Black Fire (18 page)

Retorts of powder exploding in other blocks followed every minute like gunshots, but no amount of black powder could save the wood warehouses between Montgomery Street and the water. Over at City Hall, a company of marines forced spectators back as soldiers marched chests of gold dust to a secure area. As they rolled closer to the docks, a team of Ducks blocked their way. The men of a U.S. warship whipped a path for the soldiers with the broad side of their swords and enabled them to reach the shoreline. As if magnetically drawn, the blaze leaped for the new waterfront and anchored ships. How many besotted sailors would go up in flames on their straw-filled, gin-soaked mattresses? At the mudflat, the soldiers dropped the chests into the muck and jumped on top to force them under. Bluejackets shoveled mud over them, then ran from the advancing flames. An advancing wall of flames herded five hundred pitiful citizens out onto Long Wharf. Sobbing, they watched flames crawl relentlessly toward them. The refugees, Coffin among them, were driven into the heart of the Ghost Fleet. The cool metropolis
of deserted ships offered temporary refuge, but now the castaways were cut off from all communication with the city. With a sudden shift in the wind, the dancing cinders and black smoke suddenly doubled back shoreward to where the fire had begun, the Merchant’s Hotel. The door of the furnace had reopened. Unbelievably, the blaze began to reignite the already burned areas. As the fire burned up the available oxygen, its color altered from yellow to red. Momentarily spared, the castaways on Long Wharf listened to screams from the burning shore. The fire on shore persisted most of the day.

Night fell. Flames colored the sky with a copper glow. Outlanders saw a shroud of ashes forming over the docks. Small craft caught fire. Larger vessels began to smolder. As if from a pepper mill the cloud of gray ash settled out over the Ghost Fleet. Black unburned smoke boiled upward until it reached fresh oxygen, then exploded in flames on top of the dense shroud of smoke and lit the sky again. Now one end of San Francisco rose from fire, the other from water. DeWitt & Harrison’s storehouse, midblock on the north side of Pacific Street, was threatened. Kohler recalled that about a dozen years earlier, when the Bowery Theater caught fire, Old Matt Carey of Engine Company Twenty-six had protected the adjacent buildings by hanging wet carpets, mats, and blankets over them. In San Francisco, storefronts along Washington Street had been hung with blankets during the Christmas Eve fire but had not been dampened enough, and those buildings were lost. Kohler had DeWitt & Harrison’s commodities warehouse roof covered with soaked blankets and had wet the walls of buildings in advance of the fire. To attack directly with water would create scalding steam. In the midst of all this fire it was odd to see torch boys, leading volunteers to the fire by torch through the darkened bogs. The Ducks were there ahead of them, hindering rescues so they could loot.

Sawyer, hair singed, arms blistered, and eyes watering, saw two Ducks who had plundered some buildings race to pile their swag in a vacant lot and return again. A stranger stood at the forefront of a crowd, pinhole eyes alight with flame. Sawyer found his eyes focused on him. In spite of the heat, the man was leaning into the blaze smiling and extending his palms as if warming himself. The mob swept by him and he vanished as if he had never existed.

Throughout Friday night, the five hundred refugees on Long Wharf huddled at its far end and gauged the blaze’s progress through the fog. At dawn Saturday, the fire made the water ruddy and tinted the morning
fog a salmon color, then red. Finally the red curtain dimmed and sank to a smoldering orange. As the fire subsided and heavy smoke rolled over the refugees, the town on shore and shipping in the cove became indistinguishable from each other. They felt a “fatal euphoria” come over them. The fog burned away late in the morning and the first rays of dull, gray sunlight penetrated the canopy of ashes shrouding the city. The volunteers had saved some of the waterfront, though the low tide had rendered many of their water wagons useless. Abandoned, these pumpers lay as charred rubble on the pier. Dozens of ships crowded at their moorings were damaged, but Captain Coffin’s sloop,
Sophronia
, was not among them—the first good fortune he had had since a recent unproductive trading expedition to Marysville. Solemnly he and the others left the long pier to inspect the charred sites of former homes and businesses.

