by H. W. Brands
I may have slept a quarter of an hour, when I was awakened by loud cries in the street: “Fire, fire,” and by the awful sounds of the alarm-bell. I sprang up in all haste and, looking out the window, I saw that a frame building only 20 or 30 paces from the Union Hotel was on fire. I dressed in all haste and ran out of the house, but scarcely had I reached the end of Clay Street when I saw already the hotel on fire from which I had just run out. Pushed on by a complete gale, the fire spread with an appalling rapidity, sweeping away in a few minutes whole streets of frame buildings.
Neither the iron houses nor the brick houses (which were hitherto considered as quite fireproof) could resist the fury of the element: the latter crumbled together with incredible rapidity, whilst the former got red-hot, then white-hot and fell together like cardhouses. Particularly in the iron houses people considered themselves perfectly safe, and they remained in them to the last extremity. As soon as the walls of the iron houses got red-hot, the goods inside began to smoke. The inhabitants wanted to get out, but usually it was already too late, for the locks and hinges of the doors having extended or partly melted by the heat, the doors were no more to be opened.
Jessie Frémont smelled the smoke about the time she heard the shouts and alarm bells. Her husband fetched blankets and a grass hammock on which his wife and namesake might be evacuated if necessary (Lily was expected to run). He then organized the servants and some neighbors into an emergency crew that hung water-soaked carpets and canvas over the sides of the house. A fortuitous shift of wind aided their efforts, and although the fire did more damage than any of the previous ones—dozens of people were killed, and the entire business district was destroyed—the Frémonts’ home was spared.
Almost unbelievably, yet another fire broke out the following month. This time the Frémonts weren’t so lucky. Jessie and Lily watched from the window as the fire companies battled the flames, which seemed to be moving away from the Frémont home. A sudden reversal of wind took all by surprise. A maid grabbed the baby and seized Lily by the arm, and raced away. A manservant scooped up Jessie and carried her off as the first sparks fluttered down onto the roof. Taking refuge with a neighbor, Jessie encountered a Frenchwoman who had likewise only just escaped the flames, and was nearly in shock. “Her wild fevered gaze was fixed on her burning home,” Jessie recalled. “Suddenly, with a crazy laugh, she rose and offered me her seat—‘C’est votre tour, Madame; your house goes next,’ she said.” And so it did.
John Frémont had returned to the Mariposa after the May 4 fire, relieved that his family had survived unharmed; on hearing of another fire he saddled his swiftest horse and raced back to San Francisco. When he saw the smoldering ruins of his house he naturally feared the worst. Only after some frantic searching did he find Jessie and the children, lodged with a friend among the sand dunes behind the city.
Jessie put on a brave face, but the destruction of her home was a jolting reminder of how unsettled life in this new country could be. The gold from the Mariposa continued to pour in, but all their money couldn’t buy them the most basic form of security. “It is more disagreeable than you can realize without the experience, to be burnt out,” she confided to a friend, several weeks after the fire. She was grateful that the servants and some neighbors had managed to save most of the family’s irreplaceable personal items. “Still, the new house was a sudden unchosen place, and I felt shipwrecked.”
AS SAN FRANCISCANS REBUILT yet again, they took two lessons from the fires. The first was that fire prevention was something absolutely essential to stable civic life. Reconstruction after the sixth fire went more slowly than before; new buildings featured solid brick walls up to three feet thick, iron shutters and doors with sufficient play to allow for expansion, and large rooftop tanks of water piped to allow dowsing of the premises at the first spark. As a result, although the corporate seal of the city still sported the mythic Phoenix, the bird got a rest during the next few years.
The second lesson was that not all those fires were accidents. The frequency of the blazes, and especially the fact that the May fire of 1851 occurred on the exact anniversary of the May fire of 1850, inclined many San Franciscans to smell arson in the smoke. Fire may have been the city’s foremost problem, but crime came a close second.
