Black Fire (25 page)

Heinrich Schliemann, the future discoverer of the lost city of Troy and archaeological excavator of Mycenae, was in San Francisco that night. “The roaring of the storm, the crackling of the gunpowder,” he wrote, “the cracking of the fallen store walls, the cries of the people and the wonderful spectacle of an immense city burning up in a dark night all joined to make this catastrophe awful in the extreme.” “Not all great fires are started by Greeks hiding in Trojan horses or mad Roman emperors with fiddles,” a survivor complained. “Some are Ducks with tapers.”

The city burned all night. At dawn the boom of the firefighters’ explosives rumbled like the dirge of funeral drums. The Ghost Fleet lost the
Callao, Byron, Galen, Roma, Autumn
, the
General Harrison
, a store ship, and two other converted vessels. Flames damaged the seemingly impervious
Niantic
and
Euphemia
. The
Apollo
and the
Georgian
ship warehouses shimmered with fire as did the catwalks and wharves connecting them to the city. Many more iron buildings failed—the City Hotel, Captain Folsom’s building, and an adjoining brick building were gone. So were the U.S. Assay Office, Dodge’s Express, the California Exchange, the Union Hotel, Gregory’s Express, Delmonico’s, two adjoining buildings—the Starr and Minturn—the
Courier
and
Balance
offices, and Moffat’s Lab, which was brick. Sawyer knew that on the east side of Montgomery, between Washington and Jackson, stood three stories of a supposedly fireproof building. “The fire will halt its march here,” he
predicted. “It can never get through these thick walls and iron-bolted shutters.” No sooner had he said this than the fire reached the buildings and he was proved right. Meanwhile, crowds forced north by the fantastic heat had halted at the corner of Jackson Street and saw other walls melting like snowdrifts. A change came over the crowd for the first time. They had been afraid before; now they were angry.

The people had lost their last bit of faith in a fireproof house or that anyone could stop the Lightkeeper, who set his blazes with impunity, greater frequency, and obvious relish. It was no coincidence that the fifth all-encompassing fire had broken out on May 4, 1851, the anniversary of the second city-destroying fire and the same day as the Firemen’s Parade. Systematic pillaging by organized gangs of army deserters and ex-convicts during the confusion and in every one of the devastating fires so far suggested the presence of a profit-motivated Lightkeeper. The gangs had been waiting. “The conflagration had to be the work of an incendiary,” citizens said. There is no doubt now. Their fury mounted against the arsonist’s “brazen chaos.” An investigation pinpointed the genesis of the blaze to the Clay Street upholstery shop. The space above Bryant’s Hotel was occupied by Baker & Meserve’s shop and should have been fireproof. According to the owners, residents had taken the lanterns out of their rooms at 10:00
P.M.
, no fires had been used about the house “for any purpose whatever,” and the fireplace had not yet been damped down to ash and coals to restart for the morning fire.

Yes, the blaze had been a diversion to allow strong-arm toughs to loot the great stores of gold dust that miners had in safekeeping awaiting transportation back east. Prospectors keenly missed the presence of any secure banks in the mining regions. While they panned and shored up tunnels, they had to leave their ore unguarded and stood pickaxes in their holes so no one would meddle with their claims. Astonishingly, the markings were commonly honored. An El Dorado gambler lost $45,000 at the turn of a card but said only, “I left my tools in the hole and I’ll get plenty more gold when I get back and the water falls.” Ethics in these uncommonly dishonest times were confusing.

Just before dawn, Mayor Geary announced that $200,000 worth of gold was missing. Later he would leave the city with an unexplained $200,000 fortune he had somehow accumulated on the job during his three years in office. Yet his wealth had not been derived from trade—he
had none—or from illegally buying city lots or any of the other doubtful city transactions in which both Brannan and Broderick indulged.

