Black Fire (39 page)

That October, Sawyer and his men were exceptionally busy. The entire city seemed ready to burst into flame again. On October 18, a Brannan Street stable was destroyed and Peter Reynolds was burned to death in the straw among the rearing horses. The next day Maurice Doyle’s house on Jones Street caught fire. Liberty Hose got their new four-wheel hose carriage to the scene immediately, but two children were lost. Sawyer returned slowly to his engine house, vowing to do better. Fresh from battling another fire, he entered the steam room with a towel around his waist. He and Twain talked over cards and afterward at the Blue Wing over drinks. Sawyer regaled him with his adventures fighting black fire, the worst kind; all the bad things come together at once. Twain listened attentively. Sawyer’s speaking voice was melodic and he had a beautiful singing voice. He sang Irish ballads at the bar for the rest of the night.

Again Twain tried to tackle his first novel and again it was Steve Gillis who derailed him. On December 4, Gillis got into trouble with the San Francisco police for whipping a bullying bartender. Twain, who was in trouble with the cops, too, hustled down to the smelly courtroom and signed a $500 straw bond for Gillis. Sawyer was not surprised that the police were out to get Twain. “He and I used to play pranks,” he said in an interview with the
Call
. “And the narrow escapes we had from the police …” He rolled his eyes. “I am sober enough to tell it, I guess. It was great sport in those days to bait the police. We just escaped getting locked up many a night. Guess Sam hasn’t forgotten how we used to go
around to the dance halls and scatter cayenne pepper on the seats and get all the girls crying.”

Twain intended to even the score with the police by writing some scathing critiques when he and Gillis returned from the played-out goldfields of the Sierra Nevada and Tuolumne, one hundred miles east of San Francisco. He still had $300 in his pocket from the sale of his last two shares of plummeting Hale and Norcross silver stock. “The Hale & Norcross officers decide to sink a shaft,” the
Call
reported that week (December 4, 1851), telling how their shareholders were being victimized. “They levy $40,000. Next month they have a mighty good notion to go lower, and they levy a $20,000 assessment.… Thus it goes on for months and months, but the Hale & Norcross sends us no bullion.”

By January 1865, they were in Angel’s Camp in Calaveras County linking up with Steve’s brothers, Jim and William, who were pocket miners on the hill. Steve returned to Virginia City and left Twain with them. It was the rainy season and his most frequent journal entries were “rain,” “beans,” and “dishwater.” Twain, trapped indoors hearing the recycled tales of the miners, listened to pocket miner Ben Coon’s recitation about a celebrated jumping frog, a story first mined by the Greeks two thousand years earlier. He made an entry: “Coleman with his jumping frog—bet stranger $50—stranger had no frog, & C got him one—in the meantime stranger filled C’s frog full of shot & he couldn’t jump—the stranger’s frog won.” He turned the tale into a story. On January 20, he wrote his mother and sister he longed to be back piloting up and down the river again. “Verily, all is vanity and little worth—save piloting. To think that after writing many an article a man might be excused for thinking tolerable good, those New York people should single out a villainous sketch to complement [
sic
] me on!—‘Jim Smiley & His Jumping Frog,’ a squib which would never have been written but to please Artemus Ward.”

In late February, Twain, blue with cold, returned to San Francisco. No Occidental Hotel for him this time, only the inexpensive family rooming house managed by Margaret Gillis at 44 Minna Street. He sometimes saw Sawyer, helmet tucked under his arm, dashing to Liberty Hose’s firehouse on the east side of Fourth Street about four blocks from the boardinghouse. His company of twenty-four smoke eaters often awakened Twain as they responded to a blaze, but returned quietly on one night, slinking back to the engine house after having lost more lives. Sawyer’s men needed better equipment.

