Free Black Fire by Robert Graysmith Page A

On the most star-filled night you might make out the outline of a man next to you, but never his features. Fog conceals obstructions dumped in our streets everyday. On the way to fires there are nails, stones, and abandoned wagons for firefighters to trip over. You could be sucked under by quicksand or tumble headlong into surprise pits.” Packs of feral pigs, “white wings,” rooting in garbage along every route could be fierce. “We can’t afford to get lost in the numerous hills and mazelike streets. We need fleet boys to light the way to the fire at night and carry torches ahead of the engines.” The torchboys would call out hazards, potholes, abandoned wagons, and crates along the quicksandlike streets, choose the best route, and take the volunteers speedily and safely to the blaze and back. “It’s a very romantic occupation for young lads to carry fire to the fire. Each will attach himself to his favorite firehouse as they are organized and receive room and board.” The boys would be busy. The Lightkeeper was ready to burn down San Francisco again.

    The dense forest of rolling masts in the darkness all around the Lightkeeper had been compared to Le Havre and Marseille. From the waterfront he heard the groaning of nearly a thousand ships straining at their cables, the endless flapping of sails and scrape of anchor chains dragged about by currents. Hulls thumped together as he picked his way along the waterfront. He watched every step and listened to the creak of every board. He was wise to be wary. Passengers who had passed safely over all the dangers of the vast ocean drowned like dogs—on land . The wooden quays were dangerous and the worn, fire-damaged boards, easily broken. At night residents of the waterfront routinely heard the splash of heavy bodies plunging through holes into the water. These fatalities were most prevalent at ten o’clock at night, when river steamboats down from Marysville, Stockton, and Sacramento landed at Long Wharf, which was unlighted and full of gaps. Neighbors were used to fishing floating bodies out of the bay as part of their morning chores. In just four months of 1850, sixty people had plunged to their deaths through the yawing pitfalls. The number might be inflated. Jim Cunningham, the city coroner, was paid by the inquest. Thus, in the dead of night he would sometimes take a drowned corpse and dump him through the rotted planks to be fished up and autopsied again. He was once paid for six inquests on the same individual.
    In early 1850, nighttime robberies were so common, powerful men kept to the center of unlit streets. They checked their concealed pistols and knives at the doors of theaters and restaurants as commonly as gentlemen might check their top hats at the Paris Opera, slipping bowie knives from their boot tops, removing derringers from vest pockets, and shaking daggers from their sleeves. Any man claiming to be unarmed was met by a startled look of incredulity and promptly searched. Criminals had the city by the throat. Edward Gilbert wanted something done. A Mexican War veteran, he had arrived in San Franciscothree years earlier to become the hot-tempered senior editor of the Daily Alta California . His editors fought duels on a regular basis. So did Gilbert, who was infamous for challenging, then backing out, a gambit that would eventually get him killed. His sarcastic diatribe against crime read: “We doubt if there is spirit enough among our people to even reprimand one of these throat-slashers, were he caught in the act of strangling a child or setting fire to church.… We look with apparent satisfaction upon the sprightly attempts of the recruits of penaldom to illuminate our city free gratis.”
    Editor John Nugent in the Daily Herald saw no remedy for midday crime “but the strong arms and stout souls of the citizens themselves.” He suggested that the citizens organize a band of three hundred regulators to treat a few thieves to “Lynch law” and