Black Fire

by Robert Graysmith

  Sawyer expertly pieced the cracked hose segments together with well-placed recovered rivets and with pride hung the last length of salvaged leather hose on its peg. “Just like ‘leg of boot,’ ” said Broderick. In the noon light he examined the seams of the durable hose. “The best hose is pure oak-tanned leather,” he said, turning it this way and that. “Just like the sewn leather hose we used in New York—double-riveted seams with twenty-two copper rivets of number eight wire.” He counted them: “twenty-one … twenty-two.” After Sawyer washed the repaired hoses, he rubbed them with “slush,” a cheap preservative of beef tallow mixed with neat’s-foot oil for leather hoses. The smelly concoction had to be applied before the hose was dry. A more supple hose allowed the engine to suction water easily.

  He cleaned the tools, the nozzles and half spanners used to couple the hose; filled the salvaged buckets, mostly hand sewn of tanned sole leather; and examined them for leaks and patched some with pitch. New York fire buckets, on average, held two and a half to three gallons. Broderick One’s buffalo-hide buckets were not nearly so capacious. The men spent the afternoon polishing pipes, pump handles, and trumpets, repairing slender ladders and narrow hoses, and sharpening axes with handles shaped like lazy S’s. Oddly, their most important pieces of equipment were not the formidable axes, sharp and lethal, but the glazed, hand-sewn black fire helmets of quarter-inch-thick leather. They were indestructible, reinforced inside the crown by arches of tanned cowhide. A prodigious rear duckbill or beavertail brim kept water from running down their necks, protected them from falling debris, and shielded them from heat. If a volunteer lost his ax, his helmet was heavy enough to smash a window. The fire caps identified them, too: hook and ladder companies had red leather shields, engine companies had black with white numerals, and the chief’s and assistant engineers’ helmets were colored white. Men designated for house duty tied colored scarves around their helmets.

  Their brass trumpets saved lives, too. Once, during a building fire, the second-floor planks broke under a volunteer and sent him plunging toward the flames below. At the last second he was caught by his long trumpet and suspended between floors. He was saved, but his back was black and blue for a month. During celebrations Broderick’s men corked their trumpets and filled them with fine champagne. At small fires they attacked with hooks, sacks, mud, and bare hands, holding their greatest weapon, explosives, in reserve for a fire as huge as Christmas Eve’s.

  The times between alarms were dreary for the volunteers. After drills and equipment maintenance, they maintained the firehouse, practiced their singing (Sawyer had a beautiful singing voice), played cards, and shot billiards. Former gunfighters practiced quick draws and the ex-prizefighters boxed. The torch boys swept floors, scrubbed windows, polished the engine, washed dishes, scoured the kitchen, and peeled potatoes. When there was a shortage of official volunteers, Sawyer joined in the firefighting and never retreated, even when the fire’s breath singed his only clothes.

  Gloom hung over the city during the first months of 1850. Unemployment was high. Drowning on dry land was a distinct possibility. The uneasy landfill grew hungry during rainy weeks that stretched into wetter months. Water rushing beneath the streets created sinkholes, mud pits, and bogs. Montgomery Street was a mud plague of quicksand. Drunken men were swallowed whole; half-drunk men were swallowed halfway. In January and February the bodies of three men were discovered under the mud in front of Everhart’s Tailors. Any man who stumbled into a boggy sink at midnight, too tipsy to extricate himself, would be there in the morning, cursing, and had to be lassoed like a wild steer by strong men pulling from the safety of a planked sidewalk. No one faulted the victims. In bright daylight, sober, heavy-booted men got stuck as often. To avoid being pulled “eyeball deep,” merchants frequently unloaded directly on the Montgomery Street waterfront. Sacramento Street, above Dupont, existed only as an impassable ravine and was not even “jackassable.” A mule team, wildly snorting and still hitched to their wagon, disappeared into its quicksand and was never recovered. Teams were sucked under marshlike roads. Luckier steeds were hauled out by cables reeved to blocks lashed to the pillars of any standing building.

