Hatchet Men: The Story of the Tong Wars in San Francisco’s Chinatown (3 page)

Early San Francisco was not afflicted with tong troubles. This is not to say that Dupont Gai was crime free for the first several decades following the Gold Rush. Far from it. For where, in what Utopia, is there a city of up to 30,000 inhabitants without a crime problem? But compared to the ’80s and ’90s, the 1850s were at a time of a Pax Sinica. The immediate reasons for crime in Chinatown then were the obvious ones—human nature, opportunity and an oversupply of single men who were rootless males, without family ties, in a foreign land. They were ignorant of local language, customs and laws. To cap it, Chinatown did not have a police force of its own as an American city of comparable size would have had. True, the police on Chinatown beats tried to preserve law and order just as did those in Happy Valley, on the wicked Embarcadero, or the wickeder Barbary Coast. But many of the officers, particularly the “specials,” or “locals”—the auxiliary police—had their paws out. And it was not for friendly handshakes but for cumshaw—tips.

The petty grafting of the police—at times not so petty—tended to shake the Chinese newcomer’s confidence in the force. And if the cops on the Chinatown beat were honest, and most were tolerably so, who was to say what their lieutenants or captains—or perhaps the chiefs—were up to? As for the politicos hanging around city hall, the graft prosecutions and other scandals of late nineteenth and early twentieth century San Francisco speak volumes. There was no use looking to them for help.

Small wonder, too, that it took decades for the American-Chinese to accept the proffered protection of even an honest policeman. In nine cases out of ten be would be an Irishman whose family was of “the Chinese Must Go!” persuasion, influenced by Dennis Kearney or some similar agitator. If the cop on the corner turned out to be a special, he was almost sure to be in the employ of the criminal element and not likely to defend the decent people of Chinatown.

The wonder is that the officer on the beat did as good a job as he did. He was torn internally by the temptation of payoffs versus the desire to do his duty. At the same time he might be wholeheartedly in sympathy with the ostensible aims of a mob marching on Chinatown “to save American labor.” Nevertheless he comported himself pretty well under the circumstances, even during the crisis of the summer of 1877. Graft and kickbacks or not—noncooperation by the oppressed people be hanged—he still did his job and saw to it, at the expense of more than one bloody nose of his own, that the hoodlums and self-styled saviors of the laboring classes did not get a chance to crack innocent beads, even if they wore queues. Credit is long overdue the Irish members who pounded Chinatown’s steep streets where they were fair game for clubs of hoodlums and knives of highbinders. The common people made no outward show of gratitude toward their protectors. They almost seemed to wish to thwart the apprehension of the human leeches who fed upon them. On the other hand, the criminal classes tried to flatter the harness bulls, to make friends with them, and to
buy
them off.

Chinese and Americans were still uneasy strangers during the 1850s. Sino-American contacts prior to the Gold Rush were few. In 1800 the first Chinese had been brought to the United States to learn English. Eight years later a young Chinese performed on horseback in New York, and in the 1830s the first Chinese woman, Ah Foy, came to America. A juggler of 1842, Chong Fong was upstaged by another immigrant of the gentler sex who was exhibited as a freak on Broadway. In 1847 the junk
Keying
arrived and posed in New York Harbor for Currier and Ives, but only a handful of Chinese had ever seen the States before Jim Marshall spied gold dust in Sutter’s millrace. That year of 1848, P.T. Barnum opened his Chinese Museum in New York, and California received its first Chinese settlers—two men and a woman landed from the brig
Eagle.
From this beginning a colony of 300 had grown in San Francisco by December 1849, when they met in the Canton Restaurant on Jackson Street and chose Selim Woodworth as adviser, arbiter, protector and quasi consul for the Chinese in America. By the end of 1852, the 300 had become 25,000.

