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

by Dillon, Richard

  Farwell reported to his board that for weeks police had had to be stationed at each end of Chinatown’s alleys at night to search all passers-by and relieve them of concealed weapons. Of the tongs themselves, Farwell repeated the charges of the two committees which had sat nine years earlier, ending: “They exercise a despotic sway over one-seventh of the population.” He placed much of the earlier testimony back in the record.

  For all his fanaticism, Farwell was wise enough to know that it would be difficult for much of the Chinese population to be strictly law abiding in the American sense. To some extent he excused them of deliberately superseding local and State authority, because the American system was alien to them. “The race is one which cannot readily throw off its habits and customs,” he admitted. “The fact that these customs are so widely at variance with our own makes the enforcement of our laws and compulsory obedience of our laws necessarily obnoxious and revolting to the Chinese.”

  Farwell’s report and map of crime and vice in Chinatown was indicative of a trend away from the laissez-faire policy of policing the Chinese districts, and symptomatic of a future get-tough policy. By the close of the ’80s, the police would be fighting fire with fire, roughing up highbinders and suspected highbinders, breaking up crowds and smashing lodge halls. But before this drastic program was implemented the police found some new allies in a strange quarter. The women of the Protestant missionary societies made possible a two-pronged attack on one of the foundation stones of tong power—the institution of Chinese slave girls.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Slave Girls

  “Women are bought and sold in Chinatown every day and we have not been able to prevent it. Cannot anyone suggest a plan to remedy the evil?”

  —Margaret Culbertson, Director, Presbyterian Chinese Mission House, 1896

  ONE OF THE numerous puritanical admonitions of the Hung League ritual was “Drink clear and pure water; touch not the wine of brothels.” This decree fell into complete disuse among the tong inheritors of Hung tradition in old San Francisco. Countless gallons of sam shu and bok jow sluiced the throats of highbinders who were never loath to repair to their neighborhood brothel. There was always a house just around the corner. At the time of the Spanish-American war there were over 400 singsong girls in the Chinese Quarter. Yet they could not keep up with the citywide demand for their services, much less fill the requirements of the State at large. The disreputable houses, together with gambling dens, constituted a firm economic base for the fighting tongs. There was such a need for harlots in the hinterland that Chinatown’s girls—on the rare occasions when they were allowed to parade the streets in their slit-skirted cheongsams—-were sometimes kidnapped in broad daylight. They were even hijacked from their cribs under the very noses of their masters, in order to be rushed inland to womenless agricultural or mining Chinatowns. In just one week of February, 1898, eight such incidents took place. Decent women, including wives of prominent businessmen, were not exempt from the highbinders’ forays. In one of the most terrifying kidnappings, hatchet men who had taken a merchant’s wife to Tracy, deliberately slashed her face and disfigured her for life as police closed in on them. Singsong girls who thought that they had reached safety in the Presbyterian or Methodist Missions were recaptured from these havens by force or legal chicanery. Sergeant William Price of the Chinatown squad said of the hatchet men, “They even fool the missions. They get a Chinaman to go up and marry a girl from the mission. Then they sell her to someone else.” In the most daring raid of the age a girl was stolen from the upstairs window of the Presbyterian Mission.

  Usually the highbinders preferred trickery to violence when up against their missionary foes. They became most adept at concocting charges which caused the arrest of fleeing girls. As soon as the singsong girls were “safe” in jail they were repossessed by their masters who simply posted their bail and marched them back to more years of slavery under lock and key.

