Black Fire: The True Story of the Original Tom Sawyer Page 27

  “When Sam’s father died,” Twain’s mother said, “which occurred when Sam was eleven years of age, I thought that then, if ever, was the proper time to make a lasting impression on the boy and work a change in him, so I took him by the hand and went with him into the room where the coffin was in that his father lay, and with it between Sam and me I said to him in this presence I had some serious requests to make of him, and I knew his word once given was never broken. For Sam never told a falsehood. He turned his streaming eyes upon me and cried out, ‘Oh, mother, I will do anything, anything you ask of me except go to school. I can’t do that!’ … That was the very request I was going to make.… [Then] I asked him if he would promise on the Bible not to touch intoxicating liquors, nor swear, and he said: ‘Yes, mother I will.’ He repeated the words after me with my hand and his clasped on the Holy Book, and I believe he kept that promise.”

  “I am not adverse to social drinking,” Twain, one of the great drinkers in San Francisco, said modestly. On July 15, he and Gillis moved for the fourth time. “Yes, sir, they are gone,” said the French landlady, “and the good God was kind to me when He sent them away!” Gillis went to stay with his younger brother on Brannan Street between Seventh and Eighth streets. Their father, Angus, a one-eyed war vet of William Walker’s filibustering expedition to Nicaragua, had a “dry, unsmiling way” of recounting a funny story that Twain enjoyed. Twain moved to 32 Minna Street, one of the narrow little alleys paralleling Market Street between Mission and Howard streets. Rows of frame cottages with gardens were set close to sidewalks on what he called the “quiet little street.” He enjoyed the babble of many languages, the smell of factory and gashouse smoke, and the fragrance of the bakery down the street. A week later, on July 22, a quake made his new lodgings “waltz from side to side with a quick motion” like the “suggestive of sifting corn meal through a sieve; afterward it rocked grandly to and fro like a prodigious cradle.”

  Sawyer lived a scant three blocks away just off the same quiet, narrow street at the southwest corner of Mary Street, number 18, near Fifth Street. He had fallen in love with young Mary Bridget. Her sparkling eyes, lilting smile, and brunette curls had enraptured him. After they were married, the couple moved into a two-story at 935 Mission Street. Sawyer set up housekeeping on the top floor while he converted the ground floor into a saloon.

  By the afternoon of July 25, Twain was steaming and playing a few hands of poker, pleased that Sawyer was more himself again. His spirits had been lifted by fighting a fire that had broken out at 2:00 A.M. in the Arcade Restaurant on Market between Third and Fourth. His nearby Liberty Hose Company had gotten to the blaze just as it spread to the Apollo Baths and Saloon. “We saved them!” Sawyer said. A grin lit up his face, then faded. Antonio Silva, the restaurant owner, and his cooks, William Bell and John Marx, had been sleeping inside and died in the flames before they reached the scene. Sawyer fought fire the rest of the summer. September, the hottest month, began with the burning of the Winfield Scott Saloon at the corner of Howard and Stewart. Sawyer talked about February 1850, when he first set foot in San Francisco. The city was still rebuilding after the city-destroying Christmas Eve fire. Twain puffed on his Wheeler’s long nine, its smoke mingling with clouds of steam and enveloping both men. Contented, he paid strict attention as Sawyer told him of the Lightkeeper and the six great fires. In the murk, Twain’s mind filled with exciting ideas. He circled in clouds of steam, cracking his towel and endlessly talking, talking, talking. Finally he stopped. He still had to make the rounds of the courts. He took a cold plunge, dressed, and got back to the Call while Sawyer returned to his engine house to prepare for any alarms. As foreman, a post he had worked his way up to after fourteen years fighting fire as a torch boy and volunteer at various houses, he was always needed if only to oversee maintenance of their ancient manual pumper. Today he was thinking about startling new developments in firefighting in the East. Such new technology threatened to do away with the volunteers.

