Black Fire: The True Story of the Original Tom Sawyer

  Sixteen years earlier J.B.M. Crooks, a whale oil dealer, had been awarded a lucrative contract to light the blocks bounded by Battery, Kearny, Jackson, and California streets with oil lamps. The few light posts he erected were too dim to see by. “Crooks only accomplished a way to render darkness visible, having gone about his work in true San Francisco style,” the press reported. Now the city manufactured gas inside brick structures at the corner of First and Howard streets for its own limited-area lighting system. At midnight on February 11, 1854, the gas had officially been turned on and eighty-four gas lamps mounted along Montgomery, Bush, Jackson, Sacramento, Kearny, Dupont, Commercial, and Washington streets flickered with a feeble light. A glow lit Dupont Street to the water and from Jackson to California Street. Down Washington Street a line of Chinese shops, restaurants, and saloons were drenched in green light. To Kearny and north to Broadway beamed a cheerful light. The city kept the lights lit until 2:00 A.M., even on bright moonlit nights or sometimes only part of the night or not lit at all. When gaslight finally extended to unhappy Happy Valley in 1856, the usefulness of the torch boys was ended.

  On December 1, 1866, the California State Legislature passed a measure creating a paid fire department for San Francisco. As Twain lolled in his window box, writing, midnight tolled the end of the volunteers. The next afternoon, Broderick One marched to Lone Mountain Cemetery to unveil a statue of Senator and Chief David Colbert Broderick. The next day, less than a year after the lethal battle between the companies, the volunteer companies disbanded and handed over the protection of San Francisco to a paid fire brigade. Organized under Chief Frank Whitney, the 148-member paid department was sworn in and operating within hours. At 3:00 A.M., a fruit store fire at Second and Folsom streets initiated the new professional department. When Liberty Hose Company conducted a mock funeral of a stuffed figure in a fireman’s uniform representing the defunct department, Tom Sawyer saved the hose carriage from burning by carting it to the Corporation Yard.

  Because Five’s engine house was in terrible disrepair, the legislature authorized an appropriation for a new one. Presently Lillie’s favorite firemen were using a borrowed Jeffers engine manufactured in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. They had sold their ancient third-class James Smith engine to the Virginia City volunteers, whom Twain so admired. The next day Five’s volunteers, led by Bill Fairman and Lillie Hitchcock, rode to the Nevada town to personally deliver the engine. The trek required several stagecoaches, relays, and lodgings. Lillie expertly drove Hank Monk’s team of six horses up the narrow grade on the mountain as Monk drawled his stories. After Lillie delivered the engine, Virginia City celebrated with a banquet. While in town, she helped extinguish a burning miner’s shack just to keep her dainty hand in.

  Twain saw Sawyer, “beaming with smiles and good nature,” coming down Montgomery Street. He had been drinking and told Twain how much he wanted to hear his last San Francisco lecture. “If you knew how bad I want to laugh,” Sawyer said, “you’d give me a ticket.” “Is your laugh hung on a hair-trigger?” Twain asked him, “That is, is it critical, or can you get it off easy?” “He laughed a specimen or two that struck me as being about the article I wanted and I gave him a ticket, and appointed him to sit in the second row, in the center, and be responsible for that division of the house. I gave him minute instructions about how to detect indistinct jokes, and then went away, and left him chuckling placidly over the novelty of the idea.” On December 10, nine days after the initiation of a paid fire department, a crowd, including California governor Frederick Low and Nevada governor Henry Blasdel, gathered in front of Congress Hall on Bush Street just above Montgomery to hear Twain repeat his popular Sandwich Island talk. He intended to alter only one portion and to give an uncharacteristic speech at the end summing up San Francisco, what it had been and what it would be. He would speak of its destiny. Now there were twenty blocks, 1,500 new homes and offices, fireproof buildings. “Think of it! San Francisco is here to stay.” That would be the crux of Twain’s farewell speech. Waiting for his lecture to begin, Twain said he was “quaking in every limb with a terror that seemed like to take my life away. The tumult in my heart and brain and legs continued a full minute before I could gain any command over myself.” Tom Sawyer wriggled in his seat next to Mary Bridget, his mind occupied by the $183 he owed in delinquent property taxes. At 8:00 P.M. the gaslights dimmed. Twain shuffled to the podium dressed in a claw-hammer coat, looking much as he had months before, steaming, laughing, and telling jokes and stories, though perhaps a little more rumpled. Solemn faced, he shuffled a stack of ragged pages, dropping them in feigned confusion until he had the crowd laughing. “And whenever a joke did fall,” he wrote in Roughing It, a semiautobiographical adventure story and his first solo effort, “and their faces did split from ear to ear, Sawyer, whose hearty countenance was seen looming redly in the center of the second row, took it up, and the house was carried handsomely. The explosion that followed was the triumph of the evening. I thought that honest man Sawyer would choke himself.”

