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

by Dillon, Richard

  A good way to size up the class of citizenship enjoyed by a minority group is to examine the swiftness and surety of punishment visited upon those who prey on them. The Negroes in the South over the last hundred years, for example, simply have not received the “separate but equal” amount of justice and protection given the whites. In San Francisco and the West of a century ago the situation vis-a-vis the Chinese was better. It was less good in the mining camps than in the cities. In the Mother Lode entire Chinese communities were sometimes forced by mob pressure to pack up and move out. Usually violence was not employed, but the threat of violence was always there.

  When a so-called Celestial was the victim of a criminal attack, however, the forces of law and order—both legal and extra legal—extended their protection to him. In this respect the Chinese were more fortunate than the California Indians and about as well off as the Sonorans and native (Mexican) Californios. Even San Francisco’s Asian harlots had rights. When John Badger struck and knocked down a chinoise daughter of joy, he was arrested and convicted of assault and battery. He got off no more easily than Ah Choy, the madame with the penchant for beating up her girls. She was convicted in July, 1859; Badger in September. And observe the other side of the coin. In May of that year Ah Chong was arrested for assault and battery after kicking a white youth. He was quickly discharged, however, when it was shown that he had been assaulted by the young hoodlum and had only retaliated in kind.

  Chinese in the mines were definitely second-class “citizens,” but they were regarded as human beings, not as animals or slaves as was sometimes the case with Negroes even in the West. Thus, when in 1851 a Mexican murdered a Chinese in Drytown he was lynched (clumsily, with a log chain) on the handiest tree. When a Frenchman named Raymond murdered a Chinese at Big Bar on the Consumnes River in 1852, he was tried by a jury of twelve white men and hanged for his crime. Mickey Free, one of the Sydney Ducks who plagued San Francisco until driven out by the first vigilance organization, met his end at Coloma for robbing and murdering thirteen Chinese, among numerous other crimes.

  Arrests were not always the same as convictions. There were a number of men who preyed on the Chinese and escaped with the practically nonexistent penalties. The most shocking example of a breakdown in justice, in regard to Chinese in California, occurred in 1871. A mob murdered twenty-one Chinese in Los Angeles. Thirty-seven of the mob were indicted by the Grand Jury but many got off with sentences as light as 6 years, and even 2 years, of imprisonment. The reason for the paucity of convictions as compared to the plenitude of arrests of those abusing the Chinese was mainly political, as might be expected. Governor Frederick F. Low spelled it out himself in an interview he gave historian Bancroft: “You cannot get a police court here to convict a hoodlum for beating a Chinaman today, before an elected judicial, because the hoodlum and his friends will have the vote and the Chinaman has not, and cannot.”

  Though Bancroft was no close friend of the Chinese in California, he did denounce vigorously the outrages committed upon them. Rightly, he placed the largest share of the blame on foreigners and mainly on the Irish immigrants. These were the very people who only a few years earlier had been persecuted themselves by the Know Nothings and others. It was the same old story; instead of the two bottom layers of society working together to better their common fortune, the next-to-the bottom class turned on the lowest group and visited upon it the most vicious kind of bigotry. Bancroft, however, was probably guilty of snobbery when he asserted that he had yet to find one instance when attacks on the Chinese were not roundly condemned by all of the “decent” people of the community.

  Where Bancroft saw most of the early Asiatic immigrants as sluice robbers, Albert Deane Richardson, the popular New England essayist, leaned far overboard in the opposite direction. He had nothing but praise for them as law-abiding citizens. Richardson knew that their treatment in California had offered them unusual provocation to crime. He saw that the law which forbade their testifying against white men in court had aggravated the great disadvantage at which their ignorance of English placed them. The New England writer claimed that some of the Chinese confined in California jails were wholly innocent of the offenses for which they had been sentenced. Richardson called attention to the fact that notwithstanding all the provocations offered them, the public records of the state showed that the percentage of Chinese convicted of crimes was much lower than that of other foreigners. In fact, he said, it was only a bit higher than that of the native-born population.

