by H. W. Brands
In any event, on the intelligence thus acquired, Love and the Rangers trailed the bandits to a camp in the foothills of the Coast Range. They found a large herd of horses, including some that had been stolen, but initially no bandits. A Stockton paper, which had the story from one of Love’s men, reported what happened next:
Capt. Love was about sending the horses he had captured to the settlements, when he spied the smoke of a camp fire some three miles distant on the plains. The rangers proceeded immediately to the spot, and got within three or four hundred yards before they were perceived. Then there was a hurrying to and fro in the Mexican camp, some running for the horses which were picketed outside, others starting for their pistols which were near by. Capt. Love, however, galloped into the camp and stopped those who were after the horses, and interrogated them, each one of them giving him a different answer. By this time the main body of the rangers had arrived. As Capt. Burns entered the camp, he looked at the leader and cried exultingly, “This is Joaquin, boys; we have got him at last.”
At the mention of the word Joaquin, seeing that he was recognized, the Mexicans threw off their cloaks and serapes and commenced firing and retreating. Joaquin, himself, was unarmed, having evidently just been awakened from a sound sleep, and in his hurry to get his horse forgot his weapons. However, he made a bold dash for the animal, jumped upon him unsaddled, hastily threw his lariat over the animal’s nose and leaped down off the bluff, 14 or 15 feet in height, into the dry bed of the creek. One of the rangers followed him immediately down the bank and another down the side of the creek to cut him off. They had fired at him several times but without effect, and seeing that there was a danger of his escaping, they aimed at the animal and succeeded in bringing him down. Joaquin then commenced running, and had gone some thirty yards when he received two shots, and as he was falling cried No tire mas, yo soy muerte—Don’t shoot any more, for I’m dead. He immediately expired.
Love was fairly certain he had the right man—or right body, at this point. But in order to verify the identity of the deceased, for the dual purpose of reassuring the citizens of California and claiming the $1,000 bounty, he cut the head off Joaquín’s body and preserved it in a large jar filled with whiskey. He carried the head about the neighborhood of the robberies and murders, obtaining testimony from victims and others that this was indeed the terrible bandit leader. “There is not the least doubt that the head now in my possession is that of the noted Joaquín Murrieta, the chief and leader of the murderers and robbers of the Calavaras, Mariposa and other parts of the state,” he informed Governor Bigler.
Bigler and the legislature were convinced, at least sufficiently to pay out the reward. But others wondered. Crimes of violence continued in the southern mines, if on a somewhat diminished scale. Reports circulated that Joaquín had escaped and gone back to Sonora. The uncertainty added to a sense of romance that began to spring up around the bandit leader, especially among those with complaints against the status quo. Within a year an author named Yellow Bird, an unsuccessful gold-seeking son of a Cherokee chief, published a book called The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murrieta, the Celebrated California Bandit, which made Joaquín out to be the Robin Hood of El Dorado. (A book by that name—The Robin Hood of El Dorado—eventually entered the genre as well.)
As for the head in the jar, it did the rounds of the mining country, an object lesson in the wages of crime—or, alternatively, a relic of the martyred Mexican hero. It wound up on the shelf of a San Francisco museum, where it remained until 1906, when it was lost in the great earthquake and fire.
LIKE LATINOS, THE CHINESE of Gold Rush California suffered from the bigotry of the Anglo majority. But in the case of the Chinese, it was not always easy—and historically it may be beside the point—to distinguish racism from ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and plain incomprehension. Most Americans in the 1850s had scarcely a clue what to make of the Chinese. Prior to the Gold Rush, few Americans had ever encountered a Chinese outside the pages of Marco Polo; as a people, the Chinese seemed almost as exotic as Martians would have seemed to a later generation of Americans. The majority of Chinese, of course, were non-Christians, which made them immediately suspect in an era in America when even Catholics were eyed with suspicion. Many of the Chinese spoke little or no English, and although this by itself didn’t distinguish them from thousands of Chileans and Mexicans and French and Belgians in California, the Chinese language and especially the Chinese script appeared downright bizarre next to the tongues and orthography of Mother Europe. Chinese dress and tonsure—the long pigtails, or queues, evoked endless comment—made the Chinese recognizable at a distance. Their eating habits—they ate dog!— and their use of opium put additional distance between them and others in California. (The irony of despising the Chinese for using opium, which American merchants joined the British in selling to China, was lost on most Americans in California.) Finally, in an era when racial thinking was unabashed and nearly universal, most whites had no difficulty classing the Chinese as inherently inferior.