Yet it was a problem the city was slow to confront, for reasons related to the gold fever but also to the demographic diversity of San Francisco. Crime initially concentrated in parts of the city frequented by foreigners, leaving the American majority to go about their business unmolested. Only when the transgressions touched closer to home did they take notice.
Vicente Pérez Rosales experienced the process personally. With his fellow Chileans, Pérez felt the hostility many Americans directed toward foreigners, who were accused of stealing wealth—that is, gold—that ought to be reserved to citizens of the United States. The hostility prompted recurrent efforts to keep foreigners out of the goldfields, ranging from a foreign- miners’ tax to physical intimidation. The xenophobia was far from universal; merchants like Sam Brannan and mine owners looking for cheap help were happy for immigration from any source. But the antiforeign feeling persisted among those who suffered from the competition.
As it applied to the Chileans—and other Latin Americans, with whom the Chileans were casually lumped—the xenophobia gave rise to a belief that Chileans lay behind much of what went wrong in California. One day Pérez Rosales’s compatriot álvarez—the one who led the abortive mutiny on the Stanguéli—happened to be near a group of Americans who lost a shovel; the Americans accused álvarez of theft, calling him, for good measure, a “son of a nigger.” álvarez spoke no English, and the Americans no Spanish, but when they wrapped a rope around his neck and threw the loose end over a tree limb, their meaning became clear.
Pérez Rosales reached the scene of the hanging at this critical juncture, and reckoned desperately how he might save his shipmate. Knowing that Americans respected Frenchmen more than Chileans, and guessing that these rowdies couldn’t tell a Chilean accent from a French one, he cast himself as a countryman of the immortal Lafayette. He declared that álvarez was the only protector the French in Chile ever had, that álvarez had once saved him from death, and that surely the Americans would wish to honor the memory of the Revolutionary War hero by sparing álvarez now.
The ploy worked, and álvarez was set free. But the Chileans continued to encounter trouble. Their skill in the goldfields earned them the resentment of their neighbors, who by force and other means drove them off the best claims and in many cases out of the diggings entirely. A sizable contingent returned to San Francisco, some to try their hand at commerce there, most to seek passage home. (One enterprising Chilean merchant named Wenceslao Urbistondo set the pattern for what became a striking feature of San Francisco’s urban topography. Urbistondo owned a ship that had been abandoned by its crew and was now hemmed in by a hundred others likewise marooned. Realizing that the ship had become, for all intents and purposes, a permanent part of the landscape, he made it even more so. He felled his masts to build a bridge to shore, effectively extending the street that had ended at the waterfront. Other shipowners followed his example, and eventually dirt and sand were hauled in to fill the spaces between the hulks. Soon Yerba Buena Cove began disappearing beneath the advancing city.)
By midsummer of 1849 about a thousand Chileans, joined by a smaller number of Peruvians and Mexicans, formed a colony at Clark’s Point, just north of the cove. Their reputation as gold miners preceded them, and they were generally believed to be richer than the run of their neighbors. The larcenous among San Francisco’s inhabitants eyed them hungrily.
Leading the larcenous was a band of rowdies called the “Hounds.” The hard core of this gang were Mexican War veterans from New York who had been mustered out in California and hadn’t returned home. Several of the Hounds had been schooled in the notorious Five Points and Bowery gangs of New York City, and they established headquarters in a large tent they dubb
ed “Tammany Hall.” Claiming to be a mutual defense association (hence the name they subsequently adopted: “Regulators”), they in fact preyed upon their neighbors, especially the Chileans.
For a time their depredations went unheeded by San Francisco’s honest folk. Thomas Cary, one of those honest folk, pondered this tolerance for crime.
