Black Fire

by Robert Graysmith

  The morning after, Christmas Day, a few planked streets were still smoking. The cracked mud around them was still baking. When Broderick, wheezing, trudged to the blackened ruins, he saw that except for Delmonico’s, the Square had simply vanished. In the fire’s wake, land sharks cruised the ashes with papers and pens raised above their heads like fins. Tirelessly they crested the blackened hills seeking opportunities to buy gambling dens of their own. The time was ripe. A dozen new wagering concerns were already flourishing out of small tents. The more established gamblers saw money being lost and clamored for their burned gambling parlors to be rebuilt immediately. Dennison was arguing with Mr. Cornwall, the contractor. “I want my Exchange returned to action within two weeks,” he bellowed.

  “An impossibility, Mr. Dennison,” Cornwall replied, surveying the gutted ground floor and furrowing his brow. Dennison whipped out $15,000 and flung it to the builder, who contracted immediately to raise the new building within fifteen days or forfeit $500 for each day past the deadline. Real San Franciscans like Dennison understood greed. It, too, was the San Francisco way. While the Parker House was still burning, its perpetually unlucky owner, Tom Maguire, was busily signing contracts to raise a new two-story building in its place. A ruddy man, top-heavy with an oiled mustache and white hair, Maguire, in the midst of such devastation, was impeccably dressed. A huge diamond was pinned in his scarf and a massive watch chain crossed his carpet vest. The former New York City hack driver turned saloonkeeper turned impresario wanted his new palace prepared by French designers and fitted out in Oriental splendor with glass pillars and mirrors that climbed to golden ceilings. Workers swiftly laid the Parker House’s new basement floor timbers and arranged the building to be constructed in brick sections. Maguire expected speed and perfection. When glass panes arrived cut in sections too small for his new windows, he refused to alter his designs and instead ordered specially cut glass shipped express from Hawaii.

  The El Dorado and the United States Coffee House had been decimated. The Mazourka, the Arcade, the Ward House, the Fontine House, the Alhambra, and the Aguila de Oro, in or near the Square, were badly damaged. The owners of the Bella Union, El Dorado, California Exchange, Empire, and Verandah shouted as they saw new gambling dens getting the jump on them. “Cut whatever corners necessary,” they cried, watching their competitors’ steady progress, “get us back in operation again!” The righteous in town, such as Edward Gilbert, the newspaper editor, would not miss the obliterated gambling dens. “Had that been the motive behind the city-destroying arson?” Broderick wondered. “Was it a way to be rid of the dens, along with squalid rows of shacks?” He saw the entire City Council—Steuart, Price, Ellis, Turk, Davis, Harris, Simmons, Harrison, Green, and Brannan—assembled in a corner of the Square and walked over, still wheezing. He concealed his discomfort. The same iron resolution that had made him a king among men was at work. He would have to be at his most persuasive if he was to prevent another inferno.

  Sam Brannan, the city’s first millionaire and one of the good old town’s greediest men, was such a cross between a constable and a cattle thief that one could not tell where one began and the other left off. Brannan, who had salted the city streets with flecks of gold from a quinine bottle to drum up sales for his mining supplies stores, was sitting on a barrel whittling a block of soft pine with his bowie knife. Nine months earlier he and hide merchant William Howard had transported the first thirty complete frame houses from the East. Dawn light revealed that their prefabs, advertised as “noncombustible houses,” had proved amazingly combustible. The alcalde, colonial mayor John White Geary, was there, too. Geary, appointed postmaster by President James Polk a year earlier, had brought the first U.S. mail to San Francisco by steamer from the East. Everyone else had been drawn to California because James Wilson Marshall saw something glittering in his sawmill tailrace on the American River on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada. Word got out and the world rushed in.

