Black Fire (40 page)

Mulligan returned to his window and continued firing at the second-story houses across the street. The police surrounded the hotel just as Eureka Hose Number Four foreman John Hart was passing on his way to a neighboring engine house to return a borrowed trumpet. Mulligan was aiming at the cops but instead gunned down Hart with a single shot to the heart, killing him on the spot. Shortly after 4:00
P.M.
he climbed out on the balcony, pistol in hand, and took a turn along the ledge on the Dupont Street side as if out for a stroll. He reentered the hotel by climbing through a window on the upper Clay Street side overlooking the Square. Police distracted him with a gunnysack and straw dummy they swung in front of Billy’s window. Mulligan opened the swinging window sash and leaned out to shoot “the man.” As his attention wavered, police marksman Mortimer “Johnny” Hopkins, in a room directly across the street, took a bead and fired. A single shot from his mini rifle tore through the pane and brought Billy down for good. Hopkins, the partner of Crescent Ten’s “Mountain Buck” McGreevy, was another friend of Sawyer’s and a special policeman, as he had been. “Billy Mulligan was a desperate man,” a reporter said, “but not as black as he has been painted. His life, however, is to be regarded far more as a warning than as an example in any, and he met his fate as most of his kind meet their fate—with his boots on. It is a bad way to die.”

When Twain visited his friend Dr. Stephen Harris, the coroner, he saw two policemen lay a corpse on a board. He lifted the bloodstained sheet and saw the body of a short man in a tidy black suit with a shot in the forehead. Huge muttonchop whiskers surrounded a savage, pinched face. He had been shot in the late afternoon after inexplicably firing on a number of citizens and killing two firemen and one of his close friends. Harris told him the deceased was Billy Mulligan, a famous gunfighter, a dangerous man in any segment of life, and an old firefighting friend of Sawyer’s from his volunteer days. More than a dozen years earlier, he and fifty or sixty other misfits had saved San Francisco. In return most had been deported or murdered. “Why,” Twain wondered, “had these flawed heroes come to such inglorious ends?”

On May 31, 1856, Yankee Sullivan had awakened bewildered, shivering, and clad only in pantaloons and a shirt. From his cot he could
see the windows where the vigilantes had hanged ex-fireman James Casey for shooting down King of William in front of Stahle’s steam baths. A large cell in the northwest corner held Rube Maloney and adjoined Yankee’s cell, the largest, the eighth, for important prisoners. Around the center of the west wall a platform had been erected across the passageway to the Executive Committee rooms. Inside were several long tables, cases filled with papers, and the president’s seat at the north wall. Behind was a rack filled with muskets. Yankee shrieked for his jailer. “Could I have a drink of water,” he said. “I just had a terrible nightmare. I thought I had been condemned to die, the last rites had been performed, and I had been seized and my arms pinioned behind me. They took me from my cell and led me to the window. The rope was adjusted around my neck and then I was marched to the window and placed on the platform before the jeering crowd. The trap was sprung and I was launched into space. I could feel the agony as I awoke.” “There’s no danger of you being hanged,” the guard said. “At the worst you will only be expelled from the country.” “Expelled from America?” “In another land you could reform and lead a life of virtuous industry.” “Leave the United States?” Yankee took a cup of water from the guard. His hand was shaking. The guard returned two hours later with breakfast. Yankee was lying on his back on the floor of his cell—jaws locked, lips bloodless. Just above and inside his left elbow the guard saw a large, ragged “frightful” wound. Nearby in a pool of blood was the dull case knife Yankee had used to cut his food. The former champ had killed himself rather than suffer the indignity of deportation. Poor faithful Yankee. His name and the flag he wore in the ring were more than window dressing. He truly loved the United States. As he lay in the cell, his red blood leaking away, the bars from the window fell over him like the bars of Old Glory. In his hand he clinched his handkerchief with the star-spangled U.S. flag painted upon it.

