Black Fire by Robert Graysmith Read Free Book Online Page B

surveying the gutted ground floor and furrowing his brow. Dennison whipped out $15,000 and flung it to the builder, who contracted immediately to raise the new building within fifteen days or forfeit $500 for each day past the deadline. Real San Franciscans like Dennison understood greed. It, too, was the San Francisco way. While the Parker House was still burning, its perpetually unlucky owner, Tom Maguire, was busily signing contracts to raise a new two-story building in its place. A ruddy man, top-heavy with an oiled mustache and white hair, Maguire, in the midst of such devastation, was impeccably dressed. A huge diamond was pinned in his scarf and a massive watch chain crossed his carpet vest. The former New York City hack driver turned saloonkeeper turned impresario wanted his new palace prepared by French designers and fitted out in Oriental splendor with glass pillars and mirrors that climbed to golden ceilings. Workers swiftly laid the Parker House’s new basement floor timbers and arranged the building to be constructed in brick sections. Maguire expected speed and perfection. When glass panes arrived cut in sections too small for his new windows, he refused to alter his designs and instead ordered specially cut glass shipped express from Hawaii.
    The El Dorado and the United States Coffee House had been decimated. The Mazourka, the Arcade, the Ward House, the Fontine House, the Alhambra, and the Aguila de Oro, in or near the Square, were badly damaged. The owners of the Bella Union, El Dorado, California Exchange, Empire, and Verandah shouted as they saw new gambling dens getting the jump on them. “Cut whatever corners necessary,” they cried, watching their competitors’ steady progress, “get us back in operation again!” The righteous in town, such as Edward Gilbert, the newspaper editor, would not miss the obliterated gambling dens. “Had that been the motive behind the city-destroying arson?” Broderick wondered. “Was it a way to be rid of the dens, along with squalid rows of shacks?” He saw the entire City Council—Steuart, Price, Ellis, Turk, Davis, Harris, Simmons, Harrison, Green, and Brannan—assembled in a corner of the Square and walked over, still wheezing. He concealed his discomfort.The same iron resolution that had made him a king among men was at work. He would have to be at his most persuasive if he was to prevent another inferno.
    Sam Brannan, the city’s first millionaire and one of the good old town’s greediest men, was such a cross between a constable and a cattle thief that one could not tell where one began and the other left off. Brannan, who had salted the city streets with flecks of gold from a quinine bottle to drum up sales for his mining supplies stores, was sitting on a barrel whittling a block of soft pine with his bowie knife. Nine months earlier he and hide merchant William Howard had transported the first thirty complete frame houses from the East. Dawn light revealed that their prefabs, advertised as “noncombustible houses,” had proved amazingly combustible. The alcalde, colonial mayor John White Geary, was there, too. Geary, appointed postmaster by President James Polk a year earlier, had brought the first U.S. mail to San Francisco by steamer from the East. Everyone else had been drawn to California because James Wilson Marshall saw something glittering in his sawmill tailrace on the American River on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada. Word got out and the world rushed in.
    Chastened by the ruins, the eleven businessmen-politicians ceased talking as the acknowledged hero of the Christmas Eve fire began to speak. Broderick’s Manhattan unit of volunteer firefighters had faced a similar disaster in July 1844 when three hundred buildings burned. “Why were no buildings blown up?” New York critics had asked then. “A few kegs of gunpowder judiciously ignited at 5:00 A.M. or 6:00 P.M. would have saved millions.” The result was the formation of the