Black Fire: The True Story of the Original Tom Sawyer Page 7

  Washington Allen Bartlett, the first alcalde, ordered Jasper O’Farrell to lay out the city following the natural hilly terrain. The Council overruled his plan and insisted on a gridiron layout to give the most profits upon subdivision. O’Farrell complied, with one deviation. Market Street would intersect the grid at a right angle striking out from the waterfront to the Mission District, dividing San Francisco to this day. The model of the extended city was two sections of right-angle grids with streets running north/south and east/west above Market Street, and northeast/northwest and southeast/southwest below. Thus, San Francisco streets plunge forward as if they were on a flat plane, racing over mountains as if they were not there at all—straight ahead, straight ahead—Onward!—the San Francisco way.

  Above the roar of his forge, Othello the blacksmith heard splashing in the frigid blackness that was Montgomery Street. Someone was plunging through the thick mud toward his shop. He judiciously interspersed his blows by taps upon the anvil, always shifting his iron. He heated his tire to a bright red and deluged the rim in a water barrel to prevent it from being burned up. A cloud of steam rose. He pumped his bellows until the coals glowed white and began pounding. Iron-struck sparks flew over his leather apron, burning holes everywhere but his bare black arms and hands. “The flames know me,” he thought. “The flames are my friends.” He smiled, his face reddish brown against the fire and his teeth dazzling white. He wiped his glistening brow and walked to a barn door–like opening onto the thoroughfare to listen to the rhythmic slap, slap, slap of bare feet. He wondered how anyone dared tread at night, much less sprint, through the numerous unlit pits and obstacles of the potholed quagmire of streets. He heard the babble of many voices, the clank and creak of heavy machinery. An army was advancing upon him. A light brighter than the sooty glow of the nearby saloon danced erratically in the distance. Then a panting Olympian runner, a boy with a torch, broke abruptly through the mist, trailing a column of smoke. Nervously, Othello remembered the mysterious fire that had recently burned all of San Francisco. The city, quickly rebuilt, was plump and ready again for burning.

  In March a gang of rugged firemen had dragged a bell weighing several hundred pounds into the belfry on Brenham Place—as if the simple act of hanging it would solve the problem of fires. The bell, cast by the Hooper Foundry of Troy, New York, was the first erected in California and had rung first for the burning of the steamers Santa Clara and Hartford at the end of Long Wharf. Now Othello could hear the new bell toll again—sharp, staccato taps like the pounding of his hammer. The order of the taps designated the district where the fire was and summoned the volunteers. Jumping into harness, dozens of men had raced to their firehouses to haul the heavy water rigs to the fire. At his door Othello saw a boy with upheld torch running as if to set the city ablaze again. Another set of running feet and another barefoot boy with canvas pants rolled to the knee, dashed out of the fog. Smoke from the first torch still floated in the air. The light revealed his double-breasted red flannel shirt with two vertical rows of brass buttons, a white leather belt, and ragged corduroy trousers. Chin uplifted, breath whistling, legs pumping in a blur, he hooted and called and lifted his torch to illuminate as much road as possible. The fate of an entire city was in their hands. There was always a crowd of ragged boys eager to run before the engines and hold aloft the torches that lit the way. Sawyer’s eyes darted over the mud road, searching so intently he overlooked Othello, who towered as big as his smithy, whose arms were as massive as his anvil and who was backlit by his blazing furnace. Another blacksmith in town, John A. Steele, really was a giant. Sawyer would have overlooked him, too, so intent was he on missing anything in the roadbed that might hinder the progress of the volunteers. He heard the rumble of their mighty water engine keeping pace behind him. As the runners sprinted they shouted warnings back to the firefighters. Sawyer’s moving torch revealed an iron stove blocking the intersecting road ahead. It had not been there that morning. “Stove leeward!”

  “Crate in the road!” he called next. His warning was still ringing when a group of calloused street toughs, breathing heavily, trudged into view dragging a primitive two-thousand-pound engine with a hose reel fitted into a wrought-iron ring up the incline. Pumping brakes on each side of the four-wheel jumper, folded up on the way to a fire, gave the impression of a hay wagon with high-posted sides. As red-shirted “Bully Boys” swerved to avoid the half-submerged stove, there came the squeal of hand brakes and audible curses of sweating men gasping for breath. The large back wheels turned twice in the mud, found traction, and the odd relay race was on again.

