Hatchet Men: The Story of the Tong Wars in San Francisco’s Chinatown

by Dillon, Richard

  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.

  As late as 1873, Chinese owned only 10 of the 153 major pieces of property in Chinatown. (Even in 1904 they owned only 25 of the 316 major parcels listed.) City Assessor Alexander Badlam found only about $500,000 in personal property held by Chinese in 1875, and between $150,000 and $200,000 in real property out of San Francisco’s total of $300,000,000. He reported Chinatown rentals to be high, but found that the Chinese had shown little disposition to buy property though they had to pay large sums for leases. The reason of course was that most Chinese still considered themselves sojourners rather than permanent settlers. They were just waiting for their ship to come in—to take them back to Kwangtung.

  As the ’50s rolled on, more and more coolies flooded into port from Hong Kong via the fast clippers now specializing in their transport. It was estimated that more than 20,000 Chinese arrived in 1852 alone. But one in ten sailed home the very same year, and the statewide population of Chinese was probably no more than 25,000. The Chinese were still unrepresented by a consulate, although such tiny countries as Mecklenburg-Schwerin had consuls in San Francisco. So in 1854, interpreter Norman Ah Sing began to represent the Flowery Kingdom, unofficially, in San Francisco. The uncredentialed spokesman for 25,000 Chinese set up an office on Sacramento Street between Kearny and Dupont.

  With some 25,000 Chinese in California, it would have taken a miracle of the first magnitude for none of them to be inclined to loose living or crime. There was no miracle; there was crime and prostitution. A disenchanted San Francisco took a closer look at the quaint Quarter which had sprung up in its midst. The city recoiled in somewhat theatrical horror. Why, there was overcrowding there, and a general lack of sanitation! It was obvious that there was no lack of crime, and to the city’s feigned shock it found the Quarter crawling with fallen women.

  Thus, ironically, the advent of the Chinese prostitute brought about the end of the Sino-Chinese honeymoon in San Francisco.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Honeymoon Ends

  “I think there is a class of outlaws among the Chinese population here who give us a great deal of trouble. There are also a great many good men who are made to suffer for the doings of the evil. Among our people, if John Brown does wrong, he suffers as an individual; but if a Chinaman does wrong, the whole race suffers for the act of the individual.”

  —Charles Wolcott Brooks, 1876

  THERE WERE few Chinese women in San Francisco in the ’50s and practically none of the decent variety. One of the first to arrive from the Orient was the notorious Madame Ah Toy. The editors of the Annals of San Francisco chorused: “The lewdness of fallen white females is shocking enough to witness, but it is far exceeded by the disgusting practices of these tawny-visaged creatures.”

  Ah Toy proved to be a remarkable madame. When a complaint was lodged against her Clay Street house of ill fame as a public nuisance, she somehow abated the nuisance, without changing her line of business, to the satisfaction of Judge R. H. Waller of the Recorder’s Court. In any case, she was discharged by the court. She must have enjoyed her visit, for she soon returned. This time as an un-shingled advocate. Ah Toy represented the defendant in a case, a little woman charged with kicking and mauling a corpulent Chinese whose name the newspapers made into Jonathan Nissum. The fat man claimed that the female had abused him grossly. The press chortled, “Much to the inconvenience of his ample corporation.” Ah Toy pleaded that her friend had been forced to thrash the plaintiff for welching on debts of honor. Ah Toy lost this 1852 case. Her friend had to pay a $20 fine and hear the judge threaten her with a second helping if she dared to batter the gentleman again.

  During the last month of 1854, Ah Toy and her colleagues suffered from a police crackdown on the red-light district. A number of women were convicted—-under a Grand Jury indictment—of keeping disorderly houses. In March 1859, she was again hauled into court, protesting that she had been innocently working on a bowl of rice with her chopsticks when she was arrested. The object of this harassment of harlots was to remove them from the major streets of the city, as a nuisance. It is hardly necessary to add that the object was not realized. Not in 1854, 1864, 1874 or 1884.... Of course the white Cyprians who enjoyed good police and city hall connections were not disturbed in this cleanup drive on vice.

  In the mid-’60s the Chinese brothels were shut down tight—briefly. But 1866 was a special case. Chief Martin Burke was going out of office, being succeeded by Patrick Crowley. Burke wanted to make a big impression as a final gesture, so he cleaned up the town momentarily; or at least Chinatown. The California Police Gazette at this time hoped loudly that the force itself would be reformed, too, under the new administration. Too many men who were drawing a salary of only $125 per month were flashing diamond rings and sporting gold-plated revolvers.

