Black Fire (6 page)

In 1840, Broderick had been a ward heeler for Tammany Hall,
the corrupt political machine of William Marcy Tweed. “Boss” Tweed yearned to be foreman of a New York volunteer fire company in the Democratic Ninth Ward that extended to the Hudson River west of Washington Square (now Greenwich Village) and housed New York’s three most popular fire companies. Tweed joined several units before becoming foreman of Big Six, whose seal was a growling tiger painted on the body panel of their pumper. Tweed knew any political boss who affiliated himself with a district firehouse as their benefactor acquired that unit’s prestige and great influence it wielded in their community. By allying himself, he gained not only a block of local voters but also a gang of street toughs to intimidate any opposition. The volunteers, tangible symbols of his authority, cracked heads at political rallies and got out the vote for him. When Boss Tweed became New York’s “King of Corruption,” cartoonist Thomas Nast refashioned the tiger into a symbol of Tweed’s corrupt organization: the infamous Tammany Tiger. He incited such public outrage that his scathing cartoons eventually brought Tweed down.

In 1845, the electors of the Sixth Ward in the Bowery tapped Broderick to receive the Democratic nomination for Congress. As a devout Irish Catholic, he believed he could “make more reputation by being an honest man instead of a rascal.” If he was elected, he could make a difference, but he lost to a Whig.

Broderick was a man of contradictions. Though he didn’t smoke, gamble, or drink, he ran a New York tavern, the Subterranean, at the corner of King and Hudson streets, which catered to Irish laborers. Behind the bar he wore rough workingman’s clothes, the class with which he most identified, yet read the great works of philosophy and literature, especially the poetry of Shelley. At the request of Colonel Jonathan Drake Stevenson, who was raising a company of soldiers to fight in the Mexican War, Broderick sold his saloon, poured the remaining barrels of whiskey down the gutter, and on April 17, 1849, resigned from the Red Rovers. As a parting gift, his men presented him with a heavy-duty, double-cased gold pocket watch. He set out from Manhattan for San Francisco, but hostilities had ceased by the time Stevenson’s men reached the Pacific Coast. The tortuous trip crossing Central America damaged Broderick’s health and he arrived in San Francisco on June 13, penniless and sick. The first day he vowed: “I tell you, Sir, by God, that for one hour’s seat in the Senate of the United States, I
would roast before a slow fire in the Square! I’ll go if I have to march over a thousand corpses and every corpse a friend!”

His friend, Fred Kohler, a forty-year-old jeweler, assayer, former alderman, and volunteer assistant engineer in New York, joined him in San Francisco. Broad, clean-shaven, with muttonchops and a long straight mouth, Kohler had the stolid demeanor of a Quaker. In the summer, Stevenson pointed out to Broderick and Kohler that although gold flowed in rivers from the mines, gold coins were virtually unattainable in the Bay Area. The only coins accepted in San Francisco as legal tender were English shillings, French francs, and Mexican double
reales
—all of the same value. It would be almost ten years before San Francisco would have a government assay office to buy raw gold or a mint to manufacture coin more convenient than cumbersome buckskin pouches of gold dust. Kohler, who was clever with his hands, melted up the gold dust an idled Colonel Stevenson had bought west for fourteen dollars an ounce and cast it in five-, ten-, and twenty-dollar slugs. He and Broderick profited by putting four dollars’ worth of gold into a five-dollar piece and eight dollars’ worth into a ten-dollar coin. The muscular Broderick sweated before the furnace, striking coins from gold ingots, and casting and filing the slightly debased coins. As the first to coin money locally, as well as assay and stamp gold bars in their Clay Street office, they made enough by minting for Moffat and Company to retire for life. By Christmas Eve, 1849, Sawyer, who had followed Broderick to the goldfields, had been at sea for about two-thirds of his estimated five-month voyage to San Francisco. His ship, the
Splendid
, was battling the high waves and storms of Cape Horn. Sawyer was eager to become rich in the diggings and expected to reach the city by mid-February.