  Sawyer wandered along Market, passing storefronts proclaiming “Crooks Sperm and Polar Oil,” “Union Rooms,” and “Eighteen-Carat Hash.” With no pavement, he chose his steps carefully, ready to leap to safety at any moment. Volunteer George Oakes favored bottle steps as a way to get around the mud streets. “Some merchants hammer bottles neck down into the mud in front of their stores so their customers can cross the street on pretty little glass stepping-stones,” he said. “Drinking here is such a passion that empty bottles are our greatest resource.”

  Meanwhile, Broderick’s quiet search for the arsonist continued. He had a secret weapon: a way to discover the Lightkeeper’s identity. He did not have much time.

  The Mankiller

  Sleeprunners and Flying Houses

  One golden March day in 1850 followed another at the new firehouse as Broderick’s volunteers threw balls; held grand dinners; presented stage musicals, plays, and chowder parties; and competed with the other companies to see who had the grandest furnishings. The new Sansome Hook and Ladder Company spent more than $5,000 for theirs. In the evening Broderick One’s angel-wing doors were opened to the coolness. Sawyer, who had just turned eighteen, and Fred Kohler, Broderick’s partner and chief engineer of all the volunteer companies, arms folded, leaned back on cane-bottomed chairs and observed the blue light that came so suddenly over the Gold Rush town. As summer approached, its soft evening light would seemingly last forever. These were fine times for the Brooklyn street boy—a warm bed, good friends, and heroes packed with foolhardy courage to admire. Best of all he had a puzzle to solve and a villain to catch. At that moment San Francisco was the most exciting and swiftest-moving city on earth. Every day on average thirty new houses were built, two murders committed, and one small fire set. Rugged, heavily armed men trudged past on Kearny Street—unkempt, unwashed young men—a fine hardy breed in heavy woolen shirts with rolled sleeves, sashes for belts, and trousers cut from canvas tents. Rugged mountain men and well-fed merchants passed together. Lynx-eyed gamblers in black broadcloth coats learned that their patent leather boots got just as caked with mud as the miners’ plain boots. The arsonist, if Broderick was right, could be any of them, even someone Sawyer knew. One question dominated his mind: What was the arsonist’s motive for burning down San Francisco? In the search for the Lightkeeper, Sawyer’s attention focused on a gang called the Hounds. It happened that he and George Oakes met a particularly vicious band of them the following Sunday.

  “Watch out,” Oakes warned the boy. “The Hounds are barking!” When the Hounds barked, the town became meek. Like an army under command, the thugs struck hard and shot fast. Storekeepers never antagonized these masters of the plunge and knife who robbed and stabbed in daylight without the slightest provocation. One passerby returned an insult from a Hound. The thug tore his tongue out. Another accidentally brushed a Hound’s shoulder. His ears were sliced off. One Sunday some citizens collided with their ragtag parade. The riot, which lasted all afternoon, left the innocents clubbed and bloody and the Hounds stronger and more feared than ever. At the head of the reconstructed Square, an arrogant group of men in grimy quasi-military dress entered the public space. Playing discordantly on a fife and drum, the Hounds marched, accompanying their makeshift parade with groans, hisses, catcalls, and yelps. Tramping directly into the center of the Square, they stopped waving their banners to shove a few folks from their path.

  “Lieutenant” Sam Roberts, the “Hound Supreme,” guided five of his men into a restaurant. Roberts, an illiterate brute in a tattered uniform of full regimentals with dirty gold braid, made sure his men ate and drank gratis. He sat down at a table and propped up his muddy boots. “Gin and Tonic! Gin and Tonic!” he jeered. The owner obeyed. He knew the Hounds often piled up restaurant furniture and set it afire before they left. At a sh
adowed table not far away, a tall thin man with greasy black hair sat listening. His hands were callused and scarred and his face pockmarked. His long coat hid a soot-stained, handmade copper lantern the size of a snuffbox at his belt. A crude opening had been cut into its side to create a small door. The interior was large enough for a single coal and some kindling. This man observed the Hounds wherever he could. It was easy. All day every Sunday, Hounds dressed in outrageous military costumes marched into every corner of the city.

