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

by Dillon, Richard

  “Fire! Fire on the Pacific Mail docks!” The cry swept through the crowded streets and the mob stampeded toward the Embarcadero. The word also reached the citizens’ committee, 3,000 strong, in Horticultural Hall at Stockton and Post, at 7 P.M. One hundred men, armed with the ubiquitous pick handles, were sent to the scene as an advance guard. Then another 100 marched to the waterfront. The remainder formed up into companies by city wards and tramped to city hall to await the orders of the chief of police. The chief sent 60 men to Sixth and Howard Streets to dislodge and disperse a mob there. Muskets were readied but the skirmishers moved out with only pick handles and pocket firearms. They found that the mob had stoned houses South of the Slot and had fired four lumberyards. Ships at the Pacific Mail docks were towed to safety, but the mob—awed by the cannon guarding the Embarcadero’s wharves from the bellicose ships offshore—vented its anger on the innocent lumberyard owners of the area of First and Brannan Streets. More than one hundred shots were fired either into the mob or over the rioters’ heads. Several were killed and a number wounded. The mob loosened showers of stones at the police and Coleman’s neo-Vigilantes, but many were arrested and quickly manacled to the long chain stretched in front of the Pacific Mail property. The Pick Handle Brigade closed off all streets leading to the lumberyards but a mobster sneaked through the lines and cut a fire hose at one burning yard. He was shot down in his tracks.

  The anti-coolie meeting of the 25th, in keeping with the blazing piles of lumber, featured incendiary speeches, but the mob which gathered was a dwindling one. No more than 800 men congregated that day. But the tension did not let up. Threatening letters were received by prominent members of the Committee of Public Safety. William T. Coleman himself received word that both his San Francisco and San Rafael homes would be burned to the ground. As late as August 5, an arson attempt (the second) was made on his Washington and Taylor Streets home. An incendiary got inside the house and set it afire with boxes of tar but the servants put out the blaze. When the attempt was made to ring in an alarm from the nearby fire-alarm box they found that the arsonist had put it out of order. However, Coleman’s house was connected with the American district telegraph and the police were summoned by wire.

  The prompt action of the police and the Pick Handle Brigade crushed the riot by the third day. On the 27th James Smith was arrested for starting the lumberyard blazes. On the 30th the Committee of Public Safety disbanded. When the crisis was over, Patrick Crowley, who would earn the title of Riot Chief for his participation in this affair as well as the Potrero riots and other mob actions, fainted. The strain and fatigue of the long days of vigilance had proved too much for even his tough system.

  By August 1, 1877, the worst was over. American-Chinese relations in San Francisco would never again sink so low, even in the depths of the tong wars. Of course the mob was not through yet. The turncoat Pick Handler, Dennis Kearney, would soon be the darling of the sand lotters.

  Kearneyism eventually grew so strong that politicians began to court Kearney. On August 22, 1877, the Workingmen’s Trade and Labor Union was formed with Kearney as secretary. His power and influence grew until Kearneyism elected a mayor of San Francisco, and framed a California State Constitution in 1879. Crowley arrested Kearney for inciting a riot and was on the verge of arresting Mayor Isaac Kalloch himself when Chief Ellis dissuaded him. Kalloch was another philosophical turncoat like Kearney. He had led the largest Chinese Sunday school in the city, then turned on the Chinese as a violently anti-coolie politician. Earlier, when the Chronicle attacked him in print, he made scurrilous remarks about the mother of the De Young brothers, publishers of the Chronicle. Thereupon, Charles De Young shot Kalloch and wounded him badly. (Many feel it was this qualified martyrdom which won him the election.) In April 1880, Kalloch’s son shot De Young in his office, and was acquitted. Far reaching indeed were the effects of Chinatown’s troubles.

  Sand-lotism hit its peak quickly, and then crumbled away as a political force. The one good result of the anti-Chinese riots was that they caused the city to increase the police force to a total of 400 men. For crime in Chinatown-- no more than in the rest of the city—had not disappeared with the emergence of Kearneyism. On the contrary the police had to look in both directions at once.

