Hatchet Men: The Story of the Tong Wars in San Francisco’s Chinatown (26 page)

Immigration Commissioner Hart H. North asked Lieutenant William Price of the Chinatown squad what proportion of Chinese women landed on the Embarcadero were destined for the immoral profession. “Ninety percent. I would not take one bit off that,” answered Price. “They are sold as fast as they are brought over. For every girl who comes here they get about three thousand dollars.”

But the tide really began to turn against the tongs and brothels in 1895, when Donaldina Cameron entered the fight. Within a few years she would become a living legend. Her name—or nickname Lo Mo—is still very important in Chinatown. In her the forces for good had finally found an inspired leader. This beloved, gentlewomanly missionary had the equivalent of carbon steel in her makeup. The hatchet men feared her. Donaldina mounted a counteroffensive which rolled the tong brothelkeepers back on all fronts. Lo Mo—old Mother—to all Chinatown, must be considered a potent factor in the ultimate destruction of the fighting tongs. It was she who knew best how to strike hard and repeatedly at the very foundation stone of their existence—the slave trade. With the courage and toughness of spirit of her Scottish ancestors, she became overnight a sort of Carrie Nation of Chinatown. With the help of the police, law-abiding Chinese, immigration officials, Consul General Ho Yow, an aroused public, and eventually an earthquake and fire, she put the tongs into a retreat which became a rout.

In 1961, Miss Cameron recalled for reporters how she had led the police into the brothels and fought the highbinders in court because no else would do so. Actually she was not the first to engage the tongs in combat over the alley girls. Mrs. P. D. Browne got Donaldina interested in the first place, and Margaret Culbertson—Donaldina’s boss—was no novice. But it was Miss Cameron who became the accepted commander in chief almost from the very day she came to work—the same day on which a cleaning girl found a stick of dynamite in the hall of the Sacramento Street Mission.

Donaldina was more energetic and daring than her predecessors. She willingly and proudly occupied the same cell as slave girl Kum Quai when the latter was jailed on one of the traditional trumped-up charges. She was said to know every roof in Chinatown. She had slipped into the Quarter through the tight quarantine set up by the city government during the bubonic plague scare by using roofs and skylights as knowingly as the highbinders themselves.

From the moment of her first raid on a tightly barred brothel in Spofford Alley, Donaldina Cameron was as single minded in purpose as even Andy Furuseth, who was fighting his great battle for civil rights for sailors at the same time. On her “calls” Miss Cameron usually took along a trio of brawny policemen armed with axes and sledge hammers. Only once did she make a raid without police protection and she had cause to regret it. It was on the City of Peking building on Jackson Street. There she discovered a secret panel which led to the hiding place of the girl she was after. The cornered highbinders showed fight and might have ended her crusade then and there with an ax had not her aide Kum Ching blown a police whistle. Luckily, an officer was just around the corner. He seized the girl from her captors at the same time that he shielded Lo Mo from the hatchet men.

It did not take Donaldina Cameron long to learn conditions in Chinatown. She found that not all prostitutes were of the lowly boat-people class. Some were of high caste, like Jean Ying. This girl, the daughter of a well-to-do Canton manufacturer, had been kidnapped and sent to San Francisco. Donaldina came to realize, too, why most of the girls feigned great reluctance toward being rescued. They were worried that raids might fail. Miss Cameron even learned to lie like her enemy to protect her charges, though it must have hurt her Scots conscience. Whenever a policeman came with a warrant for a girl on some faked charge, Lo Mo would insist, “She’s not here,” while praying that he would not look under the rice sacks in the dark space behind the basement gas meter. She accepted the fact that she often had to break the letter of the law in order to uphold the spirit of it. She was doubtless guilty of trespass and of breaking and entering; contempt-of-court proceedings were instigated against her. But she knew that she was in the right and never wavered in her single-minded purpose.

Donaldina had a nose for trap doors, hidden staircases, secret panels and hiding places. Even when brothel owners hired young children to play with blocks and toys in front of their establishments to give them the appearance of legitimate family residences, Miss Cameron found them out. Once Sin Kee asked her to rescue his beloved from a “boardinghouse” on Mah Fong Alley. She brought a posse to the building, but when they battered down the locked door they found only thirteen Chinese inside, quietly smoking their pipes as though oblivious to the din of axes chopping into stout oak. Donaldina paid no attention to this carefully staged tong meeting but went over the room like a bloodhound. She climbed out of a window onto a rickety fire escape. Across the way she saw a painter on a scaffold. She quizzed him and found out that the girl had been whisked up through the skylight to the roof and over to the next building via its roof. She found the girl there and rescued her.

For all her success, Miss Cameron’s actions sometimes ended in frustration, failure and even tragedy. One rescue attempt which failed was that of Yep Shung in 1898. He came to San Francisco from San Jose to join Lo Mo’s crusade. The ladies of the Presbyterian Mission sent their new volunteer to Sullivan’s Alley with one of their number along as his guide. She waited outside a den as he entered. She waited and waited for a signal. None came. While she was waiting ten highbinders inside were stripping Lo Mo’s green commando and thrashing him. They then tossed him out into the street, naked, to the consternation of the mission lady awaiting him.

Some cases did not end ludicrously, but tragically. When Foon Hing managed to bring his cousin to Donaldina for safekeeping, the girl was made secure enough, but Foon Hing was shot down by hatchet men as he left the mission. Lew Yick was another young man who rescued a girl and delivered her to 920 China Street (as Sacramento Street used to be called). He was captured by tong toughs who had owned the slave. They held him prisoner in a room on Clay Street and kept him awake for a full thirty hours by torturing him with hot irons. They demanded he raise $700 ransom—an impossible requirement. Lew Yick had lost all hope, but rescue came in the eleventh hour as an immigration officer and a police posse finally ferreted out where he was kept prisoner. In a third case, which ended badly for Miss Cameron, Lem You, a Christian Chinese who had given the mission people information on slave girls, had a price of $1,000 placed on his head by one of the tongs. He was shot in the back on Clay Street by Quon Ah You and another hatchet man.