  The percentage of criminals which the Chinese managed to muster varied widely, and wildly, from orator to orator depending on his point of view and school of statistics. A California State Senator begged to differ with Richardson, claiming that as high as 17 percent of all criminals in California were Chinese. But he ruined his bombshell by also padding the total Oriental population in order to make the immigrants appear to be more of a menace to red-blooded American labor than they actually were. The legislator claimed that they constituted 25 percent of the entire population. Charles Aull, turnkey at San Quentin Prison, brought out a formal report in 1876 which somewhat weakened the Senator’s stand, but which did not substantiate Richardson’s claim. Aull found that of 1,145 convicts in the penitentiary, 198 were Chinese.

  Richardson was particularly shocked by San Francisco’s unwillingness to accept the testimony of an Asian in court. He learned that a ruffian could shoot down a Chinese in cold blood before a thousand others, and if no white man witnessed the deed the murderer would go scot free. He thought this double standard of justice in California was a burning shame, especially since it took place in a state which he felt was characterized by a love of justice and fair play. He was right, of course. Not only did it foster a climate kindly to criminals, but it also drove the decent people of Chinatown still further away from what should have been their natural hope and refuge—the American system of courts.

  The lack of crimes of violence in Chinatown during these early decades lulled the police into inaction. They soon developed a casual attitude toward the minority clustered around Dupont Street, contenting themselves with an occasional descent on the bordellos of the district. In some respects this hands-off policy is to the credit of the city. Despite hard feelings between the two communities, there was never a pogrom—not even in the critical year of 1877. Chinatown was a ghetto but it was not a walled ghetto of people brutalized by the police. (The only actions remotely resembling police-state methods occurred in the early nineties with the tong raids of Lieutenant Price and others of the Chinatown squad in which tong headquarters were deliberately destroyed.) The damaging effect of this attitude of the police was that it allowed the city within the city to substitute extralegal institutions for the normal American agencies of law, order and justice. This paved the way for the rise of the tongs. One clan or company pressured another, rather than resorting to the legal arbitration of a controversy. These customs hardened into a system of face-saving exaction of revenge. When the pacifying hand of the Six Companies became palsied after the Geary Act loss of face, the system got completely out of hand, was taken over by the criminal element, and resulted in the series of tong wars which appalled America.

  Bancroft, writing in the 1870s, did not yet identify the problem as tong rivalry and conflicts but he did point out that as a rule the Chinese were able to manage their own trials and punishments, administering justice among themselves even to the execution of offenders. He also remarked on their ability to keep their proceedings covered from the eyes of the law. This statement of the historian added up to a tacit approval of the brutal and unjust system arising in Chinatown. It paralleled the sentiment in city hall and among the public at large. Neither Bancroft nor any of his fellow San Franciscans could foresee the horrible consequences. The city was pleased with the apparent lack of crimes of violence in the squalid, crowded Quarter. The Hall of Justice and city hall were willing to go along with the sunny
optimism of Reverend Otis Gibson who proudly proclaimed, “The Chinese excite less riots and commit fewer assaults and murders than almost any other foreign element among us. There is a class of bad Chinaman who do such things, but in far less proportion than is done by their labor competitors from Europe.”

  Despite Gibson’s whitewashing, the plain truth is that Chinatown was not entirely unacquainted with crime before the rise of the tongs. Chinatown had criminals from the very beginning. There were a number of bribery cases, for example, in the Recorder’s Court by the fall of 1854. There were so many, in fact, that Charles Carvalho had to be appointed to the court as Chinese interpreter to take care of John’s running afoul of the law. Bribery cases continued over the years, a major one being the attempt of Ah Quoy to “buy” Special Officer Benjamin S. Lynes in 1866. Some of the Chinese bunco artists were quite skilled in their trade too. There were those who cut up the cuttlefish in their shrimp nets to sell them to gullible Frenchmen as California frogs’ legs. Fishermen also operated cookie cutters on the wings of skates and sting rays, stamping out pseudo-scallops for the market place. But these were more instances of sharp business practice than out-and-out criminality. (After all, Caucasians often have revered far bigger scoundrels, including stockjobbers, land-fraud tricksters, robber barons and railroad swindlers as proud pioneers of the West.) A favorite Chinese trick was deteriorating or sweating coins. They would pass gold pieces which they had worn or shaved down to a slightly smaller circumference than when minted. (The edges were not yet milled to prevent this practice.) The Chinese would keep the flakes of gold they peeled off in pokes, just like gold-dust. In 1859, Chinatown was flooded with spurious Mexican dollars—bogus varieties of the medium of exchange in the Far East. These particular “dollars Mex” were dated 1854 and made in China. They had never seen a mint in either Manila or Mexico City. In July, 1870, two Chinese were arrested for counterfeiting bills of the Bank of India.

