Black Fire (19 page)

Hearing the alarm by day, volunteers all over the city threw aside their cashbooks and ledgers, kicked off their shoes, jumped into their boots, and hit the ground running. Hearing the alarm in the evening, they leaped from their theater seats. Hearing the alarm at midnight, they started from sleep, pulled up their trousers in one motion, and got to the engine house half dressed to wheel their pitiful engines out and pull and push for the fire. The first heavy strokes of the alarm bell had barely ceased when the brighter peals of engine bells supplanted them. A few minutes’ delay and all San Francisco might be ablaze, and who could stop it this time if not them?

Knickerbocker Five joined Broderick One and Manhattan Two as a volunteer band composed exclusively of New Yorkers, though mostly of German ancestry. Their first firehouse on Merchant Street had been destroyed by fire. Their new $10,000 three-story brick-and-stone-cut house was on the north side of Sacramento Street between Sansome and Leidesdorff streets. Five’s mahogany Van Ness piano box–type pumper was a small wheezy engine named Two and a Half. When they were not dragging Two and a Half around, they pulled a three-thousand-pound New York piano box type called Yankee Doodle. The local practice of firemen’s singing chanties at the blaze began with Number Five. Their most spirited, deep-voiced songster was John “Curly Jack” Carroll, a man of imposing height. When refugees from the Sacramento deluge were evacuated by riverboat to the steamship company in San Francisco, they were put up at the Sarsfield Hotel next door. Twenty-four hours later, a rainy Sunday at 10:00
A.M.
, Curly Jack Carroll, dressed in his splendid wedding threads—polished silk top hat and tails—dropped by rival Big Six, so called because the Baltimoreans pulled the biggest
engine of all, to discuss the wedding ceremony with his best man, Foreman J. H. Cutter. Two hours before his wedding the fire bell rang for Big Six’s district. A fire in a clutter of wooden tenement houses had leaped to the Sarsfield Hotel and trapped the Sacramento refugees inside.

Curly Jack threw off his top hat, pulled on his helmet, and in his hundred-dollar tux raced to the scene with Big Six. As a torrential downpour beat at them, Six pushed and pulled their Philadelphia-style, 4,200-pound double-decker up slick, steep hills and still beat the other fire units to the hotel. The trapped refugees had panicked, the wooden window casements had caught fire, and many were leaping from the balcony into the front street. A woman was ready to toss her infant to the crowd below when Curly Jack threw back his head and spontaneously burst into song. “Oh, we’ll hunt the buffalo,” he sang, a song he had carried with him from New York. His deep bass voice rose melodically above the cries of the trapped and calmed them. This respite gave Manhattan Two time to arrive. As the volunteers beat at the flames and set up ladders, all the men began singing. Their song gave rhythm and order to their methodical pumping. Curly Jack only stopped singing when he spied a trapped woman on the top floor and plunged into the smoking building after her. He fought fire for five hours and then stumbled home late Sunday afternoon, fortified himself with a tumbler or two of whiskey, and collapsed on his bed. As he slept, his prospective father-in-law showed up at Sarsfield Hall brandishing a six-shooter and looking for him. On Monday, sixteen hours later, Curly Jack awoke, realized he had slept through his wedding, and rushed to his bride. No one knows what she said to her soot-covered groom, but when he did marry, it was ten years later and not to her.

In San Francisco, fire and music went together perfectly, like fire and arson. Five sang their way through supper and sang while they fought blazes. They sang their way to fires and sang their way back. As they cleared rubble with their fire hooks, they sang—“Oh, we won’t be home until morning.” Soon these lusty, boisterous, musical volunteers made Five the singing fire company. While Social Three had the best singers, Five sneered at them as sentimental fellows who relaxed between pumpings to sing “Suwannee River.” All his life Big Six’s assistant foreman, Steve Bunner, found intense delight in singing “Hunt the Buffalo,” which became the anthem at the volunteers’ funerals. When Five’s volunteer Cherry was dying, he asked his fellows to give him a grand funeral because he had no money. At his funeral all the firehouses flew
their flags at half-staff and filled the sky with rockets. Residual sparks from the pyrotechnics set a building afire.

