Black Fire

by Robert Graysmith

  Northeast of San Francisco, four-fifths of Sacramento still lay underwater, permitting a steamer to shuttle up and down its streets and enable passengers to enter their second-story City Hotel rooms by window. The fifty inches of icy rain and shotgun blasts of black hail that had soaked and pummeled San Francisco all winter had not dispelled the fitful dreams of its citizens. They tossed in their beds inside combustible homes, heads filled with nightmares of what would happen when the lifesaving downpour halted. They reposed in front of their fires listening to the faint clacking of sea coals and snakelike hiss of paraffin wicks. They watched the clear glass of their lamp chimneys blacken and, instead of being warmed, feared the worst. They dreaded the high winds off the bay that would dry the soaked wood to flammability. And with no water wells or flame-fighting equipment or the inclination to buy any, everyone knew that San Francisco would burn. Four years earlier in Pittsburgh there had been a disastrous dawn fire, but that had come after a dry winter, six weeks without rain. San Francisco’s spring would be much different, but the results would be the same.

  From his window, Broderick made out the end of the road where fog mounded in heaps and a prickly forest of masts towered. These nearly a thousand abandoned vessels had transported hundreds of thousands of gold seekers who in turn had made the ships orphans. Broderick’s hands on the sill were the callused hands of a stonecutter, the practiced hands of a rough-and-tumble politician and consummate barroom brawler. During the night the ex-firefighter had slumbered fitfully, feeling all around him the thin boards of cloth-walled homes shaking in the rising winds. How strange the windy season passed and how tightly it had stretched his nerves. Broderick knew the danger San Francisco faced even if most of its citizens did not want to know. As in most man-made disasters, there had been indications of the tragedy to come. Someone had burned the Shades Hotel in January. On June 14, 1849, two weeks after Broderick first set foot in San Francisco, someone had torched the Philadelphia at dockside. A series of fires had gotten people to thinking, but no action was taken. Thinking was hard, and a little frightening. As Christmas approached, people forgot to even think. Instead they emptied Nathan Spear and William Hinckley’s shelves of overpriced gifts, bathed in freshwater at three dollars a barrel, and curled up before their fires to shiver.

  None were willing to take the least nominal steps toward preventing the tragedy they so feared, and which Broderick, from his experience, knew was inevitable. Instead, they pressed their noses against their windows and watched black water flow down the muddy streets to the shallow Yerba Buena Cove, a horseshoe-shaped bite in the western shore filled with abandoned ships. Bells rang low across the water. The harbor—chill, barren, desolate—fronted the instant city of San Francisco that was a world cut off from civilization. Bitter December cold, gloom, and disappointment were all about him. At this breaking dawn, the day before Christmas, 1849, Broderick thought his terrible thoughts.

  He watched the road outside come to life and heard the calling of ducks and geese and tradesmen tramping sleepily through the deep mud to Portsmouth Square. Three sides of the Square were taken up by the devil: gambling dens and thrown-together hotels of dry pine with flammable canvas roofs, muslin floors, and oilpaper walls and bands who played music full blast but were silent now. Only on the fourth and upper side of the Square had God taken a small toehold in a small adobe building where the Reverend William Taylor preached in thunder that “the way of the transgressor is hard” and that a great calamity was surely to befall the great tinderbox called San Francisco. Reverend Mr. Taylor was rarely wrong.

  “The [building] material is all of combustibles,” a citizen complained to his friends back east. “No fire engines; no hooks or ladders; and in fact no water (except in very deep wells) available where it might be most required. Is it not enough to make a very prudent man tremble?” This canny resident warned that fire, once begun at the windward side, would be certain to burn the whole of the boomtown to ash in an instant.

  The Christmas Eve fire at first appeared as the light of a candle in the second-floor window of Dennison’s Exchange, one of thirty gambling dens in the Square and one of nearly a thousand in town. Dennison’s stood dead center in the fledgling city on the east side at the corner of Kearny and Washington streets. From roof to ground, this “Genie of all catastrophe” was ignitability personified—ceilinged with painted cotton fabric and roofed with asphalt, or road tar. Even the paintings on its unbleached canvas walls were executed in oil. Throughout October and November, the wagering palace had sat, plump as an oil-soaked rag, ready to burst into flame at the touch of a match.

