer entered, smoked black and fire scorched, returning from Liberty Hose’s engine house, a two-story frame building on the east side of Fourth Street at number 24. He looked as beat as Twain felt. As they played cards, Twain admitted how much he loathed his job at the Call and detested its editor, George Barnes, even more. He wanted to quit, but because of considerable debt, had vowed to keep dragging himself in to work and be pleasant to Barnes. “It was awful drudgery for a lazy man,” he explained, “and I was born lazy. I raked the town from end to end and if there were no fires to report, I started some.” There was only one perk. “Reporting is the best school in the world to get a knowledge of human beings, human nature, and human ways. No other occupation brings a man into such familiar sociable relations with all grades and classes of people.”

  The Call’s offices were on the second floor of the United States Mint Annex. One floor above, author Bret Harte, a former Wells Fargo station messenger, worked as a secretary to the superintendent of the Mint. His literary patrons, Jessie Benton Fremont and Unitarian clergyman Thomas Starr King, had introduced him to Robert B. Swain, superintendent of the local U.S. Mint. As Swain’s private secretary, a nontaxing administrative post, Harte received $200 a month and had little to do but play croquet and write. Not so for Twain, whose long hours at the Call had grown so tedious that he gladly took a $15 salary cut to work in the daylight hours. Occasionally he tramped upstairs to pass the time with Harte, who, with his groomed sideburns, curly dark hair, and white eyes, dressed fashionably in plaid trousers and velveteen coats. Harte judged Twain’s dress “careless,” his manner supremely indifferent to his surroundings, and admired his “slow, rather satirical drawl which was in itself irresistible.” “My sole occupation now, Bret,” Twain said, lazily rolling his head back as if napping, “is avoiding acquaintances.” He had become adept at slinking down alleys to outwit his creditors, going out only at night with Gillis, or drinking at the Blue Wing with Sawyer and fingering his last dime till it was worn thin. “I slunk from back street to back street, I slunk away from approaching faces that looked familiar. I slunk to my meals … I slunk to my bed. I felt meaner and lowlier and more despicable than the worms.” The Golden Era published Harte’s short stories, so Twain listened attentively as the little man patiently “trimmed, trained and schooled” him and changed him “from an awkward writer of coarse grotesqueness, to writer of paragraphs and chapters that have found a certain favor in the eyes of even some of the very decentest people in the land.”

  The Fire Girl

  Out by the ocean a vivacious young woman raced her team of horses down an almost perpendicular bluff above the Cliff House. She had run her yellow-wheeled, four-horse rockaway carriage to Ocean Beach at top speed, challenging her friends to follow her twists, turns, and breakneck shortcuts and daring a suitor to follow her straight down the precipice. He rolled and crashed at the bottom but survived. The extraordinary Lillie Hitchcock wore trousers, a gun, and holster; rode bareback; and once dressed as a boy to win a race. An avid hunter and excellent rifle shot, she scored medals for her marksmanship, beating out the keen-eyed sharpshooters of Broderick One, the best shots in California. She sailed, fished, swam, and played poker better than most men and could outbox many. She smoked cigars, drank Kentucky bourbon, made late-night visits to men-only clubs, took in a cockfight near Washerwoman’s Lagoon, and placed bets at Pioneer Park, winning almost every time. Whenever she dyed her hair and grew bored with the new color, she shaved her head and wore black or red wigs until her hair grew back.

