Black Fire (34 page)

On Tuesday, November 9, a small fire broke out near the Square. When the flames butted up against a hard brick wall at Washington and Montgomery streets, they went out. The value of the new brick buildings was proved again when a fire on Merchant and Clay streets was restricted to the loss of thirty wooden buildings. Five days later San Francisco adopted a new seal, a large bird with red and gold feathers, rainbow-hued wings, and scarlet feet: a Phoenix, a fabled creature that rose from its ashes after setting itself ablaze on a pyre of cinnamon branches and myrrh. Broderick thought the image far more fitting for a great American city than the odious third eye of the cowardly vigilantes who had dishonored the volunteers by their use of the Monumental fire bell to call forth bloody deeds and bloodier hands.

Merchants begged the Council not to pass a proposed ordinance restricting building of frame houses within fire limits. “Such a measure,” they argued, “might drive away many who are now hesitating to risk another trial of their fortune in the city.” The Council, convinced of the need for fireproof buildings, passed the measure on December 6, forbidding the future erection of any frame houses within dense areas of the town, prohibiting rags within the fire limits, and mandating slate, tile, or other fire-resistant roofs. New city ordinances demanded that
all
downtown commercial structures were to be either stone or brick. The three-story Custom House at Battery, Washington, and Jackson, under construction to house federal departments and the post office,
had deep-set windows like a fortress. The new cast-iron buildings had their own peculiar beauty—stamped ornamental motifs and caryatids, iron floral friezes, and painted glass. Within two years, 626 brick or stone buildings would stand within the limits of Broadway and Bush streets, Stockton Street, and the waterfront. Three hundred and fifty of the buildings were two stories high, 154 were three stories, 34 were four stories, and 3 were five stories. Impressive brick and stone hotels, shops, theaters, and banks began to fill downtown as Montgomery Street became lined with durable structures of granite block.

Senator Broderick had been behind a recent water lot grab involving the former head of the City Hospital, Dr. Smith. In such an imperfect city, but one filled with such promise, Broderick’s little faults seemed minor. In such a metropolis of cruel men and arsonists, kindness and goodness were relative things. As the new year was rung in, Broderick continued pursuing his ethic that the end justifies the means. So far his strategy had worked to good ends, but he had made political enemies who were out to kill him and do it legally.

On December 12, George Oakes suddenly died.

By now the foot of broad California Street had been substantially planked, the city’s first horse-drawn streetcar line was operating, and the California Street Wharf was being extended farther into the cove. Grading and planking stretched from the junction of Battery and Market streets diagonally to Sacramento and Dupont streets, and from Dupont and Broadway to the bay. A flight of planking nullified the steep pitch of the grade leading to Vallejo Street, and a three-mile-long plank road out Folsom Street was built. With planking almost universal, the job of the volunteers and torch boys became much easier. The Council ripped down the last canvas buildings, improved the fire watch at the new City Hall, mandated the placement of more water tanks, and ordained a fire-free zone, bounded by Union, Powell, Post, and Second and Folsom streets. Within this area vacant lots and open fires were forbidden and laborers had to use enclosed lanterns around hay. The city tore down the last wall of the white adobe relic, rooted up the foundation, and graded the site level with the street. The previous winter’s rains had affected its stability and it was feared it might “suddenly fall and overwhelm the neighbors in its ruins.” The Casa Grande had seen San Francisco rise from a few fishing hamlets to a city of great commercial wealth and seen the greater portion of it in ashes six times and as often rebuilt with renewed grandeur. “The day of the gay and merry fandangos is over,” the
Alta
reported, “the music that once resounded through its halls is hushed.” The city filled in the tidelands between the shores and piers with sand removed from towering dunes downtown. Gradually the crescent-shaped cove, with all its secrets, was plowed over. They filled in the land between the piers and the piers became streets stretching to the waterfront, and upon them homes began to rise.

