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Sir, by God, that for one hour’s seat in the Senate of the United States, Iwould roast before a slow fire in the Square! I’ll go if I have to march over a thousand corpses and every corpse a friend!”
    His friend, Fred Kohler, a forty-year-old jeweler, assayer, former alderman, and volunteer assistant engineer in New York, joined him in San Francisco. Broad, clean-shaven, with muttonchops and a long straight mouth, Kohler had the stolid demeanor of a Quaker. In the summer, Stevenson pointed out to Broderick and Kohler that although gold flowed in rivers from the mines, gold coins were virtually unattainable in the Bay Area. The only coins accepted in San Francisco as legal tender were English shillings, French francs, and Mexican double reales —all of the same value. It would be almost ten years before San Francisco would have a government assay office to buy raw gold or a mint to manufacture coin more convenient than cumbersome buckskin pouches of gold dust. Kohler, who was clever with his hands, melted up the gold dust an idled Colonel Stevenson had bought west for fourteen dollars an ounce and cast it in five-, ten-, and twenty-dollar slugs. He and Broderick profited by putting four dollars’ worth of gold into a five-dollar piece and eight dollars’ worth into a ten-dollar coin. The muscular Broderick sweated before the furnace, striking coins from gold ingots, and casting and filing the slightly debased coins. As the first to coin money locally, as well as assay and stamp gold bars in their Clay Street office, they made enough by minting for Moffat and Company to retire for life. By Christmas Eve, 1849, Sawyer, who had followed Broderick to the goldfields, had been at sea for about two-thirds of his estimated five-month voyage to San Francisco. His ship, the Splendid , was battling the high waves and storms of Cape Horn. Sawyer was eager to become rich in the diggings and expected to reach the city by mid-February.
    In San Francisco, Broderick awakened before dawn on December 24, 1849. He was not lonely. He had been such a beloved and charismatic figure in Manhattan that many of his fellow firefighters and political toughs had trailed him to San Francisco. Lying in bed, he considered the rains that had begun in early November and poured without cease throughout December. The early-morning stillness made him contemplative. He was independently wealthy, so what was he to do now? He limped to the window, wheezing and still recovering from the illness he’d contracted in Central America that had kept him from the mines and serving his friend Stevenson. Pulling aside the muslin curtain, hesaw that the rain had momentarily stopped and the wind had faded away. The lull was a godsend.
    Northeast of San Francisco, four-fifths of Sacramento still lay underwater, permitting a steamer to shuttle up and down its streets and enable passengers to enter their second-story City Hotel rooms by window. The fifty inches of icy rain and shotgun blasts of black hail that had soaked and pummeled San Francisco all winter had not dispelled the fitful dreams of its citizens. They tossed in their beds inside combustible homes, heads filled with nightmares of what would happen when the lifesaving downpour halted. They reposed in front of their fires listening to the faint clacking of sea coals and snakelike hiss of paraffin wicks. They watched the clear glass of their lamp chimneys blacken and, instead of being warmed, feared the worst. They dreaded the high winds off the bay that would dry the soaked wood to flammability. And with no water wells or flame-fighting equipment or the inclination to buy any, everyone knew that San Francisco would burn. Four years earlier in Pittsburgh there had been a disastrous dawn fire, but that had come after a dry winter, six weeks without rain. San Francisco’s spring would be much different, but the results would be the same.
    From his window, Broderick made out the end of the road where fog mounded in