Black Fire: The True Story of the Original Tom Sawyer

  Broderick’s men—rugged, leathered, and weather-bleached—had been rushing about all day, shouting, joking, spitting, cursing, rough-housing, and fighting—mostly fighting. Five had been heavyweight boxers. All walked with a light swinging step, defiant and jaunty, much like gamecocks. Saints or devils, the volunteers were worthy of their pride. Their dress, as befitting such a dangerous occupation, was loose, careless, lively—and even sexy. A few wore high collars and fancy decorated vests, but most wore the current New York–style uniform: tight blue-black trousers or leggings, thigh-length black cowhide boots, red double-breasted flannel shirts with black buttons, and black ties. Some wore wide leather belts, but a third wore colorful suspenders in the style of New York Company Twenty-four. These gallowses, fastened in back by a leather clasp in the shape of an eagle’s head, permitted them more speed in dressing.

  Sawyer walked to the center of the engine house to study the barely functioning manual pumper under the lantern light. It was an offspring of an ancient line of “reg’lar highbred little steppers” and “light musical snuffboxes” of steel rods and brass supports that had emerged full born from the Continental Eagle in Old Maiden Lane. East Coast volunteers endowed their engines with fanciful names. Manhattan’s Engine Three called theirs Old Brass Backs because brass covered most of its pumping mechanism. Another named their double-decker end-stroke engine the Valiant. In that tradition Broderick One called their pumper the Mankiller, after a similar hand pumper owned by New York’s Exempt Fire Company.

  Sunday was the time allotted for repairing the pumper and equipment—high maintenance that Broderick and every wise chief demanded of his men. The rogues swarmed around the water carrier, bearing down on the nickel and brass pipes and silver fittings, rubbing and polishing them to brilliance. They scrubbed the signal lights and lamps, filled them with oil, charged the torches with fuel, and ground, cleaned, and oiled the bills, hooks, pikes, and axes until they gleamed in the flickering light. The yellow, red, and gold side-stroke engine was very heavy, hard to pull, and harder to pump. Its rear wheels were taller than Sawyer, but its front wheels were small and pivoted, an innovation that enabled the Mankiller to turn corners on a dime. All other types of engines except the Hunnemans had to be lifted up to wheel around corners.

  The Mankiller possessed another clever feature: a ricklike set of double brakes by which twenty men or thirty men on each side manually moved the brakes up and down to operate the pump. When not in operation, these suction bars could be swung up over the top and locked into place with two large brass pipes called squirrel tails. When in operation, these brakes could swiftly be lowered from the folded position to the breast-high pumping position. The cross arms of the Mankiller’s pumping mechanism were slotted so the leverage could be altered without changing the length of the stroke. The hand engine operated at sixty strokes per minute (a stroke is a full up-and-down motion of the brakes) or could be sped up to double the tempo. The Mankiller’s two nine-and-one-half-inch cylinders were fitted with air-discharging valves (a nine-inch stroke could produce a steady single or double stream of water). At normal pace a man could last only about ten minutes. As the rate of pumping increased, the time a man could pump lessened. The Mankiller was truly a killer of men. Fully manned and working for two minutes by the muscle power of forty volunteers, horizontal distances of between 150 feet and 196 feet could be achieved. If this old, reconditioned New York side stroker was so impressive, then what must “the King of All Fire Engines,” which Broderick recalled with such admiration, have been like?

  Sawyer’s first job was to wash the leather apron covering the hose wheel and dress the cowhide casings and covers as others adjusted the brakes and greased the wheels. As he washed the coil of rope fastened to the Mankiller’s stern to control its operation when Broderick One hauled the pumper to a blaze, Volunteer George Oakes rushed up. He drew the coil out to its length and ran his hand along it to shake off excess water. “After a blaze,” Oakes ordered, drawing out the tail rope again and violently shaking it, “this is never put away wet. Nor are the drag ropes [thick cables used for pulling the engine to the fire].” Sawyer dried the ropes and then mended a bucket. As Oakes was rubbing down the silver pipes and pump handles, he smiled and asked, “Did you know that frost makes flames green?” Sawyer shook his head.