  Sawyer hoped to attach himself as a volunteer to a company still being formed: Big Six, made up totally of Baltimoreans who had hung the new bell. He might make a start there as a pumper or runner. If no bunks or torches were available with the Monumentals, he could sprint for one of the other developing units, such as Knickerbocker Five. Each would need a contingent of young boys and teens to light the way and each was violently competitive to be first. The lead boy, usually quickest, chose the fastest route. The strange rushing, lurching parade of men, heavy silver machine, curious neighbors in night dress, barking dogs, crowds of yelling boys and blazing torches, progressed. The massive wheels of the heavy manual pumper cut ribbons in the mud. The motto “Onward!” rang out. Sawyer’s heart beat rapidly. “Onward!” Behind, the volunteers chanted, a counterpoint to the thudding of boots, slapping of feet, and rasping breath. Chief Broderick lifted the silver trumpet at his belt. Its clear bellow alerted the people ahead. That single note gave them hope, though not much. “The fire engines the city possesses,” people knew, “are of no more use than an old maid’s teapot.”

  As sixty hard-drinking roughhousers, heaving and chanting, rocked to and fro at the handles of the hand-pumper and extinguished two small brush fires, they knew another city-destroying blaze must happen as surely as the sun now rising over the flimsy structures. Charlie Robinson, most famous of all San Francisco torch boys, nearly broke his neck on such a treacherous street. Born in East Monmouth, Maine, he had grown up in a two-story gabled frame house at Number Nine Calhoun Street on Windmill Hill. Perched on a white picket fence across from the house where Hudson, the coffee and tea merchant, ground his spices, Charlie drew fine views of the bay. At age seven, he took painting lessons from the artist Charles C. Nahl. Threats of criminal reprisals forced Charlie’s father, Doc Robinson, a theatrical producer-playwright, to flee San Francisco. He left Charlie and his mother without any means of support, so the boy began running for Big Six. Torch boys might attach themselves to their favorite firehouse, but when there was a fire, they observed strict neutrality. “If no torches were to be had in the Monumental’s house,” Charlie said, “I would run for St. Francisco Hook and Ladder [on Dupont Avenue], Germans, or for Lafayette Hose, the Frenchies.” One night he ran for Vigilant Engine Number Nine out of their two-story fireproof brick firehouse on Stockton Street. He and a band of torch boys lighted the way for Nine’s New York side lever and searched for nails on the board road. “There was a night fire in North Beach,” he recalled. “Three of us were running with the engines. The first boy darted ahead and suddenly we saw his light disappear.I was next.” In the next instant Charlie’s torch flew out of his hand, the pockmarked ground whirled around him, and he was swallowed up. He felt blindly in the blackness. Mud and water were on both sides of him. The other boy lay under him, motionless yet breathing. His brand, balanced high above, cast down enough light for him to evaluate their predicament. They were lying at the bottom of an enormous pit. Another boy fell on top of them. “When the men with the engine saw two lights disappear and then a third, they knew something must have happened. A big hole that none of us knew about had been dug that day right in the middle of the street.” Charlie heard the volunteers swearing, a piercing screech of metal, and the double squeal of brakes. If that gleaming two-thousand-pound water engine should plunge into the hole on top of them … He braced himself. A sudden lurch and t
he tips of hobnailed boots peeked over the edge. His chief’s hand shot down and pulled the boys up. “Let’s get going,” he said and they did.

  “The arsonist hadn’t struck since the end of January,” Sawyer recalled. “We were all on edge in those days and still woefully unprepared.” The Alta wrote, “One of the most desperate scoundrels of England who have been serving the Queen set a fire above Washington Street.” Three other small fires followed, but none got out of hand. Everyone knew the inexperienced volunteer fire companies had no equipment and excelled more at socializing than putting out city-destroying fires. “Pride comes before the fall,” and pride was about all the three fledgling companies had. The arsonist counted on that.

  At sunset the northwest wind, which had been blowing furiously through gullies and rushing down hills since breakfast, faltered. At ebb tide it died away completely. A deadly chill set in. According to locals the abandoned ships in the shallow cove were so saturated with ghosts their planks and sails were haunted. As proof they told the story of a runaway vessel from the fleet that rode the night fog at the Golden Gate and of a sloop lost in the towering reeds and swamp grass of the east shore frantically trying to find her way, bumping and banging, and howling away with her whistle. These orphaned vessels gave Sawyer an idea.