  A particularly shocking incident took place on June 12, 1878. Substitute Officer John Coots was patrolling Pike Street, the narrow thoroughfare lined with houses of ill repute. He spotted two hoodlums, John Runk and Charles Wilson, the latter a jailbird, coming into the street at about 1:30 A.M. They began to abuse the inmates of the cribs by shouting obscenities and threats through the grilled windows of the girls’ quarters. Coots warned them to stop, but they laughed at him and began to abuse him too. They defied him to arrest them. This was too much as far as Coots was concerned. He placed Wilson under arrest, and as Runk followed them by a few feet marched him toward the police station in the old city hall at Merchant and Kearney streets. They reached Clay and Dupont, in the very heart of Chinatown, where Joe Kelly was stationed. “Need any help?” he asked Coots. “No,” the other patrolman answered. “This fellow thought I couldn’t take him down.”

  Kelly watched Coots and his prisoner go on. He saw them reach Clay and Brenham, then heard a shot, and saw his brother officer fall. The two ruffians ran through Brenham Place, through Washington Alley and Bartlett Alley, and into the arms of Officers Tom Price and Edward R. Eaton. These two policemen had been summoned from their Barbary Coast beat on Pacific Street by Kelly’s frantic whistling. Runk still held the pistol with which he had killed Coots. He had shot the unsuspecting officer in the back of the head. There was no proof that Wilson had helped him in the murder, so he was released. Runk was tried, convicted, and hanged on November 12, 1879.

  Ironically, although criminals of both races now prowled Chinatown fattening on blackmail, prostitution, murder and gambling (on July 7 one Chinese stabbed another to death in Stout’s Alley), and anti-coolie agitators circled the Quarter like cowardly coyotes, the tide slowly began to turn in favor of the Chinese.

  Symptomatic of the easing off of tension was the return of a sense of humor to San Francisco. Lecturer George Francis Train, for example, found himself defending the Chinese to an audience loaded with Fenians. He harangued them with: “Twelve hundred Chinamen arrived this afternoon upon a single ship. You cannot send them back. Will you shoot them? What will you do with them?” A wag in the gallery shouted back, “Vaccinate them!”

  One of the men who helped turned the civil-rights tide was Judge Stephen Field. Though not widely remembered today, he is recalled by many for his role in the shooting at Lathrop. His bodyguard killed the fiery ex-judge, Davis S. Terry, at this town in the culmination of one of San Francisco’s many feuds. It was Field who found that Ho Ah Kow had been disgraced by having his head shaved under the Queue Ordinance. His action ended the Bobtail Order for all time.

  Judge Field’s opinion included some language and some thinking which were ahead of his era, but which began to clear the air in San Francisco. It would take a long time for complete civil rights to come to the American-Chinese, but Field’s decision was a milepost along the way. The judge stated: “When we take our seats on the bench we are not struck with blindness and forbidden to know as judges what we see as men. When an ordinance though general in its terms only operates upon a special race, sect or class, it being universally understood that it is to be enforced only against that sect, race or class, we must justly conclude that it was the intention of the body adopting it that it should only have such operation, and treat it accordingly… Nothing can be accomplished by hostile and spiteful legislation on the part of municipal bodies, like the ordinance in question—legislation which is unworthy of a brave and manly people.”

  Unfortunately for Chinatown, Judge Field still represented a minority, although a steadily growing minority. The temper of the times was more accurately portrayed by a series
of McCarthy-like hearings on Chinatown vice and crime conducted by self-appointed muckrakers and crusaders. These men lumped all Chinese, good or bad, into one category which bore their label of Undesirable. But almost accidentally in their probing of the subsurface of Chinatown these investigators performed a service for the community in that they threw light on the highly secret (so far) activities of the fighting tongs which were growing like a cancer in the midst of Chinatown.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Inquisition

  “They [the hatchet men] are a class of men who go around and black’ mail both the Chinese merchants and the prostitutes… if they do not get it they will raise a fight… I arrested one of the men and sent him to the County Jail for, I think it was, some kind of misdemeanor, either assault and battery or carrying concealed weapons, or something of the kind. Shortly thereafter, the same house was visited by three of those highbinders. One of them, when he got to the door, pulled a pistol out and shot the woman in the head….”

