Black Fire (26 page)

At Kearny and Washington streets, unlucky Tom Maguire stood over more ruins. The previous April, the stocky impresario had added an auditorium on the second floor of his Parker House in recognition of the “Swedish Nightingale,” Jenny Lind, who had won the hearts of the New York volunteers by donating her concert proceeds to them. When she left Manhattan, the firefighters presented her with an elaborately engraved box of pure California gold. The wooden three-story Jenny Lind Theatre, where James Stark directed productions of
Hamlet, Macbeth
,
and
King Lear
, cost Maguire and his partner, J. B. Hart, $40,000. Maguire had been counting on income from the theater to pay off their debts within four months. But he was a determined man whose success was amazing, considering he was totally illiterate. He planned to erect a second Jenny Lind Theatre on the same site. The Empire and American theaters and the Adelphi were destroyed; Dutch Charley and his partner, George Baker, lost their new saloon in the Crockett Building; and the five-story Union Hotel pitched into the street, though Williard the bookkeeper, thought to have been burned to death inside, was found alive.

Sawyer slept until 7:00
P.M.
After a light supper, he slept again. When he awoke, refreshed but aching, he returned to the Square, where three thousand people had stacked their belongings and slept all night in the open, lit by flickering light. Others dug through ashes with bare, scalded hands, scrabbling for melted gold and silver. Some were crazed by the tragedy, but most met the fire with the same heroic humor as before. They were always at their finest when it was too late to do anything. “As a whole,” Editor Gilbert wrote, “the community was soon as cheery as ever, and at least a trifle wiser than before, not so much in its immediate following conduct as in its plans for the future.” “Everybody seems in good-humor,” agreed young Frank Marryat, a visiting British adventurer and artist, “and there is no reason why the stranger, who has lost nothing by the calamity, should allow himself to be plunged into melancholy reflections! Planks and lumber are already being carted in all directions, and so soon as the embers cool, the work of rebuilding will commence.… The highest praise that I can accord to the San Francisco volunteer firemen is to … say that they are zealous and intrepid and that their services are gratuitous.” One merchant asked another, “Burnt out?” “Yes,” he replied, “and burst up.” “Flat?” “Flat as a damned pancake!” “Anyway, it’s a great country.” “Nothing shorter.” San Franciscans were proud of their fires—grand fires, heroic fires, the finest ever seen. They had fire in their veins and each blaze brought a new and finer city.

Among the toppled iron posts and tottering chimneys, street preachers bellowed, but their sermons, in spite of being weighty with doom, were carried away like feathers in the updraft. People moved from the center of town to the north end. Their new neighbors were the gangs of Sydney Town, who had been burned out when the wind suddenly turned. While San Francisco mourned and nailed hot boards together,
refugees in the north end had to go about armed, sleep with pistols under their pillows, and wake to the constant sound of gunfire. The inferno had been “set by an incarnate fiend for the purpose of robbery.” The
Herald
wrote: “It appears now beyond doubt that the recent conflagration … was the work of an incendiary.” There was no shortage of suspects. Senator Broderick believed a gang of ex-convicts had ignited the devastating series of conflagrations to provide diversions allowing toughs to loot the ample stores of gold. Careful merchants, aware that looting was the aftermath of every fire, had locked up their merchandise onboard vessels in the harbor. When folks heard Ducks might have buried the looted $200,000 on Goat Island, hundreds set sail to dig it up. One enterprising volunteer
did
make a fortune. He galloped to the next town before news of the blaze reached there and cornered the building supply market before prices went up. He had been canny—within ten days the indefatigable San Franciscans would have rebuilt three hundred structures. The blaze had consumed between 2,000 and 2,500 homes this time. Complete ruin and partial ruin spread for twenty-two city blocks westward and northeastward. Sixteen blocks had burned in the first two hours. Between seventeen and eighteen square blocks had been completely vaporized and six other blocks had been damaged. Three-quarters of the business district between Pine and Pacific, from Kearny to Battery on the water, disappeared. Except for two forlorn buildings at the corner of Vallejo Street, the fire devoured everything east of Sansome Street. Colonel Poore’s new building built out over the bay marked the northernmost limit of the conflagration. From Clarke’s Point, the cessation of fire in that direction, to Happy Valley, nothing remained except foundations standing over water. Half the new wharves had been incinerated, a loss accounting for half the cost of the fire. Of the five great blazes, the anniversary fire was more costly than all the previous fires combined: $12 million. The mayor estimated the cost higher: $20 million. The total number of structures destroyed by the arsonist over the last year now stood near 4,000, the most disastrous series of fires ever inflicted on a major American city. How many lives were lost will never be known. Estimates ranged from three hundred to a thousand. Trampled corpses lay deep under the muddy ooze and no one was doing any digging, only building over them.