At the quartermaster’s, gun barrels had twisted like snakes. Coffin reached the burning pyramids of lumber. “When everything else was swept away, they stood like fiery giants … the genii of the catastrophe,” he recalled, “with innumerable arms and tongues of flame, constantly spitting out flashes and cinders. Everything else was swept away.” A gravelike pall lay over the former downtown. Not a breath of air stirred. Block upon block of glowing embers emitted a suffocating vapor. The city was like a lava flow. Jagged trenches of deep red, bright orange, and yellow glowed under the blackened crust, eerily lighting the landscape. The burned-out business district was low, dark, and red. Coffin weaved among the ruins. Buildings crumbled to dust at the first freshening of the prevailing sea wind. Precious metals accented the blackened landscape. At Coffin’s feet gold and silver had melted into the ground and pooled in glittering rivers. Rainbow lakes of glass, once the windows of happy homes, reflected his face in brilliant colors. As the sun ascended, these mirrors became blinding. Spoons, crockery, forks, and knives had melted together in heaps. Tons of fused black nails littered the dunes in the shape of the kegs that had contained them. Iron warehouses had shrunken into unrecognizable cages. A fireproof safe had burst open and was empty.

Coffin met an acquaintance who had been burned out three times in six months. “Come,” Coffin said, patting him on the back, “no dumps, up and at it again.” “No, I am done for now,” he said. “Between the first two fires I had time to recover myself, but from the third of May to the thirteenth of June is not long enough. Only let me have six months’
interval and I shall be prepared, but forty days is not enough. No, no, the risk is too great! I shall sell my lot and try my fortune in some other place.” To his left, survivors were lunching on roast ham, baked chicken, hot preserves, vegetables, and sardines—all cooked by the fire and blackly burning in drifts.

New England gold hunter Richard Hale surveyed the damage. “In a very short time,” he said, “only smoking heaps of ashes and charred debris told where San Francisco had stood, for the town had burned to the very sand.” He returned to his home on the hill to find his shack had survived. “The heights had not been swept,” he said as he entered and sat down. His single door and window let in a view of the town and the corner of the bay beyond. “Below us lay a smoking, ashy waste, flat to the sand.” The city lost its expensive new wood-plank roads. An examination showed that cheap pine had been substituted for the pricey redwood planks. More graft in the city of graft. Still deeply in debt for the road’s construction, the Council would have to issue bonds and impose stiff taxes to regain its credit balance so they could replank the streets with more cheap wood. The conflagration had hit the residential section as never before—four hundred major buildings, a four-block-square area, had been consumed at a cost of almost $3 million. The fire was again attributed to incendiarism. “Some of the largest losers by the recent fire,” reported the
Alta
, will in the end be the greatest gainers. Editor Gilbert estimated that the opening of Commercial Street would enhance the value of the land abutting it, greatly exceeding the value of the buildings destroyed. Much of the property was in the hands of commission merchants and the biggest losses would fall upon New England and New York shippers. The San Francisco merchants had in truth benefited.

Two days after the fire, the Square resounded with the rap of busy hammers. Men raced from every direction clutching hammers and saws and tripping over smoking timbers. With manic enthusiasm, almost hysteria, these undaunted citizens flew to instantly rebuild as they had done two times before and would do again. “One would suppose our people would become discouraged by such rueful reversals,” John McCrackan said, “but instead of that they seem rather to gain new impulses and energy.” Swarming to work, they duplicated past mistakes. Singing, they attacked the rubble again, nailing smoking boards onto the shells of still-smoldering houses with still-hot hammers. “Onward!” They were working on San Francisco time. The owner of a melted warehouse
was already bossing a master carpenter and putting up a new store. The floor of the new El Dorado was laid before dark. At daylight the next morning a frame was raised. In a single week a new establishment of rococo elegance with lascivious paintings on the walls would be up and running. In three days three stores would be occupied and operating.