During these years of battle Donaldina Cameron learned whom to trust. She found that she could not put all her faith in all policemen. Some officers were anti-Chinese, others Were bribe takers. Lawyers were subject to purchase, too, she found. Her friend Attorney Henry E. Monroe angrily rejected an offer of $250 per month just for tipping off the tong men in advance on Donaldina’s raids. But not all of his colleagues were quite so upright.

The years rolled on and Lo Mo kept up her raids, hitting brothels in Chinatowns as far away as Monterey and Marysville. She kept the slaving tongs always on the defensive. Willard Farwell’s map of 1885 must have been graven on her mind. She could find her way blindfolded to every hidden den. Chinatown squad officer Duncan Matheson always claimed that the great change for the better in Chinatown which transformed it from a bloody ghetto into the most orderly district in the city was due to two things: the gradual education of the Chinese people, and character-building institutions like Lo Mo’s.

At the same time that the threat of the hatchet men increased, crime in general was growing in the city Chief Crowley again and again asked for enlargement of his force. He had 400 policemen and 5 captains under him in 1886, but he pleaded for a mounted striking force, for a policewagon system, and for prohibition of “fortified rooms”—the iron-doored Chinese gambling dens. His requests were turned down by economy-minded supervisors.

The reports of Coroner D. L. Dorr tended to bolster Chief Crowley’s good but losing arguments. San Francisco during the decade was enjoying almost double the murder rate of other cities equal in size or larger. Dorr pointed out to the city fathers that San Francisco had one murder for every 11,190 inhabitants, as compared to New York’s one to 25,000. In San Francisco’s Chinatown there was a murder for every 2,222 people. Dorr placed the blame for this squarely on the hatchet men: “The system of professional murderers among this peculiar people is frequently recognized, and during the year several of the assassins have evaded detection. These murders are of the most cowardly and dastardly kind, not one having the semblance of manslaughter or justifiable homicide and generally being undertaken for purposes of revenge in money matters.”

The evasion of detection which Dr. Dorr mentioned would plague the police force for the next two decades. Chinatown was swept by a conspiracy of silence—almost a dead ringer for the silence enforced by the mafia on the terrorized folk of Sicily. Many Chinese feared that they had unconsciously violated some tax, custom or immigration law. They refused to even be witnesses in court cases, giving American justice as wide a berth as possible. And no man had the nerve to denounce even the most brazen hatchet man lest the highbinder’s bloody-handed tong brothers exact revenge on him or his family. The situation was as if the tong killers held the entire population of Chinatown as hostages.

Coroner Dorr was disturbed by some of the idiosyncrasies of Chinatown crime. First, he was convinced that a great number of homicide cases in the Quarter were never reported but were completely and successfully concealed from the authorities. Second, he was shocked that Chinese women were frequent victims of assassins. And finally and most frustratingly, he knew well that many Chinatown murderers had no fear of capture after their crime, and made clean, easy getaways, almost as if they enjoyed the connivance of their very victims.

People all over California and the West, and eventually in all corners of the United States, came to know the names of the squalid Chinatown alleys which were the scenes of murders or pitched tong battles. Whether the killers struck with stealth by night or with bravado by day, they liked to carry on their wars in the alleys which sheltered them from police and white witnesses. For although their pride and code might insist that they be seen in the act of hatcheting or shooting their victim, not one of them longed for the cells of city prison. Escape was easy in the alleyways, particularly by night. Waverly Place’s stygian blackness was hardly cut at all by the feeble street lamp, a few strings of paper lanterns, the dim light leaking through dusty, curtained windows, and the glowing braziers of the curbside foodsellers. Waverly, old Pike Street, and earlier yet, calle de las Rosas, would become the most notorious of all of San Francisco’s murderous alleys. It was near there that Little Pete, the King of Chinatown, met his end. Rivals of Waverly were Aleck Alley, Bull Run Alley, and Cooper’s Alley, better known as Ragpickers’ Alley. The denizens of the latter were of the lowest coolie class. They were the only Chinese who were personally dirty; gleaners who sold everything except the filthy and tattered rags they wore, for a handful of brass cash. With the irony so consistent with pre-earthquake Chinatown, filthy Ragpickers’ Alley was the site of one of the primitive Chinese hospitals of the period.

The alleys already had a bad name by the 1880s, when the screams of tong victims thrust them onto the front pages. They had long been the avenues of commerce for both the white and yellow wantons of the city, and violence had been quick to follow vice. Their pavements were stained with the blood of crimes of passion long before the
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were loosed in them during the tong wars. One of the first tragedies of Waverly Place occurred when it was still Pike Street. This was the murder of Marie Banier, the Parisian courtesan. As if to cleanse the street even of its horrifying memories, the city had Marie’s trim little white cottage torn down. (It was replaced by a joss house.) Stout’s Alley had its baptism of blood early, too, in one of the great murder cases of San Francisco’s history. In 1856, obeying a whim of his girl friend Jennie French, a young black sheep named Rod Backus shot a harmless man walking down the street. “Rod,” she had cried, “that fellow has insulted me. Shoot him!” Backus obliged, confident that his city hall connections would get him off. Instead, he had the scare of his life as the Vigilantes strung up his cellmate. Backus was actually relieved when the gates of San Quentin shut behind him.