Shortly after, the vigilantes deported Dutch Charley aboard the steamer
Golden Age
. “Captain,” he begged, “let me go back. I will pay my fare. I will give myself up to the Vigilance Committee immediately on landing, let them do with me as they please. I cannot go elsewhere and hold up my head.” “But they will hang you high,” the captain said. “Captain, I would rather die in California without touching ground with my feet than live a Prince in any other country!”

Senator Broderick’s enemies in the proslavery faction next held a caucus to decide how to permanently remove him from the political
scene. As his executioner they selected hot-tempered Judge David Terry, who was skilled in pistol dueling while Broderick, a famously poor shot, was not. Terry supplied the pistols: two Belgian-made eight-inch single-ball dueling pistols. On September 12, 1859, the two challengers met in a small gully to the east of the southernmost extremity of Laguna de la Merced, ten miles south of San Francisco. The predawn was cold and gray. Several times the convoy of twenty buggies lost their way in the fog. Finally the seventy-eight witnesses and officials crossed over the county line to the farm adjoining the Lake House Ranch. The sun rose thin and raw along the lonely shore as they drew up to a rail fence, the boundaries of Davis’s milk ranch, and went down into the valley. Broderick occupied his side of the field. Terry did the same. Armorer Bernard Lagoards said loudly as he loaded Broderick’s pistol, “The hair triggers might be so finely set that the breath of a strong-lunged man would discharge them. That used by Broderick carries the lightest bullet.” In his earlier duel with Caleb Smith, Broderick’s life had been spared when a bullet glanced off his heavy gold presentation watch. He still carried the timepiece as a lucky talisman but now was forced to relinquish it.

Broderick heard birds hopping in the underbrush. The sun was fighting through. Clouds were racing north and then south over their heads. The gun in his broad palm felt wrong. Terry smiled, took deliberate aim, and fired before the word
two
was completed.
Crack!
A puff of dust showed on Broderick’s right lapel. He winced, and clapped his left hand to the upper-right side of his breast. “Hard hit!” his friends said. Broderick’s half-raised right arm slowly stretched to full length. He swayed, fought to stay erect, and raised both arms over his head. His body shuddered. His right arm, still holding the pistol, contracted. His left knee gave way, then his right, and he half fell still clasping his pistol. Forty-five minutes later a dozen men gently carried Broderick to a spring wagon, laid him on a mattress in its bed, and drove him twelve miles north to Leonidas Haskell’s house at Black Point, where he lingered for the next three days. “They have killed me,” he murmured. “I die because I was opposed to the extension of slavery and a corrupt administration.” His breath was labored through the rent in his chest. Broderick died at age thirty-nine. “I die—protect my honor,” were his last words. Tears coursed down the cheeks of men in the streets. Crowds stood in stricken silence. Businesses closed. Funeral blinds were pulled. Buildings were draped in black. Dueling had been made illegal five years
earlier, thus Terry tried to flee the state but was arrested as he neared the Nevada border. “Broderick is dead,” the
Sacramento Union
editorialized. “He died by the trickery of a mutually arranged occasion.” Rumors flew that the gunsmith Natchez had set the triggers of the guns so delicately that the sudden raising of one would cause it to go off and had made Terry aware of this fact. A. A. Selover, an observer, examined the pistols and discovered that “the triggers were set so fine a strong puff of wind would prove sufficient to spring and discharge them.”

Thousands filed past Broderick’s bier. Sawyer, in the city hall tower, rang the bell joylessly. Soon the bells of all the firehouses joined in until an enormous tolling resounded over the entire city, not the busy call of volunteers but slow and funereal. In death Broderick triumphed as he never had in life. As a martyr in the cause of freedom, his death persuaded California to cast its allegiance to the antislavery faction of the Union.

