Black Death at the Golden Gate
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Farewell, dear wife, keep up good cheer,
There’s glittering scenes before me
You soon with me the wealth shall share
That lays in California.
I’ll hunt the mountains, search the sand,
Through weather clear and stormy,
With shovel, spade, and sieve in hand,
Dig Gold in California.
The Sacramento’s banks are lined,
“They” credibly inform me,
With metals of the richest kind—
I must see California.
Sutter, the man who ruled what is now Sacramento before Marshall’s discovery, found himself overwhelmed by the number of Argonauts and their audacity. Gold seekers besieged his property, stealing even the heavy millstones used to grind grain. “By this sudden discovery of the gold, all my great plans were destroyed,” he would later write. “Had I succeeded for a few years before the gold was discovered, I would have been the richest citizen on the Pacific shore; but it had to be different. Instead of being rich, I am ruined.” Marshall, too, failed to reap the rewards of the boom he had created. Unable to complete the sawmill after all his workers abandoned him to search for gold, he proved unable to recreate his luck as a prospector, dying penniless in a small cabin near what is now known as Eldorado National Forest.
In the year following Marshall’s discovery, San Francisco’s population jumped above twenty-five thousand, and every new day crammed more people into a place that felt less like heaven and more like hell. Dogs, cats and pigs roamed thoroughfares choked with broken-down carts, filthy clothing, rotting vegetables and the carcasses of overworked horses. In the fall, rain turned the streets into a thick, muddy slop, leaving one French visitor to proclaim that “This is not a town, it is a quagmire.” Despite the wealth flowing through it, San Francisco was a “nasty, dirty, slushy, raviney, sand-hilly place,” according to one doctor who found gold and then left town as quickly as he could. If barroom fights or bandits didn’t kill newly arrived Argonauts, then cholera could, with epidemics engulfing the city in 1850, 1852 and 1854 as waves of newly arrived gold seekers continued to dig water wells just one or two feet deep and without regard for the proximity of nearby latrines. All told, one in five gold seekers died within their first six months in San Francisco, according to estimates at the time.
The city’s transient population made any semblance of sanitation an afterthought. In 1852, residents were still using the site of one of the few rudimentary hospitals that could be found within a hundred miles as a dumping ground, lining its square with what one visitor called “an immense pile of rubbish and filth of the worst description.” When they weren’t throwing it into public spaces, San Franciscans were discarding their trash into gaping holes which opened in the middle of poorly made roads that were often little more than dirt paths up and down its network of hills. City inspectors dumped buckets of chaparral, sand and flour into the pits in a vain effort to congeal them into a solid surface, yet the holes inevitably opened again, often requiring residents to walk the length of a city block to find a level place to cross the street.
San Francisco felt perpetually on the edge of destruction, a feeling kindled by an onslaught of seven major fires in a span of eighteen months. Still, those who were able to survive in this unconstrained land forged new identities as self-made men, willing to brave unnamed obstacles and make their fortunes—even if it was mainly luck they were counting on. They simply assumed that they were going to get rich, and their optimism was contagious. “Though I had but a single dollar in my pocket and no business whatsoever and did not know where I was going to get my next meal, I found myself saying to everybody I met, ‘It is a glorious country!’ ” wrote Stephen Johnson Field, who left his law practice in Massachusetts to search for gold in California and was eventually nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court by Abraham Lincoln.
The belief that wealth was always just around the corner sustained the city from boom town through adolescence, with the gold mined from the nearby Sierra Nevada foothills slowly domesticating a place that remained famous for its vice. As the city grew richer, more ships clogged its docks, leaving a stew of South Americans, Australians, Chinese, Russians, Hawaiians, Europeans and Americans from the East Coast to amble along the streets. Countless bars and brothels blossomed in what was known as the Barbary Coast, a nine-block neighborhood that soon became a tourist draw on its own. “You are no longer in San Francisco, you are in Sailor town,” one early guidebook to the city wrote. “It would be a courageous citizen, indeed, who would venture within its charmed precincts after nightfall unattended by a policeman, and it is the safest place on the coast in which a criminal can hide.”
With an arduous months-long voyage that passed through the Panamanian jungle, around the iceberg-laden tip of South America, or by wagon train over the Rocky Mountains the only ways for the rest of the country to reach the state, California spent its first two decades in the Union as a land apart, independent both physically and mentally. It wasn’t until 1869—twenty years after the first frenzy of the Gold Rush—that Central Pacific president Leland Stanford drove a spike made out of 17.6-carat gold into the tracks at Promontory Summit in what is now the state of Utah, completing the first transcontinental railroad. The link brought New York and the cities of the East Coast within a week’s journey, opening up the glories of the state to a nation that remained in disbelief.
“We are so used to the California of the stage-coach, widely separated from the rest of the world, that we can hardly realize what the California of the railroad will be,” wrote Henry George, an economist whose later work Progress and Poverty would help spur the Progressive Movement, in an 1868 essay. He envisioned a San Francisco with its own Astors and Vanderbilts, its own great museums, its own literature and its own artists—an explosion of culture that could only flourish in an environment of abundance.