  In the 1850s
and 1860s the slave trade was not the big business it became in subsequent decades. It merely offered an excuse for the city to strike out at the irritant which was Chinatown. To the city emerging from an era of good feeling, the trade in Chinese wantons was a source of annoyance but hardly an economic foundation for the terrorization of the Quarter by armed bands of killers. The handwriting was clear but it was in the hieroglyphs of old China, and city hall could not figure them out.

  An overwhelming percentage of all Chinatown arrests between 1850 and 1870 were of harlots. In the fiscal year 1865-1866, for example, some 91 Chinese prostitutes were actually imprisoned in the county jail. Many more got off with fines or forfeiture of bail for the age-old misdemeanor of “tapping at their windows”—that is, soliciting.

  The cleanup of prostitutes was usually a perfunctory and meaningless gesture. The California Police Gazette, which enjoyed sensational cases while attempting to preserve an expression of outraged decency, said that the hounding of the girls of Chinatown was: “The usual offense, the usual bail and the usual result, bail forfeited. It is a pity officers could not find better employment than persecuting these poor Chinese slaves. Do they not know that these poor serfs were obliged to do as they do?” Even more fruitless was the arrest of customers, but this was done half-heartedly for a time, starting with the case of Antonio Juan Baptiste who was fined $20 for visiting the Pike Street establishments.

  The city could hardly clamp down on Chinatown’s prostitutes without brushing up against crime in general. There was plenty of criminal activity there, but no gang or tong wars. When there were instances of assault or murder—the latter extremely rare—it was usually a case of cherchez la femme.

  But there were relatively few crimes of violence such as rape, assault, murder or even armed robbery in these early years of Chinatown’s history. In comparison with the city which surrounded it, Chinatown was practically a haven of peace. (Frisco itself, on the other hand, was described in these terms: “Cases of political corruption, or party jobbing, or personal scandal, of ruin by debauching and gambling, by duelling and suicide, of squatter violence, or robbery and burglary, or assault and murder—these are nearly as plentiful as blackberries.”)

  Most so-called crime in Chinatown was ludicrous. The majority of arrests were for petty larceny—stealing bread, pipe, chickens, boots or scrap iron. Following this in number of arrests were cases of burglary and the carrying of concealed weapons. As late as the 1880s, when hatchet men were prowling the alleys, a great percentage of arrests of Chinese were for such atrocities as running liquor stores without licenses, peddling unstamped cigars, or fencing stolen hardware in Waverly Place’s hock shops.

  The real crime which existed in Chinatown generally fell into four categories: lotteries and gambling, no crime at all to many people; opium smoking, the Chinese equivalent of alcoholism; prostitution, again a social phenomenon not essentially criminal; and petty thieving. What we might call hard-core crime was difficult to find in the early decades. Chinatown was then, as it is now, a relatively law-abiding area of San Francisco.

  There are no brothels or opium dens in Chinatown today; thieving is minimal; lotteries, if any, are discreet. There are a few confidence men, of course, but only gambling remains as a major “evil,” with poker, pai gow, or Thirteen Cards having replaced the classic tan, or fan-tan. It is difficult to convince many blond Anglo-Saxon, church-going Caucasians—who join their Chinese neighbors on flights or bus trips to Reno’s gaming tables, like commuters—that Chinatown is, by reason of gambling, still a den of iniquity. Arrests are still made of those who prefer a game chancier than placid mah-jongg, but the officers who pull off such raids are apt to be labeled “spoilsport police inspectors” by the press.

  What makes the small number of American-Chinese arrests today even more remarkable is that these-people have acclimatized, or Americanized, with such a vengeance in the last quarter century that one would expect them to be more like the typical gringo Californian—used to an occasional brush with John Law. For California is still fairly lawless territory. Of every 100,000 persons in the state, there are 137 in prison today. This compares with 70 per 100,000 in Wisconsin and a mere 20 per 100,000 in granitic New Hampshire.

  A hundred and more years ago California was far wilder than it is now. The city of San Francisco, alas, had no Hogarth to depict its innumerable gin lanes, but even wicked London could not boast a Shark Alley and a Murderer’s Alley as Frisco eventually did. The time was not yet ripe, however, for Chinatown’s blood bath.

