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heaps and a prickly forest of masts towered. These nearly a thousand abandoned vessels had transported hundreds of thousands of gold seekers who in turn had made the ships orphans. Broderick’s hands on the sill were the callused hands of a stonecutter, the practiced hands of a rough-and-tumble politician and consummate barroom brawler. During the night the ex-firefighter had slumbered fitfully, feeling all around him the thin boards of cloth-walled homes shaking in the rising winds. How strange the windy season passed and how tightly it had stretched his nerves. Broderick knew the danger San Francisco faced even if most of its citizens did not want to know. As in most man-made disasters, there had been indications of the tragedy to come. Someone had burned the Shades Hotel in January. On June 14, 1849, two weeks after Broderick first set foot in San Francisco, someone had torched the Philadelphia at dockside. A series of fires had gotten people to thinking, but no action was taken. Thinking was hard, and a little frightening. As Christmas approached, people forgot to even think. Instead they emptied Nathan Spear and William Hinckley’s shelves of overpriced gifts, bathed in freshwater at three dollars a barrel, and curled up before their fires to shiver.
    None were willing to take the least nominal steps toward preventing the tragedy they so feared, and which Broderick, from his experience, knew was inevitable. Instead, they pressed their noses against their windows and watched black water flow down the muddy streets to the shallow Yerba Buena Cove, a horseshoe-shaped bite in the western shore filled with abandoned ships. Bells rang low across the water. The harbor—chill, barren, desolate—fronted the instant city of San Francisco that was a world cut off from civilization. Bitter December cold, gloom, and disappointment were all about him. At this breaking dawn, the day before Christmas, 1849, Broderick thought his terrible thoughts.
    He watched the road outside come to life and heard the calling of ducks and geese and tradesmen tramping sleepily through the deep mud to Portsmouth Square. Three sides of the Square were taken up by the devil: gambling dens and thrown-together hotels of dry pine with flammable canvas roofs, muslin floors, and oilpaper walls and bands who played music full blast but were silent now. Only on the fourth and upper side of the Square had God taken a small toehold in a small adobe building where the Reverend William Taylor preached in thunder that “the way of the transgressor is hard” and that a great calamity was surely to befall the great tinderbox called San Francisco. Reverend Mr. Taylor was rarely wrong.
    “The [building] material is all of combustibles,” a citizen complained to his friends back east. “No fire engines; no hooks or ladders; and in fact no water (except in very deep wells) available where it might be most required. Is it not enough to make a very prudent man tremble?” This canny resident warned that fire, once begun at the windward side, would be certain to burn the whole of the boomtown to ash in an instant.
    The Christmas Eve fire at first appeared as the light of a candle in the second-floor window of Dennison’s Exchange, one of thirty gambling dens in the Square and one of nearly a thousand in town. Dennison’s stood dead center in the fledgling city on the east side at the corner of Kearny and Washington streets. From roof to ground, this “Genie of all catastrophe” was ignitability personified—ceilinged with painted cotton fabric and roofed with asphalt, or road tar. Even the paintings on its unbleached canvas walls were executed in oil. Throughout October and November, the wagering palace had sat, plump as an oil-soaked rag, ready to burst into flame at the touch of a match.
    At 5:45 A.M. , when the fledgling blaze was first noticed, a mild sort of alarm was disseminated along the saloons, most of them already preparing to reopen in five hours.