  —Testimony of Officer Michael Smith before a joint Congressional committee, 1876

  AT THE SAME time that sand lotters were taking the law into their own hands, men of no less anti-Chinese bias but of more respect for law were making the hundredth anniversary of America’s independence the shameful year of the great inquisition in San Francisco.

  While the city’s Chinese businessmen were collecting a donation of $500 to send to the Centennial Fund, a parade of witnesses was filing into governmental hearings. All had their minds neatly made up a priori. Their answers were ready long before the grand inquisitors began their probing of the so-called Chinese problem. The roots of the auto-da-fé went back to at least 1852, when the California State Senate first appointed a committee to investigate the exotic newcomers. This committee had dourly predicted that disputes would take place and that blood would flow as the result of the growing community of Chinese in the midst of—yet separate from—San Francisco.

  Early in April, 1876, the resolution of State Senator Creed Haymond was adopted. It called for the appointment of a committee to investigate the problem of Chinese immigration with all its ramifications. The committee was empowered to publish its findings in a formal report. The timely creation of the highly publicized investigating committee in the midst of the anti-coolie furor and hysteria was a Democratic ploy, although Haymond—the appointed chairman—happened to be a Republican. The Democrats had an eye on the November elections. They wanted to see to it that the Chinese Question was kept alive as the one issue most likely to appeal to a voting population of whom one half were foreign born. It was sure fire; the great mass of people whom they would offend (the Chinese) were disenfranchised anyway.

  The committee was weighted toward the city, with four of its members being San Franciscans, one (Haymond), a Sacramentan, and only two from the country. It was stacked in favor of the Democrats by a ratio of 5 to 2. The San Francisco quartet—Frank McCoppin, W. M. Pierson, M. J. Donovan, and George H. Rogers—were all Democrats, as was one of the pair of hinterlanders, E. J. Lewis of Tehama County. Only Chairman Haymond and George S. Evans, of San Joaquin County, were Republicans.

  The end result of this probing investigating committee was a three-hundred-page document titled “Chinese Immigration; its Social, Moral and Political Effect.” Published in August, 1877, it was a modest best-seller. It was rushed to members of Congress, State governors and newspaper editors. Probably 10,000 copies were printed and distributed. Among its effects was the impressing of the Kearneyites with the idea that their voices were being heard in high places—-far from the sand lots.

  Of the 42 Americans called as witnesses, 4 were clergymen and one was a lawyer. There were 5 “experts” on the Chinese, rendered so by having resided in the Middle Flowery Kingdom for varying lengths of stay. Although The committee was supposedly dealing with the problem of Chinese immigrants and labor, it actually spent much of its time on Chinese crime and collected a wealth of information. Whether this information was slanted or not, many facts came to light which otherwise would have been lost. Witnesses who detailed the inroads of crime in the Chinese community included one police judge, 5 regular police officers and 5 special Chinatown police. The remainder of the witnesses was made up of 11 public officials from San Francisco or the State Capital, 2 journalists, one farmer, 2 manufacturers, an expressman, a gentleman in the marble business, and the captain and the mate of a British ship engaged in the coolie trade.

  In evaluating the testimony of the hearings it must be kept in mind that more than one half of all witnesses called were officials or public servants of one stripe or another. (One fourth were law officers.) Therefore it is obvious that at least one half of the testimony rendered was by men dependent on political favor.

  Of the Chinese witnesses called, 6 were company presidents, 2 were interpreters, one was a genealogist, and 8 were workingmen. Of the 23 public officials called, all but 2 were decidedly anti-Chinese. But to the great surprise of Senator Creed Haymond, of the 19 witnesses who were not actively connected with politics, 7 were pro-Chinese, 5 could be considered as moderate in their opposition, one was noncommittal, and only 6 were vociferously “anti.”