On May 5, J. Goldsborough Bruff, a local artist, topographer, and historian, took a walk through the smoking streets. Temporary structures
were rising like weeds among the charred rubble. “Forty-eight hours since, what a difference!” he wrote.

Compact streets, of neat, and very lofty and elegant houses; stores of every description, well filled with goods and thronged with the gay and busy bustle of pleasure and business! Now black and shattered walls, and heaps of smoking and burning ruins; confused piles of goods and chattels, and multitudes of houseless people! My bedding was burnt—Mr. Thomas McCalla of Washington City died
.

Next day he noted that many enterprises had resumed operations on a reduced scale. At the Washington and Kearny corner, the Council had set up a tent by the Verandah Saloon to aid survivors and worked under the din of the Verandah’s slightly mad one-man band. He had a drum strapped to his back and fastened to his elbows, pipes tied to his chin, and cymbals attached to his wrists. His iron-soled boots kept time. Holding their ears, the Council members drew up plans to erect $2.5 million worth of the same “inflammable” businesses and homes at the base of Telegraph Hill as before. Had they learned nothing? Not quite. The Council had a clue. One out of five
brick
structures on Market Street had not burned. Workmen were contracted to rebuild the Union Hotel as a $250,000
brick
building, refit the Adelphi Theater now at Dupont Street, and build a new fireproof Parker House. The Council located several privately owned fire engines to facilitate the establishment of Clarke’s Point’s own efficient fire station because much of the city’s private wealth was stored in highly flammable houses there.

Friday, May 9, dawned bleak. High winds blew suffocating ashes throughout San Francisco. At the northwestern corner of the Square workmen cleared the ruined walls of the old adobe Custom House to dig down to the melted gold in its vault. Editor Gilbert was gratified by the demolition of this “last sad relic.” “Possession was held by Palmer, Cook & Company under a lease for three years from Colonel Collier,” he wrote. “The lot forms part and parcel of the Square, and no individual should be permitted to occupy so formidable a notch.” On May 15, someone tried to burn down the Verandah Saloon on the corner of Washington and Kearny streets. The brick house had been closed for several hours when the arsonist set his fire. It burned through the upper part of a door to a small storeroom that he had soaked with oil and
filled the passage and upper-story rooms with flames. An alert watchman saw the smoke at 1:00
A.M.
and exhausted himself putting it out by carrying buckets back and forth. A minute more and casks of brandy in the basement would have ignited, trapping those sleeping upstairs. That the arsonist had brought oil to the fire scene was a clue to his identity, but no one saw it yet. The next day someone attempted to torch the City Hospital. When a firebug set another fire on Pike Street, the
Alta
suggested more alarms of fire could be expected anytime because “we have a band of desperadoes in our midst who have long gone unwhipped by Justice.” A shipload of Australian ex-convicts had arrived in May. Seven hundred more were due in weeks.

At heart the public appreciated each volunteer for his self-sacrifice. Enthusiastic fans trailed behind their neighborhood or ethnic favorites, cheering them on as if they were a sports team. As they clapped, chanted, and sang, everyone was thinking the same thing: “Why can’t someone catch the arsonist?”