In the years immediately following 1849, the Chinese were welcomed to San Francisco as a quaint segment of society. They were considered colorful and docile and quite law abiding. When roughly handled in the mines or persecuted by the Foreign Miners’ License Law, they often drifted down to San Francisco from the Mother Lode, to swell the population of Little China, as Chinatown was first called.

Little China was adjacent to Little Chile which became Sydney Town and later the Barbary Coast. A second Little China existed for a time at the foot of Frémont Street where Chinese wreckers squatted on the beach and broke up old hulks like the
Loo Choo,
which had brought Colonel Jonathan D. Stevenson’s regiment of brawlers to Yerba Buena. A village of 150 Chinese fishermen huddled in the lee of Rincon Point not far from the mouth of Mission Creek. With their twenty-five boats they took 3,000 pounds of sturgeon, shark and herring each day, most of which they dried. Other colonies were located on Hunter’s Point, in the South Bay, on the
contra costa,
and at China Camp in Mann County. But these were fish or shrimp camps where the men anchored their homemade junks, and merely satellites of Chinatown.

Dupont Gai became and remained the nucleus of Chinatown. Strangely, for a ghetto, old Chinatown grew up not across the tracks or as an outskirts shanty town. It blossomed in the heart of the city on high ground adjacent to Portsmouth Square—San Francisco’s first civic center. The heavily crowded but substantial buildings occupied the very site of the founding of Yerba Buena, the parent village of San Francisco, if we except Captain William Richardson’s temporary structure on the beach itself. The second building erected, that of Jacob P. Leese, was located on the corner of Dupont and Clay in 1836. Dupont was then called
calle de la Fundacion
, Street of the Founding. When Port Captain Richardson constructed his second building, in 1838, the adobe La Casa Grande, it was on a lot on the west side of Dupont between Washington and Clay Streets. The great fires of May and September 1850 swept over the area of Chinatown, and when people returned to live in the ashes more and more of them were Chinese.

With little crime or disorder in Chinatown, John and Brother Jonathan got along well in these early years. Evidence of the great affection—however short lived—of San Franciscans for their new Oriental neighbors was the celebration of August 28, 1850, in Portsmouth Plaza. Mayor John Geary, Reverend Albert Williams and Frederick A. Woodworth—like his brother Selim a sort of quasi consul for the Chinese community—gathered on a platform erected in the square. There they orated and then presented a number of religious tracts, papers and books printed in Chinese characters. The crowd listened in rapt attention to their speeches, translated into Cantonese by the interpreter Ah Sing. The mayor wound up the program by inviting the Chinese to take part in the funeral procession for President Zachary Taylor scheduled for the following day. They accepted with alacrity and gratitude. They were much honored by the gesture.

The next day the China Boys, as they were fondly called, formed up and marched in a procession to Portsmouth Square to hear Mayor Geary orate once again. The 1850
City Directory
noted the appearance in the parade of the large body of the Chinese in their curious national costume as the most remarkable feature of the ceremony. The
Directory
ventured the opinion that this was the first procession in the limits of Christendom in which Chinese had formed such a prominent part. The next morning the China Boys presented Mayor Geary with an elaborate document in ornate Chinese calligraphy which read in translation:

August 30, 1850

To HONORABLE JOHN W. GEARY

MAYOR OF THE CITY OF SAN FRANCISCO

SIR: The China Boys wish to thank you for the kind mark of attention you bestowed upon them in extending to them an invitation to join with the citizens of San Francisco in doing honor to the memory of the late President of the United States, General Zachary Taylor. The China Boys feel proud of the distinction you have shown them and will always endeavor to merit your good opinion and the good opinion of the citizens of their adopted country. The China Boys are fully sensible of the great loss this country has sustained in the death of its chieftain and ruler, and mourn with you in sorrow. Strangers as they are among you, they kindly appreciate the many kindnesses received at your hands and, again, beg with grateful hearts to thank you.

The memorial was signed by Ah Sing and Ah He in behalf of all the China Boys.

