Black Fire (21 page)

T
here was a terrible night fire in Nevada City on September 17, 1850, but from natural causes, not arson. Gongs sounded as a blazing feedback loop consumed the tinderlike pine houses in the town. The red glare fell far back into a pine forest of dry bark, needled tufts, and dead spines smelling of pitch and turpentine. In San Francisco all was well for a change. A fresh harvest moon dominated the sky. A warm wind swept in from the bay—the so-called Lightkeeper’s Wind as Sawyer had named it and which could be considered a trade wind, if the trade was arson. In San Jose, Broderick slept contentedly. Almost everyone in San Francisco was asleep, too—except the gamblers, johns, and the incendiary who had pulled on his hooded greatcoat and set off into the fog. Whoever he was, in whatever disguise he wore in daily life, he was practicing his true occupation at 4:00
A.M.
A trail of sweat coursed down his cheek as he labored through the mud to reach his target. His eyes glittered. Prometheus was bringing the gift of fire to the city; Vulcan, the fire god, was forging it.

All the inmates of the Philadelphia House Saloon on the northern side of Jackson between Dupont and Kearny streets were slumbering before their open fires when the gongs sounded. They woke to terror in their rooms of white muslin walls and oilcloth floors. Hearts beating fast, they pulled on their clothes and staggered toward the nearby Washington Market. They fled, leaving their windows and doors open to provide oxygen for the fire. Swiftly the fire created its own winds through the updraft, and the stairway became a chimney flue to upper rooms. “Not again, not again!” they murmured. “No! For the love of God, No!” Many were awakened a few blocks away on Battery Street by the cry of “
Fuego, fuego!
” In the tumult the cry, “
Quack! Quack! Quack!
” went up in the muddy pond. The Sydney Ducks were robbing and murdering and cackling as they did. At his firehouse, Sawyer cried, “Drop everything. Hit the ground running. Jump into your boots, pull up your trousers, and get to the engine.” By 4:10
A.M.
volunteers were heaving at the pump handles and hurling themselves at the blaze. The roar of flames drowned out cries for help, but the victims were lucky. The fire moved torpidly because it was night. Night winds go downhill because of the cooler temperatures and move slower than during the day because of higher humidity. Day gusts usually fly uphill because the sun heats the ground and convection carries the fire upward. Burning buildings throw off their own heat, and as the hot gases rise, the vacuum pulls in more oxygen to ignite the unburned carbon in the smoke. That heat creates a convection current and upward tornado that carries the embers for miles to start more fires.

During this fourth great fire the flames ravaged the greater part of the blocks between Dupont Avenue and Montgomery Street embraced by Washington and Pacific streets. The devastation reached half a million dollars, though officials estimated twice that amount. At least during the fire all personal feuds between ethnic and regional firehouses were temporarily forgotten as the volunteers worked together to one purpose. The arson cleared a hundred one-story wooden shanties. Sawyer went inside the few that had survived. As he had suspected, their interiors were lined with flammable paper and baize (coarse woolen cloth with a nap on one side). The destruction of so many firetraps opened up a large centrally located area where larger, fire-retardant buildings could be constructed. Because the June fire had been so recent, most of the larger buildings had not been rebuilt and thus could not be lost again.

The cost of replacing buildings was becoming cheaper as each year the cost of labor dropped and wood from Oregon became more easily obtainable. Dr. Merritt, a physician who had a sideline of importing knockdown houses from back east, made certain his customers were satisfied. The day before the fire, one of his clients discovered a door missing from his order and had gone to Dr. Merritt to demand it. He promised to deliver it in the morning, so he got up early, carried the door to his customer’s house, and found only a mound of ashes in the spot.