In March, a week after her return from another trip to Paris, Lillie joined her “Dear Number Five” at a blaze and rode with the engine driver. “There’s Lillie. There she is!” shouted spectators as she passed. The fire lasted all night. When it was over, she treated her handsome men in their tight black leggings to a feast at the little two-story Ivy Green Restaurant. “The City had not been the same without Lillie,” wrote the
Call
. Now she was the belle of San Francisco society with a considerable circle of suitors (she had already been engaged fifteen times). Her mother said that in Paris, Lillie was “knee-deep in men.” With her “brilliant accomplishments and personal graces,” a contemporary reported, “she would entertain at one time a circle of twenty gentlemen.” She had never seen Lillie enter a ballroom. “I would see a crowd of men walking into the room and another following; then you knew Lillie Hitchcock was in the center.” The Hitchcocks moved to the new Cosmopolitan Hotel modeled in the French style with a château roof, iron fencing on the topmost story, and frescoed rooms filled with carved rosewood furniture. In Lillie’s room crimson velvet drapes encircled a huge wardrobe for her Paris gowns. Her mother forced a maid on her, the better to keep an eye on Lillie’s rebellious ways. In retaliation Lillie began singing outrageous and filthy songs from her balcony to medical students passing below. She invited Twain to dinner with her mother to brighten his spirits and her mother invited Harte to brighten hers. All four headed to the Cosmopolitan Restaurant.

Chief Davey “the Prince of Rogues” Scannell, who lived nearby in room 11 of a hotel on the northeast corner of Montgomery and Jackson, was eating one of his marathon dinners there. With age his lean face had grown plump and pink, but in his younger years he had been fair, tall, straight, and compact of frame, with light blue eyes and a droopy blond mustache and goatee. “[He had] solid powerful arms and legs like a horse,” Big Six torch boy Charlie Robinson, one of the great marine artists of San Francisco Bay, described him: “His head rose large and full in the back like General Grant’s, showing great bravery and determination. He was lacking in the great thought processes of the General, as indicated in the lessened prominence of the forehead. And now I will tell you something of Scannell that I have never known of any other human being in the world. The first thing on coming down in the morning, he would take a dinner goblet of half-absinthe and half-whiskey. I have seen him often at the Commercial bar. How much is a dinner goblet? Just measure one out and see. You should have seen him in the early
’50s. He was a dandy, a wit and a municipal character in an age of notable individualists … and everybody’s darling.”

Scannell still looked dashing but had not changed his diet since 1850. He scanned the Cosmopolitan menu listing wild game and fowl of every variety. The surrounding hills offered elk, deer, turtle, hare, antelope, and beef. He ran his finger along the list—oxtail soup, baked trout with anchovy sauce—and came to rest, then went on, searching … roast stuffed lamb, roast pork with applesauce, baked mutton with caper sauce, corned beef and cabbage. A pause. He licked his lips. He liked them all. Scannell’s finger was moving to the next page when a friend pointed out Lillie, Martha, Twain, and Harte sauntering in the door and sitting down at a table. Scannell did not look up, only lifted the menu to cover his face. “Why there’s Miss Lil, our lady fireman,” his friend exclaimed, grasping his arm. “You don’t need to tell me who she is!” Scannell snapped and slapped the menu down. He made a practice of never mentioning Lillie in his many newspaper interviews. His head was by now inflated to immense proportions. Across the dining room, Twain saw him and waved, chuckling and calling out his name loudly. “The Chief does look younger than his years,” Harte said. In spite of his gluttonous past, he still cut a fine figure in his pure white foreman’s coat, helmet ornamented with gold and silver lettering, and bright silver trumpet slung over his shoulder. Right now his speaking tube hung on the back of his diner chair.

An inspiring leader, Scannell managed his men skillfully and they admired his reckless courage. He had, while fighting fire, broken his arm three times, cracked two ribs, and fractured his collarbone. When Scannell served at Broderick One, the air was always blue with his oaths. He was prone to more cussing than all One’s Bully B’hoys combined. Broderick had explained away Davey’s profanity as “merely his rough manner of expression when moved.” Scannell had come west to fight with Colonel Jonathan Stevenson’s regiment during the Mexican War and stormed the heights of Chalpultepec shouting, “Go in there, boys.” As a war hero, he reached San Francisco onboard the
Gold Hunter
. Scannell had heard Lillie was not going to run with Five anymore. Her decision had puzzled her parents, who believed the firehouse to be the most important thing in her life. Scannell was delighted, though, and bent to his food with renewed vigor. His fork flashed in the candlelight. “Naturally she has to suffer the penalties,” he said as if she were being punished. “Lillie has to pay her fines for being absent.”