  Twain had delivered his lecture in his attenuated delivery (his father had been a man of precise, grammatical manner) and now spoke solemnly. “My Friends and Fellow-Citizens—I read the signs of the times,” he said, looking out over the audience of dignitaries and his many friends. He told them he could behold the things that are in store for them. “Over slumbering California is stealing the dawn of a radiant future!” he said, dropping his comic stance. “This straggling town shall be a vast metropolis: this sparsely populated land shall become a crowded hive of busy men: Your waste places blossom like the rose and your deserted hills and valleys shall yield bread and wine for unnumbered thousands: railroads shall be spread hither and thither and carry the invigorating blood of commerce to regions that are languishing now: mills and workshops, yea, and factories shall spring up everywhere, and mines that have neither name nor place today shall dazzle the world with their affluence.” He half-unconsciously lapsed into a lazy tone and manner.

  He seemed to be speaking directly to Sawyer when he said that the time was drawing near when the dark clouds would pass away and prosperity lay upon the land. “I am bidding the old city and my old friends a kind, but not a sad farewell, for I know that when I see this home again, the changes that will have been wrought upon it will suggest no sentiment of sadness; its estate will be brighter, happier and prouder a hundred fold than it is this day. This is its destiny!”

  Twain spoke of the forty-niners, the volunteers, San Francisco’s great men, asking, Where are they now? “Scattered to the ends of the earth, or prematurely aged and decrepit, or shot or stabbed in street affrays—or dead of disappointed hope and broken hearts—all gone, or nearly all.… It is pitiful to think upon.” He was speaking, too, of Billy Mulligan, David Broderick, George Oakes, James Casey, Yankee Sullivan, and all the other volunteers who had met such tragic fates. Ringing in Sawyer’s ears were Twain’s two questions: “Has any other State so brilliant a future? Has any other city a future like San Francisco?” No, Sawyer thought, there were none. The city bid farewell to Twain, who had just turned thirty-one. Enthusiastically, Sawyer pumped his hand, hugged him good-bye, and was gone. They would never meet again. William Dean Howells, who had known all the great writers, wrote, “They were like one another and like other literary men, but Clemens was incomparable. [He was] the Lincoln of our literature.”

  On December 16, Twain left aboard the Opposition Line steamer America, leaving behind more friends than any newspaperman who had ever sailed out of the Golden Gate. The fabulous pirate Ned Wakeman, a seven-foot-long gold chain wrapped several times around his neck, was the skipper. As they sailed for Nicaragua and San Juan, Twain jotted down his stories of a snake as long as a ship’s mainmast and rats as big as greyhounds. Twain considered him one of the “most winning and delightful” people he had ever met. “I’d rather travel with that old portly, hearty, jolly, boisterous, good-natured sailor … than any other man I’ve ever come across,” he
later wrote of him in Roughing It. He never forgot his old friends and always included them in his books. He crossed Central America by way of Nicaragua and headed toward fame.

