Their action succeeded in turning the tide, supplying the leadership that the authorities had failed to provide. One or two patrolmen rescued several more Chinese, but their action came late. At about 9:20 PM Sheriff Burns took charge of the armed vigilantes at the corner of Main and Temple and led them back to Negro Alley, where they established an armed guard around Chinatown. The lynchers retreated to the saloons, where they drank and celebrated until early morning. Over the years the vigilantes of Los Angeles had fostered the conditions which allowed this ghastly orgy of mob violence to take place. But give them their due. On that night of horrors they were instrumental in ending the lynchings.
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CHAPTER 29 •
IMPERFECT JUSTICE
AT THE DIRECTION of County Coroner Joseph Kurtz, the mangled bodies of the eighteen Chinese victims were taken to the jail yard and laid on the ground in two parallel rows. The reporter for the Daily News saw them there early the next morning. “Their countenances were ghastly and distorted,” he wrote, “many of them besmeared with blood and pierced with bullets.” Among the approximately twenty Chinese successfully escorted to the jail, a number were wounded, some seriously. Many more had fled into the vineyards and orange groves east of Chinatown or found refuge in the homes of Angelenos. In the morning they went to the jail, searching for missing friends and relations. It was with their help that Coroner Kurtz was able to identify the dead, although the various iterations of his list, recorded in court documents or printed in the press, are inconsistent and feature almost no complete names. In addition to Dr. Tong, the victims included cooks, laundrymen, and common laborers. They were affiliated with four separate huiguan. Some had lived in Los Angeles for several years, others had just arrived. Kurtz summoned a coroner’s jury, and once they had completed the gruesome task of examining the victims, their bodies were placed in redwood coffins and transported to the cemetery on Gallows Hill, to an isolated corner that served as a potter’s field. They were accompanied by several dozen of their countrymen, burning joss sticks and scattering small pieces of paper inscribed with Chinese characters. The remains were later exhumed and returned to China.
“Murder! Terrible Outrages! Fiends in our Midst!” screamed the headlines of the morning Star. The lead editorial, written by George Washington Barter, filling in for an ailing Henry Hamilton, decried “the horrible assassinations which were perpetrated in our city last night by the brutal, uncivilized barbarians that infest the country.” This was not a reference to the lynch mob but to the Chinese gunmen who shot and killed Robert Thompson and wounded Patrolman Bilderrain and the Mexican boy. The story in the accompanying columns reported the murder of the eighteen Chinese, but regarding that horror, Barter simply wrote that “comment is useless.” Instead, he took the opportunity to rail at the Chinese presence in Los Angeles, urging his readers to consider “the best mode of ridding ourselves of such a living curse.” The Daily News, which appeared later that afternoon, condemned the rioters in no uncertain terms. “The fame of our city,” wrote editor Charles Beane, “has received a stain which can be wiped out only by a stern and united performance of duty by our officials.” Horace Bell had been at home on Tuesday evening, and the first he knew of the event came from the papers. Barter’s editorial in the Star disgusted him, as it did many Angelenos. “The Star was already growing dim,” Bell wrote, but “it never shone brightly after the twenty-fifth of October.”
The coroner’s jury, made up of ordinary citizens, reassembled in the afternoon for the inquest. Over the subsequent four days Coroner Kurtz examined seventy-nine witnesses under oath. In accordance with California statute law, he did not call any Chinese witnesses—but dozens of Chinese observers packed the courtroom. The witnesses, many of whom had taken part in the violence, were “very careful in giving their testimony,” reported one correspondent, “fearing to name individuals whom they know to have taken an active part in the lynchings, lest they be similarly dealt with themselves.” John W. Brooks, who witnessed the lynchings at Tomlinson’s gate, openly admitted his hesitation. “I am afraid to betray them,” he said, “lest they should shoot me.” Nevertheless, the collective testimony provided an abundance of specifics from which the jury reconstructed the event in considerable detail. “The revelations made of the brutality exercised by the lynchers,” reported the Daily News, “are really frightful, and present a sad picture for the mind’s eye to scan.”
