Black Fire (7 page)

Twenty yards away, Robert Smith Lammot was dressing for work when he gazed out his window. The Parker House was belching clouds of rough-textured smoke. Flames were surging wildly around every crack. Clouds of smoke were boiling from both ends. Inside, piles of gold and silver coins melted into slag. Lammot, frantically gathering up his valuables, then recalled a dreadful fact and rushed to his window. “Stored powder!” he shouted to the crowd below. “The Parker House has dozens of barrels of gunpowder in its basement! Run for your lives.”
That
got a reaction.

Under showers of sparks, the mob transformed itself into an elemental force, a panicky human stampede more terrible than the fire. As the thousands scattered, the stored powder in the Parker House
basement detonated, shattering the building and setting off munitions in nearby basements. A few citizens, suddenly in the middle of a battlefield with cannon on both sides, made halfhearted passes at the flames with canvas sacks and blankets. Others slathered walls with mud.

E. A. Upton, onboard one of the abandoned ships in the cove, saw the flames and rowed to shore. As he dropped onto the sandy beach, he realized he had pulled on the wrong boots. By then the fire was spreading rapidly down the Square. Upton remembered his stored trunks at the Merchants Exchange Hotel and frantically hobbled up Montgomery Street to hire a drayman. The road, a foot deep in mud, was over the hubs of most carts. For eight dollars he persuaded a ferryman to convey his trunks to the wharf and for another three dollars to row them out to his ship. Young John McCrackan, a Connecticut lawyer and artist who also lived inside the Ghost Fleet, joined Upton on the dunes. Together they ran toward the Square.

“The streets,” McCrackan recalled, “were perfectly heaping with all kinds and descriptions of goods besides gold and silver which was melted up.” The exploding Parker House had one benefit. It reminded Broderick how to slow the fire. During his marble-mining days on New York’s East Side, he had carved blocks from a quarry with well-placed charges of gunpowder and used that technique fighting fire. “We must pull down and blow up a line of houses,” he ordered. “If we throw kegs of powder into three or four of the burning buildings, we might isolate the blaze and pull the rest down.” The impact would either smother the flames or leave the fire nothing to burn. He selected several wine stores along Washington Street, but before demolishing them allowed people to help themselves. When the proprietor of one store refused to have his emporium blown up, Broderick hauled him out by his collar, tossed him onto a heap of bricks, and exploded the adobe building. Still limping, Upton was passed by two men carrying a man hurt in an explosion. “Almost every store that was burned contained more or less powder and liquor,” he said, “and explosions were taking place every moment, some of which were tremendous.” A powerful north wind built, a freshening gale that sent sparks dancing and carried the blaze to three hundred houses. Feverish men axed the ground timbers of homes in the fire path and toppled them on their sides by pulling on ropes fastened to their roofs. Each time a building collapsed, flaming debris propelled down the side away from the fire torched neighboring structures. Slipping
from one roof to another, the fire created its own bucket brigade of flame all the way down to the cove.

All morning the conflagration raged along the new fingerlike wharves as merchants lugged their safes and sacks of gold dust to the Maguire building at the end of Long Wharf. The blaze bridged the cove waters and burned the hulls of ships anchored off the beach. Thousands living in the Ghost Fleet plunged over the sides and swam for safety. A few fortunate ships, with the help of a light southerly turn of the wind, reached an anchorage just west of Clarke’s Point. From there passengers thrashed and waded through a mile of waist-deep mud to reach unburned land and safety. At 11:00
A.M.
, Upton, chafed by his oversize boots, limped in agony to the beach. He rowed to his ship to soak his blistered feet. If a high wind freshened, two-thirds of the city would be burned. At least, he thought, this, the first big fire in San Francisco history, might persuade the Council to finally establish a fire department. At four o’clock in the afternoon, Upton, barefoot now, climbed back on deck. The wind had died. The fire might still be licking and leaping, but his ship’s thermometer read seventy-four degrees, as if it were a mild and pleasant day. Three hours later, flames and smoke were still curling when the fire abruptly went out. Ships at sea clearly saw the red chimney of flame collapse upon itself and die.