  Twain visited Lillie in Paris on July 11, 1867. “I should think you would feel mighty rascally now to let me go away without that picture,” he wrote her from Marseille. “All right my dear. I am coming back to Paris before long and when I do the Grand Hotel du Louvre will not be big enough to hold both of us. We had a gorgeous time in Paris. It isn’t any use to say anything about it—I am only writing to let you know I am well.” Then Lille shocked him when she abruptly married a San Francisco firefighter. “Poor Lillie Hitchcock!” Twain wrote. “She who they talk about her in print … the hearts that rascal has broken on both sides of the water! When I saw the family in Paris, Lillie had just delivered the mitten to a wealthy Italian Count, at her mother’s request (Mrs. H. said Lillie loved him)—but ah me!—worse to jilt anybody to marry Howard Coit … a dissipated spendthrift, son of a deceased, wealthy eminent physician, a most worthy man. Until that moment I said the whole affair must be untrue, because as detestable as some of Lillie’s freaks were, she could not be capable of deceiving her mother and father marrying secretly. And to tell the plain truth I don’t really believe it yet. She is an awful girl, but she is not that awful. But remember there was never so much as a whisper against her good name. I am so sorry for that girl and so very, very sorry for her good kind mother. I hold both of them in happy remembrance always—for they were your brave, outspoken sort of friends and just as loyal to you behind your back as before your face.” Just over a year later, Twain got married himself. Lillie Hitchcock left one third of her estate to the city with the request that they should “expend it in an appropriate manner for the purpose of adding to the beauty of San Francisco which I have always loved.” Her friends and the firemen of the city gathered to dedicate a 210-foot-high white granite tower on top of Telegraph Hill where she had so often played to the memory of one they had always loved. To them the tower resembled a fire hose nozzle. By 1866, fifteen U.S. cities had adopted steam. A decade later, 275 departments were using fire to fight fire, lighting the boiler fires of steam engines. Thus steam had replaced hand pumpers, horses had replaced men to haul the heavy engine, and a telegraph alarm had replaced the bell Sawyer once rang to alert the firefighters. Better streets and widespread gas lighting replaced the torch boys who grew up and were forgotten. On April 23, 1869, Sawyer was seriously injured when Liberty Hose’s engine and hose cart overturned. He had inspected the harness and found it sound that morning, but the strain of two jerking fire horses excited by the frenzied clanging of the fire bell snapped it as they dashed from the station. He convalesced at home with Mary Bridget and their three boys—Joseph, Thomas junior, and William—now able to pay more attention to his saloon on the southwest corner of Mission and Fifth streets.

  On May 26, 1870, the cornerstone for the huge new U.S. Mint was laid across the street at Fifth and Mission streets. “At two o’clock that afternoon,” Jack O’Brien wrote, “waiting crowds heard band music in the distance and out Mission Street from the Masonic Temple at Montgomery and Post Streets came a dazzling procession.… The throng cheered. A woman fainted. Out of Tom Sawyer’s Saloon across the street [where the Chronicle Building now stands] stumbled a score of amiable drunks, who, once they had recovered from the blast of the fresh air, supported the marchers with unruly applause.” Sawyer stood at the door of his tavern and surveyed the concrete and granite Greek Revival monolith that would soon house one-third of the nation’s gold reserves.

  Sam Brannan returned to San Francisco in the early 1870s, and came into Charlie Robinson’s painting studio in the Montgomery Block on a rainy day, wet, bedraggled, and liquored up. They talked together of the old happy days. “At the same time,” Robinson said, “he paid a visit to Pioneer Hall and saw on the wall his own photograph, showing him as a tall, handsome man, with large beautiful eyes, and richly attired. Tears rolled down his cheeks.” Robinson lost his paintings by fire in 1906 and 1921. The dapper, engaging Brannan, once the state’s first millionaire and its wealthiest man, had thrown his money away “like wheat before chickens.” He never recovered from a costly divorce settlement that drained most of his capital. He gave up being a Mormon, began to drink, and went bankrupt building the Calistoga summer resort and the Napa Valley Railroad. Historian H. H. Bancroft knew him personally and disliked him. Brannan moved to Mexico to realize the Yaqui land grants the Mexican government had given him in exchange for arms and money, but the Yaquis never let him take possession. May 5, 1889, when he was just over seventy, he died alone in Escondido. His body was held in a San Diego receiving vault of Mount Hope Cemetery for sixteen months awaiting funds for burial.

  On April 4, 1871, Scannell was made chief engineer of the new paid fire department—twenty-three companies of firemen—the city’s most picturesque and beloved chief. He never married or had a sweetheart. The department was his mistress. He still ate those fabulous marathon dinners on the cuff and devoted the rest of his life to the San Francisco Fire Department, and to Broderick One in particular. Broderick had used the fire station’s influence to put him and his friends politically in power in almost every aspect of San Francisco government for years—from San Francisco’s first appointed sheriff to chief engineer of the volunteer fire department. He was removed from office in 1874 over a squabble between fire commissioners, but when the Veteran Firemen’s Association was organized in 1888, Sawyer helped name the firemen’s medal of bravery after him. By then there were fire escapes, extension ladders, fire poles, good roads, alarm systems, fire codes, effective lighting, and water towers. When Scannell died, still in harness, fire department bells all over San Francisco tapped once for each of his seventy-three years. He had not a bone in his body that had not been fractured at some time during his battles with fires and men. He had given his heart to the San Francisco Fire Department. In return, San Franciscans had given him theirs. The overwhelming applause he had so long desired was finally his.