American stereotyping of the Chinese limited their opportunities as a group; yet at the same time, it enhanced the opportunities available to certain Chinese individuals. Yee Ah Tye was one of those so advantaged.
Not long after the immigration from China began, the Chinese in San Francisco organized into four associations, or houses. The associations corresponded to the regions from which the various Chinese emigrated, and new arrivals were easily sorted into the appropriate associations on the basis of their dialects. In some respects the associations acted much like the joint-stock companies of many of the other argonauts, with members pledging mutual protection and assistance. For the Chinese, a particular obligation of the associations was the return to China of the bones of any argonaut who died in America, that he might be honored by his descendants.
Partly because of his command of English, and partly because of an evident appreciation of power and its uses, Yee Ah Tye became the principal agent of the Sze Yup association not long after his arrival. The association agents represented the interests of the associations to the civic authorities; they also presided over disputes among association members. In this latter regard they sometimes acted extralegally but with the acquiescence of the authorities, forming a kind of vigilance committee for Chinese.
On occasion the leaders of the Chinese associations overstepped their bounds. A San Francisco grand jury registered its concern in a report on the Chinese situation:
We find in existence in this community a society of Chinese called the Four Great Houses, established for the purpose of forcing trade to their different establishments and to prevent passengers among their countrymen from purchasing tickets from any but themselves, and punishing with fines and the bastinado all who may transgress their laws. Several on this account were most cruelly beaten…. They have regular meetings, which are presided over by the heads of the four great houses, viz., Sam Wo, Ah Tie [Yee Ah Tye] and the two Ah Chings. They have posted up printed handbills in their own language and signed by themselves, forewarning all from transgressing their laws and threatening their punishment.
Yee was the most notorious of the association leaders. The San Francisco Herald called him a “would-be Mandarin” and a “petty despot” who “inflicted severe corporeal punishment upon many of his more humble countrymen… cutting off their ears, flogging them and keeping them chained for hours together.” The Alta California dubbed him a “Grand Inquisitor” who was “endeavoring to coerce his brethren into such measures as he may suggest and dictate.” Various reports indicated that Yee had put a bounty on the head of a Chinese who defied him; this man then sought protection from the civil authorities. Within a week, however, the Alta California explained that the quarrel had been “satisfactorily settled outside of the judicial tribunal.” In another case, Yee struck a deal directly with the court. Convicted of assault and battery, he was sentenced to five days in the city jail. But he appealed the sentence, posted bond of $1,
000, and was allowed to remain at large.
That he commanded this kind of money indicated that things were going well for him—whether by fair means or foul. (The California press wasn’t unbiased in reporting on Chinese affairs, but the direction of the bias in matters internal to the Chinese community was neither obvious nor consistent). Unfortunately for Yee and the Chinese community in general, their very success provoked the displeasure of many Americans. American miners repeatedly drove Chinese miners from the goldfields, as Tom Archer noted in Stockton. American workers constantly accused Chinese workers of stealing jobs and driving down wages. American politicians and editors regularly recommended barring the Chinese from California.
A specific proposal in 1852 to prevent Chinese immigration prompted a response from the association leaders. In an open letter to Governor John Bigler, a loud advocate of the measure, the leaders began by noting that in China “all great men are learned men, and a man’s rank is according to his education.” (Thomas Cary, no fan of Bigler’s, was moved to comment, “There is a delicate sarcasm in these remarks, for his Excellency John Bigler was as good a specimen of an illiterate pot-house politician as could be found in the ranks of Democracy anywhere between New York and San Francisco.”) The governor and others stereotyped the Chinese as “coolies”: contract laborers who worked for a pittance and thereby undermined the wages of honest Americans. The Chinese leaders answered the charge: “If you mean by ‘coolies,’ laborers, many of our countrymen in the mines are coolies, and many again are not. There are among them tradesmen, mechanics, gentry (being persons of respectability, and who enjoy a certain rank and privilege) and schoolmasters, who are reckoned with the gentry, and with us considered a respectable class of people. Some are coolies, if by that word you mean bound men or contract slaves.” But even the bound men came of their own free will. “The poor China man does not come here as a slave. He comes because of his desire for independence, and he is assisted by the charity of his countrymen, which they bestow on him safely because he is industrious and honestly repays them.”
