Eternity Street

by John Mack Faragher

  Olegario insisted that the Luiseños still held legal title to their homeland, that it had never been ceded to the United States. Through the influence of Anglo friends, he traveled to Washington, D.C., where he met with President Ulysses S. Grant, who issued an executive order establishing reservations at the sites of several small rancherías. But the struggle was far from over. Some of those reservations were later disestablished and the residents forcibly removed from their homes and the graves of their ancestors.

  In 1877, when several hundred acres of prime Luiseño grazing land came under threat of confiscation, Olegario organized his followers to protect them. The land had been leased by Antonio María “Chino” Varela, son of the late José Sérbulo Varela, former Manilla gangster and Confederate war veteran, who had lost a leg while in service to the South. When Varela and his vaqueros arrived with a herd of several hundred sheep, they were met by Olegario and sixty well-armed men, who escorted them off the property. Varela filed a complaint with the local justice, who issued a warrant for Olegario, but the Indians expelled the constable who came to arrest him. A few days later, however, Olegario died in his sleep. The protest collapsed and Varela took possession. The local press reported the cause as apoplexy or heart disease, but Olegario’s followers claimed their leader had been poisoned.

  The Luiseños continued to suffer from encroachments on their homelands. “These Indians have been badly treated and are subjects of sympathy,” wrote the editor of the San Diego Union, but “sympathy for the Indians that ignores the right of white property-holders and settlers is the most pernicious thing that can befall the Indians, for the effect is only to postpone action that alone can save them from going to the wall in a hopeless contest with an advancing civilization.”

  IN THE MEANTIME cheap Indian labor was being replaced by cheap Chinese labor. The growth of the Chinese community—like the surging demand for real estate or the expansion of the domestic fuel market—was another vital indicator of economic activity. Chinese men began moving to the pueblo in significant numbers during the postwar boom. The 1870 census counted 234 Chinese in the county, and 172 in the city, a snapshot of a rapidly expanding community. They came to California with the intention of working, saving, and returning home with a pile of money, a motive widely shared by immigrants of all backgrounds. Attracted to Los Angeles by expanding prospects for employment, they found work as domestics and cooks, farmworkers and common laborers, the kind of low-wage jobs formerly filled by emancipados.

  Some brought entrepreneurial skills. Chinese farmers grew vegetables for the domestic market on leased land south of the city, and Chinese vegetable peddlers—their baskets suspended from long bamboo shoulder yokes—soon were a common sight in all neighborhoods. Chinese laundrymen opened the first commercial laundries in the early 1860s and quickly dominated the business, by 1871 operating eleven of the city’s thirteen washhouses and employing a quarter of its Chinese residents. A cigar factory, an herb shop, and a restaurant were among other commercial ventures Chinese entrepreneurs aimed at Angelenos. Because Chinese names were recorded in various and inconsistent ways, it is virtually impossible to track the owners of these enterprises. In 1870 the census enumerator recorded most Chinese in Los Angeles by given name only, often with the addition of the honorific title Ah, in the original Cantonese conveying intimacy or affection, but in the way it was employed by Americans a term of estrangement, effectively erasing individual identity. One of the few men listed by his complete name was physician Chee Long Tong (or, in the correct sequence, with family name first, Tong Chee Long), who established a traditional Chinese medical practice and treated a number of Anglo patients, who knew him as Dr. Gene Tong.

  More than half the Chinese in the city, including Dr. Tong, lived in the sprawling adobes along Negro Alley, divided and subdivided into a warren of low-rent rooms. Over the years, the Coronel adobe, the building that anchored the alley’s southwest corner, had been the site of numerous saloons and dives. It was where Sheriff Barton had first proved his mettle in a memorable July Fourth shoot-out with unruly gamblers, where Tom Smith had danced on the monte table before egging Frank Dana into a lethal gunfight, where John Buckley, Pancho Cruz, and Augusta Cañada had played out their lethal ménage à trois. By 1870 the Coronel building housed the Wing Chung general store, Dr. Tong’s office and residence, a Chinese rooming house, a barbershop, and a café. Nearby, wedged between saloons and gambling houses, was a small Chinese theater and a temple or “joss house,” several little fan-tan parlors and opium dens, as well as numerous brothel cribs. Negro Alley remained the pueblo’s preeminent vice district, but it had also become Chinatown.

