Download Black Fire: The True Story of the Original Tom Sawyer - and of the Mysterious Fires That Baptized Gold Rush-Era San Francisco AudioBook Free
When 28-year-old San Francisco Daily Day Call reporter Tag Twain attained Tom Sawyer at an area bathhouse in 1863, he was seeking a subject for his first book. As Twain steamed, performed credit cards, and drank beer with Sawyer (a volunteer firefighter, traditions inspector, and local hero responsible for having preserved 90 lives at sea), he had second thoughts about Shirley Tempest, his suggested book about a local female firefighter, and began to envision a book of wider range. Twain learned that a dozen years before the then-18-year-old New York-born Sawyer had been a "Torch Boy," one of the youths who raced ahead of the volunteer firemen's hand-drawn motors at night hauling torches to light the way, always aware that a solitary spark could decrease the all-wood city of SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA to ashes immediately. At that time a mystical serial arsonist known by some as "The Lightkeeper" was in the process of burning SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA to the bottom six times in 18 months - the most disastrous and costly series of fires ever experienced by any American metropolis. Black color Flame is the most in depth and accurate account of Sawyer's romantic relationship with Tag Twain and of the six damaging incendiary fires that baptized one of the modern world's favorite cities. Arranged amid a scorched surroundings of burning streets, melting iron warehouses, exploding buildings, and fatal gangs who extorted and ruled by fear, it includes the never-before-told testimonies of Sawyer's heroism through the sinking of the steamship Independence and the key role Sawyer and the Torch Males played in dealing with the puzzle of the Lightkeeper. Sketching on archival sources such as real San Francisco newspaper interviews with Sawyer and the handwritten law enforcement depositions of the arrest of the Lightkeeper, best-selling creator Robert Graysmith vividly portrays the gritty, corrupt, and violent world of Silver Rush-era SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA, overrun with gunfighters, hooligans, hordes of silver prospectors, crooked politicians, and vigilantes. By chronicling how Sawyer got it upon himself to research, expose, and stop the arsonist, Black color Flame details - for the first time - Sawyer's exceptional life and illustrates why Twain would later feel compelled to mention his iconic personality after his SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA buddy when he had written The Ventures of Tom Sawyer.