  A case of this nature which concluded differently from most occurred in the summer of 1896. Officer McGrayan was startled to see a handsome young girl in Oriental costume running down Clay Street, blowing a police whistle as she ran. He followed and managed to coax her from under a restaurant table where she had taken refuge. No sooner had he done so than he found himself surrounded by shouting and gesticulating highbinders who claimed that the girl was drunk. As they jabbered at him to hold his attention some of their companions surreptitiously seized the girl and began to drag her back to Fish Alley. Suddenly the prostitute broke away. She ran to the policeman, fell on her knees, and threw both arms around his legs. As she clung to the startled officer she piteously begged him to save her. McGrayan was quite touched by the girl’s desperation, and tried to lead her away. But now the toughs changed their tactics and assaulted him while they tried to tear the girl from his grasp. In the scuffle the girl lost both shoes and had most of her clothes torn off. But the highbinders could not get her away from the Irishman. The crowd which formed around her protector demanded that the prostitute be taken to California Street station and booked as a drunk. The battle was becoming too much for the lone officer, so he made a pretense of agreeing. But instead of taking her to the precinct house for booking and the usual bailing out by her oppressors, McGrayan took her to Margaret Culbertson at the Presbyterian Mission. For once, the highbinders were thwarted. But most girls were not that fortunate in finding a protector, even when they made their escapes to the streets.

  When slave girls had safely reached either of the two missions, the hatchet men sent police with warrants for their arrest, charging them with the theft of the jewelry they wore, actually baubles given them by visitors or their owners—the very complainants. Attorneys were frequently duped into lending their services to distortion and corruption of the law. Patrick Mogan was one example. He was supposedly hired to defend two of the “maculate females” on theft charges. Actually the bagnio operators had no intention of letting the girls come to trial. Henry Monroe, attorney for the Presbyterian Mission, warned the court of this and explained the old, sure-fire, bail-posting scheme of the highbinders; and Mogan found himself with no clients to defend. The lawyer did not appreciate being used in this fashion and he told the judge, “When Mr. Monroe made that crack in court today, that’s the first I knew about the story. If he’d come and told me that last Friday, I might have taken a different stand. All I can say is, if I’d known these things at first, I wouldn’t have had anything to do with the case.” But the eyes of Mogan and the judge were opened too late. The girls were gone, and for good.

  An agent of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children uncovered one avenue of supply of prostitutes when he raided a bordello on Bartlett Alley. There he rescued Toy Gum, a pretty little fifteen year old. He learned that she had been brought to the United States supposedly to dance in the Chinese pavilion at the Atlanta Fair. (Donaldina Cameron found this same trick was worked during the Omaha Exposition of 1889.) Toy Gum’s theatrical career had been brevity itself. She was quickly sold into slavery, and just before being saved she had been sold to Wong Fook third hand for a neat $2,000. This was very good money. The going rate was far less. Kem Ying, brought to San Francisco from Portland by a pair of chaperoning highbinders, went on the block that year for $500, and Don Sun Yet brought a mere $350.

  The men and women who struggled to eliminate the nefarious trade in prostitutes fought the highbinders with some of their own tactics. Kem Ying’s cousin had her arrested on a vagrancy charge in order to secure her escape. Minnie Brown smuggled Ah Yoke into the outbound steamer Peru as a stowaway to guarantee her getaway from the tong men watching the Embarcadero. But the chief weapon of the anti-vice crusaders was the raid. Violence often had to be met with violence. Police officers sometimes had to shoot their way into or out of a building in order to rescue slave girls kept prisoners by hatchet men.

  The long crusade against Chinatown’s slave traders was
that part of the bigger general battle against the tongs which really seized the public’s imagination. It was not just another vice drive. The prostitutes were of exotic dress and features. Many of them were frail, childlike creatures. Indeed, most of them were of very tender years. Most important was the fact that a great number of the girls were unwilling captives of brutal masters—they were slaves in a very real sense. These girls had been entrapped into the oldest profession and they wanted to get out of it. Many were tricked into sailing for San Francisco by promises of quick marriages to rich merchants. Others were kidnapped. Even those who came with their eyes open, under signed contracts, soon found that their owners did not intend to abide by the terms of the documents. There was no way out of the business for the girls but death unless they could somehow escape to the sanctuary of either the Presbyterian or Methodist Mission Asylum. An old Chinatown hand, Police Officer David Supple, testifying in one of the several Government investigations of the Quarter, was asked, “Is it possible for these women to escape that life?” His answer was, “Sometimes the chief of police can give some protection, but it is customary for the owners to charge them with crimes in order to get possession of them again. Sometimes they kidnap them, and even unscrupulous white men have been found to assist them.” “Do you know what they do with them when they become sick or helpless?” Supple was asked. “Yes, they put them out on the street to die.”