Who would have dreamed that the sentiments pronounced by Justice Nathaniel Bennett that day would raise the curtain on a half century of intolerance and lawlessness? He said: “Born and reared under different governments and speaking different tongues, we nevertheless meet here today as brothers… You stand among us in all respects as equals… Henceforth we have one country, one hope, one destiny.”

From that day on the Chinese took great interest and pride in participating in public affairs. They marched in various celebrations such as that of Admission Day in 1850. An ex-Philadelphian described their delegation in the Washington’s Birthday parade of 1852 as the city’s most orderly and industrious citizens.

In the same year Governor John McDougal urged that land grants be given the Chinese, since they were among the most worthy of all California’s newly adopted citizens. H. H. Haight offered a resolution of welcome to them which stated that California took pleasure in their presence in such great numbers. The
Alta California
confidently predicted that the China Boys would yet vote at the same polls, study in the same schools, and even bow at the same altar as the rest of the city’s citizens. Hinton Helper, the writer who did not like the Chinese because of their aloofness, was disgusted with the way the China Boys were “petted,” as he put it, by the fond—almost doting—populace.

Symptomatic were the petty annoyances which began to crop up in San -Franciscans in regard to the Chinese. They simply could not understand, for one thing, why the Orientals clung to their traditional loose blue cotton blouses and trousers. There began to appear a bit of exasperated editorializing on this ridiculous point of the pajamalike garb of the Oriental. Soon artists like Charles Nahl were commissioned by the
Wide West
and other papers to draw John in the native dress which sophisticated San Franciscans found so ludicrous. People began to poke fun at John, and Bret Harte’s
Plain Language From Truthful James,
usually called
The Heathen Chinee,
became a best-seller.

By the end of the ’50s only a handful of Chinese had Americanized to any noticeable extent. Frank Marryat found a few who wore patent-leather shoes, who cut their hair short in Caucasian style, and who could ride like the very Californians themselves. The San Francisco press noticed that several equestrian Celestials were taking the air on the Plank Road on weekends, with their “houris” by their sides. Norman Ah Sing, the baker turned volunteer Chinese Consul, even affected a stovepipe hat. But it was more than a decade before Reverend A. W. Loomis really began to notice signs of Americanization. Chinese hats, shoes and trousers were replaced with the American article by many, and queues began to vanish slowly. (The last one in Chinatown was that of Quan Hoy, who wore it till he died in 1936.)

A far more dangerous straw in the wind than satire was the xenophobia exemplified by Governor John Bigler’s 1854 address in which he called all Chinese “coolies” and urged the State Legislature to pass a law to prohibit further immigration. The press did not recognize Bigler for the political bellwether that he was. They criticized his anti-Chinese sentiments as uncalled for. But soon the popular
Wide West
swung over to the governor, turning into one of the most violent organs of denunciation. Wild broadsides of editorials likened the Orientals to the plague. For the first time, direct allusion was made to their bad effect on American labor. Since the
Wide West
was reporting the “present stagnation of business” in other columns, the scapegoatism of the Chinese is obvious. The
Wide West
posed as highly shockable too: “It is more than we can endure that their females should parade the streets with painted cheeks, disgusting every pure-minded observer.” (And doubtless titillating the pioneers.)

In its editorial the once stable paper went so far as to blame the Chinese for the crowded and filthy conditions belowdecks on the coolie ship
Libertad,
rather than blaming the greedy owners. The paper later came partially to its senses when it learned that 180 Chinese had died on the vessel, chiefly from ship fever or scurvy, since leaving the China Coast. But though outraged by the inhuman treatment of the
Libertad’s
cargo, the
Wide West
could not bring itself to attack the greedy shipowners and businessmen who waxed fat on the coolie trade. They were potential advertisers. But the paper did let loose a blast at the tenement property owners of Dupont Street. The paper thought, mistakenly, that these landlords were Chinese who were profiteering by jamming more and more coolies into the already overcrowded rookeries of Chinatown. Actually the Chinese leased their property in most cases, and from white owners.