  Chastened by the ruins, the eleven businessmen-politicians ceased talking as the acknowledged hero of the Christmas Eve fire began to speak. Broderick’s Manhattan unit of volunteer firefighters had faced a similar disaster in July 1844 when three hundred buildings burned. “Why were no buildings blown up?” New York critics had asked then. “A few kegs of gunpowder judiciously ignited at 5:00 A.M. or 6:00 P.M. would have saved millions.” The result was the formation of the New York Police Fire Patrol, forty volunteer smoke eaters called the Red Heads after their red leather fire caps who mastered the blasting technique in shifts at night. “Three hundred more buildings burned up on the same spot a year later,” Broderick told the Council. “That’s when we lost Old Number Twenty-two, a silver engine decorated with oil paintings. She could throw a stream of water six stories high. By God, she was ‘The King of All Fire Engines.’ ”

  “The King of All Fire Engines,” Brannan said, wrapping his tongue around the words, trying them on for size. Yes, he liked the sound of that. It might be a way for him to humiliate Broderick, whose power was growing. A ragged scarecrow standing in the shadow of a twisted metal building inched closer. He might have been from Sydney Town, which the Ducks ruled, but unless he spoke and betrayed an Australian accent there was no way to tell. He just as easily could have been a Hound. “San Francisco has to change its habits or even greater calamities lie ahead. These workers”—Broderick swept out his arm toward the devastation—“are constructing new buildings from the scorched wood of yesterday’s fire on the same spot and in the same careless way that has already caused us so much misery.” He paused. “The ocean winds make the smallest fire unstoppable, so we can begin by examining what we don’t have. We have no fire department, equipment, nor fire or building codes. What do we have? We have oilcloth, canvas, and cotton-batting shacks and clapboard warehouses. It boils down to three missing essentials: men, equipment, and water.”

  “Last May,” the alcalde explained, clearing his throat, “the board appropriated money to begin digging a well and a reservoir. We passed a law that required townsfolk to keep leather buckets of sand in their kitchens to put out home fires.” Geary’s eyes strayed to the upper side of the Square where, until a day ago, he had dwelled in a modest room.

  “And what came of this ‘law’?” Brannan said. “Nothing!” He returned to his carving. A considerable pile of wood shavings lay at his feet.

  “Alcalde,” Broderick said, “the few cisterns we have in San Francisco are empty at low tide.” In New York City the Great Croton Aqueduct brought water swarming with tadpoles to a reservoir at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street, where a crude pipeline of iron pipes nine to twelve inches in diameter carried water to hydrants plugged with cork. “After water, our next requirement is men. Fighting fire is backbreaking, man-killing labor, so we need fifty to sixty men—tough men—for each engine. When the alarm sounds, a man has to drop everything, run to the firehouse, and haul a two-thousand-pound engine over steep hills by rope and then pump for his life. Every municipality of importance has a chief engineer who coordinates the armies of competing fire companies. In New York, ours had a team of assistants and watchmen to run the essentials. We paid him twelve hundred dollars a year.” Geary winced as if shot by a musket ball. The Boomtown, packed with instant millionaires, was curiously without funds. “San Francisco is flat busted,” the alcalde said. In August, when he was sworn in, he disclosed that they were without a dollar in the public treasury, without a single police officer or watchman, and had no means for confining a prisoner for an hour.

  “In short,” Broderick said, “you are without a single requisite necessary for the promotion of prosperity, for the protection of property, or for the maintenance of order.” The last prerequisite was equipment. “We lacked equipment in New York, though not so much as San Francisco does. Only forty-nine of our units were engine companies. Of those, only nine were hook and ladder and of those, only six were hose companies. Alcalde, what do we have on hand in the way of water wagons?”

&n
bsp; Two weeks earlier the first fire engine in the city had arrived on the S.S. Magdalen. “We’ve got Number Forty-nine, which we call the Martin Van Buren, after the president,” he said. The eighth U.S. president had used the hand-drawn engine to wet down the lawns and irrigate his fields on his New York estates before William Free brought the engine around the Horn to pump water at his gold mines. “Some engine!” Brannan said. “Twenty-years old. A toy machine.” “We have another,” Geary said, “an inefficient hand-drawn engine—the Oahu, a private water wagon brought from England by Starkey Janion & Company [a British importing firm]. It’s well worn by years of service in Honolulu, in the Sandwich Islands.”