  When the immaculate hose spanners, half spanners, and wrenches were put in place and the toolbox repolished, they were done. Sawyer smelled dinner cooking on the second floor and ascended behind the others into a true paradise. His breath caught in his throat at such magnificence. A huge engine might clutter the ground floor, but the upper floors were the most majestic in San Francisco. Grateful benefactors had converted the rooms into handsomely fitted-up clubrooms with billiard tables, card rooms, bars, parlors, and fine libraries. Such luxury was acceptable to a public who granted every luxury a frontier town could bestow on the men who kept the city alive when the citizens did not want to be bothered.

  The Council expected the unpaid men to buy their uniforms, equipment, and engines out of their own pockets. Eventually they would offer a little financial assistance, but not before granting themselves hefty raises. The intangible rewards for the firefighters, though, were tremendous: lavish events, fashionable balls, and magnificent parades in full-dress uniform. Membership in the volunteers made a man someone in San Francisco, exempt by statute from jury duty and after five years in the unit exempt for life. Fire service was a badge of distinction equal to a gold medal. In the East, Pittsburgh’s Valiant Engine Company was so popular they charged volunteers to join. Politics and firefighting had been linked from the nation’s earliest days. Benjamin Franklin, father of the fire service, started the Union Fire Company in Philadelphia, the first volunteer group in America. George Washington was an enthusiastic firefighter and James Buchanan was a volunteer. Any politician who aspired to public office required the backing of at least one firehouse. Broderick realized Broderick One might pave his way to the State Senate. Kohler had his doubts. His partner was a work in progress.

  San Francisco was not a city, but a ship crewed by adventurers, opportunists, and thieves. In a city teeming with blown-in-the-bottle scoundrels, a “bad man” was only slightly a scoundrel. Among the forty-niners, frontier men, and fortune hunters, there had finally arrived real heroes—the volunteers. But these heroes needed torch boys. Broderick felt a sense of urgency. Even now, the arsonist was plotting their destruction. The chief asked among the fleetest, most agile children living in the city and on the outskirts if they were interested in becoming torch boys. One such boy headed downhill to meet with him. A few leafless trees stood quivering in the morning mist. The grass was wet—where there was grass—and the hard mud around tufts incised with the tracks of rats. The boy exhaled a puff of white and gazed out over the sand hills of Contra Costa across the bay. It was like looking at the same mountainous, monotonous dunes of downtown San Francisco. A few cozy homes had tucked themselves into live oak thickets across the bay. Sturdy boats and barges glided off Yerba Buena Island, trailing white wakes in the black water. White gulls circled over Alcatraz Island. The boy counted line upon line of wharves under construction stretching from the shallows into deeper water where bigger ships could safely unload. The cove, a mile across, covered 336 acres, but near shore it was shallow as a teacup. The winter storm had washed gold down from the mountains into the streams, but there were more valuable things than gold. Lumber, brushwood, and tree limbs were more precious than any commodity except freshwater. The only uncontaminated, drinkable water in San Francisco was a single well on the western slope. Thirsty San Franciscans had to import drinking water in bottles from Sausalito or buy from water-cart men who sold barrels on the street or door-to-door for three dollars.

  The boy saw Broderick in the big plate window of the Occidental Restaurant on Washington Street, where he was eating a steak butchered from a thousand-pound bear. In a town where cabbages might sell for $3 a head, tea and coffee for $400 a
barrel, and a butcher knife for $30, grizzly meat was a bargain—$1 a pound. Fat on a bear’s back stood three inches deep, but the meat was red, nutritious, juicy, and as sweet as a grilled pork chop. The boy and Broderick talked as they ate. When they finished, Broderick pushed back his chair and they went out onto the street. No vestige of the Christmas Eve blaze remained now. The city had swiftly rebuilt itself. Builders had thrown together any covering to make a house: wood, leather, canvas, frame, Chinese (paper), zinc, and iron. The same cursory construction went into the roads. Chests of tea, bags of coffee, and boxes of rice and beans were strewn in the mud. Stones, bricks, wood, lime, sand, bottles and boots, crockery and rags, dead dogs and cats, and enormous rats, of which the city was particularly rich, clogged the most frequented arteries. By day the up-and-down streets were dangerous. By night they were deadly.