  Nearby at Big Six, Big George Hossefross was doing all he could to bring the new engines to San Francisco. Over at Social Three, so was former New York volunteer David D. Hayes, inventor of the Hayes truck. He ordered five new 1863 Amoskeag steamers. The first arrived just as a grocery store caught fire in the wholesale district. Hayes and his men scrambled to their new steam engine and dragged it into the street. Their stoker, Godfrey Fisher, laid the boiler fire with dry shavings, well-tarred wood, and knobs of coal, but hesitated starting the boiler. Leaks might occur if he started the engine too suddenly and with too much steam. Sparks from the engine’s furnace might cause secondary fires as they rumbled to the scene. An unsecured hose leaking at the joints could draw in air or suck up stones that might jam the valves or crack the pistons. Condensed water could collect in the cylinder. Ten minutes from the fire, Fisher wiped the sweat from his brow and, taking a match and a pint of camphine, ignited the shavings. The coals began to glow. As the engine rattled along, he heard the boiler’s gratifying hiss and gurgle but worried whether he had enough fuel to keep the fire going. Social Three reached the scene at the same time as a manual pumper from a competing company. Fisher flung wide the valves and to his relief Three’s pumper effortlessly threw four streams of water to the two thrown by the rival hand engine and their sweating volunteers. As the boiler began to cool, Fisher looked around frantically for more fuel. At last his eyes rested on the burning grocery store. Throwing a box of hams into the firebox, he kept the boiler to a hundred degrees and extinguished the blaze. Steam had won its first West Coast victory against hand pumping.

  At once a harsh rivalry developed between the traditional manual pumpers and the newfangled “smoke bottle” steam engines. The hand pumpers felt steam heralded a loss of prestige and romance. “Why the machine does all the work!” they sniffed. “Boys,” replied Sawyer—as a veteran fireman and cofounder of Liberty Hose, his words carried weight—“the towns are gettin’ too big for the crude methods we’ve been using. These modern, efficient machines will give your outfits a chance to put out fires.” The hand pumpers replied that human brawn was more effective, and other companies would have to be convinced. To decide, a number of public trials reminiscent of John Henry’s steel-driving contest against a machine were scheduled during 1864. At first the more seasoned, disciplined veterans with their manual machines prevailed, beating their challengers to fires, extinguishing them first, and disgorging longer streams of water. But the men soon exhausted themselves pumping the brakes while steam-driven pumps kept going. Worse for the old-timers, the new steam machines required a new kind of volunteer and only fourteen men instead of the sixty needed for a manual pumper. Fewer well-trained professionals made more effective firefighters and the complex new machines demanded skilled mechanics, not rough street brawlers. Because no single unit could afford to maintain a steam machine, all the companies would have to contribute to its upkeep. Ultimately, this would lead to consolidation of departments, municipal financing of the firefighters, and the end of the volunteers and their wild and romantic ways.

  At 10:00 A.M. on September 7, Twain’s memories of his brother Henry, scalded to death onboard a steamship, were reawakened by a story he had to cover for the Call. “Terrible Calamity,” he scrawled with a trembling hand. “Explosion of the steamer Washoe’s boilers—supposed killed, one hundred.” The detonation occurred just above Hog’s Back, ten miles above Rio Vista on the Washoe’s up trip. A rusted boiler, at twenty-five pounds pressure with two cocks of solid water, collapsed a flue, exploded, shattered the upper works of the aft section, and set the Washoe afire in three places. When he closed his eyes that night, his slender brother Henry’s image floated before him, alive again in clouds of steam. Smoking until dawn, he went sleepless.

  The next day or two he perched in his window seat to work. Outside, the rain had let up and evening was falling. He tried again to work on his book about Lillie, whom he had renamed Rachel. In this draft the fire department made Rachel an honorary m
ember with an official belt and helmet, just as Knickerbocker Five had made Lillie a member. “In another dramatic scene,” he reported, “in the midst of smoke billows and leaping flames, I showed her climbing over the roof of a house to rescue its inhabitants.” In another draft, he named her Rachel “Hellfire” Hotchkiss and set the action in Dawson’s Landing. He portrayed her galloping bareback on her black horse to rescue a boy named Oscar Carpenter (based on his brother Orion) stranded on a cake of ice in the Mississippi. He could not get the character to work and abandoned his firegirl book for good. As he lolled in Stahle’s steam room, feeling a continuous flow of hot, dry air around him, he again contemplated his first novel. The Chinese as a subject had crossed his mind. He felt guilty about his earlier harsh treatment of them. Months earlier he had considered basing a character on his beloved brother, Henry, then discounted it. Twain splashed his face with water in the hot room to cool down, but his mind was already aflame with ideas.