In San Francisco, Broderick awakened before dawn on December 24, 1849. He was not lonely. He had been such a beloved and charismatic figure in Manhattan that many of his fellow firefighters and political toughs had trailed him to San Francisco. Lying in bed, he considered the rains that had begun in early November and poured without cease throughout December. The early-morning stillness made him contemplative. He was independently wealthy, so what was he to do now? He limped to the window, wheezing and still recovering from the illness he’d contracted in Central America that had kept him from the mines and serving his friend Stevenson. Pulling aside the muslin curtain, he
saw that the rain had momentarily stopped and the wind had faded away. The lull was a godsend.

Northeast of San Francisco, four-fifths of Sacramento still lay underwater, permitting a steamer to shuttle up and down its streets and enable passengers to enter their second-story City Hotel rooms by window. The fifty inches of icy rain and shotgun blasts of black hail that had soaked and pummeled San Francisco all winter had not dispelled the fitful dreams of its citizens. They tossed in their beds inside combustible homes, heads filled with nightmares of what would happen when the lifesaving downpour halted. They reposed in front of their fires listening to the faint clacking of sea coals and snakelike hiss of paraffin wicks. They watched the clear glass of their lamp chimneys blacken and, instead of being warmed, feared the worst. They dreaded the high winds off the bay that would dry the soaked wood to flammability. And with no water wells or flame-fighting equipment or the inclination to buy any, everyone knew that San Francisco would burn. Four years earlier in Pittsburgh there had been a disastrous dawn fire, but that had come after a dry winter, six weeks without rain. San Francisco’s spring would be much different, but the results would be the same.

From his window, Broderick made out the end of the road where fog mounded in heaps and a prickly forest of masts towered. These nearly a thousand abandoned vessels had transported hundreds of thousands of gold seekers who in turn had made the ships orphans. Broderick’s hands on the sill were the callused hands of a stonecutter, the practiced hands of a rough-and-tumble politician and consummate barroom brawler. During the night the ex-firefighter had slumbered fitfully, feeling all around him the thin boards of cloth-walled homes shaking in the rising winds. How strange the windy season passed and how tightly it had stretched his nerves. Broderick knew the danger San Francisco faced even if most of its citizens did not want to know. As in most man-made disasters, there had been indications of the tragedy to come. Someone had burned the Shades Hotel in January. On June 14, 1849, two weeks after Broderick first set foot in San Francisco, someone had torched the
Philadelphia
at dockside. A series of fires had gotten people to thinking, but no action was taken. Thinking was hard, and a little frightening. As Christmas approached, people forgot to even think. Instead they emptied Nathan Spear and William Hinckley’s shelves of overpriced gifts, bathed in freshwater at three dollars a barrel, and curled up before their fires to shiver.

None were willing to take the least nominal steps toward preventing the tragedy they so feared, and which Broderick, from his experience, knew was inevitable. Instead, they pressed their noses against their windows and watched black water flow down the muddy streets to the shallow Yerba Buena Cove, a horseshoe-shaped bite in the western shore filled with abandoned ships. Bells rang low across the water. The harbor—chill, barren, desolate—fronted the instant city of San Francisco that was a world cut off from civilization. Bitter December cold, gloom, and disappointment were all about him. At this breaking dawn, the day before Christmas, 1849, Broderick thought his terrible thoughts.

He watched the road outside come to life and heard the calling of ducks and geese and tradesmen tramping sleepily through the deep mud to Portsmouth Square. Three sides of the Square were taken up by the devil: gambling dens and thrown-together hotels of dry pine with flammable canvas roofs, muslin floors, and oilpaper walls and bands who played music full blast but were silent now. Only on the fourth and upper side of the Square had God taken a small toehold in a small adobe building where the Reverend William Taylor preached in thunder that “the way of the transgressor is hard” and that a great calamity was surely to befall the great tinderbox called San Francisco. Reverend Mr. Taylor was rarely wrong.

“The [building] material is all of combustibles,” a citizen complained to his friends back east. “No fire engines; no hooks or ladders; and in fact no water (except in very deep wells) available where it might be most required. Is it not enough to make a very prudent man tremble?” This canny resident warned that fire, once begun at the windward side, would be certain to burn the whole of the boomtown to ash in an instant.

