Black Fire (43 page)

“You want to know how I come to figure in his books, do you?” Sawyer told
Call
reporter Viola Rodgers. He turned on his stool, acknowledged the reporter, raised his brandy, and took a sip. “Well, as I said, we both was fond of telling stories and spinning yarns. Sam, he was mighty fond of children’s doings and whenever he’d see any little fellers a-fighting on the street, he always stop and watch ’em and then he’d come up to the Blue Wing and describe the whole doings and then I’d try and beat his yarn by telling him of the antics I used to play when I was a kid and say, ‘I don’t believe there ever was such another little devil ever lived as I was.’ Sam, he would listen to these pranks of mine with great interest and he occasionally take ’em down in his notebook. One day he says to me: ‘I am going to put you between the covers of a book some of these days, Tom.’ ‘Go ahead, Sam,’ I said, ‘but don’t disgrace my name.’ ”

In
Mark Twain’s San Francisco
, Bernard Taper wrote, “All sorts of characters swim into Twain’s ken—miners, millionaires, actors, bill collectors, notables, bums. He is on easy terms with them all. In the Turkish bath in the Montgomery Block he even meets a man named Tom Sawyer, with whom he likes playing penny ante. Long afterward this man enjoyed the conviction that it was he who had inspired Twain’s famous book, and outside of a tavern he acquired … he proudly hung the sign:
ALE AND SPIRITS
!
THE ORIGINAL TOM SAWYER
:
PROP
.” Idwal Jones wrote, “His belief that the tale was dedicated to him grew, as also grew the number of tales involving himself and ‘my friend Sam Clemens,’ going back not only to Sam’s Washoe period but also his unrecorded infancy. The sign swung profitably in the wind.” Twain’s old bathhouse crony ran the most popular watering hole in town, and in 1876 he was still an extra man with Engine Six on the east side of Sixth Street and corporation yard manager for the entire fire department. In 1884, he retired from public life as inspector of the Custom House, a job he had held for twenty-one years. After helping organize the Liberty Hose, he was elected its foreman for three terms and a member of the Board of Delegates. Four years later he was elected vice president of the Veteran Firemen’s Association along with Crooked Con Mooney, Singing Jack Carroll, and Cockeyed Frank Atkinson. On January 3, 1888, four hundred veteran firemen who had run with the first engines and worked
the brakes long before met at the Pioneer Building on Fourth Street to relieve those early days. On July 4, he marched in a huge parade.

On October 13, 1890, Sawyer organized a society to call for passage of a bill to make the city fire department a metropolitan one with a fully paid force. In the preceding twenty-five years, 1,200 men had been removed or forced to resign from the fire department, and Sawyer intended to lobby the next legislature. On July 17, the discharged firemen met at his saloon. “The fire department is badly managed,” he told them, “and many of the engines in the corporation yard could be repaired at little expense and would do good service for many years.” He complained that many cisterns downtown had not been cleaned for years and caused much of the disease prevalent in the downtown area. “In old times,” he said, “when the Volunteer department was in existence, they were cleaned every three months.” On August 17, his name was suggested as the new fire commissioner. On September 16, 1891, the Veteran Firemen Association made him first vice president of both the Vets and the Manhattans. “Sawyer hails from New York where he did his first fire duty,” the
Call
noted, calling him “Hale and hearty, ever genial and courteous.” “That big engine—just think of it,” W.D.L. Hall, a veteran, recalled. “How we ever got that over the sand, mud, and planks with her in the early days, and the service we did. It’s simply astonishing to think of it. Newcomers can hardly realize it, but it was so all the same.”