  At first the local press treated the Chinese with bemused condescension, noting the exotic language, hair style, and costume of the “almond-eyed family” from the “Celestial Kingdom.” But as the number of Chinese expanded, the tone of the coverage grew darker. The Star focused on what it claimed was the destructive competition between “the Chinese worker and the citizen laboring man,” ignoring the fact that the Chinese filled jobs Anglos and Californios had traditionally scorned and assigned to Indian workers. The Daily News, edited by Jack King, was even more negative, publishing a series of deeply racist and inflammatory editorials on “the Chinese menace.” The Chinese were a people “without one single redeeming feature,” the News declared, “so utterly depraved and debased that no single thought of virtue or honesty ever entered their heads.” In a particularly vicious column, a reporter offered his impression of the “pariahs” who resided along “Nigger Alley.”

  Within the buildings, herded like beasts, men, women and children dwell together, ignoring all distinctions of sex, and filthy to a degree absolutely appalling. Noisome vapors pervade the air, creating a stench sickening to senses unperverted by daily contact with these loathsome quarters. Here, crimes too horrible to name are undoubtedly matters of ordinary and perhaps daily or nightly occurrence.

  With allusions to animals, filth, and unregulated lust, the press coverage portrayed the residents of Chinatown as barely human.

  The negative reporting was accompanied by a dramatic upsurge in violence directed at Chinese residents. The records of the city’s justice courts, reasonably complete for the 1860s, include no complaints of violence against Chinese individuals before the spring of 1869, when teamster George Enkhardt was found guilty of having “maliciously run his wagon, loaded with brick, into the cart of a Chinaman and smashing it to pieces.” It was followed by no fewer than twenty violent attacks over the subsequent two years. Santiago Aguella was charged with “maliciously cutting and beating Ah Loy over the head and face with one wagon whip without cause or provocation.” Andy Sharkey was fined for “beating and kicking a Chinaman without provocation.” Patrick H. Gleason pled guilty to maliciously assaulting a Chinese man. When Justice William H. Gray asked Gleason whether he had anything to say in extenuation of his offense, he explained that a Chinese man had “called him hard names,” leaving him so angry that “he pitched into the first Chinaman he met.” He felt such “great antipathy to the Chinamen,” Gleason said, he simply could not help himself.

  The Chinese responded forcefully to the violence against them, filing complaints in justice court and pursuing the prosecution of their tormenters. Virtually every Chinese resident of Los Angeles was a member of a huiguan, or company, a mutual benefit association designed to assist and protect overseas Chinese. Six huiguan established headquarters in San Francisco during the 1850s and 1860s, opening branches in other western cities as the need arose. Five of the six huiguan had members in Los Angeles, but a majority of the city’s Chinese belonged to the Sze Yup Company. The companies assisted their members with employment and lodging, offered them meeting rooms and lounges where they could relax with their countrymen, and provided them with the assurance that in the event of an untimely death in a foreign land their remains would be returned to family members in China.

  The companies also hired local lawyers to represen
t their members in court. California law forbade Chinese witnesses from testifying in cases involving white persons, but when the lawyer for a defendant moved to quash the complaint of a Chinese man on those grounds in 1869, Justice Gray overruled him, rejecting his “ingenious resort to legal technicalities.” Thereafter Chinese residents enjoyed full access to Gray’s court.

  THE REVENUE of the Sze Yup Company came not only from membership fees but from the services it provided its members. Gambling and opium concessions offered lucrative returns. But with Chinese men outnumbering women by a ratio of five to one, the sex trade was the profit center. A handful of the approximately three dozen Chinese women who resided in the city in 1870 were the wives or mistresses of prominent men. The majority, though, were prostitutes, servicing not only their own countrymen but a growing number of Anglo and Latino customers as well.