The volunteers went on sweating, singing, and straining over steep hills and rough terrain, the only light provided by boys and teens with torches. Broderick One, Manhattan Two, Social Three, California Four, and then Knickerbocker Five and Big Six became unrestrained in their desire to be first at the scene. The honor of putting out a blaze first became the ultimate mark of pride and a goal worthy of any transgression—including bloodshed and, potentially, murder. This new discord disrupted what little harmony had been achieved recently between the volunteers. Big Six’s Charley “the Bone-breaker” McMahon punched a rival fireman so hard he broke a bone in his own hand. Three’s obsessive drinking made them belligerent and it would grow worse over the years until one morning every member woke up with a hangover and decided never to suffer through another such New Year’s Day, swore total abstinence on the spot, and dashed their liquor bottles into the street below. Their foreman, Franklin Whitney, organized the Dashaway Club, the first temperance league in San Francisco. Whitney was unhappy that they were forced to use Free’s toy mining pump as an engine, so he had Volunteer Tom Battelle speak to Bill Howard, who brought a beautifully painted $4,000 pumper in from Boston on his ship,
Windsor Fay
.

Sawyer knew with dread certainty that the Lightkeeper would strike. The question was when. He would not stop of his own accord. He would have to be stopped, but how could they when getting to the fire was just as dangerous as fighting it? He worried that during the next blaze the planked streets themselves might catch fire, and then what would they do? With no gutters, the gold-hungry townsfolk assigned the plentiful winter rains the task of carrying filth down the east and west streets into the cove. In summer the garbage remained where it had been dumped, drying hard in the sun and forming a crusty, sticky patina that, to Sawyer’s surprise, assisted horses to gain their footing. Tons of unclaimed cargo were stacked on shore. No one was interested enough to buy or steal it and highly paid ferrymen had no time to track down the rightful owners. When formerly valuable items became a glut, auctioneers chucked perfectly good merchandise into the pits along Clay and Jackson streets. When the cost of storing merchandise was greater than its value, merchants used the items as landfill. Downtown street foundations were composed of barrels of flour and sugar, cement,
spoiled beef in barrels, tins of lard, tin cheese boxes, chests of coffee, rolls of sheet lead, crinolines, revolvers, bales of hay, and crates of patented gold-washing machines designed by men who never saw a placer mine. The sidewalk running along Leidesdorff Street from Montgomery to the Pacific Mail Office was made of one-hundred-pound boxes of first-class Virginia tobacco. The day the price of four thousand pounds of chewing tobacco dropped to three cents per pound, the owners buried fifty large casks. The next week tobacco was valuable again. One landfill consisted of two shiploads of Spanish brandy dumped over two acres of waterfront ground.

South of Market, bounded by Folsom and Mission and Fourth and Tenth streets, was a quicksand bog that sucked anyone crossing out of sight. Each spring the city did maintenance on the single road to the cemetery that cost $15 per square inch. Because the city was flat busted, all the roads remained quagmires and a hazard for the volunteers and their torch boys. Here and there nestled a small refuge, but immense dunes still covered much of San Francisco. The town’s hills had always presented a predicament. No level ground existed beyond the narrow crescent rim forming the beach. The shore itself was a coastal desert of windblown sand, bare tawny hills, and formidable granite mountains. At times Sawyer thought Broderick One’s job was impossible. Their ancient engine, the Mankiller, was barely functioning. Because there were still no new fires, the movement toward fire safety declined and the pursuit of business again took precedence, and as time went on, harmony among increasingly competitive volunteer units grew discordant and then vanished altogether.

As for who the arsonist was, Broderick believed the long-sought fire fiend was a member of the gang clustered around Telegraph Hill. With his ties in Sydney Town and a secret undercover informant, he continued to narrow the field. Riding the swells alongside the deserted hulks, Captain Coffin eyed the cove. The tough river trader kept track of the comings and goings in the city of deserted ships around Long Wharf, and it was here that the answer to Broderick’s riddle lay. The fog was working its way across the bay’s nearly four-hundred-square-mile surface and enveloping the ship buildings that entrepreneurs had connected to city streets by narrow docks, fragile catwalks, and massive wharves. Coffin watched a man float his skiff beneath a portion of Long Wharf and remain there. There was the flicker of a lantern, the glint of a knife. Thieves sometimes tunneled into storehouses on the wharf above
by sawing away the floor planks beneath safes and letting the gold drop into their boats. The shadowy figure had come from the direction of Sydney Town and might be planning the next city-leveling fire. Coffin lost the man in the fog but was certain he had gone away with three men. He thought he recognized the first man as English Jim Stuart, the leader of the most vicious gang of thieves, grafters, and murderers in town.