  At 9:00 P.M., he walked toward this graveyard of ships, or as the Spaniards called it, Graveyard Harbor. Because the city had no streetlights, he measured his steps by the light of canvas houses made so transparent by interior lamps they became dwellings of solid light as so many Japanese lanterns illuminating paper houses also shed their light far into the cove. Fog-wet cobbles shone. Finn’s Alley, the roughest region of a rough town, overflowed with red-eyed ex-convicts who had drifted down from Spyglass Hill and Sydney Town, the enclave of ex-convicts to the north. Sawyer negotiated an area people avoided in daylight and never visited at night. Shadows were cast on the walls of tents. Men in slouch hats slouched in saloon doorways. Shouts, clapping, and laughter drowned out bands of pumping concertinas. Monte tables were piled with bags of dust, double eagles, and doubloons, the losses and wins from monte, trondo, faro, roulette, poker, rouge et noir, and vingt-et-un. “Make your bets, Gents,” a croupier yelled. Gamblers with drooping mustaches, wide felt hats, diamond shirt studs, and Prince Albert coats hooked their thumbs in brocade waistcoats. Sawyer rushed by the bright saloons. Ahead, the black silhouettes of ships’ masts peeked over low rooftops where Montgomery Street delineated the water’s edge toward its northern end. He reached Long Wharf. By day it teemed with industry, its planks rattling under the iron wheels of carriages, handcarts, porters, and drays. By day the mock auction houses, shanties, commission houses, saloons, and gambling establishments lining both sides of the pier and the frame warehouses on piles trembled. But by night Long Wharf was a silent, forlorn place, stretching a half mile into the fog of the shallow cove. The pier led him far out into the fleet moored and forgotten there. The city officially estimated that ten thousand people lived on these hulks. “In a city like this, where whole streets are built up in a week and whole squares swept away in an hour—where the floating population numbers hundreds, large portions of the fixed inhabitants live in places which cannot be described with any accuracy.” Many were deserters, refugees, fugitives, mutineers, or ex-convicts and murderers hiding out from roving bands of increasingly put-upon citizens. The residents also included gamblers who had welshed on bets, thieves planning their next robbery, and respectable citizens waiting to find homes on dry land. They would have a long wait. On shore a tiny room, if available, rented for $150 per month.

  Those vessels closest to Long Wharf had been transformed into lucrative ship warehouses and ship stores, ship restaurants, ship saloons, and a waterborne city hall. Ship houses and ship hotels stood shoulder to shoulder with land buildings as men began filling in the cove with sand. San Francisco embraced this waterborne metropolis as it built slowly outward to the landlocked fleet. As they cannibalized their cordage, spars, and planks, a third of the wood-scarce city would ultimately be constructed from these spectral ships. Because the finest steamers, clippers, and whalers brought only a fraction of their worth at sea, workers had begun hauling the abandoned vessels ashore.

  The arsonist was abroad tonight, too. His wind, the Lightkeeper’s Wind, had failed him. He rowed into the Ghost Fleet to make plans with a confederate. He always found the water city overwhelming. Hundreds of windjammers and square-riggers crowded two square miles of the bay, a lost armada dwarfing the navy of any country. San Francisco’s population had swelled from two thousand to forty thousand within just seven months. Abandoned in the cove were 650 vessels and soon nearly a thousand, the greatest amount of deserted naval tonnage ever to clog a major harbor. Gold-fevered crews had instantly abandoned them in their mad quest for gold. The runaway sailors, officers, freight men, and passengers who had leaped over the side before anchors dropped had abandoned not only perfectly serviceable ships but also holds packed with unclaimed cargoes. In a city obsessed with riches, no worker would lift a hand unless paid wages more than the worth of the merchandise remaining onboard. Crewmen who had gotten $2 a day on their ships now commanded $30 on shore. Brigs, frigates, colliers, and windjammers, at the mercy of the receding or filling harbor, arched their sterns toward the Golden Gate or pointed their bows into the oncoming flow. Surrounded by half-sunken hulks and ensnarled by anchor chains and lines tangling upon themselves, so much penned-in tonnage could never be moved. The geography then was this: two groups of 250 vessels, jammed together and separated only by Howison’s Wharf, Long Wharf, and the Clay Street Wharf. At the line dividing the two halves floated the Spanish brig Euphemia, a notorious prison ship that employed torture and forced labor. Her owner, Sam Brannan, had turned her into a regular Calcutta hole. A moan from her beaten and lashed men rolled across the choppy water. The Lightkeeper shivered and put his back to the oars. He did not wish to become one of those prisoners. Ahead he saw a ship lit by a single lantern, pulled hard, and soon reached the vessel. A rope ladder flew down and he ascended. Above he saw his secret partner.

