Black Fire (24 page)

In the choking smoke Sawyer’s breath came hard. As young and fleet as he was, he had to fight to stay on his feet. Across the street flames curled seductively along the walls lining the burning sidewalks. The planked wooden road itself was burning, its surface crackling and flickering as one immense fiery field. The flaming street shriveled all the new frame houses on both sides of Clay Street. Every structure between Clay and California streets ignited. On the floor of his office, Albert de Russailh slowly regained consciousness. Smoke and flames were swirling around him. He felt the earth shake. Firemen were blasting firebreaks to take away the fire’s fuel. Then he heard sharp, well-defined retorts in the distance as firefighters pulled down timbers and walls. In a minute he heard another rumble: the muffled roar of more buildings exploding. Merchants were voluntarily blowing up their businesses. Unforced destruction, the unchallenged dynamiting of a building, remained the volunteer fire companies’ most effective means of halting a fire’s march. Not much had changed since the Christmas Eve fire. Stored barrels of gunpowder were exploding, quaking the ground and hurling houses into the red sky. As the thunder of explosions marched closer, Russailh rose, escaped down the stairs, and ran along the planked road
for a block until he realized the street was on fire and so were his boots. Covered in sweat, he turned and, exhausted, collapsed on the floor of the Hotel de l’Alliance where he slept unaware of flames licking within inches of him and choking smoke drifting over his head.

All around the sleeping man people became insane through panic, heat, greed, despair. One man shot and killed a Mexican woman. A man on Washington Street lost his house, and then blew out his brains with a revolver. A merchant, burned out five times since he had been in San Francisco, slaughtered his family in madness, then shot himself, too. A former millionaire, his high silk hat and clothes ablaze, revolved in the gutter while laughing insanely and beating his lion-headed cane against blackened bricks. Carriages and wagons jammed together in a tangle of reins and locked wheels. Horses broke loose and charged along the flaming roads.

A powerful wind whipped around to blow a blanket of black smoke out over the bay. Washington, Sansome, and Bush streets flared into roaring furnaces. Frame houses vanished like frost on a windowpane. Flames spread rapidly north of Portsmouth Square, consuming buildings in no particular order, randomly knocking at every other back door. Timbers crashed in showers of burning splinters. Forced back by the flames, the crowd trampled everything before it. Severely burned men clawed their way to safety. Terrified horses bolted from blazing liveries. Wagons carrying the injured to makeshift hospitals overturned in the deep mud of the unburned area. The copious provisions of whiskey the thirsty town so prized propelled curtains of blue fire skyward. The glare was blinding. California Four and Broderick One and a few citizens fought on, rudderless without the chiefs and engineers.

As it had on the previous June 14, the firestorm churned hungrily toward the wharves, chasing citizens in bedclothes east along Commercial Street and far out onto the end of Long Wharf. The Great Boston Fire of 1760 had halted at the water’s edge. Most fires usually did. This blaze was different. Long Wharf caught and went, then the Montgomery Street Wharf, and then the next landing. Insatiable, the fire leaped from the piers out onto two hundred abandoned ships mired in the mudflats along the piers. The trapped armada had already suffered casualties. Volunteers cried, “Knock it down.” Working with irons, hooks, axes, and crowbars, they disconnected the remaining wooden wharves from land, saving some of the waterfront and dozens of ships crowded at their moorings. A few seaworthy ships forced their way through the tangled
chains holding them in the morass and sailed toward the Golden Gate and safety.

Unbelievably, the fire urged its way
against
the wind to Stockton Street and fought its way from there a block over to Powell Street. The gale ran along Powell in a southeasterly direction, crossed Sacramento and California streets, and howled toward Market Street. Stuart and Raines on Jackson Street was lost. The conflagration leaped Jackson and Pacific streets to Broadway, where it licked over the arid high ground and ate its way past Sansome, Battery, and Front streets to Clarke’s Point. Now a gigantic flickering noose of flame encircled the entire town and inexorably began to tighten.

