Black Fire (3 page)

In the clouds of boiling steam, Sawyer was mending his own wounds, though his were from a nearly fatal ordeal onboard a burning steamboat a decade earlier. In contrast to the lanky Twain, Sawyer, three years older, was a stocky, round-faced mesomorph. His sleepy blue eyes were comfortable to gaze into. His hair was a disordered haystack, a dark brown shock with sideburns. His chest was hairless and his body, smooth and well muscled, was without definition, though he could heft two men easily. In comparison to Twain’s remarkable
soup-strainer, his mustache and goatee were unimpressive. Sawyer was not completely nude; he wore a coat of smoke and soot that, as the three men played poker, the hot steam gradually washed away. Beneath their bare feet coursed an ancient secret tunnel and under that a huge raft upon which the massive four-story granite building floated. Two doors down was Hotaling’s distillery, two doors up was the old gold-weighing station and a block away was the bloodstained ground of “Murderer’s Corner,” where men were hanged.

In early May, Twain had departed Virginia City for a two-month visit to San Francisco to visit Bill Briggs, the handsome brother of John Briggs, a close friend in Hannibal, and Neil Moss, a former classmate. Twain habitually passed hours at Stahle’s posh ground-floor barbershop and basement steam baths on Montgomery Street, a thoroughfare he likened to “just like being on Main Street in Hannibal and meeting the old familiar faces.” The extensive chunk of granite known as the Montgomery Block dominated the southeast corner of Montgomery and Washington streets, numbers 722 and 724 Montgomery Street. It had been a Gold Rush tobacco warehouse, the Melodean Theatre, and now the Turkish bath where Twain parboiled with fireman Sawyer and Stahle, another good friend. Twain studied his cards and hefted a bottle of dark beer. It was cold and sweaty in his palm. He took a swig. A few glistening droplets caught in his horseshoe mustache and he left them there. He slumped as he played poker, smoking one of the Wheeling “long nines,” which reportedly could kill at thirty yards. He had become addicted to them while a cub pilot on the Mississippi. Puffing, he contributed his own clouds to the roiling steam. Twain bought the long, disgusting licorice-flavored ropes by the basketful for a dime and by the barrel for four dollars (including the barrel). For his guests he bought the long nines in disreputable, square pasteboard boxes of two hundred. He awoke two or three times a night to smoke. He held his cigar poised in the air, took a few heroic whiffs, and scattered the vapor with a long sweep of his arm.

Twain had acquired a taste for steam baths at Moritz’s Bath House in Virginia City and, while laboring under bronchitis and a serious cold, at the recently discovered mineral waters of Steamboat Springs, eight miles northwest on the Geiger Grade, the road between Virginia City and Steamboat Springs, a distance of seven miles. Over the first of a long line of nine beautiful steam columns, Nevadans had constructed a large house to bathe in. Twain likened the jets of hot white steam
emitted from fissures in the earth to a steamboat’s escape pipes. They made a boiling, surging noise exactly as a steamboat did. He enjoyed placing eggs in his handkerchief to dip them in the springs, soft-boiling them in two minutes or hard-boiling in four, depending upon his mood.

Sawyer luxuriated in the hot mist and surveyed his cards, murky in the haze. The pasteboards were damp from the sweat running down the players’ arms, but the fresh bottles of German beer Stahle had had sent in were cold. In his thirty-two years Sawyer had been a torch boy in New York for Columbia Hook and Ladder Company Number Fourteen, and in San Francisco he had run before the engines and battled fire for Broderick One, the city’s first volunteer fire company, under Chief David Broderick, the first fire chief. Twain, who held strong opinions on steamers, perked up when Sawyer mentioned he had toiled as a steamboat engineer plying the Mexican sea trade. The journalist had cautioned any bold boy who dreamed of shipping as a steamer fireman. “Such a job,” he would say knowingly with a waggle of his finger, “has its little drawbacks.” In Stahle’s boiling steam room he pointed out the suffocating temperature of the furnace room where the engineer stands in a narrow space between two rows of furnaces that “glare like the fires of hell … he shovels coal for four hours at a stretch in an unvarying temperature of 148 degrees Fahrenheit! Steamer firemen do not live [on average] over five years!”