  At 5:45 A.M., when the fledgling blaze was first noticed, a mild sort of alarm was disseminated along the saloons, most of them already preparing to reopen in five hours. Virtually no wind stirred, which in itself was unusual and fortuitous because the greatest threat to the city would have been an aggressive wind off the sea fanning the flames. At first the fire crawled as the halfhearted alarm ambled lazily along the Square. The news was met by silence at the City Hotel on the southwest corner of Clay and Kearny streets, the large adobe general merchandise store on the southeast corner, and the Crockett Building on the northeast corner. By day these were busy hubs. Crockett’s gambling rooms and saloon had closed at near dawn and its brocaded gamblers had staggered home. It was silent, too, at the St. Francis Hotel on the southwest corner of Clay and Dupont. All the guests were asleep. The only sign of activity was between Clay and Sacramento streets. A handful of early-rising vegetable merchants and wine sellers setting up their stalls heard the whispered alarm and, yawning, absently took up the cry and passed it on as if in conversation. “Notice how prettily the fire curls along the beams,” one remarked lazily as he put his crate down in the mud. “The Haley House and Bella Union are on fire, too,” another added matter-of-factly.

  Dogs began to yelp and the tiny fire bell finally rang out. At his window Broderick started at its first tinkle and observed ropy black smoke curling upward. This indicated a fresh fire. From its color he could estimate its temperature, and from experience knew what such a hot fire could do. Breathlessly he dragged on his trousers, pulled on his high boots, clapped his hat on his head, and rushed out in his shirtsleeves. The instant Broderick reached the Square, he began shouting, “Form a bucket brigade!” Fortunately, in those days everything to the east of Montgomery Street was underwater. Cove waters lapped between Washington and Clay streets, which ran from the northwest and southeast sides of the Square and rose halfway to Kearny on Jackson. So few buckets were available that the brigade had to use canvas sacks, boxes, and any container that held water. Broderick used his hat.

  By 6:30 A.M. the blaze had changed its hue from yellow to blue as it fed upon casks of grog, rum, brandy, and Monongahela whiskey. The colorful blaze hypnotized onlookers who had so little to amuse them in the drudgery of their daily lives. “Well, I’ll be damned,” said one. “If that ain’t pretty—Bengal lights [the San Francisco name for fireworks].” Charmed by the turquoise-green colors of now-blazing pharmacies, they inhaled chemical smoke as if enjoying a good cigar. By now the crowd had grown to a dispassionate audience of five thousand. Pleased at a little entertainment, they idly observed the betting halls being consumed: “Serves them right … lost a poke there … O.K. with me if Dennison’s burns.” The mob had a disquieting tendency to be cruel when it did not concern them and to find amusement in the misfortune of others.

  In contrast to the detached spectators, the owner of an imperiled property dropped to his knees. “Help me!” he said, clasping his hands together and rocking backward and forward in the mire. “Have some mercy.” After a hasty conference the spectators said, “We’ll want wages.” “I’ll pay fifty cents a bucket to every man who fetches water to save my building,” the owner implored. Just as flames began licking at the rear of his building, bidding between bystanders and proprietor reached an agreed-upon wage of a dollar per bucket. He saved his property, but it cost him several thousand
dollars.

  “Ooh!” said the crowd, still unconcerned. Smiles flashed in the eerie morning light. The unpaid audience continued to take a sabbatical from reason. There was not a breath of wind, so why worry? Wind was not necessary. Cotton-papered houses across the street in proximity to the scorching heat flared up spontaneously. The El Dorado, a huge canvas tent that rented for $40,000 a year, burst into flames. Burning beams and frames from the United States Coffee House crashed at their feet. Suddenly the Square, which lay on the slant side of a hill, was hot as a brick oven. Next door to the United States Restaurant was the Parker House, the first considerable house in the city. A regular two-story home with two stores, a saloon, and an entire second floor given over to gambling tables, it rented for an astonishing $150,000 a year.

  Twenty yards away, Robert Smith Lammot was dressing for work when he gazed out his window. The Parker House was belching clouds of rough-textured smoke. Flames were surging wildly around every crack. Clouds of smoke were boiling from both ends. Inside, piles of gold and silver coins melted into slag. Lammot, frantically gathering up his valuables, then recalled a dreadful fact and rushed to his window. “Stored powder!” he shouted to the crowd below. “The Parker House has dozens of barrels of gunpowder in its basement! Run for your lives.” That got a reaction.