  Although Lillie did not resemble Twain’s ideal woman, they were attracted to each other. He first met her at the Occidental, with its ankle-deep carpets, where the Hitchcocks took a suite of rooms. When the Civil War broke out, her father, Dr. Charles Hitchcock, a pro-Union West Point surgeon and son of a wealthy Southern family, became fearful of reprisals (they had family property in the South). Ironically, during the Mexican War, he had saved the leg of Colonel Jefferson Davis through a magnificent piece of surgery. Hitchcock had resigned his army commission to tend the sick in San Francisco as the Pacific coast medical director. In 1860 he insisted that Martha and Lillie, who shared her mother’s Southern leanings, leave the United States. When Lillie left for Paris, the men of Five saw her off at the dock. “Goodbye, Dear Number Five. I’ll die game,” she told them. At the court of Napoléon III, where she was a favorite for her rebellious and rambunctious ways, she translated Confederate reports into French and smuggled secret documents for the rebel cause. In 1862 she became the “lady correspondent” of the San Francisco Evening Bulletin. Her detailed “Letter from Paris” became an anticipated weekly feature in the city. On October 3, 1863, Lillie, now twenty years old, returned to San Francisco to wild applause. At the pier, Five gave her a gold fire helmet with a diamond set in its shield, a gold badge, and an honorary certificate of full-fledged membership. Lillie had become the first and only woman member of a U.S. fire department. Whenever she attended their annual banquet, she wore a red woolen blouse over a black silk skirt, a white mackintosh, and a large-buckled firefighter’s belt with the number 5 in imitation of the volunteers’ uniform. When she wore her exquisite Paris gowns, her mother hid the number 5 among the ruffles and embroidered all of her undergarments with 5s. At parties Lillie waved fans with Fives on them, even signed her name “Lillie Hitchcock 5.” In all parades and festivities she rode next to the driver on top of Engine Five, surrounded by flowers, flags. Five’s sweetheart was so vivacious and charming, San Francisco loved her. “Everybody loves Miss Lil,” it was said of her. “She has ‘towardliness.’ ” “Just as generous and warmhearted girl as you ever saw,” Twain wrote. “And her mother is such a rare gem of a woman. The family are old, old friends of mine and I think ever so much of them. That girl, many and many and many a time, has waited till nearly noon to breakfast with me, and when we all lived at the Occidental Hotel and I was on a morning paper and could not go to bed till two or three. She is a brilliant talker. They live half of every year in Paris. It always seemed funny to me that she and I could be friends, but we were—I suppose because under all her wild foolery, that warm heart of hers would always show. I thought of her as stored to the eyelids with energy and enthusiasm, her mind, hands, feet, and body in a state of tireless activity, not unlike mine.”

  Bret Harte

  Bret Harte had met Lillie nine years earlier
while trying to eke out a living writing poetry. Martha Hitchcock, who found him an endlessly fascinating conversationalist, entrusted the penniless writer to teach her and her daughter conversational writing. Infatuated, he dined with them in sumptuous restaurants while his own family endured a meager life. Soon Martha, one of his strongest benefactors, was writing so well she was being published in the Golden Era as often as he. Lillie showed promise, too. Harte drew Twain into the enclave of the local Southern aristocracy through Martha, who found in Twain and Harte the answer to improving Lillie’s journalistic style. “An earlier flippant tone in her writings disappeared,” Lillie’s biographer Helen Holdredge wrote, “cheery praise from the editor of the Bulletin, who said her articles were ‘bright and sparkling.’ ” Twain and Harte often joined Martha and her daughter for dinner. Lillie, rebellious and possessed of boundless energy, interested Twain for another reason. In this irrepressible girl, so full of brightness and fun, he found the grist of a first novel, which he called Shirley Tempest. Why,” Twain wondered, “had her fortunes become inextricably intertwined with those of Knickerbocker Five?” It took Sawyer to explain how Five’s volunteer John Boynton had saved her from a burning building.

  Meanwhile, Twain and Gillis moved into a succession of hotels, private homes, and rooming houses, each of descending value. Twain unwound at the baths, in the bars, and sometimes in his room. On July 12, as he and Gillis were carrying on with some “roughs,” the French landlady ordered her husband upstairs to complain. Gillis reacted by leveling a pistol at him and telling him, “Take your head out of the door because I want to shoot in that direction. Get scarce!” “Oh, I never saw such creatures,” the landlady fumed. “One of them always went to bed at dark and got up at sunrise, and the other went to bed at sunrise and got up at dark.… They used to bring loads of beer bottles up at midnight, and get drunk, and shout and throw their empties out of the window at the Chinamen below: You’d hear them count ‘One—two—three—fire!’ … They always had women running to their room—sometimes in broad daylight—bless you, THEY didn’t care. They had no respect for God, man or the devil!”