  The three-hundred-page document contained, in addition to a transcript of the testimony itself, a “Memorial” to Congress and “An Address to the People of the United States upon the Evils of Chinese Immigration.” About four pages of the latter were devoted to what was ostensibly the raison d’etre of the hearings—the effect of the Chinese on white labor. Seven pages were wasted on an irrelevant discussion of the failure of the Chinese to Christianize. A full fifteen pages, however, were concerned with crime in Chinatown, ten of them dealing with prostitution alone. The address stated categorically that of 100,000 to 125,000 Chinese in California, at least 3,000 were slave girls. But Gibson and historian Theodore H. Hittell bluntly disputed these figures by taking San Francisco Evening Post and Customhouse statistics to show that there were only 78,000 Chinese in California. If the second figure of the committee was as far off as the first, it was in grave error indeed.

  The handling of the perfectly respectable Six Companies’ presidents was bungling and embarrassing. They were naturally insulted by the preponderance of questions on prostitution and gambling. They were asked few questions on occupations, wages, or social integration of their people—supposedly the issues of greatest importance. In the published document their information occupied fewer than 10 of the 300 pages.

  Obviously all of the findings of this committee must be taken with deep reservations. Nevertheless, as an opened window on the law-and-order situation in Chinatown, the document is valuable and revealing. And even Dr. Mary Coolidge, with her distaste for the drumhead board of inquiry, and to admit that “on this particular charge [Chinatown crime] the report appears to have represented the testimony accurately.”

  Hittell labeled the committee’s report as strictly grist for the political mills grinding away in San Francisco’s sand lots. Dr. Coolidge, for her part, found it difficult to imagine that it was taken seriously by anyone. Yet, State Senator Frank McCoppin presented it to the subsequent United States Congressional Joint Committee on Chinese Immigration as the official opinion of the entire California State Senate.

  The Senate committee’s hearings opened at 11 A.M. April 11, 1876, in the San Francisco city hall. The first person called to testify was Frederick F. Low, an old China hand and a former governor of California. He volunteered information about conditions in the Empire and in the Big City of the Golden Mountains: ‘The Chinese come here solely to make money. When they get that,” he said, “they return to China. They come under contract to repay amounts advanced just the same as Eastern [United States] people came to California in 1849, the only difference being that a Chinaman keeps his contract where a white man fails it.”

  Perhaps because this was hardly the damning testimony expected of the State’s ex-chief executive,
he was quizzed about the attitude of the Chinese toward the American system of justice. Low replied, ‘The guilds in China have absolute power… [Here] they don’t know the law other than as the company prescribes. It is this absolute power which governs their affairs.” This was more acceptable. Ex-Governor Low was excused.

  The second witness was ex-Senator W. J. Shaw. He was one of the first to describe the tong troubles which lay ahead. He did not use the still unfamiliar word tong, but his testimony was prophetic. “Where our laws come into conflict with theirs, ours are disregarded. In Singapore, India [sic], there are 80,000 Chinese inhabiting a distant quarter of the town. They have frequent quarrels among the companies [the tongs] or sets of men, and then they rush about like Wild beasts, stabbing and killing whoever they may.”

  The next day saw Reverend Gibson defending the Six Companies by making a strong rebuttal to Shaw’s testimony, although Shaw had really been criticizing the tong organizations of the Malay States. Gibson insisted that the Six Companies had no judicial or criminal power over Chinatown; their only control being the exit-ticket agreement with the Pacific Mail Steamship Company to prevent debtors fleeing from San Francisco. He acknowledged that the Chinese were great arbitrators and that the Six Companies often intervened in cases to settle a debt.

  Actually, said Gibson, “The Chinese companies are for mutual protection, to see to their countrymen arriving here and leaving, to arrange business matters, and to settle differences among themselves. The Chinese companies at the present time and since I have been in this country, so far as I know, have no criminal power and do not exercise any. The Six Companies so far as the people are concerned, are arbiters. When they cannot arbitrate a case, they go into courts.”