  Often a real attachment would develop between a girl and one of her customers and she would run away with him. The brothel owners in some cases had the temerity to appeal to American courts for repossession of their property. More often they just turned the case over to the hatchet men of the tong. The flesh importers threw a lot of business to the boo how doy of the Temple of United Justice, the Hip Yee tong particularly. About $40 a head was paid on girls imported, and a small but steady weekly consideration was also bled from the earnings of the girls and given to the hatchet men once they were set up in San Francisco. Part of this money went to line the pockets of friendly policemen. Some of these protectors of the law were obliging to the point of standing guard over newly arrived girls to see that they did not escape from the barracoon (the detention house or so-called Queen’s Room) where they awaited bidders. Officer Andrew McKenzie testified that one such officer was James R. Rogers.

  There was no Donaldina Cameron to rescue the white girls of Chinatown. The Caucasians were slaves in only the most poetic sense. They had matriculated into their lucrative calling voluntarily. The do-gooders realized this, and drives in this area were simply to banish the girls. Groups like the Society for the Suppression of Vice urged that the evil be eradicated, but they had no plans for rehabilitating the girls once Brooklyn Alley was transformed into an economically depressed area.

  The prostitutes of such sinful thoroughfares as Stout’s Alley or Ross Alley were a mixed lot. The problems caused by the Caucasian women were not intimately related to crime among the Chinese, but unfortunately they did much to help give the Quarter a bad name. Two of San Francisco’s most notorious homicides took place in Chinatown and involved white girls—Celina Boudet and Jennie French. The former was murdered by her paramour, while the latter got her boy friend to shoot down a harmless German.

  The singsong girls picked up American slang and customs from such denizens of Chinatown’s back alleys as Jennie French. They even copied the decor in Caucasian parlor-houses, and visitors to Stout’s Alley were surprised to find Chinese harlots’ walls hung with Currier and Ives prints. The idea of escape and liberty was perhaps germinated for the poor Chinese girls by their free white co-professionals. This influence weakened their fatalistic acceptance of their lot. It would be wrong to make ministering angels of San Francisco’s white prostitutes, but they did play some little part in the undoing of the strict system of harlotry-slavery, if only by opening the singsong girls’ eyes to the possibility of escape and freedom.

  The Protestant missionaries in Chinatown did a magnificent job. However, they accomplished more in sociology than in religion. Baptists and Congregationalists had led the way with early missions in Chinatown, and the Episcopalians called a Chinese minister back from Ohio and Pennsylvania to preach in the Quarter. But the two major Christian outposts of nineteenth-century Chinatown were the Methodist and Presbyterian Missions, each of which boasted an Asylum for Rescued Prostitutes. They built upon the work already done by the law-abiding majority of the Chinese community. In the very early days of statehood, representatives of the merchants and other respected people of Chinatown had protested against the importation of loose women of the so-called “boat-people” class. But the city and State each turned its good ear from them, and the lucrative business continued to prosper. Not until 1870 was satisfactory evidence required of female immigrants that they were of good character and morals and that they came to California of their own free will.