  “The Hounds are a semimilitary company of sixty to a hundred young thugs,” Oakes explained to Sawyer. They sprang from the gangs of the Bowery and the Five Points at the intersection of Baxter, Park, and Worth streets, a “bull-baiting, rip-roaring hell” with its own “Den of Thieves” and “Murderer’s Alley.” New York diarist Philip Hone wrote of Five Points’ child gangs as “swarms of ragged barefooted, un-breeched little tatterdemalions.” Many had been signal boys for the New York fire companies. Too unlawful and unsavory to last, the Five Points’ “Plug Uglies” and “Dead Rabbits” from the Empire Club on Park Row had come west with Broderick’s mentor Colonel Jonathan Drake Stevenson in March 1847. The Hounds were remnants of the 750 ragtag soldiers in the First New York Volunteers that Stevenson commanded to secure California during the Mexican War. Hostilities had ceased by the time they reached the Pacific Coast, so in San Francisco they were idled and ill content. Because sailors deserted every ship that arrived in the cove, the city hired the ex-soldiers as peace officers, called them the Regulators, and paid $25 a head for each runaway sailor they captured. Finally, the Regulators became a greater evil than the lawbreakers they had been hired to apprehend. They formed a ravening gang of sharpers and gamblers, named themselves the Hounds, and set up headquarters in a big tent they called the Shades, at the corner of Kearny and Commercial streets.

  In the Square the intimidated restaurant owner served Roberts and his men for free. He would endure. Soon there would be no Hounds. In the meantime, it was wiser to let them take out their viciousness on the town’s minorities. Allegedly under orders from the former alcalde, T. M. Leavenworth, the Hounds set out to rid the town of Spanish Americans. In the lee of Telegraph Hill lay Spanish Town, the Chileno quarter. The Hounds, who lived at the base of the hill, launched murderous raids on the villagers on the slopes above. The night of July 14 in the year before, their self-appointed committee of justice perpetrated a drunken racist attack on Little Chile. Beating, killing, and raping, they stole a fortune in gold dust and set ablaze what they could not use. W. E. Spofford organized 230 citizens into armed police squads and headed toward the Shades, which was empty at the time. Roberts escaped, but the search of a Stockton-bound steamer unearthed him in the hold hiding behind bags of sugar. In a single day Sam Brannan tried, convicted, and deported twenty Hounds and sentenced the ringleaders, including Roberts, to terms ranging from one to ten years at hard labor. Because at the time the city had no jail to confine them, they were temporarily lodged on the warship Warren in the cove, then released into the city. Everyone knew the Hounds set fires for protection money. In the Square the six thugs finally left and staggered down the street. The sound of the fife and drum and their calls of “Woof! Woof! Woof!” faded into the distance. The thin man paid for his meal and strode in the direction of the waterfront. “Woof! Woof! Woof! indeed,” thought the Lightkeeper.

  When Sawyer returned to Broderick One, he heard terrible news. Recently an incumbent state legislator had been named to the California Supreme Court and left a vacant State Senate seat. Broderick, revered because of his heroic actions during the Christmas Eve fire, was overwhelmingly elected 50 to 1 to replace the departing senator. Broderick’s dream had been realized, but now the chief’s time would be divided between San Francisco and San Jose, the temporary state capital forty-nine miles to the south. Thus a strong leader and calming influence that might have prevented the next city-destroying fire would be absent.

  Because there had been no major new fires, the movement to build well-equipped firehouses began to decline and the pursuit of daily business again took precedence over the city’s survival. In short, the citizens forgot to be afraid and fell back upon their indolent ways—just what the Lightkeeper had been waiting for. The first real trouble came from the volunteers themselves, not the arsonist. As more fire units rapidly formed, the firefighters, having no fires to fight, felt their special niche in society slipping away and began to battle one another for dominance. Earlier the discord had been kept to the playing field where Broderick One, with little competition, had excelled in every field, especially marksmanship. Broderick, though only a middling-to-fair shot, had organized a crack musket company to compete for awards with the other departments. His rifle team, a military organization called the Empire Guards (after the Empire State), grew to 125 members. On field trips they competed publicly with their muskets for prizes in target shooting. They were still tops in pumping, singing, dancing, and organized bare-knuckle fisticuffs. Fighting was a way of life to the New Yorkers and battles at minor fire scenes became commonplace.

