Black Fire (20 page)

It was not a complete city-destroying conflagration this time, but the volunteers, Sawyer, and the torch boys ran as if it were. Sweat dampened Sawyer’s new red shirt. As they guided the fire engines, blue wharf rats and brown Australian kangaroo rats scurried from the torchlight. The Sydney Town Ducks were deadly, but ducks lay eggs and those eggs eventually hatch into ducklings potentially more lethal. Since these children had grown up in the atmosphere of their parents’ depravity, they began to rob and pillage on their own as soon as they left the nest. Known as the Tarflat Hoodlums, they roved south of Market and over most of unhappy Happy Valley, waylaying, beating, and robbing anyone they met. In their black coats, blue spring-bottom trousers, and buff-colored felt hats, they treated mothers and their little girls no better than men and boys. When an officer intervened, the Tarflatters beat him nearly to death. The call of gold had drawn the most reckless young men to San Francisco: the best artists, intellectuals, farmers, merchants, and clerks. It also attracted the worst: cutthroats, ex-convicts, profiteers, pirates, traders, deserters, renegades, crooked politicians, and the Lightkeeper. Gold made it the most diverse city on the globe. Every nationality—British, Norwegian, Italian, French, Spanish, German, and Dutch immigrants—filled its streets. Baptist ministers and cheapjacks mingled with Philadelphia Quakers and mountain men. South Sea Islanders and Chinese in blue jackets trudged alongside California Spaniards. Thus the volunteer companies were composed of whichever ethnic group was most representative in the particular neighborhood where the firehouse stood. New companies were all French, all Irish (the Hibernia), and all German (the St. Francis Hook and Ladder), who wore handlebar mustaches, brown linen pantaloons, Hessian boots, and loose brown coats. The Germans played their violins during the fires to cheer on the volunteers. Each morning on Stockton Street between Pacific and Broadway streets, the all-French Lafayette Company Number Two drilled, gave standing and passing salutes until their arms were sore, rolled drums, and flourished fifes. In their plumed helmets they wheeled back and forth in divisions at double time beneath the flag of France. Lafayette Two’s vexing habit was the wild aggrandizement of anything that could be connected, even remotely, to their beautiful France. They organized their hook and ladder brigade exactly as the
Paris Fire Department did, wore uniforms granted by Napoléon, and marched to blazes wearing lace brocade, silks, and dainty fragrances. The local French community of fifty thousand numbered the same as the German community, but they were so ever present in daily life that San Franciscans never thought to consider them foreigners. They congregated in cabarets on Jackson Street, where there were shops with signs in French; two French-language newspapers; a French gambling house, the Polka; and the popular Adelphi Theatre. In some districts, streets looked more like France in architecture than Paris did. Like the Swiss and German communities, they had their own hospital. Instead of the Teutonic Russ Gardens, Lafayette Two gathered farther down the road at the Willows, a Gallic amusement park with a zoo, bear pit, and sea lions. The men of Lafayette Two adored sauces, wine, cheeses, and sourdough bread. Their robust chief stoked his belly with onions, spices, and andouillette of tripe, smoked his pipe, drank his wine, and shared croissants with his friends. Two’s fine artists decorated their engines with beautiful end and side panels of views of their beloved Paris.

As the ethnic and regional firehouses trumpeted their superiority over one another and the French over everyone, it was only a matter of time before a real battle broke out. The French might be great shakes on land, but they were laughingstocks at sea. Dutch Charley joked that French whalers, known as Crappoes (toads), set sail from French ports with tallow candles onboard. “They foresee they will not catch enough whales to obtain oil for light,” he said. Lafayette Two retained their fine manners and courtly ways, if not their tempers, as they made sweeping bows of plumed helmets, but when the inevitable donnybrook broke out, the white gloves came off. In the midst of this escalating tension between volunteer companies, the Lightkeeper would strike again. At times like this Sawyer feared the arsonist might be one of the firefighters from Social Three, Big Six, Lafayette Two, or even Broderick One. The fire companies had become so competitive that setting a fire might enable one company to reach the scene before the others. A man thought a hero to the public might want to appear even more heroic by setting a fire so he could put it out to the applause of the city.

Gilbert adjusted his gold-rimmed glasses and gave his long, narrow galleys a final glance. Tomorrow’s
Alta
would recommend that the police force be increased again to catch the arsonist. The May fire had also reawakened interest in establishing an actual fire department. The gaps between the blazes coincided with the temporary storage of great
deposits of gold awaiting shipment back east. In each of the fires, stores of gold were looted during the confusion. Still thinking, Gilbert walked to the two-thousand-pound main press—a Washington hand printer, a rugged version of the classic flatbed mainstay of frontier editors, the R. Hoe Imperial. The printer inserted lead slugs for spacing, tightened the metal frame, and applied ink from a leather roller.