Red Davis and Curly Bill sailed from Rincon Point at the height of the conflagration to bury looted gold. Lit by the burning city, the two Sydney Town Ducks felt the Lightkeeper’s Wind at their backs and heard the California Engine Company bell ringing on Market Street and the odd cadence of the Monumental firehouse bell in the Square. As they progressed on their two-mile journey, a low white fog crept across the bay and covered over the red waters surrounding the burning city. Sheriff John “Coffee Jack” Hays, a tough customer, might be hot on their watery trail. He once led his volunteers against fifteen-to-one odds to smash a Comanche war party. The former Texas Ranger, greatest of them all, could outride and outshoot almost anybody except Billy Mulligan, who scared even the Ducks. Between the Ducks’ present position and Sand Island was Goat Island, to the south. Abruptly the 140-acre island rose steeply from the water silhouetted against a bank of white fog. Using Goat Island as a seamark, they lined up its north end with a grove of redwoods on the East Bay hills, which guided them safely past the sunken ledge of Blossom Rock, a secret and deadly obstacle to ships northwest of Goat Island. They saw a fifty-foot-high cliff and summit of trees and pulled hard for a curving white beach on the eastern side. Cautiously they circled to the island’s tiny cove. Along the coastline was a peaceful stretch of beach and beyond that tangled thickets. Smugglers often buried opium and contraband there until their confederates could row out to the island to retrieve it. They heard a flutter of wings and raucous cries as a pelican flock flew up the island slope. They beached their boat, hauled out bags, and went to bury their stolen gold. Goat Island, a perfect temporary bank for miners, Spanish pirates, wise chiefs, and medicine men (there was a sweat lodge there), offered the additional interest of more gold to discover. If only some of the wealth reported buried on Goat Island was intact, it deserved the name Treasure Island. The Ducks saw a bark moored off Goat Island, one of the rival Hounds’ ships, and went ashore to hide their treasure. Meanwhile, a government vessel parted the fog and pursued the bark, which outran the federal ship. Later authorities found some of the stolen loot in Sydney Town.

In San Francisco the dawn gave the shell-shocked survivors their first good look at the devastation caused by the deadliest arson in San Francisco’s history. “So many whirlwinds of destruction had swept over
the devoted city at short intervals, and with such fearful strides,” survivor Ralph Andrews wrote, “that the whole community was as excitable as if they had stood on the brink of a crater.” Captain George B. Coffin rushed to Stuart and Raines’s lot to see if his nautical equipment had survived the fire. “Not a piece is left large enough to make a clothespin,” Stuart told him, then turned away, already contracting with a builder for a new store. “I need it to be ready for occupancy in one week,” he ordered. Disheartened, Coffin went to see the rest of his beloved city. “A space of a hundred acres which at sunset stood thickly studded with buildings,” he wrote in his log, “was cleared away at 4:00
A.M.
” The metal homes and warehouses the Gold Rush Society had placed such faith in had failed miserably. They had been nothing more than tinderboxes. Thirty-six to sixty-eight of the so-called fire-resistant buildings had melted. Only seventeen of the structures could be salvaged. “They are little more than a woodpile enclosed in noncombustible walls,” a survivor said.

When one newspaper editor tried to transport his press to a safer location to print a fire edition, fire destroyed his press. All the newspaper offices had burned except the badly damaged
Alta
. At 5:00
A.M.
, Edward Gilbert, its contentious but cowardly editor, sat down to write: “San Francisco is once again in ashes. The smoke and flames are ascending from several squares of our city, as if the God of Destruction had seated himself in our midst. Here and there a brick building stood like a tomb among a nation of groves, yet even they, in most cases, have nothing but their walls standing.” He considered early estimates of $7 million in property loss too low. The fire was still burning in places. He calculated the loss at $10 to $12 million. Others estimated the loss as high as $17 million, with the possible loss of a hundred lives. Gilbert wrote: “The municipality of this mushroom place was at the moment in debt, for the expenses of the city government, over one million dollars; and this calamity of the great fire was surely a fitting work for such a municipal organization to accomplish over night.” He believed the fires had cleansed the city of evil. “We can and will begin again, fresh and reborn without sin.”