  Ed Stahle closed his steam baths after Twain left San Francisco in 1866 to refit them “in a style worthy the prestige and reputation of this celebrated institution for bathing, hair cutting, shampooing, hair dying, etc.…” With his new partner, George Held, he reopened the Montgomery Baths on August 22, 1867. On January 1, 1870, he dissolved the copartnership by mutual consent and carried on the business alone.

  In 1876, Twain published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in his friend’s image and name. Thirty-seven when he began writing it, he wrote one hundred pages in longhand in 1873, but composed the rest of his famous novel in the summer of 1874 and of 1875, when his friend William Dean Howells read a draft. For the character of Sawyer, Twain would only say he had drawn upon the characteristics of three different living boys. Albert Bigelow Paine, Twain’s approved biographer, in his 1923 introduction to Twain’s “What Is Man?” named the three boys as John B. Briggs (who died in 1907), William Bowen (who died in 1893), and Twain himself. In 1907, in an unguarded moment, Twain revealed himself as the primary model for Sawyer. In a note to a young girl he wrote, “I have always concealed it, but now I am compelled to confess that I am Tom Sawyer!” But he would not have said it was a “living boy he had known” if he had not meant a third person. “ ‘Sawyer’ was not the real name … of any person I ever knew, so far as I can remember.…” he said slyly. The great appropriator liked to pretend his characters sprang fully grown from his fertile mind. Twain, as Sawyer had reported, took ideas from anywhere he might find them and claimed them as his own. Sawyer had no doubts he was the inspiration for the name of Tom Sawyer. His claim was widely published in 1900, when those in San Francisco who knew them both could have challenged the assertion. No one, including Twain, ever did.

  “You want to know how I come to figure in his books, do you?” Sawyer told Call reporter Viola Rodgers. He turned on his stool, acknowledged the reporter, raised his brandy, and took a sip. “Well, as
I said, we both was fond of telling stories and spinning yarns. Sam, he was mighty fond of children’s doings and whenever he’d see any little fellers a-fighting on the street, he always stop and watch ’em and then he’d come up to the Blue Wing and describe the whole doings and then I’d try and beat his yarn by telling him of the antics I used to play when I was a kid and say, ‘I don’t believe there ever was such another little devil ever lived as I was.’ Sam, he would listen to these pranks of mine with great interest and he occasionally take ’em down in his notebook. One day he says to me: ‘I am going to put you between the covers of a book some of these days, Tom.’ ‘Go ahead, Sam,’ I said, ‘but don’t disgrace my name.’ ”

  In Mark Twain’s San Francisco, Bernard Taper wrote, “All sorts of characters swim into Twain’s ken—miners, millionaires, actors, bill collectors, notables, bums. He is on easy terms with them all. In the Turkish bath in the Montgomery Block he even meets a man named Tom Sawyer, with whom he likes playing penny ante. Long afterward this man enjoyed the conviction that it was he who had inspired Twain’s famous book, and outside of a tavern he acquired … he proudly hung the sign: ALE AND SPIRITS! THE ORIGINAL TOM SAWYER: PROP.” Idwal Jones wrote, “His belief that the tale was dedicated to him grew, as also grew the number of tales involving himself and ‘my friend Sam Clemens,’ going back not only to Sam’s Washoe period but also his unrecorded infancy. The sign swung profitably in the wind.” Twain’s old bathhouse crony ran the most popular watering hole in town, and in 1876 he was still an extra man with Engine Six on the east side of Sixth Street and corporation yard manager for the entire fire department. In 1884, he retired from public life as inspector of the Custom House, a job he had held for twenty-one years. After helping organize the Liberty Hose, he was elected its foreman for three terms and a member of the Board of Delegates. Four years later he was elected vice president of the Veteran Firemen’s Association along with Crooked Con Mooney, Singing Jack Carroll, and Cockeyed Frank Atkinson. On January 3, 1888, four hundred veteran firemen who had run with the first engines and worked the brakes long before met at the Pioneer Building on Fourth Street to relieve those early days. On July 4, he marched in a huge parade.