  Meanwhile, at the end of Long Wharf, Sawyer untied a skiff tethered to a piling and began rowing toward the stern silhouettes. Flocks of seabirds took wing like bats. He rowed into a covered passage between two rust-stained hulls created by fallen shrouds. He smelled tar, decaying wood, rusting iron, and rotting sail—the perfume of derelicts left to rot and sink. Pirates moored to the northeast hid out alongside genteel families. Treasure was hidden inside Graveyard Harbor, but Sawyer was after something more valuable. He planned to salvage what Broderick desperately needed: buckets, ropes, hooks, ladders, axes, and hoses. He was watchful. Huge ship storehouses such as the Apollo had watchmen to guard the riches and records of the city. Ahead, wavering lanterns sparkled. Smoke trailed from cooking fires. Figures on surrounding decks stood listening. Steps led up from the water to doors cut into the sides of ships. So few available lodgings existed on land that frigates in the Ghost Fleet had been drafted as ship hotels. Overcrowded, unwholesome staterooms with six berths each permitted the lodgers to sleep only between 12:00 P.M. and 4:00 A.M. Sawyer listened at these side doors for the gentle snore of sleepers, heard none, and climbed aboard a likely vessel. Wind whispered through tattered sails as he scrambled onto the deck. The frigate was canted at such an angle he had to mountain climb. Swiftly he discovered several lengths of hose. On the next abandoned hulk he ferreted out two axes, several long pieces of cracked hose, and ten leather buckets in good shape. Night was waning. This would be his last trip. Fog was drifting two feet over the water’s surface as he reached a deserted whaling ship. Blubber hooks rang hollowly in the wind. The heavy-timbered ship, a cluttered superstructure of cranes and boats, had settled on the shallow bottom. Crates of cargo had swelled and stoves and prefab metal homes had burst through the hull.

  Swinging up over the railing, he splashed across the deck to an entryway. Where the deck shone through, the boards were oily and rou
gh. Paint was peeling off the spars and blocks. A deckhouse aft held useful tools. Cutting-in tackle, four large double blocks assembled in two falls, hung just below the maintop. Along the port side and aft on the starboard side, two long boats hung from davits. A squeaking noise alerted Sawyer. He lifted his lantern. Sharp discolored teeth and red eyes shone. A Danish black rat feasting on abandoned stores of cheese and rice peered back. Rats that had journeyed to San Francisco aboard vessels from every deepwater port scampered on the lacy catwalks between ships. On shore, huge aggressive rats ruled the muddy streets. Travelers tread on them in the dark. In the Square rats did at least $500 worth of damage a day and bit the ears, noses, and cheeks of sleeping men. In a single hour the rats massacred a shipload of cats shipped in from Southern California to eradicate them. The only local rat catcher was Tips, an English terrier belonging to Alta editor Gilbert, who refused to risk his pet.

  Sawyer pried up a hatch cover. Cargo, seaweed, and a foot of oily water swirled below. He dropped down, waded in black water up to his waist into the darkened ribs of the ship, and brought up salvaged axes and long pieces of hose. He lifted himself onto the watery deck and crouched, shivering until he quit the vessel. Dawn was coloring the sky as he trundled a wheelbarrow to the firehouse on Kearny. Broderick was awake and fretting over his newly formed department’s lack of equipment when he glimpsed Sawyer shaking with cold at the angel-wing doors. He ran down and swung open the doors. Buckets! Hose! Axes! He could hardly believe it. For the first time he believed they might stand a chance against the forces of treachery and indolence gathering against them—but only a slim chance.