  By the outbreak of the Civil War, prostitutes made up three-fourths of all arrests of Chinese in San Francisco. That year saw 160 girls actually convicted in police court. The great majority were not even caught. Some forfeited their bail and went right back to “business as usual.” In the mid-’60s the city set up a “house” of its own, but without visiting privileges. This was called the Little Jail, which it was. It was a calabozo restricted to oriental prostitutes. In 1866 there were more in than out; almost 90 were locked up and a mere 50 were left at large. This little jail was part of an ambitious campaign of the city fathers to remove all bagnios and their occupants to the suburbs. The supervisors passed the ordinance but it was thwarted by the State Legislature’s enactment of a Chinese House of 111 Fame Bill. This was a completely ineffectual piece of legislation but it did take the wind out of supervisorial sails. The resulting calm proved to be a lasting one, and Ross Alley never did move to Burlingame or Kent Woodlands.

  When a committee of the California Legislature investigated Chinatown in 1862, in one of the first of several official safaris through the district, the body praised the action of the Six Companies in regard to organized prostitution. The committee commended them for their attempts to send abandoned women home to China but lamented that these efforts had been largely frustrated by the pleas of vested interests that America was a free country and that Chinese women could do as they pleased.

  Actually the girls had no say in the matter. They were treated as chattels. A correspondent for Blackwood’s Magazine in England was appalled by the slave-girl traffic in San Francisco. He could find nothing to parallel it, not even the worst features of Tokyo’s Yoshiwara district. Perhaps he had been given a look at the barracoon. It was situated underneath the joss house which fronted on St. Louis Alley and which ran through to Dupont Street. Here girls were stripped of their clothing and put up for bid. Those who resisted could be identified easily by the black-and-blue marks on their bodies from bamboo staves wielded by their highbinder masters. The most recalcitrant sometimes bore the sears of hot irons. But few were ever killed; they were too valuable for that, being worth up to $3,000 each. When old they were turned into cooks. Once in a while a pimp might kill his girl in a rage if she refused him money. This is exactly why little Toy Gun was shot three times by her master. Other murders of prostitutes remained complete mysteries, though many of them were probably crimes of passion. There was the case of Quee Sing. A highbinder walked up the stairs of Wong Ah Gum’s Dupont Street brothel, stopped at the head of the staircase, poked a pistol barrel through the wicket and shot Quee Sing in the mouth. Quickly but quietly the man slipped downstairs and melted into the crowd, although police officers were on the scene in two minutes. Quee Sing’s companion had been blinded by the pistol flash. There were no other witnesses to the murder and no clues. The murderer was never found.

  According to two influential Chinese who called on the editor of the San Francisco Bulletin in 1873, Hip Yee highbinders began the prostitution traffic in 1852. Two years later the Six Companies tried to stop it but failed.
Another try was partially successful and a handful of singsong girls were turned around and sent back to Hong Kong without being able to land in San Francisco. But shortly after the Civil War the Hip Yees stepped up production from their headquarters in Choy “Poy’s Jackson Street restaurant. Under new management, the tong membership jumped from 50 to 300. An elite corps of hatchet men was formed and equipped to fight a war against any Celestials who dared to interfere in the slave-girl traffic. Soon respectable Chinese, who at first had protested against the traffic, feared the terrible revenge of the slave dealers. Newspapers estimated that the Hip Yee tong imported 6,000 women between 1852 and 1873, and netted $200,000 from the illegitimate traffic.

  Mayor-Bryant loudly condemned Chinese prostitution but his words rang a little hollow. One of the presidents of the Six Companies remarked pointedly to him, “Yes, yes, Chinese prostitution is bad. But what do you think of German prostitution, French prostitution and American prostitution? Do you think them very good?” Since San Francisco was a wide-open town, there was little the mayor could say in answer. Occasionally Bryant or some other occupant of city hall made a big show of clamping down on Chinese houses of ill fame. Police measures of the ’70s were particularly ludicrous, however. To “check” prostitution, courtesans were forbidden to stand in the open doorways of their dens. One policeman was heard to scold a prostitute, “You must close your front door. You may invite as many people as you please through your window, but I can’t let you stand in the door any more.” But the girls were permitted eight- to ten-inch openings in their doors, with movable slides to allow them to maintain good public relations.