THE BURNED DISTRICT FROM THE JUNE 22, 1851, FIRE

“It now came out,” said George E. Schenck, record keeper for the Vigilantes, “that [English Jim] Stuart was a leader of a gang of nine, who had been concerned in various robberies and assaults, composed of T. Belcher Kay, who was port warden at the time, John Morris Morgan, [Sam] Whittaker, [Robert] McKensie, Jack Edwards, Jim Stuart, Benjamin Lewis, Jemmy-from-Town and one other.” English Jim’s gang agreed that if their men were hung, “which we expected they would be,” Sam Whittaker said, “we would fire the town on Sunday night in
several places.” He had heard that another member of their gang, “Billy Sweetcheese, whose real name is [Billy] Shears,” had assisted in setting the United States Gambling Exchange on fire on the Square “at the time it was vacant.” Thus two men had accomplished the May 1850 fire that destroyed San Francisco. Of T. Belcher Kay, historian H. H. Bancroft wrote, “He is said to have been the instigator of the great fire of the 22nd of June.” Kay’s assistants in the June fire were Whittaker, Jemmy-from-Town, and George Adams. English Jim Stuart, Sam Whittaker, and McKensie were lynched in July 1851. Kay escaped to South America.

Sawyer finally learned the name of Ben Lewis’s confederate: Jack Edwards, another Duck, a member of English Jim Stuart’s gang, and leader of a gang who robbed and assaulted people on the outskirts of town. Edwards was also the man seen on the staircase with Ben Lewis when he torched his Collier House room. When Edwards was brought to trial after a long delay, like Lewis he was freed by venal judges under the sway of politicians in the Ducks’ pocket. When Edwards was searched, police found in his belongings what could have been a small lamp scorched almost beyond recognition but which made Sawyer certain that Edwards had been the second Lightkeeper and that the horror was finally over.

STEAMING WITH TWAIN AND SAWYER

May 26, 1863–December 16, 1866

Billy Mulligan

TWAIN AND HARTE PROWL THE SAN FRANCISCO DOCKS

Investigations showed clearly that at least four of the conflagrations had been started by a gang of firebugs led by two former convicts from Australia—Jack Edwards and Ben Lewis.

—Herbert Asbury,
The Barbary Coast

Steamers

Subsequent confessions of criminals on the eve of execution, implicated a considerable number of people in various high and low departments of the executive.

—Frank Soule,
The Annals of San Francisco

M
ore than a decade later, in clouds of rolling steam, Mark Twain studied Tom Sawyer, foreman of Liberty Hose and the new San Francisco customs inspector. Sawyer reminded him of the rugged platoon of volunteer smoke eaters, mostly New Yorkers, in the Bowery B’hoy tradition in Virginia City. Virginia, as he called the Nevada town where he currently worked as a reporter, was only a small town, about three times as large as Hannibal, Missouri, his hometown since age four. He visualized their foreman, Big Jack Perry, leaning against the six-foot-high wheels of the town’s hand-drawn fire cart and concluded that Sawyer compared favorably. Later he patterned Buck Fanshaw in
Roughing It
on Perry.

Twain, Sawyer, and Ed Stahle, the proprietor of the Turkish baths at 722 and 724 Montgomery, played cards, drank cold bottled beer, and listened to the rain pounding on the street outside. It was May 5, 1863, and Twain was three days into his first visit to San Francisco to “wildcat on Montgomery.” He had learned that Sawyer was a former policeman, Fire Corporation yard keeper, and Liberty Hose’s foreman. Twain luxuriated in the hot mist and surveyed his cards. The poker deck displayed full-length, single-ended court figures but no numbers. All three men loved to steam, Twain most of all. Stahle’s Turkish baths had been part of the Montgomery Block at the intersection of Montgomery and Washington streets for a decade. The ground floor on the
northwest corner housed the Bank Exchange saloon (home of Pisco Punch), where Twain and Sawyer had met—drinking, of course. Twain had liked him immensely. Almost everyone did. Bret Harte, a frequent visitor to the bar, wrote “The Luck of Roaring Camp” in the Montgomery Block, the most important literary site of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American West. It was a hub of creative expression that magnetically attracted talent. Former torch boy Charles Dormon Robinson (later called the dean of San Francisco artists) worked out of his upstairs painting studio opposite Ambrose Bierce’s old apartment. Robinson and his fellow artists frequented the Occidental Hotel. Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, Gelett Burgess, Frank Norris, George Sterling, Joaquin Miller, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Ralph Stackpole, who would paint murals within Coit Tower, kept their offices there. Sun Yatsen wrote the first Chinese constitution there.