In San Jose, Senator Broderick was busy lobbying for more durable structures for San Francisco. The city erected some iron prefab buildings with heavy iron shutters and masonry and put up a few three- and four-story brick warehouses, painted a depressingly ugly red, on Montgomery Street. Finally they began a two-and-a-quarter-mile plank road between Portsmouth Square and Mission Dolores. The city also repaired Long Wharf, seriously damaged in the third big fire, at a cost of $180,000 and sent it stretching two thousand feet into the cove so eastern merchants’ speedy clipper ships could tie up in deepwater. Captains
increased wages to hold trustworthy crews, but the days of seamen’s deserting in the cove were ending as the gold mines played out.

The city’s first modern fire engine, en route from New York, was slated to arrive on the first anniversary of the Christmas Eve fire. Sam Brannan, hide merchant Bill Howard, and Talbot Green, all major financial supporters of Company Three, had each pledged $600 to the city’s firefighting effort. Green had had a street named after him before it was revealed he was really Paul Geddes of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, who had a second wife and had absconded with $8,000 from a Pennsylvania bank. Green went east to clear his name and never returned. Brannan had to settle his $600, but nothing could dampen his enthusiasm for that splendid Hunneman engine he had ordered with $20,000 of his own money to ride during the upcoming Fireman’s Day Parade. On September 20, Kohler’s term as chief engineer ended and the volunteer companies voted on his replacement. Andrew McCarty was elected, but three days later the Council realized that though the Protection Company had cast 104 votes, they had only fifty members. The results were thrown out and Kohler was formally reelected on October 19 to another eight-month term.

A day earlier Dr. Jacob Stillman, who had observed many of the tragedies in the city, had finally been on his way out of San Francisco. “Good riddance,” he said. He had kept a careful journal of his tribulations over the last fourteen months. “It is man here that passes into sere and yellow leaf and not trees,” he said. Just then the
California
’s sister mail ship, the
Oregon
, steamed through the Gate and anchored halfway between the city and Alcatraz Island. Flags were fluttering from her rigging. Stillman observed a large banner in the bunting he could not read. The
Oregon
’s crew began firing cannons from her deck and sailors on other ships began discharging their artillery. Next, big guns roared from the fort. Thousands were converging on the waterfront, some firing revolvers. Shouts filled the streets. On Long Wharf, Sawyer, Kohler, and Senator Broderick tried to read the
Oregon
’s banner. The eighteen-year-old’s eyes were sharpest. “Just you read it! We’re the thirty-first state!” Sawyer yelled. “Now we’re at home again. We are
in
the States!”

“Far better than being a state,” added Senator Broderick, who was the symbol of every Californian against slavery, half the population, “we are a
free
state!” And that, thought Sawyer, in spite of Broderick’s skating on the edge of the law, in spite of his rough friends and rougher tactics to make the changes he wanted, was why he idealized the man.
Every great man was just about a hundred years ahead of his fellows. To him the senator stood for all that was noble in the city. He was, after all, only slightly dishonest in a thoroughly dishonest city. Until now the common answer to the question of a person’s nationality had been, “I am a San Franciscan.” Now everyone answered, “I am an American!”

The Council appropriated $5,000 for a celebration the next day, but the impatient citizens arranged the grand affair that night at $20 a head. They held the American Ball at the California Exchange on the corner of Clay and Kearny streets. Because supper was served at the Union Hotel at Merchant and Kearny, the owners built a carpeted bridge from their modest building to the Exchange so women would not have to go out on the boggy streets and tread over sacks of beans in their fine gowns to reach the ball. The sheriff, appointed chief of twenty-eight marshals, kept the event secure and the American Ball was a glittering success—and none of the women even got their shoes muddy. With Kohler’s reelection as chief engineer of Broderick One, Sawyer saw his chances for any future advancement diminished. He got along poorly with Kohler, who could be ostentatious and once paid $1,500 for a single seat at Irish-born opera diva Catherine Hayes’s concert, even had his men shower the stage with gold nuggets, jewels, and fifty-dollar pieces in heaps at her feet.