  Midblock, Broderick found himself trapped ankle deep in mud. “Why does a city of millionaires keep its roads in such disrepair,” he moaned. “Surely, planking could be gotten from somewhere?” He conjectured that the roads were kept in such poor condition because the townsfolk put all their energy into the accumulation of gold. Nearby a street inspector and his two assistants balanced on planks as they carted buckets of sand and armloads of chaparral to fill in a quicksand pit. “It’s a hopeless job,” Broderick said. “By tonight, the mud pools will be wider and deep as ever.” Broderick and the boy had gone only a few steps before they stubbed their toes on a protruding bundle of mill saws. Uneven planks encased in jagged sheets of zinc cut into Broderick’s boots. New boots, like oiled clothing, were hard to come by. The interminable rainy season left local stores so understocked that one advertised knee-high boots at $96 an ounce. “Let’s cross to Kearny here,” he said. “There won’t be a safe passage to the opposite side for another three blocks.” Only three makeshift walks existed in town: the upper side of Kearny Street between Sacramento and Clay in front of Barrett & Sherwood’s jewelry store, part of the west side of Montgomery between Clay and Washington, and Montgomery Street in the section by Burgoyne and Company’s bank.

  As they crossed, Broderick looked both ways. Recently a man was knocked off his horse on Kearny Street merely for undertaking to ride over a fellow who had no horse. To secure a foothold, folks ruffled the slippery battleground with iron and wooden hoops, tons of wine sieves, barrel tops, and discarded shirts and trousers. Dozens of men, horses, and wagons black with mud churned and beat the swamp until it was thick glue. Heavily laden wagons pulled by reliable London drays inched along. A pile of casks and barrels blocked a sidewalk that was only a rutted dent. People, like dancers, moved a step at a time along a bridge of bottles, drinking as they went and providing empties for future stepping-stones. Comically dignified men tiptoed to the other side of Market Street only to plunge full face into the morass before they reached it. “Pick, jump, stride, and totter,” a citizen groused, “and we got something that no doubt looks somewhat like a street on a map, but is not recognizable in its natural form although they call it a street. All we succeed in is getting stuck.”

  Each segment of the planked Kearny Street sidewalk was different. There was a stretch of packing cases, window shutters, and a mosaic of sides and ends covered with tin. In front of Hanlon’s Saloon, forty kegs had been hammered into the mud as a makeshift sidewalk that ended so abruptly unwary pedestrians plunged full length into the mud. “The narrow Kearny Street sidewalk is fearfully and wonderfully made,” Broderick said. They turned onto the south side of Clay Street between Montgomery and Kearny where the city had laid its first sidewalk—stringers and springy barrel staves. The Montgomery Street sidewalk from Clay to Jackson Street was the oddest of all: two blocks made from pianos. “The fill was composed of heavy crates, big machinery tied together, and discarded cook stoves,” Broderick said. “When the stoves sank, the city plugged the holes with a shipload of damaged pianos, then layered over blades twined together to make a loose crust that lack the gravity to sink further.” Some streets were partially planked or had rugged cobblestones, but mostly it was mud and more mud. When the rains stopped, prevailing winds whipped the dunes over the roads. Then it was sand and more sand. “I wanted you to see firsthand,” Broderick said, “that the unlit streets offer a blackness deeper than a moonless country road. On the most star-filled night you might make out the outline of a man next to you, but never his features. Fog conceals obstructions dumped in our streets everyday. On the way to fires there are nails, stones, and abandoned wagons for firefighters to trip over. You could be sucked under by quicksand or tumble headlong into surprise pits.” Packs of feral pigs, “white wings,” rooting in garbage along every route could be fierce. “We can’t afford to get lost in the numerous hills and mazelike streets. We need fleet boys to light the way to the fire at night and carry torches ahead of the engines.” The torch boys would call out hazards, potholes, abandoned wagons, and crates along the quicksandlike streets, choose the best route, and take the volunteers speedily and safely to the blaze and back. “It’s a very romantic occupation for young lads to carry fire to the fire. Each will attach himself to his favorite firehouse as they are organized and receive room and board.” The boys would be busy. The Lightkeeper was ready to burn down San Francisco again.

