Black Fire (44 page)

Mary Floyd Williams’s
History of the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance of 1851
, volume 12, lists minutes of the Executive Committee for July 21, 1851, and comments by George E. Schenck on the apparent fate of Ben Lewis. I relied upon the June 3, 1851, handwritten depositions given by the residents of the Collier House to the police in
The People v. Ben Lewis
. These documents are part of the H. H. Bancroft Collection, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley. Captain George B. Coffin’s
A Pioneer Voyage to California and Around the World, 1849–1852
provided firsthand accounts of the great fires. The San Francisco Fire Department’s
Historical Review
, with résumés of its personnel, was written while Tom Sawyer was still alive. Pages 100–101 include his biography as a volunteer firefighter. “He arrived in San Francisco Bay in February, 1850 … and immediately went to steam shipping, running as a fireman between this port and San Juan and Panama. He continued at this occupation for some years during which time his vessel, the steamer
Independence
, was wrecked on a reef off the Southern coast and burned to the water line and sunk.” The piece implies that Sawyer left for the sea immediately, but the
Independence
was not launched in New York until Christmas Day, 1850, and did not reach San Francisco Bay for the first time until September 17, 1851, three months after the great fires ended. Sawyer may have done some sporadic work on the Sacramento River or on a freighter between fires, but he remained in San Francisco, with its clogged harbor, and used his fleetness to save a great city.

The
Fire Department History
states of Sawyer: “Through his ingenuity and heroism he saved the lives of ninety people aboard.… When nearly exhausted with the great task of swimming ashore with each passenger on his back, his great mind came to his rescue. By putting the rest of them in life preservers he towed them ashore and landed in the boiling surf safe and sound.” The history includes a Lillie Hitchcock piece by Frederick J. Bowlen, battalion chief, San Francisco Fire Department. I consulted period newspaper accounts of the fires and central figures in Sawyer’s story from the San Francisco Library microfilm collection and the California Digital Newspaper Collection, a repository of digitized California newspapers from 1846 to the present, including
the
Daily Morning Call
, 1863–64; the
Californian
, 1864–67;
San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle
, 1865–66;
Sacramento Daily Union
, 1865–66;
Daily Hawaiian Herald
, 1866;
San Francisco Bulletin
, 1866; and the
Daily Alta California
, 1867–69.

Sources for Henry Clemens’s death in an explosion in 1858 onboard the steamer
Pennsylvania
are a
Memphis Eagle and Enquirer
article, June 16, 1858, on the arrival of Twain at his dying brother’s bed.
Sunday
magazine, March 19, 1908, printed an illustrated article on Mark and Henry. Twain’s precognition of Henry’s death appeared in his
Notebooks and Journals, volume 2, Notebook #20
. Margaret Sanborn’s
Mark Twain: The Batchelor Years
relates Twain’s dream of his brother Henry in his casket on pages 124–129. Twain in his autobiography and in his
Mississippi Writings
, chapter 20, “A Catastrophe,” writes of his brother Henry’s death and the fatal steamboat explosion.

I reviewed the San Francisco Fire Department Museum for lists of SFFD firehouses, volunteer companies of 1850–66, and notable people; consulted 1850s diaries and letters, birth and death records, coroner’s reports, and census reports of 1856–66; looked at city maps of 1852, 1853, 1873, 1896, early city views of 1837–55, city directories for 1850, 1852–53, 1863, 1864, city street guides for 1861 and 1882; and read weather reports, San Francisco County voting records, ward maps and the voter register for 1867, fire insurance maps, ships’ passenger lists, descriptions of arrivals, marriages at sea, and shipwrecks; and studied fleets lists, pictures, journals, immigration reports, and the San Francisco Delinquent Tax List, 1867. I used the San Francisco History Center, the San Francisco Public Library, the Historical Abstract of San Francisco for 1897, Vigilance Committee trial transcripts, hundreds of books on the Gold Rush and the adventurers who sailed to San Francisco, tide and wind charts, survivors’ accounts of the
Independence
sinking, and San Francisco and Bay Area histories. As a longtime San Francisco resident, I walked all the sites over many years. In 1968–69, as the
San Francisco Chronicle
’s political cartoonist, I sat at my desk during reconstruction on the southwest corner of Mission and Mary streets, directly above the site of Sawyer’s saloon at 935 Mission.

At every opportunity I tested the validity of Sawyer’s claims. He recalled in an interview that on September 28, 1864, he and Twain went on a bender. “Me and Jack Mannix, who was afterwards bailiff in Judge Levy’s court, was walkin’ down Montgomery Street.” A man named John E. Mannix lived at 829 Mission Street close to Sawyer at 935
Mission. “Mark caught sight of us from a window across the street in the Russ House.” Twain should not have been at the Russ House. During that time he was one of two lodgers with a well-to-do private family on Minna Street and preparing to take rooms farther along Minna only two blocks from Sawyer. But I learned that three days earlier, Twain had written his mother and sister that his comrade of two years, Steve Gillis, was getting hitched to Emeline Russ, daughter of the late Christian Russ, who owned the Russ House. Twain was going to stand up for his friend at the nuptials. Sawyer was correct and there was no other way he could have known this. The same day as their bender, September 28, 1864, Twain wrote Orion and Mollie Clemens to say, “I
would
commence on my book, but (mind, this is a secret, & must not be mentioned), Steve & I are getting ready for his wedding, which will take place on the 24th Oct. He will marry Miss Emmelina [
sic
] Russ.” So Sawyer’s mention of a book on that day and Twain’s presence at the Russ House was not only true but a secret.