The morning of the May firemen’s parade, the harbor was trimmed with flags. At daybreak fire bells began to ring. Thirteen guns in the Square saluted. Firehouses swung open. Engines were pushed and dragged to California Street by men in skintight breeches and high boots. As Scannell donned his white helmet and slicker, he was perturbed. Any firefighter in town who eclipsed his own popularity always inflamed him. The most popular volunteers in town were Curly Jack Carroll of Five, a fine singer who now owned a barbershop and was another of Lillie’s favorite firemen, and Crooked Con Mooney and Cockeyed Frank Atkinson of Number Ten. “The most romantic rival of Scannell was Sawyer of Liberty Hose,” Helen Holdredge wrote. This day, though, the celebrated smoke eater, whose past was so romantic and future so bright, was not the star. That was Lillie, resplendent in her red shirt, black skirt, a parade helmet with her initials, and a formal parade belt from the Veteran Firemen’s Association. Scannell was vexed that she would ride Five’s flower-bedecked engine after resolving to no longer fight fire. It seemed dishonest. Lillie climbed over the oversize front wheels and confidently took her place atop the engine’s wash box amid wreaths, garlands, and bouquets of flowers. Seven years earlier she had ridden on top of the same first-class, hand-pumped $5,000 engine. Five’s engine had two ten-inch cylinders, the longest pumping bars ever built on a side-stroke machine, and in full operation, powered by a pumping crew of sixty, it could throw a stream of water more than 250 feet. Lillie waved. The yells of “Tiger, Tiger!” in return were deafening. As the roar of cheers and hand clapping for Lillie rose, Scannell sank lower in his seat, his mouth a thin line. Twain, in the crowd of cheering San Franciscans, studied the petite Lillie, smiled, and went to look for Sawyer.

Let Us Build a City

P
eter Donahue, owner of the Union Iron Works, south of Market, had heard about the new, improved steam fire engines from New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. He enumerated Moses Latta and Abel Shawk’s Uncle Joe Ross, a 22,000-pound steam horse-drawn wagon, the Old Rock; Hunsworth, Eakins & Co.’s Independent; and Reaney & Naafie’s Mechanic, the Hibernia, and the Good Intent, which had taken part in the Philadelphia steam engine trials of 1859. Lee & Larned exhibited their Elephant, the first practical mobile steam fire engine, at the International Exhibition at London’s Hyde Park and afterward presented to Manhattan Engine Company Eight. Donahue decided to buy his own steam engine. The High-toned Twelve learned of his mission and ordered their own steam engine shipped by way of the Isthmus. Simultaneously Big Six foreman George Hossefross dispatched his own order by Pony Express to have a steamer quickly sent around the Horn. Big George bet $500 with Twelve’s foreman that Six would have a steamer in their engine house before Twelve hauled theirs from the ship’s hold. He won, but his express freight charges equaled exactly the amount of his winnings.

On July 3, Billy Mulligan was arrested for assault with a knife against Walter McGairy in a Clay Street cellar. Three nights later, two veteran firefighters, Con Mooney and Jack McNabb, saw him throwing money around Ten Engine House on Kearny Street. “He’s suffering from delirium tremens,” McNabb realized. At 1:30
A.M.
, they fetched a dose of valerian to steady his nerves. He pushed aside the bottle and rushed out into the street to beg the police to lock him in a cell for his own protection. “They are after me,” he cried. “I feel like I’m going to die tonight.” Released in the late morning, he bought a gun at a pawnbroker’s shop. The next day Sawyer heard that brewer Tony Durkin had fallen under Number Two’s engine while running to a fire and crushed his arm so badly it had to be amputated. Sawyer himself was prone to accidents. On July 7, Mulligan barricaded himself in his San Francisco Hotel room and began sniping from his second-story window at passing pedestrians below. Across the street on the corner of Dupont and Clay, a Chinese laundryman ducked as a bullet crashed through his window. McNabb went to calm Mulligan. Carrying another glass of valerian, he knocked gently on his friend’s door. Believing McNabb to be one of the vigilantes come to deport him again, Billy shot twice through the door. One ball hit McNabb in his right breast near the armpit. He tumbled downstairs and was dead within a half hour. Next, Con Mooney tried to reason with Billy. “Con, if you come another step,” Mulligan said, cracking the door, “I’ll shoot you.” Mooney backed down the stairs and went for help.