  Under showers of sparks, the mob transformed itself into an elemental force, a panicky human stampede more terrible than the fire. As the thousands scattered, the stored powder in the Parker House basement detonated, shattering the building and setting off munitions in nearby basements. A few citizens, suddenly in the middle of a battlefield with cannon on both sides, made halfhearted passes at the flames with canvas sacks and blankets. Others slathered walls with mud.

  E. A. Upton, onboard one of the abandoned ships in the cove, saw the flames and rowed to shore. As he dropped onto the sandy beach, he realized he had pulled on the wrong boots. By then the fire was spreading rapidly down the Square. Upton remembered his stored trunks at the Merchants Exchange Hotel and frantically hobbled up Montgomery Street to hire a drayman. The road, a foot deep in mud, was over the hubs of most carts. For eight dollars he persuaded a ferryman to convey his trunks to the wharf and for another three dollars to row them out to his ship. Young John McCrackan, a Connecticut lawyer and artist who also lived inside the Ghost Fleet, joined Upton on the dunes. Together they ran toward the Square.

  “The streets,” McCrackan recalled, “were perfectly heaping with all kinds and descriptions of goods besides gold and silver which was melted up.” The exploding Parker House had one benefit. It reminded Broderick how to slow the fire. During his marble-mining days on New York’s East Side, he had carved blocks from a quarry with well-placed charges of gunpowder and used that technique fighting fire. “We must pull down and blow up a line of houses,” he ordered. “If we throw kegs of powder into three or four of the burning buildings, we might isolate the blaze and pull the rest down.” The impact would either smother the flames or leave the fire nothing to burn. He selected several wine stores along Washington Street, but before demolishing them allowed people to help themselves. When the proprietor of one store refused to have his emporium blown up, Broderick hauled him out by his collar, tossed him onto a heap of bricks, and exploded the adobe building. Still limping, Upton was passed by two men carrying a man hurt in an explosion. “Almost every store that was burned contained more or less powder and liquor,” he said, “and explosions were taking place every moment, some of which were tremendous.” A powerful north wind built, a freshening gale that sent sparks dancing and carried the blaze to three hundred houses. Feverish men axed the ground timbers of homes in the fire path and toppled them on their sides by pulling on ropes fastened to their roofs. Each time a building collapsed, flaming debris propelled down the side away from the fire torched neighboring structures. Slipping from one roof to another, the fire created its own bucket brigade of flame all the way down to the cove.

  All morning the conflagration raged along the new fingerlike wharves as merchants lugged their safes and sacks of gold dust to the Maguire building at the end of Long Wharf. The blaze bridged the cove waters and burned the hulls of ships anchored off the beach. Thousands living in the Ghost Fleet plunged over the sides and swam for safety. A few fortunate ships, with the help of a light southerly turn of the wind, reached an anchorage just west of Clarke’s Point. From there passengers thrashed and waded through a mile of waist-deep mud to reach unburned land and safety. At 11:00 A.M., Upton, chafed by his oversize boots, limped in agony to the beach. He rowed to his ship to soak his blistered feet. If a high wind freshened, two-thirds of the city would be burned. At least, he thought, this, the first big fire in San Francisco history, might persuade the Council to finally establish a fire department. At four o’clock in the afternoon, Upton, barefoot now, climbed back on deck. The wind had died. The fire might still be licking and leaping, but his ship’s thermometer read seventy-four degrees, as if it were a mild and pleasant day. Three hours later, flames and smoke were still curling when the fire abruptly went out. Ships at sea clearly saw the red chimney of flame collapse upon itself and die.

  “And by God, they’ve stayed the fire by resorting to powder and blowing the buildings up,” McCrackan said, though during a blast two men had been killed and dozens had received broken limbs and burns. Surely, with such strong winds and paperlike dwellings resting on shifting sand, clay, and sucking mud, there would be more and greater fires, but San Franciscans had failed to comprehend the solution before their eyes. The fire only truly halted when it butted up against an unfinished brick building. Stunned, murmuring prayers, and covered with soot that made them scarcely recognizable to one another, harried men and women dug through the ruins, salvaged what they could, and cried in each other’s arms. Broderick could not accurately estimate the tremendous loss of life. Fleeing mobs had trampled and kneaded bodies into the ooze. Corpses lay crushed under fallen buildings. As if shocked into silence, the winds over San Francisco scarcely stirred. For days an umbrella of ash hung unmoving above the city. John H. Brown speculated that Dennison’s had been fired to avenge a racial affront committed against a black man by a southerner, Thomas Bartell, who ran the gambling house’s saloon. No proof of his allegation existed. There were plenty of arson suspects.