“The next day I met Mark down by the old
Call
office,” Sawyer continued. That Twain worked at the
Call
was not known, because his articles were not signed. He was later fired from the
Call
, something he never spoke about, but Sawyer knew. “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.’ ” Twain was working on his first book, “a pet notion” of his of about three hundred pages, probably about the river. “Nobody knows what [the novel] is going to be about but just myself,” Twain said.

Twain was more definite about the real-life model for Huckleberry Finn than Tom Sawyer. He admitted he had based
Tom Sawyer
’s Becky Thatcher on Laura Hawkins, who lived opposite the Clemenses on Hill Street and modeled Sid Sawyer, Tom’s well-behaved half brother, on his late lamented brother Henry. John Briggs, the Joe Harper of
Tom Sawyer
’s gang, was based on one of Mark’s closest boyhood friends. Twain’s friends from San Francisco were always on his mind. In
Tom Sawyer
, Injun Joe murders Doctor Robinson, the name of torch boy Charlie Robinson’s famous father, Doc. Years later, Twain and Harte in their disastrous play,
Ah Sin
, would name Broderick a villain and use the character Shirley Tempest.

Mark Twain’s eighty-one-year-old mother, Jane, might have known who the real Tom Sawyer was. On April 17, 1885, a Chicago reporter
decided to ask. She was living with Twain’s brother, Orion, and his wife, Mollie, in an unpretentious two-story brick house at the intersection of High and Seventh streets in Keokuk, Iowa. Twain was the sole support of the crippled household: a widowed mother, Jane; a widowed sister, Pamela; and Orion, now a lawyer who still trod a long road of foreclosure and bankruptcy. Nearly deaf, Twain’s mother needed an ear trumpet to hear the reporter’s questions. She painted Mark as “always a good-hearted boy” who was also very wild and mischievous and often skipped school. “Often his father started him off and in a little while followed him to ascertain his whereabouts,” she said. “There was a large stump on the way to the schoolhouse and Sam would take up a position behind that, and as his father went past would gradually circle around in such a way to keep out of sight.” He asked if Twain in his boyhood days resembled his Tom Sawyer. Was he the immortal character? “Ah, no!” replied the elderly lady firmly, “he was more like Huckleberry Finn than Tom Sawyer. He was always a great boy for history and could never get tired of that kind of reading, but he hadn’t any use for schoolhouses and textbooks. This used to trouble his father and me dreadfully, and we were convinced that he would never amount as much in the world as his brothers because he was not near so steady and sober minded as they were.” Molly added that Twain had gotten all his humor and talent from his mother. “Tom Sawyer’s ‘Aunt Polly’ and Mrs. Hawkins in
Gilded Age
,” she said, “are direct portraits of his mother.” And that’s where the matter lay. The reporter did note that the old lady could not discuss the death of her son Henry onboard a steamboat without sobbing uncontrollably.

Curiously, the claim that Twain was supposed to have named his book
Tom Sawyer
after his San Francisco acquaintance was well known in 1900 when all of the principals were alive, including Twain, Sawyer, and probably several hundred San Franciscans who knew them both, and could have authenticated or challenged the claim. No one disputed it in San Francisco. The life of Tom Sawyer is replete with stirring scenes and adventures, and he never doubted that Twain named his first book for his longtime friend who had been the inspiration for his best work.

When I worked as a cartoonist and artist at the Stockton, California,
Record
in 1963, I was told the story of “the man who burned down San Francisco” by a sea captain in his late eighties who called the arsonist the Lightkeeper. He said the firebug was set off by the Lightkeeper’s Wind, the gales that propelled fogs through the Golden
Gate and up from Southern California. These gales imperiled shipping and set lonely lighthouse keepers to trimming their wicks and activating their blazing lights. I found this name most evocative and used it. I speculated on the arsonist’s death at the hands of irate firemen because many suspected looters and arsonists were beaten to death that night. If Ben Lewis did escape, his ultimate fate remains unknown.

Profound thanks to my agent, Joel Gotler, Jenna Ciongoli, Michael Chernuchin, Dan Gordon, Michael Larkin, Michael Goldstein, Thomas Ellsworth, Darren Hattingh, Ryan Fischer-Harbage, Margot Graysmith, Aaron Smith, David Smith, Melanie Graysmith, Penny Wallace, David Zucker, Jordan Sheehan, Kevin Fagan, Marli Peterson, and Mizuki Osawa. Special thanks to the spirited and always reliable Miriam Chotiner-Gardner, art director Christopher Brand and designer Elina Nudelman, Patricia Shaw, Ellen Folan, and Rachel Meier. I am deeply indebted to Charles Conrad, whose wise guidance, sometimes only a word or two, put me on the right path.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
 

Andrews. Ralph W.
Historic Fires of the West: 1865 to 1915
. New York: Bonanza Books, 1966.

Asbury, Herbert.
The Barbary Coast
. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1937.

Askins, Col. Charles.
Texans, Guns & History
. New York: Winchester Press, 1970.

Bacon, Daniel.
Walking San Francisco on the Barbary Coast Trail
. San Francisco: Quicksilver Press, 1996.

Baldwin, Joseph G. Edited by Richard E. Amacher and George W. Polhemus.
The Flush Times of California
. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1966.

Bancroft, Hubert Howe.
The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft: History of California, Vols. 4 and 23, 1849–1859
. San Francisco: The History Company, Publishers, 1888. (From the original first edition with two foldout maps and diagrams of the vigilante cells in proximity to the cage holding Yankee Sullivan.)

————.
The Works, Vol. 37, Popular Tribunals
. San Francisco: The History Company, Publishers, 1887. (First edition. Billy Mulligan is discussed on pp. 604–8.)

Barker, Malcolm E.
San Francisco Memoirs 1835–1851: Eyewitness Accounts of the Birth of a City
. San Francisco: Londonborn Publications, 1996.