Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [65]
What made the threat of fires particularly nightmarish was the absence of professional firemen. Towns had volunteer night watches, and all able-bodied men were required by local ordinance to respond whenever the night watch raised the alarm. Some towns did have fire engines—horse-drawn wagons equipped with ladders and buckets and hand pumps. But these rarely went to good use. After a major fire in St. Louis in 1825, a newspaper report found “buckets broken and without handles, and not half enough of these; the engines unfit for service; everyone gaping at the fire instead of forming a line to convey water.”
St. Louis eventually became the first city on the river to hire and train a professional fire department. The local authorities had no choice. Fires were becoming a major threat to the city’s survival. By the 1840s St. Louis was the largest city in the American interior: a maze of wood shanties and factories, infamous for the inferno of heat on its streets in the summer and the storms of fiery cinders blown down from the smokestacks that blackened the snow all winter. Frederick Marryat wrote that St. Louis “approaches the nearest to the Black Hole of Calcutta of any city that I have sojourned in.” Some longtime residents called it “the city built above Hell.”
But it was also a rich and progressive city; some boosters claimed that it would inevitably replace Washington, D.C., as the capital of the new American empire. It was particularly renowned for its levee, a long promenade where more than a hundred steamboats arrived and departed each day. On May 17, 1849, a small fire broke out at the levee’s north end, on a steamboat called the White Cloud. The night watch spotted it almost immediately. But by then it was already too late. The steamboat was built entirely of white pine, and, as the official history of the St. Louis Fire Department later noted, once on fire anything made of white pine “is as impossible to save as a pile of shavings.”
There was barely even a need for the night watch to sound the alarm: the boat burned so fiercely that the glare could be seen all over the city. The fire department hurtled to the docks in their nine fire engines. They found that there was little they could do. The fire had already reached the White Cloud’s waterline and the boat was a dead loss. But that was not the end of it. The moorings burned through, and the burning wreck drifted downriver with the current and began bumping against the other steamboats lined up along the levee. They, too, caught fire; their moorings also burned, and they were set loose. They in turn started fires on other boats, and soon there were twenty-three steamboats burning.
Then the fire jumped to the warehouses along the levee. The fire department had been attempting ineffectually to prevent the last of the steamboats from catching fire; now they had to watch helplessly as the flames fanned out into the riverfront. Over the next several hours the fires burned their way through the warehouse district and into some of the oldest residential neighborhoods before reaching the central commercial district. By dawn hundreds of downtown buildings were on fire, including three of the city’s largest banks and the central post office.
The fire department then made a move of desperation. They planted gunpowder charges and blew up a long row of commercial buildings to form a firebreak. One of the lead firefighters, Captain Thomas B. Targee, was throwing a powder keg through the window of a music store when it ignited; the fire department history says “he was blown to atoms.” (He was later honored as the first professional fireman in America to die in the line of duty.) But the plan worked: the firebreak held. To the incredulity of the whole city, the flames didn’t jump the gap. By midafternoon some of the worst fires were burning out. The area around the riverfront was a smoking ruin—the burned stumps of the buildings went on smoldering for weeks