At 7:00
A.M.
the final remnants of the fire reached a sparsely built section of town, ran up against an unfinished brick structure, and died. Hard brick withstands ignition temperatures up to 1000 degrees. When the fog burned away, the city’s tallest structures were a few chimneys
shaking against the slate sky. Devastation stretched three quarters of a mile long and a quarter mile wide. Every house on Leidesdorff was gone. Eerily, among acres of devastation, an isolated house or two stood untouched. Coffin stumbled to Sacramento and Montgomery streets to learn the fate of the traders who locked themselves inside Taaffe & McCahill’s iron warehouse. “Their burnt and mangled bodies were found among the ruins near the door,” he wrote. “It is supposed that, finding the building no longer tenable, they had endeavored to escape, but the intense heat had so warped the iron doors and windows that they could not be opened. Their bones were burned to a cinder.” The victims had rushed to the same spot and perished together, their bones indistinguishable from one another. Mr. Wells, the Boston banker, had remained in his fireproof building too long, but he did escape. Wells, dreadfully burned, would carry the marks to his grave. Coffin wondered why the apparently fireproof Wells & Company building had been destroyed and descended into its cellar to find out. When the cellar workers fled, they left a door open and one of the little windows at the rear that provided light, the only window not shuttered by iron. The draft had brought “a perfect hurricane” of flames into a basement filled with liquors. On the first floor contractors were already laying plans to replace the building within weeks.

At the Naglee warehouse, of the four men shut up in their vault for four hours, James, Noyes, Forst, and Mudge, only Mudge was seriously burned, but Edward Cahill, last seen inside his flaming store, was presumed lost. On the corner of Montgomery and Sacramento streets lay the charred remains of Leon Greenebaum, Reuben Backer, M. Nassbaum, and O. Rossenthall. They would be buried at 2:00
P.M.
at the Israelite burying ground. At California and Montgomery streets, by Naylor’s brick building, Heath Davis had lost his four-story brick building, the city’s first, that he had leased as the new Custom House.

All the warehouses in town but three had been destroyed. Gildermeister & De Frenery’s brick building on Montgomery between Sacramento and Commercial streets was saved by its thick rear walls. Jesse and Joe Seligman’s single-story shop at California and Sansome survived because of its twenty-two-inch-thick brick walls and heavy iron shutters. Immediately the Seligmans, as owners of one of the few business district buildings still standing, gave up being mining supply salesmen and became bankers. When they opened Burgoyne’s safe,
they found $1.5 million and all the papers and deposits inside not even singed. Meanwhile, a citizen named Mr. Argenti formed a patrol of guards at his own expense to protect the ruins of his neighbors.

Five large store ships full of merchandise were still burning. One, the
Niantic
, so miraculously saved in the previous June’s fire, had been enclosed in a wall of sheet iron for protection and might still be salvaged, at least below water. At the foot of the Jackson Street Wharf neighbors saved a big warehouse but nearly lost their lives. All around it, the tops of ten thousand piles in the mud had burned down to the water’s edge. At 8:00
A.M.
, an hour after the fire burned out, Sawyer, half drowned and half toasted, and smelling of plaster and wood, shambled back to his engine house to sleep. His hair was singed, his eyes red, his lungs sooty, and every muscle in his body was screaming. While he slept, weary survivors wandered glassy-eyed though smoldering streets. A lucky few had salvaged their goods and stored them onboard the British vessel
R. K. Hurtley
of Liverpool. The unlucky many carried furniture with no place to put it. Shelter on the outskirts of town was costly: $150 for the use of a tent for ten days. One family set up housekeeping in the street, arranging their family portraits around a post. A man ran back into his office, which had suddenly burst into flame again. He perished from smoke inhalation. Monumental Six volunteer James Welch burned to death.

Over at the St. Francis Hotel, two burned-out men ascended the outside stair to the second floor. Inside, a tall, powerfully built man, dreadfully burned, was standing behind the door, eyes closed, head drooped upon his chest, and wrists crossed as if he were shackled. His beard and all the hair below his hat had been burned off, as if shaven. When he spoke, it was through scorched, mangled lips. His voice was muffled, yet oddly familiar. “Excuse me, but I do not know where I am,” the stranger whispered, “or how I came to be here. Don’t you know me? I am your counselor, Elbridge Gerry Austin.”