“And by God, they’ve stayed the fire by resorting to powder and blowing the buildings up,” McCrackan said, though during a blast two men had been killed and dozens had received broken limbs and burns. Surely, with such strong winds and paperlike dwellings resting on shifting sand, clay, and sucking mud, there would be more and greater fires, but San Franciscans had failed to comprehend the solution before their eyes. The fire only truly halted when it butted up against an unfinished brick building. Stunned, murmuring prayers, and covered with soot that made them scarcely recognizable to one another, harried men and women dug through the ruins, salvaged what they could, and cried in each other’s arms. Broderick could not accurately estimate the tremendous loss of life. Fleeing mobs had trampled and kneaded bodies into the ooze. Corpses lay crushed under fallen buildings. As if shocked into silence, the winds over San Francisco scarcely stirred. For days an umbrella of ash hung unmoving above the city. John H. Brown speculated that Dennison’s had been fired to avenge a racial affront committed against a black man by a southerner, Thomas Bartell, who ran the
gambling house’s saloon. No proof of his allegation existed. There were plenty of arson suspects.

At the height of the fire, seventy members of the Ducks, “ruffianly larrikins,” ticket-of-leave men from British penal settlements, had been arrested for looting. After the fire, the Hounds, a gang of idled army renegades from Colonel Stevenson’s regiment, terrorized the poor ranging through the blackened rubble and kicked apart promising heaps of debris as they searched for coins. What they had no use for they destroyed. Whoever got in their way they beat. Broderick suspected a member of one of the two gangs had instigated the arson. He pointed out how well organized and well timed the attacks had been. The Ducks and Hounds had been ready and waiting to strike. Somewhere there was a fire fiend who had set the Christmas Eve fire. There had to be. Broderick would bet his life on it. A month earlier the
Alta
had flat-out said there were arsonists in the city and demanded an increase in manpower to apprehend them. At least a night watch should be formed. The Council, responsive to their pleas, resolved to increase the police force by fifty men.

During the five hours the fire raged, it had consumed $1.5 million worth of ships, piers, and buildings—290 structures and the earliest vestiges of the city known as Yerba Buena until 1847. The one-story adobe Custom House, La Casa Grande, the oldest building in the city, survived. It was relatively fireproof. San Francisco lost all its buildings on both sides of Kearny Street between Washington and Clay streets, but they would be completely rebuilt by spring. If San Francisco’s citizens were lazy when it came to forming a fire department, they set about rebuilding with awesome zeal. The Square’s planked streets were still steaming as men galloped onto the surrounding mud-pit streets and leaped from their horses. Wagons carted fresh lumber down from the hills. Sailors ripped planks from the decks of the abandoned Ghost Fleet ships to incorporate into presumably haunted houses. At each site, men cleared rubbish in a minute. Within an hour, amid a racket of axes, saws, and hammers, men had raised the frames of three houses, nailed still-smoldering lumber into place, and hammered warm nails into scorched timbers. Their smoking hammers described graceful arcs in the cool air.

Tirelessly the men labored on. No sooner had they raised a block of new frameworks than a terrible gale from the sea sent them crashing into the mud. Indefatigably they lifted the timbers and stood them
again. Down the beams went again, only to be thrown back up. Broderick walked the ruins looking for clues. The highly vaunted new metal houses had failed miserably and lay as misshapen grotesques, iron ovens that had baked everything inside. The uncompleted brick house that had stopped the spread of the fire interested him the most. The ex-fireman examined it for some time and even went away with one of the bricks.

No one else took heed of the indestructible building, but labored only on buildings identical to those that had burned: slight frame structures with split clapboard exteriors nailed on and interiors of simple unbleached cotton cloth, stretched smooth, with ceilings of bleached cloth that sagged in the middle. For partitions, a frame was raised, cloth and paper were applied to both sides, and a gap of air was left between. A private dwelling took two days to construct. A hotel took four days to erect and a church six days. Within the time it took to raise a church, six large houses had been roofed, weatherproofed, and completed, with four others almost done. “Beat that in the East if you can!” roared one worker, slapping his thigh as another dwelling shot up from the smoking mud—the Boomtown way.