  At the height of the fire, seventy members of the Ducks, “ruffianly larrikins,” ticket-of-leave men from British penal settlements, had been arrested for looting. After the fire, the Hounds, a gang of idled army renegades from Colonel Stevenson’s regiment, terrorized the poor ranging through the blackened rubble and kicked apart promising heaps of debris as they searched for coins. What they had no use for they destroyed. Whoever got in their way they beat. Broderick suspected a member of one of the two gangs had instigated the arson. He pointed out how well organized and well timed the attacks had been. The Ducks and Hounds had been ready and waiting to strike. Somewhere there was a fire fiend who had set the Christmas Eve fire. There had to be. Broderick would bet his life on it. A month earlier the Alta had flat-out said there were arsonists in the city and demanded an increase in manpower to apprehend them. At least a night watch should be formed. The Council, responsive to their pleas, resolved to increase the police force by fifty men.

  During the five hours the fire raged, it had consumed $1.5 million worth of ships, piers, and buildings—290 structures and the earliest vestiges of the city known as Yerba Buena until 1847. The one-story adobe Custom House, La Casa Grande, the oldest building in the city, survived. It was relatively fireproof. San Francisco lost all its buildings on both sides of Kearny Street between Washington and Clay streets, but they would be completely rebuilt by spring. If San Francisco’s citizens were lazy when it came to forming a fire department, they set about rebuilding with awesome zeal. The Square’s planked streets were still steaming as men galloped onto the surrounding mud-pit streets and leaped from their horses. Wagons carted fresh lumber down from the hills. Sailors ripped planks from the d
ecks of the abandoned Ghost Fleet ships to incorporate into presumably haunted houses. At each site, men cleared rubbish in a minute. Within an hour, amid a racket of axes, saws, and hammers, men had raised the frames of three houses, nailed still-smoldering lumber into place, and hammered warm nails into scorched timbers. Their smoking hammers described graceful arcs in the cool air.

  Tirelessly the men labored on. No sooner had they raised a block of new frameworks than a terrible gale from the sea sent them crashing into the mud. Indefatigably they lifted the timbers and stood them again. Down the beams went again, only to be thrown back up. Broderick walked the ruins looking for clues. The highly vaunted new metal houses had failed miserably and lay as misshapen grotesques, iron ovens that had baked everything inside. The uncompleted brick house that had stopped the spread of the fire interested him the most. The ex-fireman examined it for some time and even went away with one of the bricks.

  No one else took heed of the indestructible building, but labored only on buildings identical to those that had burned: slight frame structures with split clapboard exteriors nailed on and interiors of simple unbleached cotton cloth, stretched smooth, with ceilings of bleached cloth that sagged in the middle. For partitions, a frame was raised, cloth and paper were applied to both sides, and a gap of air was left between. A private dwelling took two days to construct. A hotel took four days to erect and a church six days. Within the time it took to raise a church, six large houses had been roofed, weatherproofed, and completed, with four others almost done. “Beat that in the East if you can!” roared one worker, slapping his thigh as another dwelling shot up from the smoking mud—the Boomtown way.

  A month earlier Captain Cole had arrived with twenty-five kits for wooden houses, numbered in sections for easy assembly. The prefabricated houses from New England were prepainted white and trimmed green. Thousands more of these prefab wooden sectionals—hospitals, churches, even bowling alleys—were at that moment being shipped west from Baltimore, Philadelphia, London, and Hamburg. Tasmania and China exported to the Bay Area portable ready-mades with mortised joints for effortless construction. Darkness fell, but the blackened figures rising from the mud were already smiling. “I have now only a $1.50 in my pocket,” one optimist said, “but I do not care, for before many days are over, I will have a $150.” Nothing could keep the greatest go-ahead city down. Singing and whistling, the laborers worked through the night as the fog came in and made them look like ghosts.