s pieced together from neighbors, workers, and investigators, the fire began near midnight and destroyed Wolf House in about three hours. Constructed in a hollow, the fire could not be seen until the roof began caving in and the flames and smoke leaped out. By then, with no water available, it was too late to do anything but watch it burn.

But the suddenness of it seemed suspicious and newspapers in San Francisco, Oakland, and Santa Rosa were the first—after the Londons themselves—to speculate that an arsonist, or gang of them, might have been responsible. In November, Charmian wrote in a letter, "the deepest hurt lies in the indisputable fact that it was set afire by some enemy...Who it could be we have no idea."

Among the possible malefactors was Eliza London Shepard's elderly husband James, a former sea captain, from whom she was estranged. Three months before the fire James Shepard had returned to the ranch where he had been invited to dinner with Eliza, Jack and Charmian, and Jack Byrne, married to Eliza's sister. During an argument with Eliza, Shepard drew a pistol and threatened to shoot her, was wrestled to the floor by the men and disarmed. London threw Shepard off the ranch and the next day found himself and Jack Byrne under arrest for "assault." The case was thrown out of court but for a time Shepard remained a suspect.

Disgruntled workmen were also mentioned as potential arsonists. London had fired one man for laziness and insolence only a few days before the fire but the other workers said they had been paid and treated well and this possibility was eventually rejected.

The idea of "agents"—Socialist Party minions or perhaps a cell of the I.W.W. (Industrial Workers of the World, the "Wobblies," as they were popularly known) cropped up early in the arson speculation. London's advocacy of socialist beliefs had never been wholly convincing; he seemed to embrace party ideas and in his time became the most eloquent spokesman for the "working class" and against the "monied captains of industry."

But his espousals in fiction, essay and speech, were romantic and sentimental, outgrowths of a stormy youth in ten-cent-an-hour sweatshops and on the boxcar road with Coxey's army of unemployed. What he embraced was also the product of his self-education wherein he read deeply and eclectically but without direction.

He wrote "Dear Comrade" and "Yours for the Revolution" on many of his letters, gladly debated socialism in comfortable surroundings, before a podium at Yale or among friends at the Beauty Ranch, but he never walked a picket line or stood at the barricades against the scabs hired to break a strike. He believed in socialism, as biographer Richard O'Connor wrote, "as an actor believes in the lines he is declaiming," and London seemed to admit this in a letter he wrote in 1913: "I have never taken any part in the policy of the [Socialist] party. I have never spoken out in a meeting. I've just been a propagandist."

At the time Wolf House burned to embers, what fire remained in him for the socialist movement was also dying out and since, to many of London's one-time comrades, Wolf House was an ugly monument to capitalism, its ruins now stood as a grim reminder of the price of betrayal of the militant socialism he once espoused.

However, these speculations, entertained by Jack and Charmian and many among their circle of friends, remained dead ends.

Natale Forni, the general contractor for the Wolf House project, had a more workable and believable theory on the disaster. He was devastated over the fire, knew the house to be Jack's great dream, the focus of his energy and funds since the day the great earthquake-proof slab had been poured and work had begun on the walls. The day before the fire, Forni said, electricians finished their work and the cleanup crew used turpentine and linseed oil to clean and rub down the redwood paneling and other wooden fixtures in preparation for the move-in the next day. These workers dumped their rags in a corner when they ended the day and the contractor believed that the combination of turpentine, oil, and the 100-degree heat created a spontaneous combustion that spread to all the chemical residue on the exposed wood. Forni even took some of the blame. He personally inspected the house at the end of each workday and had often removed the flammable rags left behind. But this time, he said, he had been distracted and forgot the inspection.

Whether the Londons accepted this theory of the fire is not known but eighty-two years after the event, Forni's ideas were tested.

In May, 1995, a ten-member forensics team was assembled by Robert Anderson, a retired San Jose State University engineering professor and member of the American Academy of Forensic Science, to bring modern investigative techniques to the study of the Wolf House fire. Among the experts were a state criminologist, a specialist in hydrocarbon and chemical fires, an electrical engineer, an arson authority and another expert on fire burn patterns.

For four days the team examined the evidence: the design and construction plans and documents, witness statements, historical records, weather reports for August, 1913 (lightning was ruled out based on these reports and from testimony of Glen Ellen residents), a computer reconstruction of Wolf House, and the remains of the mansion itself, seemingly unlikely to give up any secrets after eight decades.

The team found that the house had been wired for electricity, as evidenced by junction boxes, conduit embedded in the walls, copper wire, and porcelain knob and tube insulators found in the ruins, but the system had not been connected to a generator at the time of the fire.

Important evidence was uncovered in the moss-invaded stone walls and chimneys. Pieces of charred wood were discovered in notched masonry pockets where the redwood beams connected to the stone walls. These were important in determining the most likely progression of the fire. In the dining area, on the ground floor under London's library and study, ceiling beams were canted and showed signs that they had failed first, caving in by the force of the tile roof dropping down on them. These beams and timbers were found to be burnt more severely than in other rooms, indicating that the dining hall was the most likely locus of the fire, the point of origin. The hall also had the largest fireplace in the house and the only one with a redwood facing—all the others were finished in stone and loose cobbles. The significance seemed to be that the day before the fire workmen had applied linseed oil to the redwood paneling around the fireplace and threw their rags in the corner of the room when they finished the day's work.

Although the forensic team could not completely rule it out, arson was considered a "low probability": the tall-ceilinged dining area would not have been a natural choice for an arsonist nor would an arsonist have been content with a single place to start a fire in so huge a structure. Also, the site was so remote that traveling in the dark would have required a lantern and a moving light might have come to somebody's attention.

The investigators adopted the Forni theory. There were no furnishings in the house but the cabinetry had been finished the day before the fire. (The Santa Rosa Press Democrat described the walnut and oak "interiors" and redwood paneling and said all were "magnificent"). The finishes applied to the woodwork were surmised to be linseed-oil based stains and varnishes, "industry standards" of the day for fine woods.

The self-heating process of linseed oil on cotton, the investigators said, releases large quantities of a choking, white, "lachrymatory" (tear-making) smoke. A loosely piled handful of cotton rags dampened with boiled linseed oil was shown by forensic experiments to be capable of self-heating to flaming ignition in a few hours. The fire created by even a modest pile of such rags can be sustained, the experts wrote in their report, "as a very energetic fire for more than an hour. This was enough heat and time to insure the ignition of any wooden shelves or cabinetry in close proximity."

The final key, they reported, was the temperature: the higher the ambient temperature, the faster the spontaneous combustion of the flammable rags would have occurred, and the night temperature at Wolf House on August 23, 1913, was at least one hundred degrees Fahrenheit.

"I've been down there at midnight on August 23," the late Russ Kingman wrote in May, 1980, referring to the Wolf House ruins, "and I can testify that Forni had it right." A Jack London biographer and authority on the writer's life, Kingman was also a former navy firefighter who after moving to Glen Ellen made a study of the 1913 disaster. "Spontaneous combustion is a dull finding," he wrote, "not as interesting as arson by some Molotov cocktail-throwing socialist, but dull or not, that's what happened." - End