The association leaders granted that Chinese ways weren’t the same as American ways. “But in the important matters we are good men. We honor our parents; we take care of our children; we are industrious and peaceable; we trade much; we are trusted for small and large sums; we pay our debts, and are honest, and of course must tell the truth.” Some Chinese intended to go back to China after making money in the goldfields; others would stay in California—if given the chance. “If the privileges of your laws are open to us, some of us will doubtless acquire your habits, your language, your ideas, your feelings, your morals, your forms, and become citizens of your country—many have already adopted your religion as their own—and we will be good citizens. There are very good China men now in the country, and better will, if allowed, come here after—men of learning, and of wealth, bringing their families with them.” The Americans shouldn’t pass laws against the Chinese. “Let us stay here—the Americans are doing good to us, and we will do good to them.”
13
Reflections in an All-Seeing Eye
When Daniel Webster declared, after passage of the Compromise of 1850, that the Union stood firm, the great orator was engaging in exhortation rather than description. The California compromise, far from soothing sectional passions, inflamed them. Many northerners were incensed by the opening of Utah and New Mexico to slavery, and were even more outraged by the Fugitive Slave Act, which compelled free-state complicity in the return of escaped slaves. “The consummation of the iniquities of the most disgraceful session of Congress,” Charles Francis Adams of Massachusetts called the compromise. Southerners were no less angry. Governor Whitemarsh Seabrook of South Carolina castigated the California compromise as “another triumph of the fell spirit of abolitionism.” Robert Rhett eulogized his and Seabrook’s fellow South Carolinian, John Calhoun—who died while the debate over the California compromise still raged—as the finest friend the Union ever had, which made it the more fitting that Calhoun died when he did, just after that final brilliant speech against the Clay package. “It was the last flash of the sun, to show the ship of State her only port of safety, as darkness and the howling tempest closed around her.” Had Calhoun lived long enough to see the compromise pass, Rhett asserted, he would have been forced to admit defeat in his defense of the South, and thereby defeat of the Union.
Clay and Webster followed Calhoun to the grave in 1852. The former succumbed to consumption, the latter to liver disease. Yet in a political sense, and certainly in a symbolic one, Clay and Webster were felled by the demons of sectionalism the fight over California unleashed. Their Whig party splintered, and the whole idea of compromise—the idea on which Webster and especially Clay had built their political careers—acquired an evil name. From the wreckage of the Whigs arose a new party, the Republicans, pledged to no more truckling to slavery—a pledge that in turn provoked southern vows to secede if the Republicans ever came to power.
Stephen Douglas thought he could tame the demons of sectionalism, or at least make them work to his benefit. California was rending the nation; California therefore should help bind the nation together—by ribbons of steel. Douglas sponsored a Pacific railroad, a line linking the East to California. The idea, of course, had tremendous appeal in California, where travelers to the East dearly desired to trim the monthlong journey via the isthmus—the route of choice by now—to a week or less by train. Yet the other states would benefit almost as much as California, in Douglas’s view at any rate. Both North and South would profit from easy access to California and its vast treasure, and in the joint benefit the two sections would rediscover the larger interests they held in common. A side effect of a transcontinental railroad would be the populating of the plains beyond the Missouri River; and when had the opening of new lands to settlement ever been bad for America? The fact that a railroad to California from Chicago, the obvious eastern terminus, would particularly benefit Illinois, including a certain Illinois senator with property in Chicago, was a happy accident. And if that statesman, who was now taking the lead in bestowing all these boons on his fellow Americans, were subsequently spoken of as a candidate for president, who was he to gainsay the wisdom of the American people?