  The dense forest of rolling masts in the darkness all around the Lightkeeper had been compared to Le Havre and Marseille. From the waterfront he heard the groaning of nearly a thousand ships straining at their cables, the endless flapping of sails and scrape of anchor chains dragged about by currents. Hulls thumped together as he picked his way along the waterfront. He watched every step and listened to the creak of every board. He was wise to be wary. Passengers who had passed safely over all the dangers of the vast ocean drowned like dogs—on land. The wooden quays were dangerous and the worn, fire-damaged boards, easily broken. At night residents of the waterfront routinely heard the splash of heavy bodies plunging through holes into the water. These fatalities were most prevalent at ten o’clock at night, when river steamboats down from Marysville, Stockton, and Sacramento landed at Long Wharf, which was unlighted and full of gaps. Neighbors were used to fishing floating bodies out of the bay as part of their morning chores. In just four months of 1850, sixty people had plunged to their deaths through the yawing pitfalls. The number might be inflated. Jim Cunningham, the city coroner, was paid by the inquest. Thus, in the dead of night he would sometimes take a drowned corpse and dump him through the rotted planks to be fished up and autopsied again. He was once paid for six inquests on the same individual.

  In early 1850, nighttime robberies were so common, powerful men kept to the center of unlit streets. They checked their concealed pistols and knives at the doors of theaters and restaurants as commonly as gentlemen might check their top hats at the Paris Opera, slipping bowie knives from their boot tops, removing derringers from vest pockets, and shaking daggers from their sleeves. Any man claiming to be unarmed was met by a startled look of incredulity and promptly searched. Criminals had the city by the throat. Edward Gilbert wanted something done. A Mexican War veteran, he had arrived in San Francisco three years earlier to become the hot-tempered senior editor of the Daily Alta California. His editors fought duels on a regular basis. So did Gilbert, who was infamous for challenging, then backing out, a gambit that would eventually get him killed. His sarcastic diatribe against crime read: “We doubt if there is spirit enough among our people to even reprimand one of these throat-slashers, were he caught in the act of strangling a child or setting fire to church.… We look with apparent satisfaction upon the sprightly attempts of the recruits of penaldom to illuminate our city free gratis.”

  Editor John Nugent in the Daily Herald saw no remedy for midday crime “but the strong arms and stout souls of the citizens themselves.” He suggested that the citizens organize a band of three hundred regulators to treat a few thieves to “Lynch law” and make their fellows more careful about future depredations. “The floodgates of crime have been opened,” another e
ditor roared, “and thieves and vagabonds can do as they please and it makes me damn mad. Someone should do something, anything, or burn the place down!”

  “Burn the place down!” the Lightkeeper agreed. “Now there’s an idea!”

  He moved along the pier, biding his time. At his waist he carried a small lantern. The arsonist felt some sympathy for the rabid editors. Reliably reporting on an unreliable police force must be tedious work. The new department was composed of so many ex-bandits and active bandits’ pals that it must be difficult to tell the cops from the crooks. The cops made sure, for a wink and old times sake, that no punishments ever fell upon their chums. If that failed, the corrupt courts set them free for the proper monetary consideration. One could not count on juries, either. Some men made a comfortable living as jurors whose vote was for sale. Should the Lightkeeper be captured, though his existence was barely suspected except by the wisest, the chances of his conviction were slim. He looked around. The waterfront was dangerous, but then so was he.

  Deeper inland Broderick One’s new ragtag band of torch boys, bunkers and ragamuffins, veered off the main street onto another road, their torches carving a sharp line in the night. The echoes in the ravines were confusing. The city was filled with baffling sounds that carried for miles. Searching for a burning house ahead, the runners saw not a spark. Many buildings were hidden in pitch-black canyons or behind hills. San Francisco was small, but its high cramped streets, endless dunes, and sand mountains made any fire invisible. They were also learning that the going was tough. No level roads existed except for Washington Street.