Black Fire by Robert Graysmith Read Free Book Online

merchants lugged their safes and sacks of gold dust to the Maguire building at the end of Long Wharf. The blaze bridged the cove waters and burned the hulls of ships anchored off the beach. Thousands living in the Ghost Fleet plunged over the sides and swam for safety. A few fortunate ships, with the help of a light southerly turn of the wind, reached an anchorage just west of Clarke’s Point. From there passengers thrashed and waded through a mile of waist-deep mud to reach unburned land and safety. At 11:00 A.M. , Upton, chafed by his oversize boots, limped in agony to the beach. He rowed to his ship to soak his blistered feet. If a high wind freshened, two-thirds of the city would be burned. At least, he thought, this, the first big fire in San Francisco history, might persuade the Council to finally establish a fire department. At four o’clock in the afternoon, Upton, barefoot now, climbed back on deck. The wind had died. The fire might still be licking and leaping, but his ship’s thermometer read seventy-four degrees, as if it were a mild and pleasant day. Three hours later, flames and smoke were still curling when the fire abruptly went out. Ships at sea clearly saw the red chimney of flame collapse upon itself and die.
    “And by God, they’ve stayed the fire by resorting to powder and blowing the buildings up,” McCrackan said, though during a blast two men had been killed and dozens had received broken limbs and burns. Surely, with such strong winds and paperlike dwellings resting on shifting sand, clay, and sucking mud, there would be more and greater fires, but San Franciscans had failed to comprehend the solution before their eyes. The fire only truly halted when it butted up against an unfinished brick building. Stunned, murmuring prayers, and covered with soot that made them scarcely recognizable to one another, harried men and women dug through the ruins, salvaged what they could, and cried in each other’s arms. Broderick could not accurately estimate the tremendous loss of life. Fleeing mobs had trampled and kneaded bodies into the ooze. Corpses lay crushed under fallen buildings. As if shocked into silence, the winds over San Francisco scarcely stirred. For days an umbrella of ash hung unmoving above the city. John H. Brown speculated that Dennison’s had been fired to avenge a racial affront committed against a black man by a southerner, Thomas Bartell, who ran thegambling house’s saloon. No proof of his allegation existed. There were plenty of arson suspects.
    At the height of the fire, seventy members of the Ducks, “ruffianly larrikins,” ticket-of-leave men from British penal settlements, had been arrested for looting. After the fire, the Hounds, a gang of idled army renegades from Colonel Stevenson’s regiment, terrorized the poor ranging through the blackened rubble and kicked apart promising heaps of debris as they searched for coins. What they had no use for they destroyed. Whoever got in their way they beat. Broderick suspected a member of one of the two gangs had instigated the arson. He pointed out how well organized and well timed the attacks had been. The Ducks and Hounds had been ready and waiting to strike. Somewhere there was a fire fiend who had set the Christmas Eve fire. There had to be. Broderick would bet his life on it. A month earlier the Alta had flat-out said there were arsonists in the city and demanded an increase in manpower to apprehend them. At least a night watch should be formed. The Council, responsive to their pleas, resolved to increase the police force by fifty men.
    During the five hours the fire raged, it had consumed $1.5 million worth of ships, piers, and buildings—290 structures and the earliest vestiges of the city known as Yerba Buena until 1847. The one-story adobe Custom House, La Casa Grande, the oldest building in the city, survived. It was relatively fireproof. San Francisco lost all its buildings on both sides of Kearny Street between