A month earlier Captain Cole had arrived with twenty-five kits for wooden houses, numbered in sections for easy assembly. The prefabricated houses from New England were prepainted white and trimmed green. Thousands more of these prefab wooden sectionals—hospitals, churches, even bowling alleys—were at that moment being shipped west from Baltimore, Philadelphia, London, and Hamburg. Tasmania and China exported to the Bay Area portable ready-mades with mortised joints for effortless construction. Darkness fell, but the blackened figures rising from the mud were already smiling. “I have now only a $1.50 in my pocket,” one optimist said, “but I do not care, for before many days are over, I will have a $150.” Nothing could keep the greatest go-ahead city down. Singing and whistling, the laborers worked through the night as the fog came in and made them look like ghosts.

The morning after, Christmas Day, a few planked streets were still smoking. The cracked mud around them was still baking. When Broderick, wheezing, trudged to the blackened ruins, he saw that except for Delmonico’s, the Square had simply vanished. In the fire’s wake, land sharks cruised the ashes with papers and pens raised above their heads like fins. Tirelessly they crested the blackened hills seeking opportunities to buy gambling dens of their own. The time was ripe. A dozen
new wagering concerns were already flourishing out of small tents. The more established gamblers saw money being lost and clamored for their burned gambling parlors to be rebuilt immediately. Dennison was arguing with Mr. Cornwall, the contractor. “I want my Exchange returned to action within two weeks,” he bellowed.

“An impossibility, Mr. Dennison,” Cornwall replied, surveying the gutted ground floor and furrowing his brow. Dennison whipped out $15,000 and flung it to the builder, who contracted immediately to raise the new building within fifteen days or forfeit $500 for each day past the deadline. Real San Franciscans like Dennison understood greed. It, too, was the San Francisco way. While the Parker House was still burning, its perpetually unlucky owner, Tom Maguire, was busily signing contracts to raise a new two-story building in its place. A ruddy man, top-heavy with an oiled mustache and white hair, Maguire, in the midst of such devastation, was impeccably dressed. A huge diamond was pinned in his scarf and a massive watch chain crossed his carpet vest. The former New York City hack driver turned saloonkeeper turned impresario wanted his new palace prepared by French designers and fitted out in Oriental splendor with glass pillars and mirrors that climbed to golden ceilings. Workers swiftly laid the Parker House’s new basement floor timbers and arranged the building to be constructed in brick sections. Maguire expected speed and perfection. When glass panes arrived cut in sections too small for his new windows, he refused to alter his designs and instead ordered specially cut glass shipped express from Hawaii.

The El Dorado and the United States Coffee House had been decimated. The Mazourka, the Arcade, the Ward House, the Fontine House, the Alhambra, and the Aguila de Oro, in or near the Square, were badly damaged. The owners of the Bella Union, El Dorado, California Exchange, Empire, and Verandah shouted as they saw new gambling dens getting the jump on them. “Cut whatever corners necessary,” they cried, watching their competitors’ steady progress, “get us back in operation again!” The righteous in town, such as Edward Gilbert, the newspaper editor, would not miss the obliterated gambling dens. “Had that been the motive behind the city-destroying arson?” Broderick wondered. “Was it a way to be rid of the dens, along with squalid rows of shacks?” He saw the entire City Council—Steuart, Price, Ellis, Turk, Davis, Harris, Simmons, Harrison, Green, and Brannan—assembled in a corner of the Square and walked over, still wheezing. He concealed his discomfort.
The same iron resolution that had made him a king among men was at work. He would have to be at his most persuasive if he was to prevent another inferno.

Sam Brannan, the city’s first millionaire and one of the good old town’s greediest men, was such a cross between a constable and a cattle thief that one could not tell where one began and the other left off. Brannan, who had salted the city streets with flecks of gold from a quinine bottle to drum up sales for his mining supplies stores, was sitting on a barrel whittling a block of soft pine with his bowie knife. Nine months earlier he and hide merchant William Howard had transported the first thirty complete frame houses from the East. Dawn light revealed that their prefabs, advertised as “noncombustible houses,” had proved amazingly combustible. The alcalde, colonial mayor John White Geary, was there, too. Geary, appointed postmaster by President James Polk a year earlier, had brought the first U.S. mail to San Francisco by steamer from the East. Everyone else had been drawn to California because James Wilson Marshall saw something glittering in his sawmill tailrace on the American River on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada. Word got out and the world rushed in.