1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [127]
But the unofficial nicknames by which New Yorkers actually knew them told a different story: Screamer, Black Joke, Hounds, Old Nick, Shad-Belly, Bucky-Boys, Dry Bones, Old Turk, Mankiller.90
The contests between these companies were epic, hard fought, and often bloody: thirty years’ wars whose battlefields were the nighttime streets of Brooklyn and the Bowery, Greenwich Village and Five Points. The ringing of a fire alarm wasn’t so much a signal of emergency as the starting bell of a no-holds-barred decathlon. Companies raced one another to the scene of the fire, hurtling through the muddy, unlit thoroughfares, young runners sprinting alongside with torches as brawny firemen pulled hand-drawn engines weighing up to a ton each—and woe betide any unfortunate gentleman, groping his way homeward from late revels at a tavern or bawdy house, who might stumble into their path.91
As the engines pulled up in front of the blaze, another competitive event began, as companies vied to see who could pump the fastest; the volunteers stripped to the waist and worked until their breath came in choking gasps; the foremen stood atop the engines bawling orders through brass trumpets above the din. Sometimes they drove the wooden pump handles into such a frenzy that the flailing shafts might crush a man’s fingers or even break his arms if he momentarily lost his grip. Often, different engines had to connect their leather hoses to relay water from a hydrant or cistern, which meant that if one group pumped faster than the next one down the line, the water would burst out the sides of the rival company’s engine, spilling out over the ornate woodwork and polished brass in a spectacularly humiliating torrent known as a “washing.” Whether or not this calamity might interfere with the task of actually putting out a fire was wholly inconsequential: every company’s fondest hope was to “wash” its enemies.92
Not surprisingly, these rivalries often degenerated into all-out brawls. The Black Joke men once rolled out a howitzer loaded with bolts and chain links to defend their firehouse from a rival company’s attack, while Old Nick’s main engine was known to other companies as the Arsenal, for it was rumored to hold a cache of loaded revolvers. In their impatience to avenge defeats, the firefighters themselves sometimes set buildings aflame so as to hasten the opportunity for a rematch.93 For decades after the invention of horse-drawn, steam-pumped engines that carried their own water supply, New York firefighters refused to give up their inefficient machines, little changed since colonial times, since this would have taken all the sporting fun out of it.94
More genteel New Yorkers shuddered at press reports of nocturnal rampages, and agitated for reform, with little result. Not only were the companies an essential voting bloc for the city’s Democratic political machine, they had become folk heroes. Ordinary workingmen coined the fond nickname “b’hoys”—based on Irish immigrants’ pronunciation of “boys.” Down in the taverns of Five Points, people swapped tall tales of the ultimate b’hoy, a semilegendary figure called Mose the Fireboy, an urban Paul Bunyan who stood eight feet tall, could swim across the Hudson in two strokes, carried streetcars on his back, smoked a two-foot cigar, and drank wagonloads of beer at a sitting. When a brawl broke out against a rival fire company, Mose uprooted lampposts with his bare hands to smite his enemies. The character of Mose may have been a slight exaggeration, but the actual b’hoys were still impressive figures. Their fame