  Near the Plaza late one night, an off-duty patrolman was accosted by a Chinese streetwalker who tugged at his coat and asked him how he liked it. He played dumb, saying he didn’t know what she meant. “You fuck me for two bits,” she said. When he hesitated, she doubled down. “Me give you two fucks for two bits.” Even at low rates like those, the typical Chinese prostitute produced an annual profit of several hundred dollars for her pimp. The sex trade in Chinatown was valued at thirty or forty thousand a year, the equivalent of several million in today’s dollars. While the Sze Yup Company did not manage the brothels itself, its members did, and a share of the revenue went to the company in exchange for referrals and protection.

  These women were very young and very vulnerable. Some were the victims of kidnappings in China; others had been sold into slavery by their impoverished families. Forcibly transported to the United States, they were indentured to brothel masters, typically for a term of four years, considered the maximum working life of a prostitute. If they complained or resisted, they risked punishment. The record overflows with accounts of Chinese prostitutes beaten, whipped, and sometimes tortured by brothel masters. One evening as two patrolmen made their rounds near Negro Alley they heard a woman’s screams. Rushing down a dark corridor they came upon a group of Chinese men standing over a severely beaten woman who was bleeding profusely from cuts about her face and head. Nearby was her master, Sing Lee, headman of the Sze Yup Company. In halting English she told the patrolmen that she had been punished for resisting his plan to sell her to another man. Both Sing Lee and the woman were arrested and taken to jail, where he was released after paying a small fine. But, according to the Star, the woman “begged to be allowed to stay, stating that Sing was ‘a big Chinaman,’ and that, because she had been the cause of his going to jail, the other Chinamen would kill her [and] cut her body into little pieces.” Nevertheless, she was turned out to an unknown fate.

  Chinese prostitutes sometimes ran away, but when they did their masters often filed false complaints against them for theft, thus enlisting the authorities in their apprehension. Los Angeles patrolmen, easily corrupted with a little cash, proved eager to cooperate. In October 1870, when the Sze Yup Company offered a $100 reward for the return of a particularly valued woman, both City Marshal William Warren and Deputy Joseph Dye jumped into action. Dye learned where the woman was hiding, but it was Warren who made the arrest and collected the reward. He was escorting the woman to jail, trailed by a large crowd of Chinese, when Dye confronted him on Main Street. “Warren, what are you going to do in regard to this matter?” Dye demanded. “I want my money.” Warren brushed him aside. “I don’t want anything to do with you,” he said. “But you have defrauded me,” Dye exclaimed. “You’re a damned dirty liar,” Warren responded. Dye reacted instinctively, raising his walking stick to strike, but Warren had a derringer pistol concealed in his hand, and he fired first. The ball struck Dye in the forehead but miraculously glanced off, leaving him with nothing more serious than a bad bruise and a terrible headache. The two men pulled their revolvers and, in the words of one witness, “the pistol shots commenced coming thick and fast.” Three bystanders were struck before Warren was hit in the groin and fell to the ground, mortally wounded. “I’m killed,” he cried. He died the following morning. Tried for manslaughter in district court, Dye was released after Judge Morrison declared the homicide a clear case of self-defense and directed the jury to bring in a verdict of not guilty.

  Most fugitive prostitute cases ended more prosaically in the courtroom of Justice Gray, who resented the ability of Chinese brothel masters to corrupt the judicial system. Although slavery had been outlawed by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, few public officials applied the law of the land to the bondage of Chinese women. Justice Gray was the exception. “The law does not recognize slavery,” he exhorted the principals at the close of a hearing in which two Chinese masters disputed the ownership of a woman. Yet Gray had to acknowledge that he did not possess the authority to intervene and release her. “The Court,” he declared, “regrets its want of power to punish both parties as they deserve, for the violation of the Laws of the Land and for contempt of this Court in attempting to make it a party to the transaction.”