Meanwhile, the Council had decided to plank east-to-west streets, such as California and Sacramento, from the waterfront to Stockton Street. Only Nob Hill’s steepness halted planking in that direction. As the city grew, workers built new roads but did not bother leveling lots down to street level. The hills above Stockton Street had been too steep for wagons to climb without ending up in a tangle at the bottom, so the city planners decreed Stockton be laid out as much as fifty feet lower than the existing topography. This made for some decidedly odd homes. Houses constructed before the grade of the street was fixed suddenly found themselves perched high above Stockton Street, which now cut through the hillside. The torch boys had to run through narrow ravines with high cliffs on either side with rooftop lots that might be on fire. The potential to be crushed by an avalanche of fire was a real issue. Sawyer, running in the wide trench of Stockton Street, dodged pebbles and avoided fine sand showering on both sides. Earth sometimes gave way beneath a stranded house and sent it tumbling down into the road. He studied houses above on both sides. Cliff-dweller families climbed ladders to their front doors—now twenty-five to forty feet above street level—drew up all their food, wood, and water by rope, or climbed rickety wooden stairs. By night they crouched in front of their camphor lamps and pondered why they had so few callers.

While these houses tottered above the rim of a gulch, necessity had made an important thoroughfare; dwellings in lower-lying areas had the opposite problem. The regraded roads formed a high embankment, nearly burying the block of houses at its foot. Residents became archaeologists, excavating the falling earth each evening to tunnel to their buried front doors. No flat land existed between Nob Hill and the water’s edge along Montgomery Street. Wide California Street had to be planked by the following year. Between California and Broadway was the densest area of business. Small portions of Montgomery and Washington streets had been cobblestoned, but the numbering of houses on Washington would not begin until the following May. Then San Franciscans
could ride or walk from one end of the town to the other over reasonably dry ground. By year’s end, seventeen streets would be planked for almost ten blocks. It was one step ahead, two steps backward as repeated battering by iron-rimmed wagon wheels and sharp horseshoes ruined the new planking. “Planking has served well in the infancy of the city,” the press commented, “but it is probable that so perishable a material will soon give place to cobblestones or Macadamized paving, or even square-dressed blocks of granite or whinstone.” An enterprising local, Charles Polhemus, built a forty-foot-wide plank road from Third to Sixteenth Street, the edge of the Mission District. He charged a toll: twenty-five cents per horseman, seventy-five cents for a wagon with two horses, and a buck for a four-horse team.

Alta
editor Edward Gilbert stormed from his office. Though he owned the most important paper in town, he was perpetually discontented. He hated what he saw in the city and wished he could do away with the whole thing. Along the waterfront a man was found with a cord around his neck, another with a crushed skull, and another with knife wounds in his back. In an argument over a cigar, teenager Domingo Basquez stabbed a man to death. Gilbert passed warehouses where miners inside wagered on dogfights. Over on Kearny and Commercial and Clay streets, rat races and rat circuses flourished. Plays presented at theaters like the Lyceum and Bella Union appealed to the basest emotions. As for the arsons, he did not think the Ducks were behind them. No, he had another theory: A merchant had instigated the fires. Some merchants had been outbid, out-ordered, and beaten to San Francisco by their rivals. Before the Christmas Eve fire, their warehouses had been swollen with unsold goods with more shipments of the same arriving with every steamer. Afterward the fire prices rose 20 percent and merchants cleared their inventories.

Seeing corruption all around him, Gilbert walked to the bright lights of the Square, the center of all debauchery. All-night gambling dens such as the Parker House were raking in gold dust. “The city shouldn’t be this way,” he thought. “Somebody should do something to clean this wickedness up.” Why, there were more saloons than boardinghouses in town; more gambling dens than hotels. He stalked across to Delmonico’s for a steak and sliced tomatoes. As he ate, he jotted down ideas for an editorial: “Systematic pillaging by organized gangs during the confusion of each fire suggests the presence of profit-motivated arsonists such as merchants.” “Yes,” he vowed, “someone should do something.”
He heard the crackle of flames in the distance—“My God!” he thought. “The Ducks are quacking!” In the heat and tumult, the cry “
Quack! Quack! Quack!
” went up everywhere.