It will be asked why the more respectable part of the community did not exert themselves to put a stop to these proceedings. The answer is simple. The influential citizens, the merchants, lawyers and others, lived around what had been known as Yerba Buena Cove, while the Mexicans and Chileans lived at the back of the town among the sand-hills. They, therefore, knew little of what was going on out of sight and out of hearing. Everyone was too much interested in his own affairs to trouble himself about the misfortunes of others, and besides this, the Spanish-Americans were looked upon at that time very much as the Chinese are at the present moment [Cary was writing in the 1880s], as interlopers who should properly have been sent back to their own country, and these “Hounds,” or “Regulators” as they now called themselves, professed to be the guardians of the community against the encroachments of all foreigners.
With no one else to look out for them, the Chileans looked out for themselves. “Compliant in their own country,” Pérez Rosales explained of his compatriots, “Chileans cease to be so abroad, even in the face of a pistol aimed at their hearts, provided only they can lay hand on the knife at their belts.” Pérez added that the Chileans “detested the Americans, whom they constantly averred to be cowards.”
In late June 1849 two young men linked to the Hounds entered the shop of a Chilean merchant. Employing a favorite tactic, they began quarreling with the shopkeeper over a debt they said he owed them, and which he denied owing. As their attempted extortion grew louder and more threatening, the shopkeeper pulled a pistol. One of the pair tried to grab the gun; the other headed for the door. In the struggle for the pistol, the weapon went off and the fleeing man was shot. He died the next day.
The Hounds proclaimed their intention of bringing the murderous Chileans to account. Contriving a set of ill-matched military uniforms, they began parading and drilling. During the first two weeks of July, tensions between Americans and Chileans escalated sharply.
On July 15 a company of the Hounds crossed the bay to Contra Costa for additional drilling and marching. On their return, the company leader, a man named Sam Roberts—who, as it happened, had lived in Valparaiso and shipped aboard a Chilean man-of-war—discovered his Chilean girlfriend, a prostitute appropriately named Felice, entertaining another man. Roberts viciously assaulted the fellow, beating him with his riding whip and raking his face with his spur. Roberts then returned to Tammany Hall and summoned reinforcements for a general venting against the Chileans. For the rest of that day and into the night, the gangsters marauded through Clark’s Point, breaking, burning, looting, shooting, slashing. Several people were wounded; at least one died.
This orchestrated anarchy finally aroused the American community of San Francisco. Leading the response was Sam Brannan, who had expanded his mercantile operations to San Francisco, and who now called for stern measures against the Hounds. “Boiling with indignation,” as Pérez Rosales described Brannan, “he strode up to the roof of his house and shouted for the town to gather below. Briefly and energetically he asserted that it was high time to make an example of the perpetrators of these unheard-of outrages against the citizens of a friendly nation that daily exported to San Francisco not only the finest flour, but the best hands in the world at making bricks!” More than two hundred citizens answered Brannan’s call. Armed with their own weapons and with sixty muskets supplied by one of Brannan’s merchant allies, the posse went after the Hounds, arresting twenty, including Sam Roberts.
Another public meeting, at Portsmouth Square, nominated and elected two judges to try the cases. A prosecutor was appointed and a grand jury empaneled. Roberts was convicted of conspiracy, riot, robbery, and assault with intent to kill. Eight others were convicted on one or more of the same counts. Roberts and a second man were sentenced to ten years at hard labor; the rest received lesser sentences.
For various reasons, starting with the lack of a prison but including a feeling that popular justice had made its point by the arrests and convictions, Roberts and the other prisoners never served their sentences. Yet the Brannan-led crackdown broke the strength of the Hounds as an organized gang and was widely interpreted as a positive precedent.
A PRECEDENT IT WAS, but hardly a solution. The decline of the Hounds simply made room for other thugs, including a gang of Australians known as the Sydney Ducks, or Sydney Coves, who by 1850 had a reputation worse than the Hounds’. To some extent the Australians’ evil name owed to their country’s history as the outdoor prison for British felons, but to some extent it was honestly—which was to say, dishonestly—earned in California. Frank Soulé explained the Australians’ preeminence in crime:
The voyage from Sydney to San Francisco was neither a very tedious nor an expensive one; and great numbers of “ticket-of-leave” men and old convicts who had “served their time,” early contrived to sail for California. There the field seemed so rich and safe for a resumption of their quondam pranks that they yielded to the temptation, and forthwith began to execute villainies that in magnitude and violent character far exceeded those for which they had been originally convicted. Callous in conscience, they feared nothing save the gallows.