“There is in the whole world no city—not even Constantinople, New Orleans, or Panama—which possesses equal advantages,” he wrote. “From San Diego to the Columbia river, a stretch of over 1000 miles of coast, the bay of San Francisco is the only possible site for a great city. For the whole of the vast and rich country behind, this is the only gate to the sea. Not a settler in all the Pacific States and Territories but must pay San Francisco tribute; not an ounce of gold dug, a pound of ore smelted, a field gleaned, or a tree felled in all their thousands of square miles, but must, in a greater or less degree, add to her wealth . . . Considering these things, is it too much to say that this city of ours must become the first city of the continent; and is it too much to say that the first city of the continent must ultimately be the first city of the world? And when we remember the irresistible tendency of modern times to concentration—remember that New York, Paris and London are still growing faster than ever—where shall we set bounds to the future population and wealth of San Francisco; where find a parallel for the city which a century hence will surround this bay?”
By the turn of the twentieth century, San Francisco was home to one out of every four people who lived west of the Rockies and was the richest and most important port on the Pacific, as deeply tied to trade from Asia as to the East Coast. It reigned as the unquestioned cultural and financial capital of California, a state so overflowing with superlatives that it seemed blessed by God: home to the tallest trees, the deepest ports, the most fertile farmland and the wealthiest people.
The Brooklyn Eagle declared San Francisco the “most cosmopolitan town in the country outside of New York.” Its banks handled more than one billion dollars each year, a figure greater than every other city in the West combined. The San Francisco Mint, a granite Greek Revival fortress standing at the corner of Fifth and Mission, held a third of the nation’s gold deposits, a sum so monumental that it took some time before guards realized that $300,000 worth of gold had been stolen one New Year’s Day. A few blocks away stood the Call Building, which at 310 feet loomed as the tallest structure west o
f Chicago and from whose porthole windows diners in the top-floor restaurant could look down upon the entire bay. At the foot of Market Street rose the tower of the Ferry Building, modeled on a Spanish cathedral, which was on its way to becoming the second busiest transportation hub in the world. In Golden Gate Park, workers were putting another coat of gleaming white paint on the Conservatory of Flowers, a Victorian jewel box which was one of the first public conservatories in North America.
“It was a city of romance and a gateway to adventure,” wrote Will Irwin in a memoir of the city at the turn of the century. “It opened out on the mysterious Pacific, the untamed ocean; and through the Golden Gate entered China, Japan, the South Sea Island, Lower California, the west coast of Central America, Australia. There was a sprinkling too, of Alaska and Siberia. From his windows on Russian Hill one always saw something strange and suggestive creeping through the mists of the bay. It would be a South Sea Island brig, bringing in cope, to take out cottons and idols; a Chinese hunk after shark’s livers; an old whaler, which seemed to drip oil, home from a year of cruising in the Arctic.”
But for all its charms, San Francisco remained hollow, a town more rooted in façade than fact. Graft, corruption and self-interest were a part of the city’s foundation, the natural consequence of a metropolis whose population believed in fate rather than skill. Nothing embodied this more than City Hall, which when it officially opened in 1897 was the largest municipal building west of Chicago. Its elaborate design, the product of twenty-five years of construction, was beautiful to behold, with a three-hundred-foot-high dome rising above the city’s Hall of Records. Yet it was rotting from within.
“On taking possession of City Hall we found it in a most dilapidated condition and so filthy as to be almost beyond description,” wrote John Barnett, the superintendent of public buildings, in a 1900 report. “The corridors were covered with the dirt of the ages; every closet in the building where dirt, ashes and rubbish could be stored was filled to overflowing; the rotunda and vestibule were coated with the original dirt, lime and mortar made in construction; the sub-basement was so filthy as to endanger the health of any person who was compelled to pass through it; several parts of it, which were below level, were filled with stagnant water; the leader pipes running to the sewer were broken in many places, and many of the sewer pipes opened directly into the sub-basement; the water closets and toilet rooms throughout the building were so unsanitary that the occupants of the building who had any regard for their health would not use them . . . the plastering in all of the corridors and in many of the rooms looked very much as if some person or persons had deliberately tried to remove it from the walls with a hatchet.”
Stuck at a crossroads between its rough past and a new future in which gold was no longer plentiful, the city that confronted Kinyoun from across the bay was facing an uncomfortable reality in which white men could not easily find work, breeding a generation that felt cheated out of the riches once showered upon their grandfathers. All the while, men and women expecting the easy life continued to arrive from the East Coast, multiplying the number of the poor and frustrated.
“Even now, far and wide, people think of California as a region where wealth is not dependent on thirst, where one can somehow ‘strike it rich’ without that tedious attention to details and expenses which wears out life in effete regions such as Europe and the Eastern states,” wrote David Starr Jordan, the founding president of Stanford University, in a widely read essay titled “California and the Californians.” “San Francisco, by force of circumstances, has become the hopper into which fall incompetents from all the world, and from which few escape . . . The city contains more than four hundred thousand people. Of these, a vast number, thirty thousand to fifty thousand, it may be, have no real business in San Francisco. They live from hand to mouth, by odd jobs that might be better done by better people; and whatever their success in making a living, they swell the army of discontent, and confound all attempts to solve industrial problems.”
