Black Fire: The True Story of the Original Tom Sawyer

  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

  Peter 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 dispa
tched 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.

  Mulligan returned to his window and continued firing at the second-story houses across the street. The police surrounded the hotel just as Eureka Hose Number Four foreman John Hart was passing on his way to a neighboring engine house to return a borrowed trumpet. Mulligan was aiming at the cops but instead gunned down Hart with a single shot to the heart, killing him on the spot. Shortly after 4:00 P.M. he climbed out on the balcony, pistol in hand, and took a turn along the ledge on the Dupont Street side as if out for a stroll. He reentered the hotel by climbing through a window on the upper Clay Street side overlooking the Square. Police distracted him with a gunnysack and straw dummy they swung in front of Billy’s window. Mulligan opened the swinging window sash and leaned out to shoot “the man.” As his attention wavered, police marksman Mortimer “Johnny” Hopkins, in a room directly across the street, took a bead and fired. A single shot from his mini rifle tore through the pane and brought Billy down for good. Hopkins, the partner of Crescent Ten’s “Mountain Buck” McGreevy, was another friend of Sawyer’s and a special policeman, as he had been. “Billy Mulligan was a desperate man,” a reporter said, “but not as black as he has been painted. His life, however, is to be regarded far more as a warning than as an example in any, and he met his fate as most of his kind meet their fate—with his boots on. It is a bad way to die.”

  When Twain visited his friend Dr. Stephen Harris, the coroner, he saw two policemen lay a corpse on a board. He lifted the bloodstained sheet and saw the body of a short man in a tidy black suit with a shot in the forehead. Huge muttonchop whiskers surrounded a savage, pinched face. He had been shot in the late afternoon after inexplicably firing on a number of citizens and killing two firemen and one of his close friends. Harris told him the deceased was Billy Mulligan, a famous gunfighter, a dangerous man in any segment of life, and an old firefighting friend of Sawyer’s from his volunteer days. More than a dozen years earlier, he and fifty or sixty other misfits had saved San Francisco. In return most had been deported or murdered. “Why,” Twain wondered, “had these flawed heroes come to such inglorious ends?”

  On May 31, 1856, Yankee Sullivan had awakened bewildered, shivering, and clad only in pantaloons and a shirt. From his cot he could see the windows where the vigilantes had hanged ex-fireman James Casey for shooting down King of William in front of Stahle’s steam baths. A large cell in the northwest corner held Rube Maloney and adjoined Yankee’s cell, the largest, the eighth, for important prisoners. Around the center of the west wall a platform had been erected across the passageway to the Executive Committee rooms. Inside were several long tables, cases filled with papers, and the president’s seat at the north wall. Behind was a rack filled with muskets. Yankee shrieked for his jailer. “Could I have a drink of water,” he said. “I just had a terrible nightmare. I thought I had been condemned to die, the last rites had been performed, and I had been seized and my arms pinioned behind me. They took me from my cell and led me to the window. The rope was adjusted around my neck and then I was marched to the window and placed on the platform before the jeering crowd. The trap was sprung and I was launched into space. I could feel the agony as I awoke.” “There’s no danger of you being hanged,” the guard said. “At the worst you will only be expelled from the country.” “Expelled from America?” “In another land you could reform and lead a life of virtuous industry.” “Leave the United States?” Yankee took a cup of water from the guard. His hand was shaking. The guard returned two hours later with breakfast. Yankee was lying on his back on the floor of his cell—jaws locked, lips bloodless. Just above and inside his left elbow the guard saw a large, ragged “frightful” wound. Nearby in a pool of blood was the dull case knife Yankee had used to cut his food. The former champ had killed himself rather than suffer the indignity of deportation. Poor faithful Yankee. His name and the flag he wore in the ring were more than window dressing. He truly loved the United States. As he lay in the cell, his red blood leaking away, the bars from the window fell over him like the bars of Old Glory. In his hand he clinched his handkerchief with the star-spangled U.S. flag painted upon it.

  Shortly after, the vigilantes deported Dutch Charley aboard the steamer Golden Age. “Captain,” he begged, “let me go back. I will pay my fare. I will give myself up to the Vigilance Committee immediately on landing, let them do with me as they please. I cannot go elsewhere and hold up my head.” “But they will hang you high,” the captain said. “Captain, I would rather die in California without touching ground with my feet than live a Prince in any other country!”

  Senator Broderick’s enemies in the proslavery faction next held a caucus to decide how to permanently remove him from the political scene. As his executioner they selected hot-tempered Judge David Terry, who was skilled in pistol dueling while Broderick, a famously poor shot, was not. Terry supplied the pistols: two Belgian-made eight-inch single-ball dueling pistols. On September 12, 1859, the two challengers met in a small gully to the east of the southernmost extremity of Laguna de la Merced, ten miles south of San Francisco. The predawn was cold and gray. Several times the convoy of twenty buggies lost their way in the fog. Finally the seventy-eight witnesses and officials crossed over the county line to the farm adjoining the Lake House Ranch. The sun rose thin and raw along the lonely shore as they drew up to a rail fence, the boundaries of Davis’s milk ranch, and went down into the valley. Broderick occupied his side of the field. Terry did the same. Armorer Bernard Lagoards said loudly as he loaded Broderick’s pistol, “The hair triggers might be so finely set that the breath of a strong-lunged man would discharge them. That used by Broderick carries the lightest bullet.” In his earlier duel with Caleb Smith, Broderick’s life had been spared when a bullet glanced off his heavy gold presentation watch. He still carried the timepiece as a lucky talisman but now was forced to relinquish it.

  Broderick heard birds hopping in the underbrush. The sun was fighting through. Clouds were racing north and then south over their heads. The gun in his broad palm felt wrong. Terry smiled, took deliberate aim, and fired before the word two was completed. Crack! A puff of dust showed on Broderick’s right lapel. He winced, and clapped his left hand to the upper-right side of his breast. “Hard hit!” his friends said. Broderick’s
half-raised right arm slowly stretched to full length. He swayed, fought to stay erect, and raised both arms over his head. His body shuddered. His right arm, still holding the pistol, contracted. His left knee gave way, then his right, and he half fell still clasping his pistol. Forty-five minutes later a dozen men gently carried Broderick to a spring wagon, laid him on a mattress in its bed, and drove him twelve miles north to Leonidas Haskell’s house at Black Point, where he lingered for the next three days. “They have killed me,” he murmured. “I die because I was opposed to the extension of slavery and a corrupt administration.” His breath was labored through the rent in his chest. Broderick died at age thirty-nine. “I die—protect my honor,” were his last words. Tears coursed down the cheeks of men in the streets. Crowds stood in stricken silence. Businesses closed. Funeral blinds were pulled. Buildings were draped in black. Dueling had been made illegal five years earlier, thus Terry tried to flee the state but was arrested as he neared the Nevada border. “Broderick is dead,” the Sacramento Union editorialized. “He died by the trickery of a mutually arranged occasion.” Rumors flew that the gunsmith Natchez had set the triggers of the guns so delicately that the sudden raising of one would cause it to go off and had made Terry aware of this fact. A. A. Selover, an observer, examined the pistols and discovered that “the triggers were set so fine a strong puff of wind would prove sufficient to spring and discharge them.”

  Thousands filed past Broderick’s bier. Sawyer, in the city hall tower, rang the bell joylessly. Soon the bells of all the firehouses joined in until an enormous tolling resounded over the entire city, not the busy call of volunteers but slow and funereal. In death Broderick triumphed as he never had in life. As a martyr in the cause of freedom, his death persuaded California to cast its allegiance to the antislavery faction of the Union.