  “Put in an order for two engines,” Broderick said. “Side strokers from New York for Volunteer Company Number One and Company Number Two.”

  “I can prevail upon Bill Howard to buy an engine for a Volunteer Company Number Three,” Brannan said. The Mormon leader owned more real estate than anyone in town and could have bought twenty engines if he had been so inclined, but he allowed his wealthy partner to do the honors. “We’ll still need ladders, pumps, and men trained in their use.”

  “And hoses,” Broderick said.

  “No hoses. No water. No buckets to put water in,” Brannan said.

  “Some salvageable merchandise still lies in the devastation,” Geary noted. “Have the new police chief station men around the burned district to protect the property of the sufferers.” Broderick suggested that they afford immediate medical aid to the few people who had exerted themselves during the fire and been injured. Geary nodded and resolved that the citizens meet in the Square on Wednesday at noon to organize fire companies. “So ruled,” said them all, even Sam Brannan. The eavesdropping scarecrow lost himself among the charred rubble as the councilmen retired. Late that afternoon, under a heavy canopy of smoke, the most illustrious citizens in town appropriated $800 to buy hoses, buckets, ropes, hooks, axes, ladders, and Ed Otis’s wagon. Otis suggested they call the new volunteer department the Independent Unpaid Ax Company. The official names of the three volunteer groups became the San Francisco (or Eureka) Company, the Protection Company, and Engine Company Number One, which, because it was the first to organize, became Independent One. The next day the Council appointed Fred Kohler as the volunteers’ temporary chief engineer at a salary of $6,000 per year, to be paid monthly from the city treasury, and increased by $1,200 within six months if he should be reelected. Kohler insisted Independent One be renamed the Empire because the unit was composed solely of men from New York, “the Empire State.” Because the enormously popular Broderick had been so instrumental in establishing the first volunteer unit and was its first foreman, the majority celebrated the first volunteer unit as Broderick Engine Company Number One, ultimately renamed Broderick One.

  On February 5, 1850, the Council ordered Kohler to obtain three engines. He was to superintend the organization of the volunteers, examine all engines, hose, and apparatus that the city might acquire, manage the construction of engine houses and cisterns, protect all engines and apparatus placed in the houses of private companies, and have the authority to blow up any buildings he deemed necessary for the suppression of fire.

  Sawyer

  On February 17, 1850, shortly after the striking of a single match burned San Francisco to the ground, the Splendid, a 392-ton mining company ship under the command of Captain Bayliss, anchored in the stream with Tom Sawyer aboard. The Spendid had sailed from New York on September 17, 1849, and taken 139 days by way of Cape Horn, St. Catherine’s, and Valparaiso to reach the city of gold. Sawyer, who had just turned eighteen a month earlier, and sixty-five other passengers were rowed ashore for $3.00 apiece. Dressed in a hickory shirt and corduroy trousers, he sat at the bow and added up his worldly goods. It did not take long. The mud-caked and scarred boots on his feet and $11.50 in his pockets were the only items of value he owned. His immediate plan was to seek gold and then to enter steam shipping, running as a coal pusher or fireman between San Francisco and the San Juan and Panama ports or perhaps on one of the river steamers to Sacramento. Unfortunately, San Francisco Bay was jammed with an abandoned fleet of Gold Rush ships that clogged all shipping. In 1850 alone, thirty-six thousand people would arrive by sea. Those vessels that reached the bay were deserted at once by gold-crazed crews and left jammed with cargo and rotting in the harbor. Yerba Buena Cove was so shallow that bigger ships could not approach the shore to pick up passengers or tie up to unload. The loss of all the piers in the Christmas Eve fire had made unloading difficult. Things were no better along the San Juan route, where shipping was in disarray and rioting mobs at Panama City, the last stop before continuing on to San Francisco, were fighting for passage to the Golden Gate. Onboard these arriving ships cholera was rampant. Things were worse in the goldfields. An unabated violent rain, a very warm rain, had melted the snow so that the river overflowed the rich diggings, submerged the goldfields, and washed out the miners, thus mining and engineering were temporarily out of the question for Sawyer. He learned about the first city-destroying fire not long after he reached shore.