Still, the every-man-for-himself spirit of the gold rush lingered on, halting any proposed solutions before they could be launched. The city could not even bring itself to fund its public health department, believing that it was a waste of money at best and a swindle at worst. As its population doubled between 1870 and 1885, San Francisco’s spending on sanitation, hospitals and other forms of medical care and prevention fell by 20 percent, leaving it a big city with the festering health issues of a frontier boomtown. “There is not, and never has been, a noble generosity in California,” one physician wrote at the time. Those who did fall ill and had little means could expect to “languish in boarding houses and private homes, often badly cared for . . . until death mercifully comes to their relief.”
In response to the palpable sense of anger among its white citizens, Mayor James D. Phelan cast the city’s Asian immigrants as its chief problem. Racism and bigotry had been a part of California since the first Spanish encounters with natives in the sixteenth century; the rising influence of the new science of anthropology and the 1859 publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species gave prejudice a scientific veneer and greater urgency. Taking their cue from Darwin’s notion of the survival of the fittest, scientists began envisioning race as nothing less than a battle for the future. In his influential work On the Unity of Mankind, German physician Johann Blumenbach identified five major species of humanity, each of which possessed what he called unalterable physical and moral traits. Caucasians, he posited, were the closest to God, with strong, beautiful bodies “not stained with pigment.” He lumped together all Asians into a lesser species he termed Mongolian, who were marked by small skulls—a sign of diminished intellect and depraved morals—and yellow skin, which suggested laziness.
In America, the idea that Asians were both wily and brutish took hold. The historian Hubert Bancroft noted in his book Mongolianism in America that “It was quite amusing to see [Chinese men] here and there and everywhere, and to show them to strangers as one of the many unique features California could boast. It put one in quite good humor with one’s self to watch them waddling under the springy pole sustaining at either end a huge and heavily laden basket; it made one quite feel one’s superiority to see these queer little specimens of petrified progress, to listen to their high-keyed strains of feline conversation, and notice all their cunning curiosity and barbaric artlessness.”
The backbreaking demands of building the transcontinental railroad led railroad companies first to hire Chinese workers in California, and then to import as many as fifteen thousand men directly from China. By 1867, approximately 90 percent of all laborers laying track and tunneling through the mountains were Chinese, doing work that white men refused to do. “A large majority of the white laboring class on the Pacific Coast find most profitable and congenial employment in mining and agricultural pursuits, than in railroad work,” Leland Stanford told Congress. “The greater portion of the laborers employed by us are Chinese . . . without them it would be impossible to complete the western portion of this great national enterprise.”
The willingness of the Chinese who remained after the railroad was completed to work for low wages led the Workingmen’s Party, headed by a former sailor and gifted orator by the name of Denis Kearney, to form vengeful mobs in the 1870s that burned and plundered Chinese settlements from Seattle to San Diego. In Los Angeles, then a lawless outpost of approximately six thousand people, the city’s two newspapers ran near-daily editorials condemning the roughly 175 Chinese residents of the city as dirty and inferior. After a popular saloon owner named Robert Thompson was killed in a shootout between two police officers and members of a Chinese gang in 1871, a mob of nearly 500 white men surrounded a building housing the suspected shooters and dragged them outside. There, at a makeshift gallows constructed at John Goller’s wagon shop, seventeen men were lynched, their bodies hanging from the shop’s portico and from the edges of nearby freight wagons. By morning, 10 percent of the city’s Chinese
population was dead. Only one of the victims was later thought to have been involved in the gunfight which sparked the massacre.
Kearney went on a national speaking tour soon after, punctuating his speeches with calls for “bullets to replace ballots” if white business owners continued to employ the Chinese, and once threatened to block the Golden Gate with the dead bodies of Chinese immigrants. “I made up my mind that if our civilization—California civilization—was to continue, Chinese immigration must be stopped,” he thundered, before ending his speech with the rallying cry, “The Chinese must go.”
Mayor Phelan, himself the son of an Irish immigrant and later a candidate for the U.S. Senate on a platform pledging to “Keep California White,” tried to put Kearney’s sentiments into municipal action. Though he presided over a city that cared little for government and even less for taxes, he argued that the only way forward for the white working class was for the city to issue bonds to fund the construction of public works projects which would put it on a par with those towns on the East Coast that many had fled, while excluding Asians from civic and economic life.
“The rough work of the building of a city has been successfully accomplished in San Francisco. The forest, as it were, has been cleared, the land has been tilled, the promise is abundant. We must bank on that,” Phelan wrote in a Christmas Day message in 1897. “We are far enough away from the great cities of the East to develop an individuality, and that very remoteness makes it incumbent upon us to work out our own salvation.”
Wong Chut King knew that to live in San Francisco was to remain in the shadows. At the age of forty-one, he had spent the majority of the last two decades of his life in dank, dark rooms, spending as little as he could to ensure his survival. Whatever money he did manage to keep from his job at a rat-infested lumberyard on Pacific Street he sent back to his wife and parents in his native village of Bei Keng, a tiny hamlet located in the southwest corner of China’s Guangdong province.