Sawyer walked to the corner of Gold and Sansome where Sansome Hook and Ladder Number Three kept their small firehouse and aggressively added his two cents’ worth to the latest volunteer group to form. He suggested a division of labor—hose men would fight the fire and ladder men would rescue victims and use their hooks to pull down walls. Sansome Three was in charge of blasting caps and black powder for all the other companies. Blowing up buildings in the path of an uncontrollable fire had proved to be the one foolproof means of containing a blaze. Until now Three had stored the explosives in the biggest cart in the new state, one large enough to hold fifty-foot ladders but maneuverable enough to be kept out of a fire’s path. A bigger, more substantial fireproof engine house, though, was really the answer. Sansome Three was sustained by rich businessmen, among them their foreman, A. DeWitt, co-owner of DeWitt & Harrison’s warehouse, who paid for a new $44,000 headquarters on Montgomery Street. The furniture alone cost $5,000. “Ah,” Sawyer thought, “if only the rest of San Francisco was built so well.”

Bill Daingerfield, an eastern lawyer who dreamed of making big money by buying real estate and selling political secrets, joined
Broderick One as a volunteer. When Daingerfield’s new properties in Shasta burned down, he wrote his family back east: “I will make a fortune and a large one, in the next few years, I will have information that I can sell to speculators at a high price, as I will have full knowledge of the character of all the lands put into market.” He predicted a profit of $9,000 in his first year, and that then the governor would make him a judge. As a judge he would have even greater secrets to sell. Until then he would fight fire and sell a new kind of property he had discovered. He had decided to invest in city water lots, plots of water in the cove that when filled in could be built upon. Senator Broderick had invented the water lot by introducing a bill in a sleight of hand in the Senate that transferred title to the waterfront from the state of California to San Francisco. After the bill passed, the city turned over the water lots to a ring of predatory politicians who were managing municipal affairs. The city marked streets and offered rows of building lots that still were submerged a quarter of a mile offshore. When the plots were auctioned off, Broderick and Brannan had first bid on the most valuable. Though Daingerfield never became rich, in three years the governor would make him a judge. Never more than moderately successful, he would die while hearing a case. His days with Broderick One, though, were his happiest because then his dreams were boundless and possible of fulfillment, and hope still existed.

Between fires, Sawyer did a little river work on the San Joaquin and Sacramento river steamers, in shallow San Pablo and Suisun bays, and traded periodically in Sacramento and Marysville. On October 31, another arson gave the volunteers a scare. The blaze, kindled by an unknown hand, set afire the City Hospital. Dutch Charley and Archie Watson of Protection Two arrived first, got 150 patients out, and then discovered the fire had communicated to a one-and-a-half-story garret. Dutch Charley and Archie found no one inside, but they were cut off by flames. Dutch axed a hole in the roof to escape and sent Archie out first. “After shouting through my trumpet to the St. Francis Hook and Ladder Company for a ladder to be placed against the house,” Dutch Charley recalled, “I followed Archie. We slid to the edge of the roof where the ladder was hoisted and then went down through the flames which burst out from the windows on both sides and singed our hair as we passed.” On the lawn outside, Mayor Geary, a normally unassuming man, was issuing orders directly in conflict with those of Chief Kohler. Finally Kohler had had enough. “Keep your mouth shut or leave the
ground instantly,” he snapped. When the mayor refused, Kohler ordered Dutch Charley to place Geary under arrest. Only after he had escorted him some yards toward jail did the mayor agree to “clear out of here.”

On December 14 a second intentional blaze ignited inside Cooke Brothers and Co.’s iron building at the foot of Sacramento Street below Montgomery. Another million dollars in merchandise and several iron buildings went up in smoke, but its breadth did not gain the status of a city-destroying fire. Now the city treasury was as empty as the reservoirs. So far two big fires had been kept from spreading. The volunteers had to celebrate that fact. The city still stood, but the people thought every cry was a signal of impending destruction. At any moment the Lightkeeper might murder again with the striking of a single spark.