  Tom Sawyer

  An arsonist was at work in the City of Wood, an arid tinderbox of kindling and matchwood, of brittle buildings and a few juiceless trees. Fear was everywhere and no one knew what to do. Sawyer surveyed the devastation. San Franciscans were enthusiastically rebuilding the city on the exact site of the cataclysmic Christmas Eve fire and inadvertently making it ready for the next burning. A valiant, experienced runner with long legs and a keen sense of direction, Sawyer decided to use his experience to help organize packs of boys, some as young as seven or eight, to run ahead of the engines to light the way. If there was a vacancy, Sawyer could work the pump with the new volunteers and occasionally be a fire engineer on the river traffic, which was composed of smaller and lighter boats able to escape the shallow cove.

  “Right at the beginning,” Sawyer said, “I temporarily put aside my dreams of being an engineer and sought out San Francisco’s first fire chief, Broderick, whom I knew from our battles in New York. I would be a signal boy, as I had been in New York, running ahead of the engine to light the way with a signal light of polished metal so that the volunteers could find the fire in the confusing streets and avoid any obstacles in their path.” He quickly learned that in San Francisco they used flaming torches, not lamps. Signal boys were nicknamed torch boys or runners. Just as the volunteers bestowed pet names on their engines, San Franciscans dubbed the new fire-eaters Salamanders, implying they could survive a blaze and rise from the ashes like the fabled amphibian. They called a volunteer who tore shingles from a burning house with an ax to gain access a shingle eater.

  On Sunday, Sawyer went to see Broderick at the new engine house on the south side of Kearny, between Sacramento and California streets. He found a fine brick building with the word One carved into its facade. How romantic it appeared in the dim light of February. The lamps had been lit. The smoky air quivered in anticipation. Evening was falling. A giddy, raucous laughter and whirl of discordant music spilled into the street. The powerful New York volunteers known as Broderick One were busy cleaning their huge engine. Old hose carts and used pumps cluttered the firehouse ground floor. Compared to the rest of rugged San Francisco, it was the most attractive, well-constructed, fireproof structure in town. Even more remarkable was how fast they had erected it, in San Francisco style: three days for a house, six for an engine house. When its entrance doors were open, like barn doors, the arched opening looked like the spreading of an angel’s wings. Sawyer felt he was returning to paradise, though the men inside were not angels by any stretch of the imagination.

  Broderick welcomed him as a temporary “bunker” because he had no place to live. “My men are rough men with rough pasts,” he warned, “hard as flint and possessed of lightning tempers.” A town formed as hastily as San Francisco was as inflammable as its inhabitants’ tempers, and these men were walking tinderboxes. Broderick had known them from his New Y
ork firefighting days. They had either sailed westward with him or followed him on their own, slavish in their devotion. They sprang from every class and included merchants, soldiers, laborers, and bankers, but no greater gang of rogues existed—deadly gunslingers, gamblers, professional blacklegs, barroom brawlers, and a world heavyweight champion known as the Ugliest Man in California. All were political shoulder strikers, electioneering ruffians who protected the ballot box as poll watchers for Broderick. A couple were murderers. “Broderick has certainly allied himself with a lively set of rogues,” Sawyer thought. Though of dubious character (many had served time in prison), they loved to fight fire and would lay down their lives for Broderick. That was their saving grace, though almost all of them, like diminutive gunfighter Billy Mulligan, were destined to meet tragic ends: murdered, hanged, or deported. Broderick needed his roughnecks, street ruffians, ex-boxers, and gunslingers to make the political and civic changes needed if San Francisco was to survive the arsonist some called the Lightkeeper because he struck only when the Lightkeeper’s Wind was blowing from the north and signal men on Telegraph Hill were lighting their warning fires against the dense fog. In the process his men might steal a little from rich thieves like Brannan, break a jaw or two, or rig an election or three or four to increase Broderick’s political clout, but was it not all for the greater good? For most volunteers firefighting was secondary to political expediency. They all had other jobs except for Sawyer, who was waiting for an engineering berth on a steamer.