  On September 28, Sawyer and Twain went on a momentous bender. “Me and Jack Mannix, who was afterwards bailiff in Judge Levi’s court, was walkin’ down Montgomery Street,” Sawyer recalled in an interview. John E. Mannix lived at 829 Mission Street, near Fifth Street close to Sawyer at 935 Mission Street. “We drifted into the Capitol saloon [at 220 Mongomery Street] where the Mills building now stands and Mark caught sight of us from a window across the street in the Russ House.”

  “Tom,” Twain cried, “up here. Wait for me. I’ll be right down.”

  As Sawyer waited, he wondered what Twain was doing at the Russ House, because he was presently lodging in a private family home and preparing to take rooms farther along Minna Street to within two blocks of Sawyer’s. It turned out that Twain’s close buddy and comrade for two years, Steve Gillis, was getting hitched to Emeline Russ, a pretty young woman worth $130,000 in her own right and the daughter of the late Christian Russ, who had owned the most real estate in San Francisco. Twain considered Emeline a “good sensible girl” who would make Steve an excellent wife. As far as marriage for himself, Twain was “resolved on that or suicide—perhaps.” The wedding was set for October 24 and he was going to stand up for his friend at the nuptials as “chief mourner” and take a “bridal tour of a week’s duration.”

  “Well, as soon as he seen us he come down,” Sawyer continued, “we all went in [to the Capitol Saloon] and had a few jolts together.” The bartender who prepared their drinks was dressed as most of his brethren in striped trousers and a brocaded waistcoat studded with a diamond. The brandy vanished. “The result was, to be plain with you, we got full. Mark was as much sprung as I was, and in a short time we owned the City, cobblestones and all.” Laughing and singing, they made the rounds of the Montgomery Street saloons, growing more expansive as they spent most of the night drinking brandy at the Blue Wing and the Capitol Saloon. “Toward mornin’ Mark sobered up a bit and we all got to tellin’ yarns,” Sawyer said. “I dished up a few, Mark dished up a few, but Mannix was speechless.” Twain had never heard anything before like Sawyer’s stories of an entire city waiting to be burned and listened with fascination. Somewhere along the line, they lost Mannix. The sun was up by the time Sawyer and Twain called it a night.

  “The next day I met Mark down by the old Call office. He walks up to me and puts both hands on my shoulders. ‘Tom,’ he says, ‘I’m going to write a book about a boy and the kind I have in mind was just about the toughest boy in the world. Tom, he was just such a boy as you must have been.… How many copies will you take, Tom, half cash?”

  Sawyer did not take him seriously. He got to the firehouse on Fourth Street and tried to sleep off his hangover in a back room. Twain went home, slept, and then wrote his sister about the Gillis nuptials. “As soon as this wedding business is over,” he wrote, “I believe I will send you the files, & begin on my book (mind you this is a secret and must not be mentioned).” He had already spoken of his ambitious literary plan to write a novel to his brother Orion, cautioning him to say nothing of it. Twain told him he would like to begin right away and asked him to send him his Nevada “files” and any scrapbooks he had kept of his newspaper articles. Meanwhile, Gillis’s love affair, house-building plans, wedding arrangements, and a dozen other events kept Twain so busy it would be six years before he got back to his secret project. In the meantime, things went terribly wrong for Gillis: Emeline Russ did not marry him. Instead she married Frederick Gutzkow on December 28, 1867. On the rebound, Gillis married Kate Robinson.

  In the steam room Twain and Sawyer discussed Yankee Sullivan, whom Sawyer had known. Everyone was aware of Twain’s sojourn as a river pilot. Few knew of his aspirations to be a boxer. He had once hired the best boxing coaches, but they had never seen any man of such little account as a boxer as Twain. Once, he entered the ring in a loose woolen shirt that concealed his muscular deficiencies, and when his sparring partner gave him a light slap under the ear, Twain threw a double somersault, fell on the back of his neck, and stretched full length on the canvas. “Shall I send for a doctor for you?” Denis McCarthy asked. “Send for an undertaker,” Twain gasped.