  Yet even with the padding of the statistics on Chinese criminality by arrests of amateur counterfeiters and bunco steerers—and for such trivial offenses as violation of the Cubic Air Ordinance (sleeping too many in a room), or for peddling without a license, the Chinese as a group managed to stay out of trouble in quite remarkable fashion. In 1876 the New York World commented on the fact that California’s prison statistics showed the average of crime among Chinese to be lower than for any other segment of the population. Very few indeed were hardened and vicious criminals like the murderer-rapist-thief, Ah Fook, finally arrested in 1866 after a long career of crime; or the treacherous servants, Ah Say and Ah Sam, who bungled the murder of Mrs. Saufley in Oakland. These latter two were about the only Chinese with heinous enough crimes on their hands to rate a rogue’s-gallery woodcut portrait in the California Police Gazette. Chinatown, in the 1850s and ’60s, got little newspaper space, much less a real headline in the scandal-mongering Gazette. Yet in the 1890s the sector would do a volte-face and secure a seeming monopoly on murder.

  The patient and long-suffering Chinese, both on the raw mining frontier and in cosmopolitan San Francisco, rarely resorted to violence in the ’50s and ’60s. They seldom even defended themselves when attacked. Hence the frequency with which they were abused by cowardly hoodlums. An exception was made to the rule in 1855, when a party of three ruffians near Greasertown, south of San Francisco, asked a Chinese for some water. While he was obliging them one of the men, William Link, drew a pistol and fired at him. The ball struck John in the wrist but he instantly drew a revolver and shot Link dead. The rest of the gang fled. The Chinaman was arrested but after an examination of the case was acquitted. Normally, however, this handiness with firearms was restricted to the criminal class in Chinatown. For the most part the law-abiding Chinese preferred to put up with the indignities and even physical attacks of hoodlums with a stoicism and pacifism which was much remarked upon. It was not until 1874, for example, that another such story broke in the newspapers. In that year a Celestial beat off four roughnecks, singlehanded, to the delight of the San Francisco press. But basically John was a peaceable man. This made all the more unexpected and horrible the senseless butchery which would take place within a few decades. No one, certainly not the police, could guess that in a few years the cobbles of Chinatown’s alleys would be slick with the blood of the innocent as well as of the guilty.

  Until about 1880, there was no special name for Chinese criminals. The terms highbinder and hatchet man came late. While giving testimony during the 1870s in regard to evildoing in Chinatown, Special Officer Delos Woodruff answered a question from the bench by saying, “A lot of highbinders came to the place—” The judge interrupted him with a gesture of his hand. “What do you mean by ‘highbinders?’” His honor queried. “Why,” replied Woodruff, “a lot of Chinese hoodlums.” The judge persisted, “And that’s the term you apply to Chinese hoodlums, is it?” “That’s what I call them,” responded Woodruff.