The Christmas Eve fire at first appeared as the light of a candle in the second-floor window of Dennison’s Exchange, one of thirty gambling dens in the Square and one of nearly a thousand in town. Dennison’s stood dead center in the fledgling city on the east side at the corner of Kearny and Washington streets. From roof to ground, this “Genie of all catastrophe” was ignitability personified—ceilinged with painted cotton fabric and roofed with asphalt, or road tar. Even the paintings on its unbleached canvas walls were executed in oil. Throughout October and November, the wagering palace had sat, plump as an oil-soaked rag, ready to burst into flame at the touch of a match.

At 5:45
A.M.
, when the fledgling blaze was first noticed, a mild sort of alarm was disseminated along the saloons, most of them already preparing to reopen in five hours. Virtually no wind stirred, which in itself was unusual and fortuitous because the greatest threat to the city would have been an aggressive wind off the sea fanning the flames. At first the fire crawled as the halfhearted alarm ambled lazily along the Square. The news was met by silence at the City Hotel on the southwest corner of Clay and Kearny streets, the large adobe general merchandise store on the southeast corner, and the Crockett Building on the northeast corner. By day these were busy hubs. Crockett’s gambling rooms and saloon had closed at near dawn and its brocaded gamblers had staggered home. It was silent, too, at the St. Francis Hotel on the southwest corner of Clay and Dupont. All the guests were asleep. The only sign of activity was between Clay and Sacramento streets. A handful of early-rising vegetable merchants and wine sellers setting up their stalls heard the whispered alarm and, yawning, absently took up the cry and passed it on as if in conversation. “Notice how prettily the fire curls along the beams,” one remarked lazily as he put his crate down in the mud. “The Haley House and Bella Union are on fire, too,” another added matter-of-factly.

Dogs began to yelp and the tiny fire bell
finally
rang out. At his window Broderick started at its first tinkle and observed ropy black smoke curling upward. This indicated a fresh fire. From its color he could estimate its temperature, and from experience knew what such a hot fire could do. Breathlessly he dragged on his trousers, pulled on his high boots, clapped his hat on his head, and rushed out in his shirtsleeves. The instant Broderick reached the Square, he began shouting, “Form a bucket brigade!” Fortunately, in those days everything to the east of Montgomery Street was underwater. Cove waters lapped between Washington and Clay streets, which ran from the northwest and southeast sides of the Square and rose halfway to Kearny on Jackson. So few buckets were available that the brigade had to use canvas sacks, boxes, and any container that held water. Broderick used his hat.

By 6:30
A.M.
the blaze had changed its hue from yellow to blue as it fed upon casks of grog, rum, brandy, and Monongahela whiskey. The colorful blaze hypnotized onlookers who had so little to amuse them in the drudgery of their daily lives. “Well, I’ll be damned,” said one. “If that ain’t pretty—Bengal lights [the San Francisco name for fireworks].” Charmed by the turquoise-green colors of now-blazing pharmacies, they
inhaled chemical smoke as if enjoying a good cigar. By now the crowd had grown to a dispassionate audience of five thousand. Pleased at a little entertainment, they idly observed the betting halls being consumed: “Serves them right … lost a poke there … O.K. with me if Dennison’s burns.” The mob had a disquieting tendency to be cruel when it did not concern them and to find amusement in the misfortune of others.

In contrast to the detached spectators, the owner of an imperiled property dropped to his knees. “Help me!” he said, clasping his hands together and rocking backward and forward in the mire. “Have some mercy.” After a hasty conference the spectators said, “We’ll want wages.” “I’ll pay fifty cents a bucket to every man who fetches water to save my building,” the owner implored. Just as flames began licking at the rear of his building, bidding between bystanders and proprietor reached an agreed-upon wage of a dollar per bucket. He saved his property, but it cost him several thousand dollars.

“Ooh!” said the crowd, still unconcerned. Smiles flashed in the eerie morning light. The unpaid audience continued to take a sabbatical from reason. There was not a breath of wind, so why worry? Wind was not necessary. Cotton-papered houses across the street in proximity to the scorching heat flared up spontaneously. The El Dorado, a huge canvas tent that rented for $40,000 a year, burst into flames. Burning beams and frames from the United States Coffee House crashed at their feet. Suddenly the Square, which lay on the slant side of a hill, was hot as a brick oven. Next door to the United States Restaurant was the Parker House, the first considerable house in the city. A regular two-story home with two stores, a saloon, and an entire second floor given over to gambling tables, it rented for an astonishing $150,000 a year.