One of the issues most debated in the aftermath was the role played by vigilantism. On Wednesday the leaders of the vigilance committee—Widney, Foy, Lazzarovich, Signoret, Watson, and others—met and issued a statement. “The Vigilance Committee had nothing to do with the attack on the Chinese,” it asserted. On the contrary, members of the committee “were the ones who took the Chinese from the rioters and who organized to stop the riot.” At the inquest, Widney related the story of being challenged by the armed lyncher with the square-cut whiskers who declared “we are all vigilantes.” It made dramatic telling, but Widney regretted it almost as soon as the words were out of his mouth. Immediately after the following witness concluded his testimony, Widney asked permission to amend his statement. “The man referred to was not a member of the old Vigilance Committee,” he declared. Widney’s defense of the vigilantes, as well as his confidence that he knew those who were and were not “old vigilantes,” certainly amounted to a prima facie case for his leadership of the committee. But what was notable was his defensiveness.
That was because the critics of vigilantism were on the attack. For years vigilante leaders had justified their actions by arguing that the legally constituted courts were incapable of securing justice, ignoring the improving record of the justice system. “With the law as well administered as it usually is in Los Angeles,” the correspondent of the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin noted, there seemed no reason to doubt that the courts would have taken up the case against the Chinese gunmen “in due time, without the extraordinary uprising.” But the rioters acted on the same premise as those who for years had promoted lynch law. “We have the sequel of that wretched business now,” the article concluded, “in the hanging of eighteen Chinese.” Charles Beane of the Daily News made a similar argument. “The monstrosity of the thing,” he wrote, “was in imitation of the Vigilance Committee, in hanging those arrested, or who surrendered, instead of allowing the law to take its own course. The lawless elements of society have been educated to believe that murder could be indulged in with impunity, provided it was committed by a mob instead of a single individual.”
For the first time since the public debate between Francisco Ramírez and Henry Barrows in 1857, vigilantism was under fire. A striking piece of evidence appeared in a short notice published in the Star two days after the massacre, a report that the posts and crossbeam at Tomlinson’s corral had been torn down by the proprietor. “He evidently does not appreciate the use that it has twice been appropriated for, and has at no little cost to himself entirely destroyed it.” No one was a vigilante now.
ON OCTOBER 28 the coroner’s jury went public with its report. “The mob consisted of all nationalities as they live in Los Angeles,” it concluded. Despite the reluctance of witnesses to provide names, the jury compiled a list of several dozen individuals who had taken part “in the destruction of the lives and property of the Chinamen.” Eight men were arrested and jailed under warrants issued by Coroner Kurtz. The press withheld publication of the names, “so as not to defeat the ends of justice,” as the Daily News put it, continuing the editorial practice toward vigilantes established ten years before.
County Judge Ygnacio Sepúlveda impaneled a special grand jury to issue indictments. “Lawlessness has again raised its monster head in our midst,” he declared in his charge. “The scenes enacted on the evening of the twenty-fourth of October, when eighteen human beings were mercilessly murdered by a mob, have sent a thrill of horror throughout the State, and a page is marked in the record of Los Angeles forever indelible, making the nam
e of this community a reproach to humanity and civilization.” The previous year Judge Sepúlveda had issued a similar charge to the grand jury investigating the Lachenais lynching, but it had refused to act. “We see the bitter consequences which follow impunity,” said Sepúlveda, referring to that failure. He asked the jurors to consider their accountability to society. “Act, and be true to your manhood, to morality, and to mankind. You must indict all who, after the hearing of legal evidence, you consider as deserving punishment for crimes committed within the county. Set an example of true courage in the performance of your duty; be faithful to your trust. In this way only can you satisfy an offended God, violated law, and outraged humanity.”
