Black Fire (10 page)

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 editor 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.

Washington Allen Bartlett, the first alcalde, ordered Jasper O’Farrell to lay out the city following the natural hilly terrain. The Council overruled his plan and insisted on a gridiron layout to give the most profits upon subdivision. O’Farrell complied, with one deviation. Market Street would intersect the grid at a right angle striking out from the waterfront to the Mission District, dividing San Francisco to this day. The model of the extended city was two sections of right-angle grids with streets running north/south and east/west above Market Street, and northeast/northwest and southeast/southwest below. Thus, San Francisco streets plunge forward as if they were on a flat plane, racing over mountains as if they were not there at all—straight ahead, straight ahead—Onward!—the San Francisco way.

Above the roar of his forge, Othello the blacksmith heard splashing in the frigid blackness that was Montgomery Street. Someone was plunging through the thick mud toward his shop. He judiciously interspersed his blows by taps upon the anvil, always shifting his iron. He heated his tire to a bright red and deluged the rim in a water barrel to prevent it from being burned up. A cloud of steam rose. He pumped his bellows until the coals glowed white and began pounding. Iron-struck sparks flew over his leather apron, burning holes everywhere but his bare black arms and hands. “The flames know me,” he thought. “The flames are my friends.” He smiled, his face reddish brown against the fire and his teeth dazzling white. He wiped his glistening brow and walked to a barn door–like opening onto the thoroughfare to listen to the rhythmic
slap, slap, slap
of bare feet. He wondered how anyone dared tread at night, much less sprint, through the numerous unlit pits and obstacles of the potholed quagmire of streets. He heard the babble of many voices, the clank and creak of heavy machinery. An army was advancing upon him. A light brighter than the sooty glow of the nearby saloon danced erratically in the distance. Then a panting Olympian runner, a boy with a torch, broke abruptly through the mist, trailing a column of smoke. Nervously, Othello remembered the mysterious fire that had recently burned all of San Francisco. The city, quickly rebuilt, was plump and ready again for burning.

In March a gang of rugged firemen had dragged a bell weighing several hundred pounds into the belfry on Brenham Place—as if the simple act of hanging it would solve the problem of fires. The bell, cast
by the Hooper Foundry of Troy, New York, was the first erected in California and had rung first for the burning of the steamers
Santa Clara
and
Hartford
at the end of Long Wharf. Now Othello could hear the new bell toll again—sharp, staccato taps like the pounding of his hammer. The order of the taps designated the district where the fire was and summoned the volunteers. Jumping into harness, dozens of men had raced to their firehouses to haul the heavy water rigs to the fire. At his door Othello saw a boy with upheld torch running as if to set the city ablaze again. Another set of running feet and another barefoot boy with canvas pants rolled to the knee, dashed out of the fog. Smoke from the first torch still floated in the air. The light revealed his double-breasted red flannel shirt with two vertical rows of brass buttons, a white leather belt, and ragged corduroy trousers. Chin uplifted, breath whistling, legs pumping in a blur, he hooted and called and lifted his torch to illuminate as much road as possible. The fate of an entire city was in their hands. There was always a crowd of ragged boys eager to run before the engines and hold aloft the torches that lit the way. Sawyer’s eyes darted over the mud road, searching so intently he overlooked Othello, who towered as big as his smithy, whose arms were as massive as his anvil and who was backlit by his blazing furnace. Another blacksmith in town, John A. Steele, really was a giant. Sawyer would have overlooked him, too, so intent was he on missing anything in the roadbed that might hinder the progress of the volunteers. He heard the rumble of their mighty water engine keeping pace behind him. As the runners sprinted they shouted warnings back to the firefighters. Sawyer’s moving torch revealed an iron stove blocking the intersecting road ahead. It had not been there that morning. “Stove leeward!”

“Crate in the road!” he called next. His warning was still ringing when a group of calloused street toughs, breathing heavily, trudged into view dragging a primitive two-thousand-pound engine with a hose reel fitted into a wrought-iron ring up the incline. Pumping brakes on each side of the four-wheel jumper, folded up on the way to a fire, gave the impression of a hay wagon with high-posted sides. As red-shirted “Bully Boys” swerved to avoid the half-submerged stove, there came the squeal of hand brakes and audible curses of sweating men gasping for breath. The large back wheels turned twice in the mud, found traction, and the odd relay race was on again.

Sawyer hoped to attach himself as a volunteer to a company still being formed: Big Six, made up totally of Baltimoreans who had hung
the new bell. He might make a start there as a pumper or runner. If no bunks or torches were available with the Monumentals, he could sprint for one of the other developing units, such as Knickerbocker Five. Each would need a contingent of young boys and teens to light the way and each was violently competitive to be first. The lead boy, usually quickest, chose the fastest route. The strange rushing, lurching parade of men, heavy silver machine, curious neighbors in night dress, barking dogs, crowds of yelling boys and blazing torches, progressed. The massive wheels of the heavy manual pumper cut ribbons in the mud. The motto “Onward!” rang out. Sawyer’s heart beat rapidly. “Onward!” Behind, the volunteers chanted, a counterpoint to the thudding of boots, slapping of feet, and rasping breath. Chief Broderick lifted the silver trumpet at his belt. Its clear bellow alerted the people ahead. That single note gave them hope, though not much. “The fire engines the city possesses,” people knew, “are of no more use than an old maid’s teapot.”

As sixty hard-drinking roughhousers, heaving and chanting, rocked to and fro at the handles of the hand-pumper and extinguished two small brush fires, they knew another city-destroying blaze must happen as surely as the sun now rising over the flimsy structures. Charlie Robinson, most famous of all San Francisco torch boys, nearly broke his neck on such a treacherous street. Born in East Monmouth, Maine, he had grown up in a two-story gabled frame house at Number Nine Calhoun Street on Windmill Hill. Perched on a white picket fence across from the house where Hudson, the coffee and tea merchant, ground his spices, Charlie drew fine views of the bay. At age seven, he took painting lessons from the artist Charles C. Nahl. Threats of criminal reprisals forced Charlie’s father, Doc Robinson, a theatrical producer-playwright, to flee San Francisco. He left Charlie and his mother without any means of support, so the boy began running for Big Six. Torch boys might attach themselves to their favorite firehouse, but when there was a fire, they observed strict neutrality. “If no torches were to be had in the Monumental’s house,” Charlie said, “I would run for St. Francisco Hook and Ladder [on Dupont Avenue], Germans, or for Lafayette Hose, the Frenchies.” One night he ran for Vigilant Engine Number Nine out of their two-story fireproof brick firehouse on Stockton Street. He and a band of torch boys lighted the way for Nine’s New York side lever and searched for nails on the board road. “There was a night fire in North Beach,” he recalled. “Three of us were running with the engines. The first boy darted ahead and suddenly we saw his light disappear.
I was next.” In the next instant Charlie’s torch flew out of his hand, the pockmarked ground whirled around him, and he was swallowed up. He felt blindly in the blackness. Mud and water were on both sides of him. The other boy lay under him, motionless yet breathing. His brand, balanced high above, cast down enough light for him to evaluate their predicament. They were lying at the bottom of an enormous pit. Another boy fell on top of them. “When the men with the engine saw two lights disappear and then a third, they knew something must have happened. A big hole that none of us knew about had been dug that day right in the middle of the street.” Charlie heard the volunteers swearing, a piercing screech of metal, and the double squeal of brakes. If that gleaming two-thousand-pound water engine should plunge into the hole on top of them … He braced himself. A sudden lurch and the tips of hobnailed boots peeked over the edge. His chief’s hand shot down and pulled the boys up. “Let’s get going,” he said and they did.