But that they had little reason to dread in merciful, gentle, careless California, where prosecutors and witnesses were few, or too busy to attend to the calls of justice; where jurors, not knowing the law, and eager to be at money-making again, were apt to take hasty charges from the bench as their sole rule of conduct; where judges, chosen by popular election, were either grossly ignorant of law, or too timid or careless, corrupt or incapable, to measure out the full punishment of crime; and where the laws themselves had not yet been methodically laid down, and the forms and procedure of legal tribunals digested into a plain, unerring system.
The center of the Australian criminal activity was the “Sydney Town” district between Broadway and Pacific Streets. Saloons and brothels were the principal establishments of the neighborhood; prostitutes and professional gamblers (by no means all of them from Australia) were the primary entrepreneurs. In this congenial atmosphere the Sydney Ducks plied their criminal trade. Armed robbery was a daily occurrence; resistance often resulted in murder. Decent men and women weren’t safe in the district at any hour of day or night. When the police dared to enter, they did so only en masse and retreated quickly to their fortified station houses.
As in the case of the Hounds, the American community initially ignored the Ducks. But when the Australian gangsters began roaming beyond Sydney Town, committing burglaries in the neighboring districts, the prominent merchants and their friends were forced to take notice. And when evidence relating to the great fires pointed to Australian complicity—with the Ducks profiting by plunder and looting amid the general confusion of the fires—these city fathers felt compelled to take action.
They were urged on by the city mothers. As San Francisco continued to evolve—from the caravansary of 1849 to the commercial hub of 1851— its permanent population continued to grow. Merchants, artisans, and professionals made the city their home, and many brought their wives and children (typically via the isthmus, where the anarchic crossing conditions of 1849 had been replaced by relatively reliable transit service). As the ladies took up residence, they smoothed off some of the city’s rough edges and contributed to an expansion of cultural opportunities. Thomas Cary described what had changed—and what hadn’t:
With the families came a sense of home-life, and the general reck lessness which had been a marked feature in the early days was be ginning to disappear. The gambling houses were still open to the public, and did a thriving trade, but were not, as formerly, frequented by all classes of men, many of whom went there becau
se there was nowhere else to go. There were theatrical entertainments and concerts, not terribly good, to be sure, but affording amusement to those who for a long time had seen no other tragedy than a street-fight with pistols, or heard better music than a brass- band in a gambling saloon.
The comforts of life, and of good living, had also improved very much, both in private houses and in restaurants. Farmers and gardeners had found they could make more money by digging for vegetables and raising fruit than they could get by prospecting for gold at the “diggings.” The absurdly high prices which had formerly been charged were reduced to what at the time appeared to be quite reasonable, and strangers from Europe or the Atlantic States were surprised to find, together with the activity and bustle of a western city, all the luxury and gayety of a highly civilized metropolis.
This, however, was the bright side of the picture. The continued increase of crime in San Francisco made it evident to every thinking man that the time was not far distant when self- preservation would make it necessary for the people to assert their rights and take the law into their own hands.
The anniversary fire of May 1851 prompted these thinking men to reenage the engines of popular justice. In early June a self-appointed association styling itself the Committee of Vigilance adopted a charter pledging its members to “the maintenance of the peace and good order of society, and the preservation of the lives and property of the citizens of San Francisco.” The members bound themselves to uphold the law and back the legal authorities. “But we are determined,” they added significantly, “that no thief, burglar, incendiary or assassin shall escape punishment, either by the quibbles of the law, the insecurity of prisons, the carelessness or corruption of the police, or a laxity of those who pretend to administer justice.”
