Black Fire (33 page)

Eventually this last conflagration burned itself out—thanks to the torch boys who nailed stores of blankets to the front of Barny and Patten’s building on the southeast corner of Sansome and Pacific streets and kept them saturated with water. The fire, moving east, ran up against the blankets like a wave and died. On Montgomery Street, sheet iron in the windows and doors of Howard and Green’s basement halted the flames there.

Farther along Montgomery, gratings and solid iron doors melted and ran off in blazing streams, and streets glowed like the inside of a smelter. Burning skeletons of men, horses, and mules crumbled to powder in the wind. A waxworks dissolved, leaving behind a foot-deep walk of colored wax with bits of costume jewelry congealed inside. Jones’s Hotel at the foot of California Street survived, protected by a brick building on one side and an unoccupied iron house on the other side. A lucky alteration of the wind’s course toward Sydney Town kept the fire from crossing Sansome to the south of California Street and spared the Happy Valley and great stores of lumber. After igniting upper Washington, the flames had burned all the houses around the square and any areas that had survived the May anniversary fire. Kearny and Sansome streets burned, as did the entire district between Pacific and Cunningham’s Wharf between Green and Vallejo. The inferno destroyed ten blocks fronted by Broadway, Powell, and Sansome streets and incinerated the last traces of Colonial San Francisco of just two years earlier. Ghost Fleet ships that had transported hordes of forty-niners burned to their keels.

This time the fire had destroyed the previously untouched northwestern quarter of the city—ten to fifteen blocks bounded by Sansome, Mason, Washington, and Broadway streets and all the buildings between Clay and Powell. Nearly all the northern portion had been incinerated. The foothills were untouched and, after some rains, would be denser than before. Though the sky was still tinted with a lurid glow, the last vestige of the blaze on the other side of the city burned itself out against a barren hillside.

“Just think,” said Sawyer. “Five hundred more buildings—gone!”

Stillness fell over the city. Hundreds removed their possessions to the Square and guarded them throughout the night. Piled goods made impressive bonfires. Men rich only a few hours earlier wept and ran their fingers through ashes that had once been splendid fortunes. Women collapsed on steps that led up to only rubble. Others drank from simple tin cups and blankly pondered on fate that had turned the wind at one point and punished the gangs behind the arsons in Sydney Town. Steam condensed and rained over acres of blackened shells. The City Hospital burned and ninety patients were carried to a vacant lot. On the hills at the head of Kearny and Dupont streets, thousands shivered amid chaparral and the few household goods they had saved. Many lives had been lost: A man burned to death on Jackson Street and another perished trying to save his storeroom. Three people in the Square died from flames, the police shot two looters, and four or five other pillagers perished at the hands of outraged citizens, including the unknown man buried by bricks. Sawyer liked to think there had been some justice at the end and never found out anything different. That was good enough for him.

He passed the rubble of a brick warehouse and a melted iron building. He pawed through the ruins of a brick warehouse, examining the flaws that had allowed air to spread the fire into the interior. Last, he trudged to the empty, jack-legged house on Pacific where the fire had originated. Though the abandoned home had been the catalyst for widespread destruction, it had survived with only two walls gone. As wind cut though the shell making an eerie howl, Sawyer could almost hear the mirthless laugh of Ben Lewis. Possibly the arsonist had surrounded himself with fire to warm a cold heart. At least the devil had returned to the flames and he was not going to look for him any further. As in the anniversary fire, the fire was doubtless the work of an incendiary. No fire had been used about the empty, makeshift house for any purpose whatsoever. Sawyer wondered what they would find when they removed the pile of charred rubble by the merchant’s store. Would the arsonist still be there or had his body vanished into the warm earth? Was it even him? Perhaps he had escaped to burn again. “Ben Lewis,” he thought, “the man who burned San Francisco to the ground.” The Lightkeeper was dead, if not at the hands of an infuriated mob then as a casualty of his own blaze. The fires should now be at an end. He had only walked a few feet when he halted. “If Ben Lewis was the Lightkeeper,” he asked
himself, “then who had started the second blaze that had simultaneously erupted on the outskirts of town?” Lewis could not have been in two places at once. The Lightkeeper had to have a secret partner, and he was still out there.