Led by their foreman, the indomitable J. J. Warner, the grand jurors spent the month of November digesting the inquest testimony and examining 111 witnesses. Unlike Coroner Kurtz, who had excluded Chinese witnesses from the inquest, Warner actively solicited their testimony. The task of the grand jury, he wrote in the report he delivered to Judge Murray Morrison in early December, was to expose all those “chargeable with disorders and crimes committed upon that night—crimes which must cause Christianity to weep, civilization to blush, and humanity to mourn.” The initial responsibility for the riot, Warner argued, rested with the Chinese company fighters, who turned their guns on officers of the law, resulting in the death of one citizen and the wounding of a policeman. That “opened the way,” he wrote, “for evil-doers to create a confusion, in the midst of which the worst elements of society, consisting of all nationalities, not only disgraced civilization by their acts, but in their savage treatment of unoffending human beings, [and] their eagerness for pillage and bloodthirstiness, exceeded the most barbarous races of mankind.” Accompanying the report was a flood of indictments, holding 8 Chinese men responsible for the deaths of Ah Choy and Robert Thompson, and 25 rioters for the deaths of the 18 Chinese victims.
The report concluded with a scathing condemnation of the conduct of city and county officers. All of them, Warner wrote, had been “deplorably inefficient in the performance of their official and sworn duties during the scenes of confusion and bloodshed which disgraced this city.” Not one had attempted to arrest those men “who in their presence were openly and grossly violating the law, even to the taking of human life.” Few made any attempt to rescue the victims, yet the evidence clearly indicated that when resolute men confronted the mob “they were successful and met with no overpowering resistance.” The majority of the citizens present on the streets that night, Warner argued, would gladly have joined the authorities in preventing “the revolting scenes that were passing before their eyes,” if only a “resolute and energetic man, clothed with authority and an average share of ability and judgment” had organized and directed their efforts. Instead, the city marshal and the county sheriff had improperly instructed members of the crowd, who later “excused themselves of criminality by alleging they acted in conformity to the orders given them.” Warner’s stinging indictment of local law enforcement was right on target.
By early December more than thirty men had been arrested on warrants signed by District Attorney Cameron E. Thom, dangerously overcrowding the jail. Judge Morrison approved the release on bail of a number, and most immediately skipped town. That raised serious doubts about the capacity of the justice system to handle such a big case. The doubts were amplified when Judge Morrison died of a lingering chronic illness in mid-December. Los Angeles County was about to proceed with the most important prosecution in its history, and it was imperative that the state’s Republican governor immediately name someone to serve out the unexpired term. Among the several local jurists who pressed for the appointment was Robert M. Widney, who the Star claimed was “sending hot shot after the Governor in the form of subsidiary influence and pressure.” Widney, still chafing under the charge of vigilante responsibility for the riot, wanted desperately to be the judge who tried the “Chinese riot cases,” as they came to be known.
When Widney won the appointment in early January, editor Charles Beane of the Daily News, reacted with scorn. Should a man who had led the vigilance committee, a man who had condoned and abetted murder, be elevated to the bench of the county’s highest court? In a biting bit of sarcasm, Beane suggested striking a medal in Widney’s honor, one side embossed with “the balances of Justice, with one scale superseded by the effigy of a strangling man and above it the motto—‘Law,’ ” and on the reverse the legend suspendatur per collum—hanged by the neck. The issue of vigilantism was not going away.
THE FIRST OF THE CHINESE RIOT CASES, the prosecution of two Chinese men, Quong Wong and Ah Sing, for the murder of Ah Choy, took place in February 1872. Several Chinese witnesses had identified the suspects before the grand jury, but during the trial they refused to repeat their accusations, for fear of retaliation. District Attorney Thom was forced to admit that he had failed to make his case, and Judge Widney directed the jury to bring in a verdict of not guilty, which it did. The Daily News dismissed the proceedings as “a complete farce.” Some months later Sam Yuen would be acquitted of manslaughter in the death of Robert Thompson. None of the Chinese fighters were convicted in the Chinese riot cases.