  In October some Irish hoodlums stoning a Chinese laundryman awakened Twain’s long-slumbering moral conscience and he wrote the only article he mustered any real enthusiasm for in the four months he had been at the Call. On October 10, he eagerly scanned the morning edition. His piece was not there. He found the metal type buried under some condemned matter on the standing galley in the composing room. Gillis said Barnes had pulled the story. Twain stormed into his cubicle. “What’s this about!” he thundered. Barnes fixed him with a cold eye and asked, “Who are the Call’s readers?” “The Irish working class, I guess.” “Yes, the Irish,” editor George Barnes said. “The Call is the paper of the poor. The Call gathers its livelihood from the poor and therefore must respect their prejudices or perish. The Irish are the poor … and they hate the Chinamen.” He paused. “Do you know what I think of you as a local reporter? You’re out of your element. I believe you are unsuited to it. Besides, you’re obviously capable of greater things in literature.” “You mean to say that I don’t suit you.” “That’s exactly what I mean.” The mild firing so frightened Twain that he referred to his discharge throughout his lifetime and contemplated revenge. In 1906 he said that the San Francisco earthquake and fire had been God’s retribution on the Call for his firing.

  That October, Sawyer and his men were exceptionally busy. The entire city seemed ready to burst into flame again. On October 18, a Brannan Street stable was destroyed and Peter Reynolds was burned to death in the straw among the rearing horses. The next day Maurice Doyle’s house on Jones Street caught fire. Liberty Hose got their new four-wheel hose carriage to the scene immediately, but two children were lost. Sawyer returned slowly to his engine house, vowing to do better. Fresh from battling another fire, he entered the steam room with a towel around his waist. He and Twain talked over cards and afterward at the Blue Wing over drinks. Sawyer regaled him with his adventures fighting black fire, the worst kind; all the bad things come together at once. Twain listened attentively. Sawyer’s speaking voice was melodic and he had a beautiful singing voice. He sang Irish ballads at the bar for the rest of the night.

  Again Twain tried to tackle his first novel and again it was Steve Gillis who derailed him. On December 4, Gillis got into trouble with the San Francisco police for whipping a bullying bartender. Twain, who was in trouble with the cops, too, hustled down to the smelly courtroom and signed a $500 straw bond for Gillis. Sawyer was not surprised that the police were out to get Twain. “He and I used to play pranks,” he said in an interview with the Call. “And the narrow escapes we had from the police …” He rolled his eyes. “I am sober enough to tell it, I guess. It was great sport in those days to bait the police. We just escaped getting locked up many a night. Guess Sam hasn’t forgotten how we used to go around to the dance halls and scatter cayenne pepper on the seats and get all the girls crying.”

  Twain intended to even
the score with the police by writing some scathing critiques when he and Gillis returned from the played-out goldfields of the Sierra Nevada and Tuolumne, one hundred miles east of San Francisco. He still had $300 in his pocket from the sale of his last two shares of plummeting Hale and Norcross silver stock. “The Hale & Norcross officers decide to sink a shaft,” the Call reported that week (December 4, 1851), telling how their shareholders were being victimized. “They levy $40,000. Next month they have a mighty good notion to go lower, and they levy a $20,000 assessment.… Thus it goes on for months and months, but the Hale & Norcross sends us no bullion.”

  By January 1865, they were in Angel’s Camp in Calaveras County linking up with Steve’s brothers, Jim and William, who were pocket miners on the hill. Steve returned to Virginia City and left Twain with them. It was the rainy season and his most frequent journal entries were “rain,” “beans,” and “dishwater.” Twain, trapped indoors hearing the recycled tales of the miners, listened to pocket miner Ben Coon’s recitation about a celebrated jumping frog, a story first mined by the Greeks two thousand years earlier. He made an entry: “Coleman with his jumping frog—bet stranger $50—stranger had no frog, & C got him one—in the meantime stranger filled C’s frog full of shot & he couldn’t jump—the stranger’s frog won.” He turned the tale into a story. On January 20, he wrote his mother and sister he longed to be back piloting up and down the river again. “Verily, all is vanity and little worth—save piloting. To think that after writing many an article a man might be excused for thinking tolerable good, those New York people should single out a villainous sketch to complement [sic] me on!—‘Jim Smiley & His Jumping Frog,’ a squib which would never have been written but to please Artemus Ward.”