On July 8, Sawyer heard about Billy Mulligan’s death and realized that those great and glorious days of firefighting were gone forever, as were his heroic friends. In just a dozen years the volunteers had shrunk. Broderick One now had only fifty-two full-time members, down by more than half. Sadly he went to view Mulligan’s body laid out in an expensive rosewood coffin in the Broderick One firehouse. On August 31, the Niantic Hotel at Clay and Sansome streets, another link with the past, caught fire. Big Six answered the alarm first, but as their brakeless engine rushed from its housing on the hill at Brenham Place, it reeled out of control down the steep Washington Street hill. Careening from side to side, the huge steamer shook off clinging firemen like fleas from a dog. James Washington and Foreman Walter Bohen were thrown under the boiler that kept punching down upon them as the engine ran away. Big George rushed to the still figures, but both had been crushed to death. Charles Rhoades composed a song, “Our Engine on the Hill,” to commemorate them and Big Six sang it at the top of their lungs to the next fire.

At noon on Sunday, October 8, Twain rose in his bed at the Gillis family rooming house on Minna Street and decided to visit the
Dramatic Chronicle
(its first issue had only been in January) and get some paying work. He reached the corner of Minna and Third streets, where William Love’s Bakery stood, admired the sign, and then turned right. In the distance a horse-drawn streetcar clopped along Mission Street. Crowds of people passed. As he ambled down Third Street he was shaken off his
feet. “The entire front of a tall four-story brick building in Third Street sprung outward like a door,” he wrote, “and fell sprawling across the street.… A lady sitting in her rocking chair and quaking parlor saw the wall part at the ceiling, open and shut twice, like a mouth, and then drop the end of a brick on the floor like a tooth. She was a woman easily disgusted with foolishness, and she arose and went out of there.” Blocks away some of Sawyer’s antique firefighting memorabilia was smashed. As he swept up the shards, he realized he had not seen Twain recently. The writer had tried to borrow money but could not arrange it even though Gillis’s brother was a moneylender. Ten days after the quake Twain had reached a momentous decision. “I have a call to literature of a low order—i.e. humorous,” he wrote Orion and his wife, Molly. “It is nothing to be proud of but it is my strongest suit.” He turned “to seriously scribbling to excite the laughter of God’s creatures. Poor, pitiful business!”

At 328 Montgomery Street, Harte was editing a new literary weekly, Charles Henry Webb’s
Californian
. When he arranged for Twain to write four signed articles a month at $50 apiece, equal to the $12.50 per article he received from the
Golden Era
and the
Sacramento Union
, Twain quit the
Golden Era
. “It wasn’t high toned enough,” he explained. Soon after Joe Goodman of the
Territorial Enterprise
offered him a contract to write a letter a day for $100 each. Things were looking up. “The
Dramatic Chronicle
pays me,” he said, “or rather will begin to pay me next week—$40 a month for dramatic criticisms. Same wages I got on the
Call
, and more agreeable and less laborious work.” He freelanced for the
Dramatic Chronicle
and hung around their office with other Bohemian writers until the paper tired of him and he of them. Because the
Chronicle
consistently neglected to pay Twain or Harte, it was no great loss.

After the Civil War ended in April 1865, tempers were raw. Sawyer commonly heard stories of volunteer firemen back east fighting for possession of a hydrant while buildings burned to the ground around them. The last five years had been the most divisive and explosive in the Republic’s history: battles at Antietam, Gettysburg, and Shiloh; the surrender at Appomattox on April 9; and Lincoln’s assassination five days later. The New York City volunteers had fallen under the sway of politicians who promoted the intercompany rivalries that got in the way of honest firefighting. The volunteers cut one another’s towropes, jammed carriage wheels, stole valuable equipment, and laid ambushes for their competitors along the route to the fire. Sawyer’s old volunteer company,
New York Number Fourteen, was disbanded for fighting. Company Two’s long, colorful career ended when its steam engine was transferred to Engine Eleven of the new paid New York Fire Department and they were disbanded. Would the San Francisco volunteers meet a similar fate? All fourteen San Francisco volunteer fire companies held divergent views. The regional, ethnic, and national difference of the strikingly disparate companies caused friction. Three in particular held strongly divergent views—Knickerbocker Five embraced all things Northern, Social Three supported all things Bostonian, and Big Six embraced all that was Southern, especially politics and slavery. In fifteen years, discord among the volunteers had grown worse and only escalated after the Civil War. A battle was building between them.