Yet getting the railroad going was no small matter, even for one as shrewd as Douglas. Investors shrank from putting money into a political no-man’s-land; a precondition of construction was the political organization of the territory between the Missouri River and the Rockies. Under the terms of the Missouri Compromise, this territory should have been off limits to slavery, as it lay above the line of 36° 30′. But the Compromise of 1850 had gone far toward erasing that line, by allowing that Utah might one day enter the Union as a slave state. (Strictly speaking, the Missouri Compromise dealt only with the region east of the Rockies, but many had come to expect that the underlying principle would apply beyond the mountains.) Moreover, southerners were calling for the wholesale abrogation of the Missouri Compromise, which with hindsight they interpreted as a bad bargain. Douglas, who chaired the Senate committee on territories, lacked the votes to organize Nebraska, as the trans-Missouri region was called, without some southern support. That support might be won, but at a price: repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and hence the opening of the new territory to slavery. David Atchison of Missouri spoke for many southerners when he said he’d see Nebraska “sink in hell” before he’d vote to organize it as a free territory.
The southerners had additional leverage against Douglas. Employing the reports of John (and Jessie) Frémont against the Pathfinder, they argued that a northern railroad route to California was impractical. Hadn’t Frémont himself nearly perished in the snow? A California railroad, they said, should traverse the southern portion of the Mexican cession, where the mountains were lower and the winters less severe. (The deserts were harsher, but this was chiefly a problem for livestock of flesh and blood, not iron horses.) To bolster their position they persuaded t
he administration of Franklin Pierce to purchase a parcel of land from Mexico—the Gadsden Purchase—which held the key to the southern route.
They may have been bluffing, for the southern route entered California far from the goldfields and the important cities of the state. Yet if they were bluffing, the bluff worked. Douglas introduced a bill organizing Nebraska into two territories—Nebraska in the north and Kansas in the south—without regard to slavery. The measure also repealed the Missouri Compromise.
Douglas guessed that his bill would “raise a hell of a storm,” but even he had no idea of the tempest he was loosing. Northern editors savaged the Douglas bill; from several northern states “anti-Nebraska” meetings sent petitions and resolutions to Congress. “This crime shall not be consummated,” said one, characteristic of most. “Despite corruption, bribery, and treachery, Nebraska, the heart of our continent, shall forever continue free.” A Whig senator from Maine, William Fessenden, called the Douglas bill “a terrible outrage,” and added, “The more I look at it the more outraged I become. It needs but little to make me an out & out abolitionist.”
But the Whigs were a dying breed, as the canny Douglas knew. And the Kansas-Nebraska bill finished them off. On the vote, in the spring of 1854, northern Whigs unanimously rejected the bill while southern Whigs voted strongly in favor. Douglas and the Democratic leadership meanwhile enforced something much closer to party discipline (a majority of northern Democrats joined nearly all southern Democrats in favor), and the bill became law.
This made matters only worse. By leaving the future of slavery in Kansas and Nebraska in the hands of settlers in those territories, Congress guaranteed a bitter contest between free-soilers and slavery men there. The battle centered in Kansas, whose eastern districts looked much like Missouri in terms of climate and terrain that might support slavery. (Douglas’s decision to divide Kansas from Nebraska seemed to many an implicit offer of Kansas to the South, with Nebraska reserved to the North.) The contest quickly turned bloody. “Since there is no escaping your challenge,” William Seward of New York told his southern colleagues in the Senate, “I accept it in behalf of the cause of freedom. We will engage in competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and God give the victory to the side which is stronger in numbers as it is in right.” The slavery men in turn accepted Seward’s challenge, supporting hundreds of pro-slavery settlers who streamed into Kansas from Missouri. For some of the southerners, the campaign against the free-soilers elicited memories of an earlier crusade. “We will be compelled to shoot, burn & hang, but the thing will soon be over,” Missouri senator Atchison told Jefferson Davis of Mississippi. “We intend to ‘Mormonize’ the abolitionists.”