Coffin headed back to the waterfront. “The three huge pyramids stood there for three days and nights,” he recalled, “gloating over the general destruction till at last the same devouring element having eaten them off their balance, they toppled and fell in a crash of fire and smoke, the grand finale to a stupendous pyrotechnic exhibition.” Street preachers shuffled through the smoking embers bellowing that God was leveling San Francisco for its debauchery, sharpsters, and thieves. They were probably right, but the noise of busy hammers drowned them out, leaving their dour sermons to hang over the city like another shroud of ashes. Barrels of gunpowder stored in basements over many blocks remained a constant threat, as did the desiccated redwood structures, ignitable ship hulks, discarded goods, dry-as-bone timbers, and oil-drenched buildings. As Coffin tried to sleep on the
Talma
, he could practically hear the flutter of kerosene, whale oil, and camphene lamps, of fat wax candles and the hiss of open stoves. Another strong wind swept in from the ocean. Howling, it blew away the cinders and dried the living firetrap, making it ready for the next big burning. People were already taking bets on when. In two weeks all would be as it had been except for the Montgomery Street banks, impervious as eggshells, that had burned. Since the fine for refusal to aid firefighters had been ineffective, the Council raised the penalty to $500. No one would pay that either.

All the volunteers had torn ligaments, scalds, injuries caused by falls, and considerable smoke in their lungs. Sawyer had injured his hand. He and new volunteer Mike Gully argued over the best balms for burns. Kohler commonly used a mixture of nitrate of silver, sulfate of iron, bicarbonate of soda, white paint, and sulfate of zinc to heal burns, but Gully suggested Sawyer hold his burn
patiently
in cold water so no blisters would form. Good advice.

Widespread discussion over who had been setting the blazes raged. The leading theory was that the Ducks were igniting San Francisco as part of their protection racket. Some thought the Hounds were using the ensuing confusion to loot stores and rob citizens. “No matter what
the answer is,” the mayor said, “we’ve got to improve buildings.” First, he banned the use of highly combustible building materials. Citizens raided the San Mateo hills for thousands of feet of new redwood, filled in ditches that had impeded the volunteers, and dug some artesian wells. There was talk of using corrugated metal and granite blocks for the new buildings, but by now the same old firetraps as before had been erected. Citizens met at the St. Francis Hotel to further organize the unpaid fire department. Local government had little control over the volunteers. They could construct their engine houses wherever they wanted but tended to overprotect some neighborhoods and underprotect others. In July the mayor signed an ordinance to propose the establishment of a charter. Within a week Broderick, who was emerging as political boss of the city, twisted arms and got the charter approved. Another two fire companies were created, not regional but nationalistic departments, which only made friction between the cantankerous volunteers worse. As Sawyer had seen in New York City as the number of companies grew, they became more competitive. In the East, firefighting had become less community service than armed combat. Around Pell Street and in the Bowery residents still spoke of the 1836 battle between Lady Washington Company and the Peterson Engine Company when hundreds of volunteers and bystanders were caught up in a knock-down, drag-out, and bloody slugfest. New York Engine Company Number Two, notorious for its bitter rivalries with companies Nineteen and Twenty-six, was disbanded for brawling, as was the Hudson Company.

The next new San Francisco company was California Engine Company Number Four. It displayed none of the lavish gold braid of Social Three. Their uniforms were plain as boiled potatoes, though they had them shipped all the way to New York to be cleaned at a cost of $1,300. Their modest dress caused them to be called the Simple Fire Company, or Simple Four. Cook Brothers & Company lent them their first water engine. It was simple, too, but would soon be replaced by a Hunneman pumper. William Hunneman, an apprentice of Paul Revere and Ephraim Thayer, built and designed more than seven hundred manual engines. Simple Four’s procedures for responding to fires, though, were complicated and required two sets of men—one for a cart and one for the engine, which made their response time to a fire slow. Their engine house, a lean three-story building with a white flagpole and Moorish grillwork, stood on Sacramento Street as far east as the edge of Happy Valley. A year earlier squatters had pitched their tents on the eastern portion
of the cove and named the sandy level Happy Valley. It was neither happy nor a valley, only an unhappy region of plague. Most of Simple Four’s members lived and toiled there in its planning mills or in the Peter Donahue foundry. One of its rugged laborers, William S. O’Brien, Number Four’s foreman, became one of the Big Four millionaires who controlled interests in the Comstock Bonanza, the richest strike ever. Sam Brannan, who suppressed the squatter movement, had so far been unable to oust the settlers and before long would advocate that the city take violent action. An inordinate number of future detectives and police chiefs sprang from Four’s ranks. Isaiah Wrigley Lees, a machinist in a foundry, became San Francisco’s chief of police and widely known as the greatest detective in the nation.