When the Sacramento Union hit J Street, the Capital’s main thoroughfare, it carried the item buried back among the advertisements for Japanese salve, corner saloons and Sitka ice. It read [there were not yet six companies in the union]:
FROM THE PRESIDENT DIRECTORS OF THE FIVE CHINESE COMPANIES OF CALIFORNIA
The deceased, Yu Kow, was a See Yup man. He was connected with a bad gang. Speaking the English language well, he chose for his victims those of his countrymen who were ignorant of the foreign tongue. These he oppressed. He made fish meat of them. Innumerable were his dark deeds, injurious to life and property, sometimes committed in clear, shining day, often by stealth at night. Placed as the leader of a large gang [tong], he intimidated his victims, who were afraid to accuse him before the courts. And if ever accused, the gold and illicit gain of his villains were placed at his disposal, thereby enabling him to employ eminent counsel to escape the punishment of the law.
Verily, he was a wicked man!
It was our intention united to have accused him, for crimes committed, before the tribunals of justice and by getting him punished, save our countrymen from receiving further injuries at his hands. But who can fathom the excellent principles of Heaven! The evil leader fell, assassinated. This was indeed a great happiness for his countrymen. But his followers, animated with bad hearts, are striving now to cause innocence and excellence to suffer. They wish to confound virtue with crime. They arrested Chu Pak, charging him falsely with having aided in the murder of Yu Kow. They charge that he wrote a letter and sent money to Wong Yuen to accomplish the deed.
How easily they could have forged one and submitted it to the presiding officer of justice for scrutiny! But for what ends? They know full well that it would be impossible for the American judge to detect the written Chinese characters. The Chinese alone are able to distinguish the different handwritings of their countrymen. They, therefore, well knowing this fact, forged a letter with no other purpose than evil and to lead justice astray. Such are the false schemes, the black plots, of this wicked gang.
But we, the Head Directors, are well acquainted with the defendant, Chu Pak. He is considered amongst the men of the Four Districts [See Yup) as the most upright For the long period of six years he presided as Chief Director, Master and Trustee of the Company, and his conduct throughout has been pure and excellent. His great virtues are known to all and farspread. During his term of Directorship, he had occasion severely to correct and reprimand Yu Kow for his evil deeds. For this, Yu Kow never forgave him but harbored in his heart a spirit of revenge and hate. All of a sudden, Yu Kow was murdered and his followers, because he fell, preferred false charges against Chu Pak. This is perjury and oppression. Behold the facts!
But we, the Head Directors, bowing our heads down, place our hope in the clear discrimination of the officials of justice, trusting that after a strict investigation, they will save the innocent from receiving wrong, thereby defeating deceitful plots to the great happiness of our merchants and people.
Wherefore we, the Head Directors of the Five great Chinese Companies of the State of California, deeming it our duty to expose wrong and evil schemes, do now publish these facts, submitting them to your high intelligence and praying you to pass a righteous judgment in the perusal of the same.
The ultimate fate of Chu Pak is not known today but the “black plots of this wicked gang” continued long after the Five Companies alerted their clansmen in Sacramento. The tong machinations continued and eventually seized control of the Chinese Quarter.
But long before the tong evil itself—the heart of the matter—became apparent to police and public, the curse of opium caught the eye of the authorities. They did not realize that it was, with gambling and prostitution, an economic foundation for the fighting tongs quietly building their strength underground. But the evil of opium which police and Federal authorities exposed in the ’60s and later, was in itself enough to shock the entire community and attract the attention of Washington.
CHAPTER THREE
Pipes Of Peace
“Just as drunkenness is the curse and bane of American society, just so opium smoking is the curse and bane of the Chinese people. Just as depraved, unprincipled white men will open groggeries and drinking saloons, in order to enrich themselves by the certain ruin of their neighbors, just so depraved, unprincipled Chinamen in order to enrich themselves will open dens for the certain ruin of their neighbors by the consumption of opium.”