Flames had surrounded banker James Naglee’s warehouse, an important repository, by the time the St. Francis Hook and Ladder Company reached it. The engine had so little water pressure, its two narrow streams of water vaporized on contact with the hot bricks. Scald cascaded over the men like needle pricks. Soon all were swimming in an ocean of steam. “More men,” bellowed a temporary foreman through his silver trumpet. “For the love of God, more men over here!” In the distance Sawyer heard the clank of fire brakes, another engine coming, and the screams of the burned and dying. Heavy black smoke under great pressure was issuing from the upper-story windows of a hotel across from Taaffe & McCahill’s huge mail-order warehouse at Sacramento and Montgomery streets. From the color and pattern, he knew there was tremendous heat in that smoke. Deep orange meant the temperature exceeded 2000 degrees and white signaled a blaze of 2370 degrees. Dazzling white meant the temperature was climbing beyond the limits of the iron boiler and had to be damped down. The underventilated fire had created a thick mix of accumulated fire gases.

Dense mushrooms of smoke boiled from the burning hotel at high velocity. There was partial autoignition on the hotel’s exterior as fire gases exited and mixed with the air, but this superheated cloud of fuel was too rich to ignite. Inside, reradiation from ceilings, walls, and objects fed one another. As a backdraft entered the hotel along a thermal runway, there was a total autoignition of superheated fire gases where incoming air met the smoke. A fireball erupted. Energy released from the fire burned uncontrollably and became hotter. A man trying to escape from a neighboring building ran into thick black smoke issuing from the hotel and became enveloped in fire. He ran a few steps, fell, and was consumed before Sawyer’s eyes.

Inside Naglee’s warehouse, a quartet of nine-to-twelve traders had shut themselves up behind barrels of water they believed would enable them to ride out the inferno. The thin brick walls they confidently relied upon had already begun to crumble. Spirits and chemicals within the warehouse ignited. The lurid colors blinded the traders inside. They still might live if they could endure the next hours of incredible heat. They huddled together behind the cooling water barrels.

Outside, three firefighters were cut off. Running for their lives, they reached the safety of an alley, only to be crushed by bricks falling directly on them. A whirlwind of sparks spun over the mountain of bricks as if to mark their grave. California Four feared that DeWitt & Harrison’s commodities storehouse in midblock on the north side of Pacific Street might automatically ignite next. The warehouse’s owners had no water, but they did have kegs of vinegar. By the time the volunteers reached the storehouse, Harrison had gotten to the roof and drenched the building with eighty-three thousand gallons of stored vinegar, and DeWitt’s men were beating out the rest of the flames with vinegar-soaked blankets. Ahead, Taaffe & McCahill’s three-story metal store was anchored imposingly on the corner of Sacramento and Montgomery streets, south of the City Hotel and close to the quartermaster’s house. Inside Taaffe’s crouched six stubborn traders as loath to leave their merchandise and gold and silver in the advance of the flames as the four traders huddled inside Naglee’s.

“We’ll sit the fire out,” said one. “Of course,” agreed another. “Our new building is corrugated iron and fireproof.” The men slammed the massive iron doors, one-inch-thick metal plates and castings of insurmountable weight, and bolted the thick shutters. Secure, they crouched behind double sheets of iron. They listened to the dull thud of falling debris against their metal fortress and tensed as the inferno rumbled up to the doors and covered the metal warehouse like a fiery blanket. Sawyer and other volunteers arrived out front but were driven back. Shielding his face, he could only watch as the fire began to curl the iron. The cheap metal began glowing. Conduction directly transferred heat through the wall and made the inhabitants of the warehouse sweat. By now they doubted their decision to ride out the firestorm. If things got bad, they knew they could always fling open the strong metal shutters or slide back the thick iron doors and escape.

A fringe of thin smoke quivered along the window casements, gave
a puff, and in an instant the windows became perfect rectangles of woollike smoke. Heavy black smoke issued from the upper story under great pressure. It was perfect for black fire: boiling smoke, underventilated fire, and a heavy rich mix of fire gases accumulating within. The fog frames blackened as the six traders watched. They heard the volunteers outside crying for them to escape. Long tongues of bright yellow flames belched from small rents in the metal coffin. Outside, the volunteers screamed louder for the men to evacuate. By then it was too late. While white signaled a blaze of 2370 degrees, dazzling white meant the temperature was climbing beyond the limits of the cheap iron. The exterior of the metal building and the ore inside was melting and flowing into white-hot puddles at the firefighters’ feet. As the smoke around the window frames darkened, the six men inside ran to the shutters to open them. They would not budge.

“What’s wrong?” one asked. “Pull harder.”