“A possibility,” Gilbert thought, “a number of merchants have ordered tons of expensive merchandise. It takes a considerable number of months to sail here. In that time items formally in demand become too plentiful. Vessels arrive daily with goods fit only for the Montgomery Street bogs.” Small fires had broken out all over town, posing the danger of a general conflagration just as several ships all bearing the same cargo anchored. “Such surpluses to the merchants meant a fortune lost overnight. Our arsonist might be a prosperous merchant with a fat overstock and the fires his way of clearing his books and collecting the insurance.” George Wilkes, Broderick’s earliest tutor and adviser in New York, would have agreed. “The warehouses of San Francisco were glutted to the roofs,” Wilkes wrote in a letter to Broderick, “but the precious commission merchants of San Francisco could not make returns to their Atlantic shippers. And then came the terrible conflagrations which gave them a clear balance sheet.” “Thieves, thieves, incendiaries!” shouted Gilbert suddenly. “Hang them! Hang them.” The printer wiped his inky fingers on his leather apron, inserted a sheet of Chinese paper onto the hinged wooden tympan, folded it over the inked type, slid the bed carrying the form to a position beneath the cloth-covered platen, and pulled back on a leather-covered bar to force the platen downward against the bed of metal type and produce an impression. Gilbert paused as he took the first copy. “What if the Lightkeeper had an even darker motive. What if he was one of the volunteer firemen?”

The dust of April and the showers of May turned all of San Francisco into a slough of liquid mud that ruled their lives. Sawyer rolled up his trousers and plunged on. Mud oozed through his worn boots. A two-wheeled covered wagon, deep in the mud, had been backed to the verge of a hill. Its owner had constructed a table from a couple of boxes with boards laid across. On top of a chest were a few loaves, pies, bread and butter, buns and cakes. A teakettle was bubbling over an iron furnace. Sawyer selected a sweet bun and had lunch. Still eating, he walked to
the eighty-foot-high sand mountain on Market Street and Third Street and another sixty-foot-high sand hill on Second Street. He trudged on, longing to be at sea as a fire engineer, kindling fires instead of putting them out. But he could not go yet. What was it they said about New York firemen? “Faithful and fearless,” he recalled. He was both. Sawyer, still hungry, accepted a fatty chunk of white sausage, a concoction of fresh veal and pork called bockwurst from a vendor, and plowed on.

By June the mud pits on Market Street, the broadest part of the dismal bog, had covered over with a thin, hard crust spiderwebbed with cracks burned there by the heat. In July, with the end of “June Gloom,” the sun baked the whitewashed board shanties and oilpaper walls and made them matchboxes. The people inside hid behind their muslin and Osnaburg partitions or rocked all night in tumbledown chairs. In the heat, wharf rats snoozing beneath the raised plank sidewalks had become indolent, but the sand fleas had grown bolder. Restlessly the fleas flitted about in sultry winds that daily increased in ferocity. Violent, hot gusts off the bay shook block upon block of warehouses. The hillsides became brown.

To defeat the sandy and boggy roads that made daily commerce and firefighting so difficult, the city fathers had decided to cover over the main streets with planking. But lumber in this wood-scarce city was again costly thanks to the last fire. At over $400 per one thousand board feet, lumber had to be freighted down from Oregon. To fetch local brush from the surrounding hills cost far more in wagon fees and overpriced manpower. Finally, the Council scheduled serious planking to begin and decided to worry about paying later. It would be the least of their worries.

THE LIGHTKEEPER

September 17, 1850–June 22, 1851

The faults of [Broderick’s] career were seen to be the results of his origin, his early orphanage and his youthful associations, but the man himself stood revealed as one whom God had endowed with personal incorruptibility, a grave, earnest, honest, brave man, who in the midst of unparalleled corruption in his own party kept his own hands clean and his record straight.

—
The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft: History of California

One of Sam Clemens’s diversions in the city, whenever it rained so heavily that it would have been unwise to trudge about on mere routine calls at the wharf or the courts, was to play penny ante at the Turkish bath downstairs with the proprietor and a friend of them both, a fireman. The company was amusing and it is probable that Sam found the talk of this fireman more to his liking. Tom Sawyer (such indeed was his name) had been a Brooklyn gamin who took to the sea, had worked on vessels in the Mexican trade, and had served with great heroism in a shipwreck, rescuing many lives: a great exploit no doubt, for he had to swim about in a water boiling with sharks. It was a fortunate acquaintance for the ex-fireman. When the book
Tom Sawyer
came out, he had embarked in business as a tavern keeper.… Thenceforth he basked in renown, thriving mightily.

—Idwal Jones,
Ark of Empire, San Francisco’s Montgomery Block

Eliza “Lillie” Hitchcock

Tug-of-War