—Reverend Otis Gibson, 1876
IN ALL THE furor over coolies flooding the city from the wharves of the Embarcadero, few San Franciscans in 1861 even noticed the arrival of the clipper Ocean Pearl from Hong Kong. She bore no troublesome coolies. All she carried was a cargo of rice and tea—and fifty-two boxes of opium. These turned out to be Pandora’s boxes for San Francisco.
The ’60s saw the rise of the opium-den evil while the slave-girl traffic continued to mount toward a high point in the last two decades of the century. But aside from these problems, the Civil War decade proved to be a more or less peaceful period in Chinatown and something of an Indian summer to the era of good feeling of the 1850s. It was fortunate that this was so. In 1861, the San Francisco police force was greatly understaffed. It totaled a mere 30 men. Only 7 men could be detailed to patrol duty at a time, and 2 of these were kept busy guarding the wharves of the Embarcadero. That left but 5 policemen—“Fearless Charlies” in the argot of the times—to protect a city of 80,000 souls. While hoodlums were amusing themselves by lassoing newly arrived coolies as they came up the streets from the docks, the San Francisco press was lamenting that “No civilized city on the globe ever had such meager protection, and yet, thanks to the vigilance of our policemen, no city was ever so orderly as San Francisco this day, even though a large proportion of it consists of the worst materials which ever composed a community.”
The pressure of the press on the Board of Supervisors brought results, and the force’s strength was increased from 30 men to 40. But the population rose too rapidly for the force to catch up. In 1863, Chief Martin Burke had only 56 regulars and 37 undependable specials. With this small band he tried to keep order in a city of 83,000 to 103,000 population, including drifters from the Seven Seas, shanghaiers on the Embarcadero, and ex-Bowery blacklegs on the Barbary Coast. It was a blessing the tong wars did not erupt in 1863. As it was, the first real anti-Chinese riot occurred that year on August 4. A party of Chinese employed by a contractor to grade a lot near the sugar refinery were driven off the job by a group of Irish laborers. It was not serious but it was symptomatic of things to come.
In the East, 1864 was the year of the fall of Atlanta. But in San Francisco it was the Year of Opium. The importation and smuggling of the drug into San Francisco became not only a plague but very big business. On January 16, a large lot was brought in on the ship Derby. It was seized by the authorities. On April 22, another shipment arrived and it, too, was captured as attempts were being made to smuggle it ashore from the bark Pallas. On June 19, revenue officers seized a large consignment of the drug hidden in eggs.
Reporters of the sensational daily press sank their teeth into the opium story quickly. The degradation of the opium dens was soon as good for a story in San Francisco as a shipwreck on Point Reyes. There is no doubt they were a sickening social institution. Estimates of the percentage of the Chinese population of the city who used opium ranged from 16 percent to 40 percent, with sots, or far-gone addicts estimated to range from 10 percent to 20 percent. But there is good reason to believe that many opium denizens adhered to the habit with no more insane passion or ill effects than the John Doe who clung to his bottle. Whatever the physiological case against opium smoking, it did bring in big money. And it thereby attracted and bred criminals and crime. One might almost say of opium that its side effects were the more deadly. With gambling halls and brothels, opium dens supported the fraternity of brigands who plag
ued the Chinese Quarter for years.
The correspondent of London’s Cornhill magazine who signed himself “Day,” visited California in the ’80s and wrote that he never saw a street fight or other disturbance in some thirty trips to Chinatown, but he noted many opium dens operating openly in spite of the law prohibiting the sale of the drug for smoking. He observed wryly, “Occasionally, when the police are short of funds, they make a descent on some of the dens but, as a rule, the proprietors are left unmolested.”
Almost everyone who was literate at all appears to have left behind him a description of the typical San Francisco opium den. Reverend Frederic J. Masters wrote: “The air is sultry and oppressive. A stupefying smoke fills the hovel through the gloom of which the feeble yellow light of three or four opium lamps struggles hopelessly to penetrate. There are two or three wooden beds covered with matting and each is furnished with lamp and pipe. Three Chinamen lie curled up on the beds, one taking his first puffs, the others in different stages of stupefaction. The room is about fifteen feet by ten feet, ceiling and walls black with years of smoke. We have been in this den about five minutes and no one has spoken a word. It is like being in a sepulchre with the dead.”