Vigilantism played no role in those trials, but it came up immediately in the trial of the first rioter charged with murder, which began in February 1872. Leonard “Curly” Crenshaw, a young midwesterner with a thick shock of hair and a reputation as a troublemaker, was charged with aiding and abetting the murder of Dr. Gene Tong. His attorneys, Thomas Chipley and Christopher N. Wilson, interrogated prospective jurors about their association with vigilance committees. “Are you now or have you ever sympathized with such or a like organization?” Several men answered in the affirmative, and the defense moved their dismissal for cause. It was an uncomfortable moment for Judge Widney, but he sustained the motion. He and his “law and order” colleagues had actively opposed the rioters, and the defense would do whatever it could to keep supporters of vigilantism off the jury.
Once a jury was impaneled, the prosecution presented its case. Witnesses testified that Crenshaw had been one of the first men on the roof of the Coronel, had fired indiscriminately into a crowd of Chinese, and later that night had bragged of lynching three men. In his own defense, Crenshaw testified that the witnesses were all mistaken, that he had been no more than a bystander, had followed the instructions of the officers, and before retiring had gone to Billy Rapp’s saloon, where he “took a couple of drinks and went to supper, then to bed.” The defense pointed out that none of the testimony placed Crenshaw at Tomlinson’s gate, where Dr. Tong’s lynching took place. But the prosecution argued that his riotous conduct had aided, abetted, and assisted the murderers, making him a principal to the crime. The case went to the jurors late on the second day of the trial. They returned after only twenty minutes with a verdict of guilty of manslaughter. According to the Daily News, their initial vote had been eleven to one for first-degree murder, but unable to reach unanimity on that charge they compromised on the lesser one.
Following the trial District Attorney Thom announced that he would immediately proceed with the prosecution of nine more of the indicted men for complicity in Dr. Tong’s murder. The defendants included three Californios, a Mexican, three men from the eastern states, two from Ireland, and one from Prussia. They ranged in age from twenty to thirty-seven. They included shoemaker Alexander Johnston, the burly man with the Colt’s Dragoon, whom numerous witnesses identified as one of the ringleaders. The defendants, read the indictment, “did feloniously, unlawfully, deliberately, premeditatedly, and of their malice aforethought, stand by, aid, abet, assist, advise, counsel, and encourage unknown persons to kill and murder one Gene Tong.” They were represented by E. J. C. Kewen and James G. Howard, the most distinguished defense team in southern California. The defense requested a single trial for all the defendants, a proposition District Attorney Thom readily accepted, since it would save the county considerable expense.
Jury select
ion began on February 20. Kewen and Howard aggressively challenged all prospective jurors regarding their past support for vigilantism. “I was a member of the organization that hanged Lachenais,” one man admitted. “I approved of his hanging and do still.” He was dismissed for cause. When Thom objected to the intense interrogation, Kewen’s response surely must have raised Judge Widney’s dander. “Everyone who participated in the hanging of Lachenais or the resolutions of the vigilance committee,” he declared, “was a murderer, just as much as those who killed these Chinese.” Two hundred and fifty-five men were examined before a jury of twelve was seated, consisting of eight farmers, three craftsmen, and a merchant.
During the trial, which lasted eight days, twenty-five witnesses for the prosecution provided disturbing and vivid testimony. When it came time for the defense to present its case, Kewen and Howard moved for dismissal of the charges. “There was no proof of conspiracy,” they argued, “there was no proof of any involvement of the defendants” in Dr. Tong’s murder; indeed, “there was no proof of the death of Gene Tong.” The indictments, they argued, “failed to establish the corpus delicti,” that is, they failed to explicitly state that Dr. Tong had in fact been murdered. Judge Widney overruled all those motions. He acknowledged the error in the indictments, but correcting it would require convening another grand jury, a risky proposition. Widney cited the legal doctrine that indictments “shall be construed in the usual acceptance in common language,” and argued that the fact of Dr. Tong’s death was something acknowledged by everyone in the community. Once the defense finished that piece of business—intended to establish the grounds for an appeal—it closed without calling a single witness.
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