  The historian Herbert Howe Bancroft called the thirty years of the city’s history from 1847 to 1877 “the Augustan Age of Murder.” But he was not referring to Chinatown, where the strange inversion of criminality prevailed. The exact number of homicides committed during this period will never be known, but the Sacramento Union, in applauding the actions of the second San Francisco vigilance committee, stated that there were 1,400 murders in the six years 1850-1856. On the other hand, Bancroft recorded that in the thirty years following 1847 there were only 16 legal executions and 8 extra-legal (Vigilante) hangings in San Francisco. Among the two dozen criminals who had the rare honor of actually suffering capital punishment for their crimes—for not having friends in high places—there were two Chinese. Chong Wong was executed in 1866 for the murder of his mistress, and another murderer, Chin Mook Sow, was hanged in 1877.

  The first vigilance committee took up only one Chinese case. On a complaint of Ah Sing and Lip Scorn, the Vigilantes deported Ah Low and Ah Hone and their property—two prostitutes—because of their supposed evil influence on the Chinese community. Charges were soon preferred against Sun Co and Ah Oeh by other Chinese as word got around of this convenient extradition service. The committee of vigilance quickly realized that it was being victimized by a conspiracy. Refusing to be used by one faction in Chinatown against another, it washed its hands of any Chinatown affairs.

  According to Bancroft, no class of people benefited more from the activities of the vigilance committee than the “Guests of the Golden Mountains.” The bullies who were accustomed to maltreat the Chinese were forced to lie low or leave. The Chinese merchants were so grateful to the 1856 committee for the change in social climate brought about by the crackdown on the lawless crowd that they subscribed $1,000 to the vigilance committee fund. As a testimonial of their appreciation, the committee rendered the Chinese a formal vote of thanks for their contribution.

  For years well-meaning citizens and the press had deplored the outrages perpetrated upon arriving coolies by water-front hoodlums. Finally on the evening of July 17, 1869, a Vigilante-like group was formed by a large body of citizens meeting in a Fourth District courtroom. Their express purpose was to create a society for the prevention of abuse of Chinese. The society elected officers and pledged that a party of men would be on the Embarcadero for the arrival of the next steamer bearing coolies. It set up its own six-man police force and made public its constitution. The preamble of this document proposed the protection of the Chinese, since the municipal authorities were unable to halt the hoodlums’ attacks, which the society termed a disgrace to American free institutions, to civilization and to Christianity.

  Unimpressed by the good intentions of the group, the California Police Gazette lampooned it as a society for the prevention of cruelty to Chinese. Then the newspaper’s editor sarcastically begged for the creation of similar societies to protect the Irish, the Germans and the Americans. Though most of the roughnecks who picked on the Chinese were Irish and thus Catholics, the leader of the Chinese Protective Society was the very prominent (French Canadian) Roman Catholic printer, Edward Bosqui. The organization operated about a year, spending some $6,000, but the Chinese had little faith in it and gave it only $600. It was soon dissolved.

  A good index of the degree of bigotry in a city is the record of punishment of minority-group criminals. The evidence suggests that there
was little or no racial bias, as distinguished from overt hostility, in San Francisco’s early years. In the main, Chinese evildoers were treated to the same brand of quick frontier justice in the ’50s as any other group. The one exception to this rule was when San Francisco’s first chief of police, James Curtis, tried to humiliate Chinese criminals as well as to punish them. For a brief period Curtis not only sent them to the chain gang, like whites and Negroes, but also cut off their queues. The first three trophies of war—the pigtails of Ah Sing, Ah Bing, and Ah You—Curtis hung on the railings which decorated the city hall; after the old Spanish custom of mounting the heads of malefactors on pikes on city or castle walls. Curtis said of the swaying queues, “They are a warning to all Celestial evildoers.”

  Judge Lynch was in the chair during the 1850s, but the Chinese outlaws of California were treated no better and no worse than their brothers of the Coast whose skins were a different color. In San Francisco, lynchings were few and none of the victims was Chinese.

  Although they were treated quite fairly by even the drumhead courts of the lynchers, there was already a growing bias against the Chinese. Bancroft revealed it when he expressed a low opinion of the first immigrants from China, saying that while there were good Chinamen and bad Chinamen they were mostly of the latter category and highly skilled in robbing sluice boxes, to boot. The common punishment for these Chinese claim jumpers, incidentally, was nothing so drastic as a lynching bee. True, a rope was used on them but it was only laid on their backs to the tune of fifty lashes. Their queues were sometimes amputated too.