New York Police Chief George W. Walling’s description of the effects of opium read: “Reveries, dreams and stupefaction do not come with one pipe. Again and again the smoker cooks his lump of opium, packs it into the bowl and lazily watches the smoke curl up around the lamp. After awhile the pipe drops from his nerveless hand and there is a glaze on his eyes which are half-shut like a dead man’s. His head falls upon his breast and he is in that opium trance which is either paradise or hell according to the degree of his indulgence in the narcotic.”
Trust Mark Twain to describe the sot and his pipe both colorfully and succinctly. He wrote: “Opium smoking is a comfortless operation and it requires constant attention. A lamp sits on the bed, the length of the long pipe stem from the smoker’s mouth. He puts a pellet of opium on the end of a wire, sets it on fire and plasters it into the pipe much as a Christian would fill a hole with putty. Then he applies the bowl to the lamp and proceeds to smoke—and the stewing and frying of the drug and the gurgling of the juices in the stem would well-nigh turn the stomach of a statue…. “
Evidence of the importance of the opium trade in the Pacific are the two wars forced upon China by John Bull to keep the trade booming. A whole fleet of swift vessels came to be called opium clippers—lean rivals of the tea clippers and Gold Rush clippers. San Francisco was their major American port of call. It became a market almost entirely for the prepared product but a little crude opium came in from time to time, to be refined (boiled) in Chinatown for local consumption.
Frisco bought only the finest opium—the Patna variety from India. With only 6 or 7 percent morphia, it was superior to the acrid-tasting Persian or Turkish opium whose 10 percent of the alkaloid induced headaches and skin rashes in its consumers. The opium was prepared by the Fook Hung Company in Hong Kong, a well-to-do firm which paid the Colonial Government $200,000 to $300,000 per annum just for the privilege of doing business. The refined smoking opium—a dark fluid of the appearance and consistency of molasses—was put up in five tael tins which sold in San Francisco for $8 each.
The Burlingame Treaty of 1868 between the United States and China held that no Chinese resident of the United States or American resident of China might import opium. But nothing was said of the keeping of opium dens. It was not until the 1880s and 1890s that strong legislation began to be applied to the problem. Earlier, an honest and efficient Customs officer lost his job and nearly his life when his efforts to expose the enormity of the racket led him too far down the trail. Like many other crooked big businesses of the nineteenth century, its ramifications extended far beyond the confines of Chinatown. By a section of the State Penal Code, denkeepers eventually were made guilty of a misdemeanor punishable by a $500 fine and 6 months in jail. A few keepers, and even customers, were locked up in the 80s, as a result. Since San Francisco was the American capital of opium debauchery, the city’s Board of Supervisors also joined the attack. Their 1890 ordinance made even visiting an opium den an act punishable by a fine of from $250 to $1,000 and a jail term of 3 to 6 months, or both. By 1892, white visitors to opium dens were being given jail terms of 3 months and no option of a fine. Reverend Masters, however, reported fewer and fewer Caucasians as denizens of opium joints as the century wore on. Opium like the tong wars, was a Chinese problem. It attracted Caucasians briefly for what later would be called “kicks,” but as a sociological or health problem it never amounted to much except for the Chinese. It was a problem which the Chinese community solved with surprising ease and dispatch. Opium was never a big problem after the 1906 earthquake and fire.
But none of the legislative maneuvers stamped out opium. Prior to 1887, the opium provision of the Burlingame Treaty was not even enforced. An immense quantity of the drug was shipped through the Golden Gate to the wharves of the Embarcadero. In late 1886, agents suddenly swooped down on a $750,000 shipment and seized it. During the following February, Congress passed an act to prohibit the importation of opium by Chinese. Surely this was one of the most healthy of the various acts promulgated to harass the Oriental minority. What this actually meant was that Chinatown’s needs would have to be met in the future by smuggling and by white firms fronting for Chinese customers. These companies placed large orders for the drug, supposedly for medicinal purposes.