Sawyer had survived twice that long because he was a fireman in every sense of the word. He extinguished fires and stoked fires to fury; he knew furnaces and every aspect of perfect combustion intimately. “The stronger the draught, the thicker the fire should be,” he explained, his face lighting up in the clouds of steam as he warmed to his topic. “If the fire’s thickness is kept even and no hollow places are allowed to form in it, the furnace temperature gradually increases until at a certain breadth the fuel reaches a state of brilliant white incandescence.” Sawyer could tell temperature by the coal’s color to within a few degrees. Dull red meant 1290 degrees Fahrenheit, cherry red indicated 1470 degrees, deep orange meant the temperature exceeded 2000 degrees, and white signaled a blaze of 2370 degrees. Dazzling white meant the temperature was climbing beyond the limits of the iron boiler and had to be damped down.

Before Sawyer abandoned the sea for good, he had made a brief attempt at making a fortune in the gold mines with John W. Mackay, who did strike it big but not until much later. When bankruptcy threatened
Twain two decades later, he, too, sought Mackay’s aid. By then the bonanza king was flush. An unusual number of sailors had a thirst for prospecting and had been unusually lucky in their pursuit. Dame Fortune failed to smile upon Sawyer and he had gone back to steamship engineering as fast as he could. When he returned to San Francisco in 1859, he became a special patrolman on land and was appointed Fire Corporation yard keeper.

Though Sawyer never realized his dream of becoming the foreman of Knickerbocker Five, he had achieved an equally lofty position. He had held literally the highest office in the city as a fire bell ringer in the City Hall Tower, elevated forty yards above the mayor. In 1862, because of his long experience fighting fire, he was elected as a delegate under William C. Cox to the Liberty Hose Number Two, a volunteer fire company he had helped organize a year earlier. In February 1863, he replaced John D. Rice as Liberty Hose’s foreman. Sawyer knew every byway in San Francisco, every steep hill and twisting canyon.

Burly Ed Stahle, once a strong adherent of the rebellious and bloodthirsty vigilantes, had lived with his family on the top floor of the Montgomery Block since the building was erected more than a decade earlier. Before that he had owned the baths across the way. He was living there when James King of William (King of William was so named to set himself off from the eight other James Kings residing in his native Georgetown, District of Columbia), the self-righteous, muckraking editor of the
Daily Evening Bulletin
, was gunned down out front. The shooter was James P. Casey, a former volunteer firefighter with a criminal past in the Tombs of New York. King, brought inside to die, was laid out on Stahle’s counter. In life, King’s huge head, perhaps heavy from so much brain, lolled to one side as he walked. As he lay dying, it lolled over the edge of the beer-stained table. When King died in Buffett’s store, room 297 of the Montgomery Block, the Vigilance Committee lynched Casey and set the city aflame. Stahle still held strong opinions. He was vigorously opposed to a number of his patrons, especially the prominent lawyers and judges who were not promoters of the law and order side. “Many were the heated arguments almost to the danger point that arose in bath and barber’s chair,” local author Pauline Jacobson wrote of him.

“When I first set foot in San Francisco in February 1850,” Sawyer continued in the clouds of steam, “I wanted to be an engineer on a steamer [Twain grunted in disapproval], but got sidetracked performing the honest business of fighting fire and training a gang of ragtag
adolescent boys to lead the engines with their torches. The city desperately needed Volunteers then and runners like I had been in New York City even more.”

Sawyer’s ninety lifesaving acts of courage had taken place onboard a burning steamboat, of which Twain had a particular horror—the kind of dread that awakened the journalist at night and set him shaking in clouds of cigar smoke. For that reason, he listened, sweat rolling down his brow, to Sawyer’s story of fire and explosion onboard the steamboat
Independence
, in which nearly two hundred died from hideous scalds. The steamer, launched in New York on Christmas Day, 1850, did not reach San Francisco Bay until September 17, 1851. Blasting its whistle, laying a wide trail of foam and thrashing its paddles with abandon, the
Independence
glided toward Long Wharf, an extension of Clay and Commercial streets between Howison’s Pier and the Clay Street Wharf. Pent steam was screaming through the gauge cocks. The cloud of white steam hanging above it was normal. In such noncondensing engines as those on the
Independence
, the exhaust steam escapes into the air like a Virginia City hot spring.