On June 17, 1894, Sawyer and the other vets who ran with the hose in the fifties told what it was like as they “battled with the flames which destroyed the tumble-down landmarks of a boom town. There was something to being a Volunteer fireman in those good old days when heads were cracked and human claret flowed to taps. There were no nickle-plated steamers or water towers in those days.” That afternoon, a race for fat veterans over sixty years old was held. A one-eyed whiskered gent not “a day under ninety ran like a chief and won a prize of a case of champagne which he fled with.” Sawyer came in fourth and was presented with a bootjack by his large group of lady friends. In mid-March 1895, as president of the Society of Old Friends, he celebrated with the veterans at Sutro Baths by roasting three oxen and a number of sheep and hogs. In May he performed an overture and a vocal solo at a Jolly Ladies’ High Jinks Night at Liberty Hose. The old volunteers told stories, sang, and danced until midnight. In January 1896, Thomas L. Adington, an elderly bartender, swallowed a big dose of morphine in his
Ninth Avenue room and left behind a stamped, unsealed letter: “If anything happens to me, I wish you would see Mr. Tom Sawyer, 935 Mission Street and ask him to intercede to have me buried in the Old Friends’ plot … I cannot live this way any longer, and I hope he will forgive me. So goodbye and God bless everybody. PS Friend Tom, Do what you can. I think I am going crazy.”

On October 20, 1897, the
Call
wrote, “The surviving eighteen members of the old Volunteer Fire Company, Knickerbocker Five, met and celebrated the forty-seventh anniversary of their organization. Present were Thomas Sawyer and his wife.” Sawyer had briefly served on Lillie’s favorite fire company. On October 23, 1898, Viola Rodgers of the
Call
decided to interview him. She was intrigued by what Twain had written in postscript to
Tom Sawyer:
“Most of the characters that perform in this book still live and are prosperous and happy. Some day it may seem worthwhile to take up the story of the younger ones and see what sort of men and women they turned out to be; therefore it will be wisest not to reveal any of that part of their lives at present.” She reached the old-fashioned Mission Street saloon just to the east side of the Mint. “Over the front door hangs a sign ‘The Gotham—Sawyer Proprietor,’ ” she wrote. “To a casual observer that name means no more than if it were ‘Brown’ or ‘Tom Jones,’ but to Twain it meant the inspiration for his most famous work. For the jolly old fireman sitting in there in an old fashioned haircloth chair is the original Sawyer and it was from him that Twain gathered material for his two greatest works,
Sawyer
and
Huckleberry Finn
. This real-life, up-to-date Sawyer spends his time telling stories of former days while he occasionally mixes a brandy and soda or a cocktail.” The walls were completely covered with helmets, belts, election tickets, badges, hooks, bugles, nozzles, mementos, and other firefighting paraphernalia. A huge frame containing small photos of a hundred firemen hung on the south wall. A mounted stag’s head looked on impassively. “He prides himself on being a member of the first volunteer fire company ever formed in California,” she wrote. “One knows intuitively he is a character the moment one sees him.” He wore a navy-blue cap and on his vest he had pinned an electric diamond that glittered alongside badges of the orders of volunteer firemen. “Next to his badges of his fire company, Sawyer values his friendship with Twain, and he will sit for hours recalling the jolly nights and days he used to spend with Twain.” Sawyer’s parrot, whose companionship he enjoyed for eighteen years, had just died. His voice got shaky and he got
teary when he spoke of “old Pol’s” demise, but he soon regained his jolly attitude. Mary Bridget was busy cooking dinner in the rooms above his saloon where they have lived for thirty-seven years. One of his sons, Thomas junior, a former secretary of the Veteran Firemen’s Association, was behind the bar as his father’s full-time bartender.

“Well, when
Tom Sawyer
was published Sam sent me a copy,” Sawyer said. “It was as if I was reading my own diary.” His shining morning face lit up. He looked not a day over fifty. Being good-natured kept him young. “Sam got me down to a science, I tell you. He also used some of the things I told him in
Huckleberry Finn
.” Sawyer told how Twain used to listen to tales of his youthful antics. “Sam, he would listen and occasionally take them down in his notebook. ‘He was just such a boy as you must have been,’ he told me. ‘I believe I’ll call the book
Tom Sawyer.’
That’s the way it came about, and you can bet when Mark shows up here in August he’ll bear me out. Have a drink?