The Deputy Collector of Customs estimated that between 1884 and 1892, a total of 477,550 pounds of prepared opium entered San Francisco. Despite the efforts of hard-working Customs men, half of all the opium imported entered the Golden Gate illegally. Factories in Chinatown where the crude opium was refined were raided. Smugglers were apprehended. The Government increased duties from $6 to $10 a pound on the prepared product. The result was failure. From an average of 60,000 pounds per year, the illicit traffic increased to 100,000 pounds a year by 1888. The Government struck at the trade again in 1892 by placing a $12-a-pound duty on the drug to literally price it out of existence except for legitimate medicinal purposes. But the situation showed no signs of improvement. In fact it grew worse.
The Grand Jury horrified the decent population by reporting that “white girls between the ages of thirteen and twenty are enticed into these opium dens, become regular habitués, and finally are subject wholly to the wishes of the Oriental visitors.”
An anonymous police captain confirmed the Grand Jury’s report and said darkly, “It is only we detectives who know the extent to which the opium habit has caught on amongst high-toned women in San Francisco. And the trouble is that the high-spirited and most adventurous women seem to succumb first.”
The attacks on the traffic continued. Late in 1896, a $200,000 shipment arrived on a steamer for H. R. Davidson, an accountant of the Bank of British Columbia. Two new Custom agents, completely unknown to Bay area narcotics smugglers, were sent for. They were Caleb West of Washington and Leslie Cullin of Oregon. The two men discovered not only the supplier, Rosano & Company, but tailed the shipment and found its true destination to be the firm of Kwong Fong Tai. The Collector of the Port, John H. Wise, then stepped in and ordered all opium in port—from $300,000 to $400,000 worth of it—into bonded warehouses. Even with the ubiquitous smugglers working around the clock, the price of the poppy-seed paste doubled in San Francisco.
The San Francisco Call, about this time, estimated the number of opium rooms in the city to be 300. Most were in Chinatown, bearing red signs over their doors reading in Chinese calligraphy PIPES AND LAMPS ALWAYS CONVENIENT, or similar phrases. But some were in other sections of the city. They served some 3,000 hopheads or opium fiends, as the addicts were usually called. The newspaper would have had to be the size of The New York Times just to have listed and described the innumerable holes in the wall, garrets and subterranean huts which were opium dens. The Call conten
ted itself with the more notorious dens, especially those which catered to whites.
Blind Annie’s Cellar was one such den still frequented by Caucasians. It was a noisome sinkhole of depravity between—and below—718 and 720 Jackson Street. Ah King’s place at 730 Jackson Street was probably the most notorious of all those resorted to by white hopheads. Hop Jay’s smoking establishment was on the second floor of a tenement which was so outstandingly filthy that waggish reporters dubbed it the Palace Hotel.
Other dens clustered on Waverly Place, Church Alley, Washington Alley or Fish Alley, and on Duncombe Alley. This last was a narrow cavern from Jackson Street to Pacific Street and the Barbary Coast. Its doors bore no numbers, nor were any habitations listed there, but midway along the dank and slimy passage was a hidden opium hang-out.
One of San Francisco’s great journalistic scoops was the expedition of Frank Davey, the crack photographer of the California Illustrated Magazine. He invaded the filthy dens under the guard of Officer Chris Cox and took the first flash photographs of them. His was one of the first photo-stories to appear in the San Francisco press. His pictures and those of the Department of Public Health document the degradation of the opium dens, all of which were wiped out by the quake and fire of 1906. They never made a comeback, and opium ceased to be a major problem. But it was the change in mores of the Americanizing Chinese rather than the crackdown by officials—or even the physical destruction of the dens by the holocaust—which brought an end to the opium evil. The American-Chinese abandoned opium before they jettisoned their pajama-like costume, their queues or even their concubines.
Hatchet Men: The Story of the Tong Wars in San Francisco’s Chinatown Page 5