  From that time on, Chinese murderers, pimps, blackmailers, gunmen, professional gamblers and toughs of all kinds in San Francisco began to be known as highbinders. It was not necessary that they be tong men, though most of them were. When they took to assassinations with hatchets and cleavers the other term, hatchet man, was born. The word highbinder had apparently been used to signify a member of the Irish banditti as early as 1806. It was used in New York and Boston as a synonym for hoodlum and was probably extended to Chinese bad men by New York police. As late as 1876, the word tong itself had little usage. Reverend Otis Gibson, testifying that year before the Chinese Immigration Committee of the California Senate, stated that the Hip Yee tong controlled the brothels of Chinatown. He carefully distinguished the organization from all of the Six Companies by describing a tong as more like a labor union, such as the washerman’s guild. Policeman Alfred Clark also explained the term to the State Senators, insisting that the Six Companies had nothing to do with the slave-girl trade. He reported that it was under the control of the Hip Yee tong. Later Gibson changed his mind and attributed proprietorship of Chinatown’s gambling dens to the Hip Yee tong and the whorehouses to the Po Sang tong. In any case, the public was exposed to the term tong, a word which would one day chill every citizen’s spine. Also, the testimony of Gibson and Clark demonstrated that Americans were still confused over the role of the Six Companies.

  Crime in Chinatown, as the years wore on toward the tong-war decades, remained an individualistic matter except for the tong combines which ran the gambling houses and red-light district. In his 1859 annual report the chief of police asked the Board of Supervisors to appoint a special committee to investigate the evils of Chinese prostitution. But he said nothing about organized gang warfare in the Quarter.

  Yet even as early as 1854, ominous portents of the protection racket of future tong troubles were being heard. The editors of the Annals of San Francisco noted that whereas the Chinese were generally peaceable and contented folk who seldom troubled the authorities, there were a few secret societies among them which grossly oppressed their brethren. ‘The police have attempted to interfere,” said the Annals, “and to protect the injured, though seldom with much effect. The terror of these, lest vengeance should somehow befall them from their persecutors, has generally prevented full disclosures of the unlawful practices of the secret societies.”

  The Wide West also sniffed something rotten in Chinatown: “Those among them who have the opportunity are continually levying taxes for some inexplicable purpose on those of their countrymen who are able to pay them and afraid to refuse. The only reason they themselves are ever known to give for the various disturbances that arise among them is the existence of a secret society of which no member ever was seen, or known to exist, by any of the received rules of evidence.”

  On October 6, 1854, police hurried to the hotel kept on Dupont Street by Ah Kuang. There they quickly quelled a disturbance, arresting a number of Chinese who were attempting to extort a fine for the benefit of the
Triad Society. Here was the secret society whose existence the Wide West doubted. The police were still in the dark as to the evil they were trying to combat. They did not know that the seeds of future tong wars were already sown in such actions as the riots at Ah Kuang’s hotel.

  Although it is commonly said there were never any tongs in China itself, only in America or other outposts of the Chinese, this is mainly a pointless quibble over semantics. Kenneth Scott Latourette estimated twenty-five years ago that fully one half of the adult male Chinese population belonged to one or another secret society. The San Ho Hui, or Triad Society, alias the Hung Society and the Society of Heaven and Earth, was a secret organization of real power in China. It was primarily a revolutionary political movement formed to oppose the Manchus. But it was destined to do more than just play a role in mainland disturbances such as the Taiping Rebellion of 1850-1864. It fathered all of the fighting tongs of San Francisco. This progeny differed in that their announced reasons for existence were as benevolent or legal-aid societies rather than as political parties or revolutionary clubs. But in action they were almost identical; they were secret pressure groups not at all unwilling to stain their hands with blood to reach their goals.

  Five months after the Triad Society raid, on the last day of March 1855, the Grand Jury of San Francisco (unwittingly) took another anti-tong measure by indicting Charlie Ah You for assembling parties of armed men for the purpose of disturbing the peace. But things then quieted down and the coals of the tong wars smoldered on for another seven years.

  In the summer of 1862, a leak developed in the wall of silence and secrecy which surrounded the fighting tongs, growing in strength every year. The police were asleep, lulled by the stereotype of the docile Chinese. Had they read one of the valley newspapers they might have learned something of what was going on beneath their very noses in Chinatown. On one of those typically mot, blistering days of summer in the Central Valley a typesetter laboriously composed an announcement which had been paid for and sent up from San Francisco. He cursed as, fumbling to spell correctly the unfamiliar “heathen” names listed at the end of his sweat-stained sheet of copy, he composed the piece.