“But he’s coming out here some day, and I am saving up for him. When he does come there’ll be some fun, for if he gives a lecture I intend coming right in on the platform and have a few old time sallies with him. I’ll just ask him right in meeting about a few of those things when he comes to Frisco.” Rodgers ended her full-page interview: “And so Tom Sawyer, who gave Mark Twain the impetus for his famous book, now stands at the bar giving other things to other people.” Another interviewer wrote how Sawyer spoke of Twain “with that feeling which signifies the invisible bond between the old timers and their comrades.”

On January 26, 1899, Sawyer sang “On the Rocky Road to Dublin” at the volunteers’ banquet and all one hundred guests drank a toast to “our departed members and sang, ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ ” Sawyer had little money, only a building lot at Douglass and Duncan streets, but he had lived a rich, full life. During the Veteran Firemen’s Association’s second annual picnic on June 23, 1901, Sawyer bested Con Mooney in a tree-climbing contest. On December 15, 1905, “Tom Sawyer’s” cave, where Tom and Becky Thatcher were lost, and “Injun Joe” perished, was gone. A manufacturing plant had ground all seven miles into Portland cement.

On October 1, 1906, the
San Francisco Call
headlined “Tom Sawyer, Whose Name Inspired Twain, Dies at Great Age.” It continued, “A man whose name is to be found in every worthy library in America died in this city on Friday.… He was Sawyer, pioneer, steamboat engineer, veteran volunteer fireman and vigilante, who in the early days was a
friend of Twain. So highly did the author appreciate Sawyer that he gave the man’s name to his famous boy character. In that way the man who died Friday is godfather, so to speak, of one of the most enjoyable books ever written. He was one of the organizers of the volunteer fire department and later was a member of the regular department.”

The original Tom Sawyer’s Saloon was destroyed that same year—by fire. The memory of the fleet brave lads had always remained in Sawyer’s mind. In the middle of the night, surrounded by mementos of his adventurous past, he frequently returned to memories of those early days when he’d heard the
slap, slap, slap
of bare feet racing through the mud as a contingent of boys sprinted ahead of the volunteers’ hand-drawn engines. They bore flaming torches over the pitch-black and hazardously pitted roadways of Old San Francisco, lighting the way for the salvation of a great city. The torch boys carried fire to the fire—a very poetic occupation.

SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
 

The initial spark for
Black Fire
was Matthew Brady’s October 29, 1990,
San Francisco Independent
column, “The Torch Boys.” Unfortunately, only the names of a few had survived, and what records the conflagrations of 1850–51 did not destroy, the great quake and fire of 1906 did. A year later I read in Rand Richards’s
Historic San Francisco
, “It was in the basement steam baths in fact that Twain met a fireman named Sawyer. Twain used the name for his famous novel, and Sawyer, who later opened a saloon on Mission Street … capitalized on his immortality by advertising his tavern as ‘the Original Tom Sawyer’s.’ ” Then I discovered a number of interviews Sawyer had given the press. “He prides himself upon being a member of the first volunteer fire company ever formed in California [Broderick One],” Sawyer said on October 23, 1898. Sawyer was already a hero and worthy of a book when he returned from the sea in 1859. Proof of his earlier experience fighting fire in San Francisco between February 1850 and June 1851 was that upon his return he was appointed fire corporation yard keeper and fire bell ringer in the City Hall Tower, coveted positions held by seasoned firefighters. Articles about the Veteran Firemen’s Association of California prominently highlighted Sawyer in a drawing. As he told his stories of fighting fire and running for the volunteers in front of the firefighters of 1850, he was never contradicted.

I relied upon the original hardcover 1850–51 volumes from my personal library, including
The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft: History of California, 1849–1859
, volumes 4 and 23, with two foldout maps and diagrams of the vigilante cells in proximity to the cage holding Yankee Sullivan. Bancroft’s volume 37,
Popular Tribunals
, discusses Billy Mulligan on pages 604–8, and on page 7 it is the primary source for
Sullivan’s invention of the false-bottom ballot box. Of equal importance is Frank Soule, John H. Gihon, and James Nisbet’s
The Annals of San Francisco
, which mentions on page 244 the muddy streets and children who ran with the fire engines.