  Senator Broderick returned from the capital to check with Kohler about the worsening conflict between the engine companies and cautioned him to defuse the situation. Unheeded, their discord could destroy everything they had worked for. But winning battles didn’t establish the magnificence of any firehouse; its engine did. In this, Broderick One was not deficient, but hampered by the Mankiller’s age. To them the old New York side-lever pumper’s clean lines and graceful curves were beautiful. Their hearts leaped as the dilapidated machine rattled over newly planked streets peaked in the center to facilitate water runoff. It took all their skill to keep the engine on the straight and narrow. Beloved as their antique fire wagon was, it was not “the King of All Fire Engines” that Sam Brannan yearned to make his own. No one doubted any volunteer company possessing the invincible king would reign supreme. While no engine house could afford such a machine, Brannan could. With his deep pockets and crooked schemes, the man who had built a terrible floating prison, salted the muddy streets with gold, and fleeced the miners could buy anything he desired. And he desired everything.

  Harsh winds whipped sand off an eighty-foot dune and into the streets. A storm provided the water to turn sand to mud. Ocean wind set clapboards banging, doors slamming, gates rattling, and shingles soaring over Sawyer’s head. From the abandoned ships he heard squeaking blocks and yards and spars snapping. Feeling the first few drops, he ran onto a piazza running alongside a house. Two fashionably dressed women were huddled in conversation beneath the overhang as a downpour began. In the slanting rain, launches sped from the anchored ships to the rude, fire-damaged adobe near the lower end of the town, the Custom House. Men rowed for the Merchant’s Exchange and gambling houses. Carriages and drays flew pell-mell. Teamsters in sugarloaf hats lashed their horses, only sinking deeper. Rolling wheels cut deep trenches in the mud. Across the street huddled “the Fountain Head Man,” who kept a tray of horehound and peppermint candy tied around his neck. Another vender tried to keep his armload of China silk handkerchiefs dry. “Only half a dollar each,” he hawked without hope.

  The rain turned all of San Francisco into a slough of liquid mud, a bog that ruled their lives. It ranged from ankle deep to “off soundings,” ensnared grown men up to their knees, and sucked down small boys. Sawyer rolled up his trousers and plunged on. The rain poured with little interruption until March 22, when it stopped altogether and the city dried to tinder overnight, ready for its next burning. During the following days strong winds and dust kept everyone dirty. Anyone who escaped the mudpits still became filthy in the hard labor that was everyone’s lot. All their work was for nothing. Soon afterward the second great fire completely destroyed San Francisco.

  Sawyer turned restlessly in his bunk and listened to the heart of the city beating—church bells chiming, the crack of a pistol, volunteers serenading a favorite actress at her hotel. In the shallow cove he heard rotted sails flapping. Out
there somewhere was a man who could reduce it all to ruin. On Wednesday, May 1, 1850, voters formally elected John White Geary as the city’s first mayor and Malachi Fallon as the first city marshal (chief of police). Thursday was Steamer Day, that special twice-a-month time, approximately the first and fifteenth, when arriving steamers brought as many as sixty thousand letters and picked up eastbound letters to loved ones, business correspondence, and gold dust for shipment. On Steamer Day the post office lines were often three blocks long. It took a day and a night to give out all the letters. While waiting in line, men drank brandy toddies, juleps, and brandy straights or paid someone $50 to stand in for them. The sturdy post office, the former home of first citizen William Howard, was an improvement over the former Pike Street office, with its single delivery window. Howard, who had made a fortune in hides, moved to a small cottage which, as he added little colonnades and connected wings and extensions to increase its capacity, he converted into a weird maze. He took in borders, including the hasty but cowardly Alta editor Edward Gilbert, who raged against the lawlessness.

  Sawyer observed that several ships had arrived with heavily insured merchandise identical to tons uncrated on the wharf last week. Should the city burn while the floating and landlocked warehouses bulged with a glut of unsold inventory, the merchants might profit instead of failing. Could some merchant have been behind the Christmas Eve fire? Some of the recent small fires had been arsons, but not all. The towns of Grass Valley, Columbia, and Sacramento had this week been nearly wiped out by blazes from natural causes. On the slopes along the San Francisco coast a cluster of redwood shacks had been dried by sea winds and spray. The makeshift frame two-by-fours, rough planked and unpainted, stretched in every direction. Brush surrounding them on the reddish cliffs made their ignitability inevitable. Inland, the same rising gales whipped the Square and dried the wood. The city by turns denied and braced itself against the threat of fire.