At the wheel swaggered a real-life pirate, the fabulous Captain Ned Wakeman. He had stolen a New York paddle-wheel steamer on the Hudson River from right under the sheriff’s nose and sailed it around Cape Horn, the southernmost headland of South America. The giant’s jet-black hair and whiskers gleamed in the morning light. Twain later sailed with Wakeman, who became a great friend, and described him as burly, hairy, sunburned, and “tattooed from head to foot like a Feejee islander.” He conceded that Wakeman told yarns as well as he did, an incredible admission from a writer who liked his readers to think that all his ideas sprang fully grown from his fertile mind. Twain, as Sawyer reported later, took ideas from anywhere he might find them and claimed them as his own. He especially admired the pirate’s animated gesture, quaint phraseology, and complete and uninhibited defiance of grammar. Wakeman lifted his huge hand—bells jangled, wheels stopped and then reversed, churning the water to foam as the
Independence
docked.

On October 4, 1851, when the
Independence
returned to San Francisco for a second time, Sawyer was on hand to sign aboard as a fireman. At 8:00
A.M.
, R. J. Vanderwater, the San Francisco agent for Cornelius Vanderbilt, lowered the wages of the crew and the stewards. Refusing
to sail under diminished pay, the crew carted their sea chests ashore and dumped them at Vanderwater’s feet. An hour later, Wakeman, who also deemed the agent’s step improper, stepped onto the pier, his huge belly preceding him. Glowering with suppressed rage, “an earthquake without the noise,” he had belted a bowie knife and a brace of pistols outside his jacket. Seventy-five disgruntled
Independence
passengers trailed behind this elemental force, demanding their money back. Four hours later, Vanderwater, cowed by Wakeman’s fury and the loss of so many dollars, agreed to retain the rate of wages. Most of the crew and passengers returned to the
Independence
, and at 1:00
P.M.
, Sawyer, who could now fill a vacancy in the engineering department, sailed with them.

On February 16, 1853, the sea was running high on the
Independence
’s upward trip from San Juan del Sur, the Pacific terminus of the route across Nicaragua, via Realjo and Acapulco to San Francisco. The two-decked wooden side-wheel steamer, part of the newly organized Vanderbilt Nicaragua Line, was more than six hundred tons in weight and two hundred feet long. Its walking-beam engine, including cylinder, valve gear, beam, and cranks, was slung in graceful trunnions at the top of an A-shaped gallows frame. Below, in the engine room, Sawyer was toiling and dripping with sweat as the
Independence
steamed off the south point of Isla Santa Margarita, one of two barrier islands at the entrances into Magdalena Bay. Sawyer’s shift had started at midnight alongside the firemen (Jackson, DeMott, Orr, Banks, Jones) and the coal pushers (Byrne, Gale, Merrill, Cormick, Herron, and Glenn). The firemen’s mess boy, Harris, was in bed asleep. At 1:00
A.M.
, the ship, having been set inshore by the current, made the mainland to the east. Captain F. L. Sampson altered her course to southwest. An hour later he made the island of Margarita (then “south point at bearing W. by 8. per compass,” he wrote in his log) and changed course to west southwest. “I intended to give the point a berth of three miles,” he said later, “but owing to a haze over the land I was deceived in the distance.” There was no haze and this was a lie. Sampson was not her regular captain. Captain T. D. Lucas, who had replaced Captain Wakeman as commander of the
Independence
a year earlier and whom Sawyer knew and respected, would have known better and steered farther away.

At 4:00
P.M.
, the end of Sawyer’s engine room shift, he staggered on deck to get some fresh air. He had no appetite for breakfast. His mouth was dry as cotton. At daybreak the sea was smooth enough for
him to spy breakers a long way off. The sight made him nervous. The Vanderbilt Line, known among angry passengers as Vanderbilt’s Death Line, had suffered a string of recent accidents. On July 6, it had lost the
Union
, run aground on the lower California peninsula. Because the crew and passengers had celebrated the Fourth so heartily the night of July 5, no deck watch had been maintained. On August 17, the northbound
Pioneer
, an 1,800-ton screw-driven Vanderbilt Line steamer, was run aground with a full load of passengers on a beach in San Simeon’s Bay and abandoned. Shortly afterward, the
North America
went ashore at Acapulco in bright daylight and excellent visibility.