The twin sheets of bolted metal trembled and grew cherry red—too hot to touch. The great double-layered iron shutters, as advertised, did not melt. Instead, they expanded in the heat and sealed the windows permanently. Next the men raced to the huge iron doors, but the fire had welded these to the building. The double sheets of bolted iron began to tremble. The traders, who were suffocating, pounded miserably on the door, burning their fists, and then ran back to the shutters. The color of the flames altered to orange. Flashovers of superheated gases radiated across the ceiling and downward, setting crates of merchandise afire. Radiation raised the temperature of objects to their ignition point. Their ledger books were already burning. Glass became molten. The traders’ lungs filled with fluid; their throats closed in spasm. They were being roasted alive in a huge furnace. The moisture was sucked from their lungs and their skin began to bubble. Fiery explosions of smoke began consuming the available oxygen. Smoke turns to carbon when it reaches a temperature of 1000 degrees. The traders’ lungs were black by now. Carbon monoxide killed the merchants mercifully quick at this point.

Outside, the volunteers observed the heaving red and white sea brooding at the iron windows and smelled sulfur and charred meat. More of the impervious “fireproof” iron structure collapsed into heaps and puddled into glowing slag. Twisting, groaning, and glowing, Taaffe & McCahill’s warehouse grew suddenly white hot—so incandescent it
blinded their eyes. The volunteers said nothing. The iron warehouse inflated to unimaginable size. The strain was unbearable. It had to blow at any moment.

“Get back, boys,” Sawyer called. Retreating as far as they could, they took refuge in a burned-out lot. The iron building expanded to its limit, shook violently, once, twice, and exploded its fastenings. Red-hot bolts scattered like bullets, puncturing men and structures alike. Shutters burst out. Long-tongued flames twisted the iron into monstrous shapes. Gold and silver inside melted, flowed among the twisted black iron, and created one grotesque piece of metal. The doors coalesced into a caricature of their former shape. The bulging storehouse, having lost its integrity, shriveled. It collapsed before their eyes to become a dripping, molten metal coffin. Chastened, the volunteers left the warehouse and mechanically went on pulling down houses in the path of the fire. Whirlwinds of flames and smoke columns walked alongside them, running clockwise and counterclockwise and creating additional whirlwinds that carried sparks miles away. Sawyer now knew smoke could roar. He held his ears as timbers dropped in his path. Escape seemed impossible. In the choking smoke the volunteers’ breathing came in gasps as they rushed blindly looking for safety. All were exhausted. The blaze rumbled westward and northeastward at the same time. Fresh air was blown in as the wind changed and filled the fire with oxygen. Other torch boys led firemen through shortcuts and down seldom-used alleyways until they reached salvation.

The blaze swept past them—a momentary darkening, then a gush of sparks followed by superheated air, gases, and a broad column of red shrouding everything with glare and the sound of a locomotive rumbling over broken tracks. An umbrella of dark smoke projected a reflection of the blaze on the underside of clouds. On the outskirts of town, people saw the ghastly light above San Francisco. As far as Monterey the fire cast an unearthly light below. The vast sheet of flame was so bright it attracted flocks of birds from surrounding marshes. Against the black smoke the birds were specks of burnished gold. Drawn to the flames, they flew into them and vanished one after another in tiny puffs of steam.

Former convicts robbed and assaulted citizens fleeing the city. Gangs of Ducks, principally members of Jack Edwards’s gang, began robbing and assaulting people on the outskirts of town. As looting began in the suburbs, thieves in the city bided their time. The Coveys could
not loot properly until the fire burned out. A few, eager to begin pillaging, pulled wet bedsheets over their heads and dashed headlong into burning stores. Few came out again. The ones who did dragged steaming valuables to the road, pulled them to a secure spot, and rushed back for more. While they were gone, their fellow Coveys robbed them. Empty strongboxes littered the smoldering ground like mortar shells. Any fireproof safe that had burst open was now empty. Merchants kept moving their valuables ahead of the fire, but it was a losing battle.

A half block away, men cried out in agony, but the inferno’s trainlike bellow drowned them out. In a deserted hollow on the northwestern corner of Jackson and Montgomery was a shallow basin of weeds that was a pool in summer. The depression was stacked with rescued merchandise: a jeweler’s plate-glass showcase, velvet lined and overflowing with sparkling rings, stickpins, bracelets, and brooches belonging to Hayes & Lyndall’s Clay Street store. It lay unprotected while its owner had gone back to salvage more goods. A band of drunken Ducks trotted down the slope of Montgomery Street and sprang upon the case.