  AS CHINATOWN GREW, other huiguan established branches in Los Angeles, and the Sze Yup Company slipped from its dominant position. A power struggle broke out among headman Sing Lee’s top lieutenants, Sam Yuen and Yo Hing, legitimate businessmen but brothel masters as well, both of them fined in justice court for “maintaining and residing in a house of ill fame.” Reports of the conflict began appearing in 1868 and continued through the autumn of 1870, when both men resigned from the old company and led their factions into two huiguan that had recently established branches in Los Angeles. Sam Yuen became headman of the local Ning Yung Company; Yo Hing assumed leadership of the branch of the Kong Chow Company. With that move the struggle sharpened for control of the Chinatown vice trade. “Sunday evening, extensive preparations for a battle royal were made by the Chinese denizens of Negro Alley,” the Star reported in January 1871. “Between the lines formed by the two companies were the headmen arguing the point at issue, which appearances indicated could only be settled by an appeal to the law of arms.” But “the row was nipped in the bud” by the timely arrival of the newly elected city marshal, Francis Baker.

  Sam Yuen quickly negotiated a defensive alliance with his old boss, Sing Lee. But Yo Hing took them both on. About thirty years old, Yo Hing was both charismatic and commanding, “a huge man,” in the description of a contemporary, with “a voice that fairly rumbled when he talked.” His Los Angeles career had begun several years earlier when he went to work as a cook in the household of Jack King and his family. He quickly worked his way up, leasing land to grow vegetables and investing his profits in a cigar factory and brothels in Chinatown. Yo Hing was fluent in English and maintained good relations with important Anglos. Horace Bell described him as “a fine fellow,” and the Star praised him as “the best and most favorably known Chinaman in the city.”

  Yet in his struggle for control of Chinatown, Yo Hing did not hesitate to employ ruthless tactics. In the spring of 1871 his men abducted the wife of a prominent Chinese merchant, an ally of Sam Yuen’s, and succeeded in keeping her hidden for several months. Sam Yuen was shamed as a leader unable to protect his own people, and after months of humiliation he decided the time had come to eliminate his rival once and for all. He put a price on Yo Hing’s head and arranged for two professional Chinese gunmen to come from San Francisco. In mid-October they arrived on the steamer, intent on collecting the reward. The contract on Yo Hing was common knowledge in Chinatown, and the cadre of the two companies prepared themselves for a battle royal, stockpiling arms and ammunition. The proprietor of a local hardware store reported he had “sold forty or fifty pistols to Chinamen within the last few days.”

  On the morning of Monday, October 23, as Yo Hing emerged from an apartment at the northern end of Negro Alley, Ah Choy and Yu Tak, the San Francisco hitmen, were waiting for him. “They fired at me,” Yo Hing told the Star. “I ran into the house. Ah Cho
y’s pistol got out of order, I think a cap caught in the cylinder, and that saved my life. One ball passed through my coat and shirt.” The shooters fled and Yo Hing hurried to the office of his attorney, Jack King, where he swore out a complaint charging the two men “with the crime of assault with deadly weapons with intent to kill.” They were arrested and jailed. At a hearing in Justice Gray’s court the following afternoon, rival boss Sam Yuen posted their bail.

  Yo Hing considered himself in mortal danger. “They are bound to kill me,” he told a reporter for the Star. “They will kill me even if they are killed after. They don’t care and will kill anybody who tries to arrest them.” Yo Hing was determined to seize the offensive, which he did that afternoon, shortly before sundown. Sam Yuen later provided his version of what happened. The gunman Ah Choy, he said, “was eating his evening meal, at a back part of a house on the east side of Negro Alley, heard a fuss, and went out to the front door. Yo Hing and three others were around with pistols, and one of them shot Ah Choy in the neck.” Moments later three or four of Sam Yuen’s fighters burst from the Coronel building across the street and began firing at the assailants.