The June 22 fire reawakened arson fears. Four days after the Vigilance Committee advertised a reward for “the capture and conviction of anyone guilty of such a crime.” At one time, a strong suspicion of arson rested upon a black man known as Ben Robinson. In spite of an antislavery clause in the state constitution, he lived in abject subjection to a depraved white woman, Margaret Robinson, who habitually beat him if he disregarded her wishes. When police arrested him on suspicion of starting the fire, he confessed he had done so in obedience to Mrs. Robinson, who had a grudge against the man in whose house the fire originated. With unusual negligence, officers allowed him to escape, but vigilantes immediately seized him and took him to headquarters on June 30, when he repeated the same story. Mr. and Mrs. Robinson were arrested the same night; thereupon Ben withdrew his whole confession and accused a cop of bribing him to tell the story. Uncharacteristically the Committee unraveled a plot to incite the vigilantes to take action against Mrs. Robinson, “whose evil life made credible any tale that might be told about her.” The Robinsons were discharged on July 12.

According to the
Annals
, four of the conflagrations had been started by gangs of former convicts from Australia led by Ben Lewis and his partner. Further proof the arsons were organized came from two more feeble attempts. A man tried to fire the Pacific Street Wharf and was arrested. Someone set fire to the rear of Marvin & Hitchcock’s building but was foiled. Police discovered where the arsonist had broken a glass pane in the door sash leading into the yard and had set fire to the window curtain. The match was still on the floor. “More than ever,” wrote the
Alta
, “we are convinced by this there is in this city an organized band sworn to destroy it.”

Kohler had had enough. “We should abandon this site and find a place that won’t burn down with such damnable regularity,” he said passionately. “Perhaps Benicia or Sacramento.” “Will these fires never end?” other townsfolk lamented. “We can take no more.” Hundreds of San Franciscans loaded their goods into wagons and ferried them to the East Bay, where their only neighbors were the Gonzales Ranch, a sprinkling of Spanish ranches, the tiny town of Oakland, a wilderness stretching all the way to the Benicia settlement, and an army garrison
at the far eastern end of the bay. In the emptying streets the preachers bellowed that the city was a Sodom and Gomorrah, referring to wicked cities reviled in the Bible and destroyed by fire from heaven. “These six horrendous disasters are God’s great retribution to an evil city,” the local prophets said. The churches filled and people begged for forgiveness. Perhaps the chastened multitude was heard at last. After June 1851 there were no more city-destroying fires. The persistent volunteers and their valiant torch boys had won.

Between December 24, 1849, and June 22, 1851, San Francisco had been completely burned six times (seven times if one counted the December 14 fire, which Kohler did), with three thousand structures lost. The mayor estimated that a total of $25 million of uninsured real estate had been lost in the eighteen months through the fires. He estimated that San Franciscans had lost $44 million of personal valuables, including great quantities of gold and jewels. Unlike four of the previous conflagrations, which had burned out residents, gamblers, and merchants, and the anniversary fire, which had burned out the business section, the June 22 inferno was the “poor man’s fire,” which hurt the common laborer with a loss of $3 million.

With the mines playing out and the multimillion-dollar loss of the sixth fire, the future looked bleak. The mayor could not go to the City Hall at Kearny and Pacific streets. That was gone. The prison was transferred to Sheriff “Coffee Jack” Hays’s jail, and he packed eight or nine more men into each of the already crowded cells. So far only seven new cells and a keeper room had been completed. He had no idea how to finish the expansion project. There was a mortgage of $4,000 and a lien of $2,250. An honorable man, the sheriff paid most of it out of his own pocket.

So much of the city had burned that finding a place to suit Martha Hitchcock’s aristocratic pretensions was difficult. The winds of Rincon Hill where her family took temporary refuge disturbed her. So did the neighborhood’s constant gunfire. Eventually Lillie and her parents moved into the new hotel on Market Street, at Bush and Battery streets. Martha liked the beautiful exterior with its broad verandahs, but because the hotel was built out over the bay, she had to tiptoe across narrow planks to the entrance. The makeshift interior was furnished with French antiques from the William Leidesdorff estate, but the glare of astral lights revealed scurrying rats. Upstairs flammable cotton ceilings stretched above the bedrooms. All over the city tons of scrap metal
protruded from the rubble—safes, tools, metal warehouses, and stoves. Workers spent three weeks cutting up the twisted remnants of Howard and Green’s melted warehouse at Clay and Leidesdorff. It cost more than $9,000 to cart it away. All that metal created a new industry. Cheap recovered iron made foundries the city’s newest and biggest industry. From the melted wealth came more wealth as brick and iron replaced the flimsy, comparatively worthless lumber flooding San Francisco. San Franciscans were proud of their fires—grand fires, heroic fires, the greatest ever seen—because they had fire in their veins. They thrived on the blazes because each brought a new and finer city.