All roads led to the waterfront but did not stop there. Piers extended from the tips of all principal roads—Market, California, Sacramento, Clay, Washington, Jackson, Pacific, and Broadway streets—and as new wharves walked on stilts out over distant tidal flats, the existing streets rode their backs. On Sunday afternoon a lone, skeletal figure strode on long legs southeast along the mudflat waterfront. The bedraggled scarecrow with black tousled hair, pockmarked face, and soot-blackened hands reached a run-down waterfront flophouse on Long Wharf, Stuart and George Simmonds’ Collier House, and climbed the outside stairs to his second-floor room. He paused at the door and looked around. His neighbors were always watching. He had the rough appearance of a Hound, but his Australian accent and his companions, all ticket-of-leave men from Van Diemen’s Land, betrayed him as a “Sydney Duck of notoriously bad character.” Born in London, in his youth he had been transported on charges of arson and robbery to the New South Wales penal colony for life. Possibly his mother had been an ex-convict, too, but he never knew for sure. Deported like other Australian convicts, he arrived in San Francisco in November 1849, about the same time as notorious gang leader English Jim Stuart, and gravitated toward the waterfront and the base of Telegraph Hill.

He was frequently seen around town: Sam Brannan had seen him come up in court a dozen times and get off as often, and had glimpsed him around the wharves, where he was a sometime lighterman on the
Whitehall Bay taxies. When the Lightkeeper’s partner, a member of English Jim Stuart’s gang like himself, provided Stuart with a tip about the gold shipments of a wealthy waterfront merchant, the Lightkeeper and the rest of the gang met at Mrs. Mary Ann Hogan’s rooming house to plan the robbery. It was their common meeting place, though Stuart sometimes roomed at Mrs. Hogan’s hotel, which was used by criminals who needed a place to hide.

People stopping at the Collier House noticed something odd about the lodger: He frequently smelled of oil. Edward Johns and his roommate, Henry Tufts, lived in number two on the second floor directly over the butcher’s shop and next door to the Lightkeeper, who lived in number three. William Hellman occupied the room on the other side, number four, and of all the neighbors, he was most curious about him. The lodger sometimes left in the middle of the night and often returned lathered with sweat. His midnight forays suspiciously coincided with three or four failed attempts to burn down San Francisco again.

The lodger spent the afternoon in bed surveying his meager belongings—a bowie knife, two wooden boxes of matches, some boys’ clothing, jars of oil, lumps of coal, and some wooden shavings—which fit comfortably into a battered trunk. The miserable bed with two mattresses, a cook stove, a pine table, an oil lamp, and some flowered curtains belonged to the Collier House. The lodger yawned. He was content. He had work to do. A summer fire perhaps.

On May 20, Eliza “Lillie” Wychie Hitchcock asked, “Where are the buildings?” The little girl had just arrived in San Francisco aboard the
Tennessee
, a wooden side-wheel steamer. The slender seven-year-old with large brown eyes and chestnut hair had made the difficult journey with her parents down the Atlantic Coast, over the Isthmus from the Chagres River to Panama, and along the Pacific coast with a capacity for 150 cabin passengers, 50 children, and 350 in steerage. She surveyed the cove—jammed with decaying ships and fringed by drab slopes of low brush and scrub. On the summit a gray windmill turned slowly. “Then that is not the army fort?” asked Lillie’s mother, Martha, gesturing toward the tent city on the high slopes. “No,” said Mr. Taaffe, who had lost his metal warehouse, “most of the burned-out families are living in tents and everyone is short of supplies.” That night the refugees on Telegraph Hill ate boiled beans for supper, but the Hitchcocks were
luckier. Captain Joseph Folsom and homely Henry Halleck drove them in a hired rig to Bill Howard’s old estate at Stockton and Washington. Gilbert, the feisty duel-challenging editor, boarded there, too. Over dinner he discussed the arsonist. A blaze had broken out on the deck of the
Tennessee
on their way up the California coast and had terrified Lillie. That night she awoke screaming of fire. As San Francisco rebuilt, the little girl rode horseback along the muddied streets, went “fishing for rats” under the raised sidewalks, trotted her donkey cart around Mac-Condray’s grounds, or watched the many daylight fires that volunteers promptly extinguished. One day a bullet whizzed by her head while she was walking in the dunes south of Market. Instead of turning and running, she rushed up the hill to locate the origin of the shot.