On July 9, Dutch Charley and Broderick spoke at an antivigilance meeting in the St. Francis Hook and Ladder firehouse. On July 21, Lewis’s trial for arson began in the district court. The next day Sawyer heard that he was convicted in absentia and sentenced to two years. Lewis was nowhere in sight. Juror and Vigilance Committee prosecutor and recorder George Schenck speculated in his trial notes that the arsonist had escaped and traveled to New York, where he murdered Dr. Harvey Burdell, a dentist, and killed a second man in New Jersey in 1857. Dr. Burdell, though, had been strangled and stabbed by the mistress of his Bond Street house, Emma Cunningham, and one of her borders, a man named John Eckel. Unless Lewis was Eckel, Schenck was wrong. If Lewis was still alive, he was a very lucky man. Two days after his conviction, a new state statute made arson punishable by death.

On July 21, Ira Cole reported that Dutch Charley was drinking more liquor in one day than he used to drink in a week. Yet his love of fighting fire, an admirable quality, might yet save him. Who could not admire the dedication and single-mindedness of any man who raged against those who interfered with the honest occupation of firefighting and dealt out dreadful punishment to those who disrespected the volunteers? In spite of his furious tantrums and bullying, he was a fireman at heart, possibly the bravest of all. Always first on the front lines, he was cited numerous times for heroism at the scene of a blaze. He was a bad man to have against you and a good man to have with you. When mobs began to lynch men in the streets, Dutch Charley would stand almost alone against the thousands for the rights of a few. He was especially needed in the worsening rivalry between the volunteer companies that had toiled for the public good so long without reward.

On October 4, just as Zeke Wilson erected Wilson’s Exchange, the first five-story on the Pacific Coast, Sawyer finally shipped out for the first
time as a coal pusher on the ill-fated
Independence
under the colorful Captain Wakeman. It was only the second visit of the new steamer to San Francisco. That same day the tireless promoter Tom Maguire reopened his latest Jenny Lind Theatre on the same site where his earlier Jenny Lind Theatres had been destroyed by fire. Poor Tom Maguire. He had opened one of the city’s first theaters above his saloon only to see it burned in the anniversary fire, worked hard to raise another $100,000 to rebuild, even labored as a bartender to earn money. He reopened his Jenny Lind Theatre at Kearny and Washington streets on June 12, and by June 22 it was ashes. “The next Jenny Lind,” he vowed, “would be of fireproof brick, yellow-toned sandstone facings shipped from Australia, grander with gilded trim, an orchestra pit and a dress circle.” He kept his promise. The handsome new three-story neoclassical structure, shipped in sections around the Horn, had a gorgeous gold and pink interior capable of seating two thousand people that rivaled the best theaters in the Atlantic states. Sadly, the sorely put upon entrepreneur had built too well. The Council cast its coveting eyes on the palace and demanded it as a replacement for the destroyed City Hall. In August, Maguire sold it to them for $200,000, an exorbitant price brokered by his friend Broderick. The cash was diverting but hardly fulfilled the thwarted promoter, who would rather have had his beloved theater. If Maguire could not win on land, then he would triumph on water. He would outfit a floating “Jenny Lind at Sea” from a rebuilt stern-wheel steamer. Within two years the seaborne theater would be throbbing past Pulgas Ranch off San Francisquito Creek when her boiler steam pipes would burst, explode through the dining room bulkhead, and kill thirty-one aboard. Scalded passengers leaped over the side as flames enveloped the
Jenny Lind
, which drifted onto the riverbank and sank. Tom Maguire would die a pauper.

On October 21, Dutch Charley led his men to the St. Francis Hotel fire on Dupont and Clay streets. Seeing the upper two stories in flame, he ran hoses through the ground-floor doors to fight the fire from the inside, an efficient, effective way to fight fire. The flames were out in twenty minutes. The
Alta
wrote, “Mr. Duane … regardless of the flames, heat and danger, placed himself in the second story of the frame building using his energy and brawn to save it.” His redemption was happening just as Sawyer had predicted. On December 5, Pacific Eight helped reelect him as the volunteer companies’ chief engineer.
Dutch Charley, reformed and reforming, enforced the ban on hazardous stored explosives by going from house to house enforcing the “powder ordinance” by seizing kegs of explosives and arresting the owners. One day he came to a small, empty shack in the Mission, saw an unsafe stovepipe encased in wood on its roof, entered and discovered a trapdoor in the floor. Prying it up, he located a stamping machine, a press, tools, coins, and dies—a counterfeiting operation. Police confiscated the equipment but not the counterfeiters. He never retired before the first light of dawn. “I told Mr. Yale [who needed his aid] that I made it a rule since the firemen of the city had so honored me with the highest position in their gift never to go out of hearing of the fire alarm bell. The city had been burned to the ground and had been almost wholly destroyed nearly every time there was a fire before I was elected Chief Engineer and I did not propose to let such a catastrophe occur through any neglect of mine.”