Hatchet Men: The Story of the Tong Wars in San Francisco’s Chinatown Read Online Free PDF Page B

inspectors” by the press.
    What makes the small number of American-Chinese arrests today even more remarkable is that these-people have acclimatized, or Americanized, with such a vengeance in the last quarter century that one would expect them to be more like the typical gringo Californian—used to an occasional brush with John Law. For California is still fairly lawless territory. Of every 100,000 persons in the state, there are 137 in prison today. This compares with 70 per 100,000 in Wisconsin and a mere 20 per 100,000 in granitic New Hampshire.
    A hundred and more years ago California was far wilder than it is now. The city of San Francisco, alas, had no Hogarth to depict its innumerable gin lanes, but even wicked London could not boast a Shark Alley and a Murderer’s Alley as Frisco eventually did. The time was not yet ripe, however, for Chinatown’s blood bath.
    The historian Herbert Howe Bancroft called the thirty years of the city’s history from 1847 to 1877 “the Augustan Age of Murder.” But he was not referring to Chinatown, where the strange inversion of criminality prevailed. The exact number of homicides committed during this period will never be known, but the Sacramento Union, in applauding the actions of the second San Francisco vigilance committee, stated that there were 1,400 murders in the six years 1850-1856. On the other hand, Bancroft recorded that in the thirty years following 1847 there were only 16 legal executions and 8 extra-legal (Vigilante) hangings in San Francisco. Among the two dozen criminals who had the rare honor of actually suffering capital punishment for their crimes—for not having friends in high places—there were two Chinese. Chong Wong was executed in 1866 for the murder of his mistress, and another murderer, Chin Mook Sow, was hanged in 1877.
    The first vigilance committee took up only one Chinese case. On a complaint of Ah Sing and Lip Scorn, the Vigilantes deported Ah Low and Ah Hone and their property—two prostitutes—because of their supposed evil influence on the Chinese community. Charges were soon preferred against Sun Co and Ah Oeh by other Chinese as word got around of this convenient extradition service. The committee of vigilance quickly realized that it was being victimized by a conspiracy. Refusing to be used by one faction in Chinatown against another, it washed its hands of any Chinatown affairs.
    According to Bancroft, no class of people benefited more from the activities of the vigilance committee than the “Guests of the Golden Mountains.” The bullies who were accustomed to maltreat the Chinese were forced to lie low or leave. The Chinese merchants were so grateful to the 1856 committee for the change in social climate brought about by the crackdown on the lawless crowd that they subscribed $1,000 to the vigilance committee fund. As a testimonial of their appreciation, the committee rendered the Chinese a formal vote of thanks for their contribution.
    For years well-meaning citizens and the press had deplored the outrages perpetrated upon arriving coolies by water-front hoodlums. Finally on the evening of July 17, 1869, a Vigilante-like group was formed by a large body of citizens meeting in a Fourth District courtroom. Their express purpose was to create a society for the prevention of abuse of Chinese. The society elected officers and pledged that a party of men would be on the Embarcadero for the arrival of the next steamer bearing coolies. It set up its own six-man police force and made public its constitution. The preamble of this document proposed the protection of the Chinese, since the municipal authorities were unable to halt the hoodlums’ attacks, which the society termed a disgrace to American free institutions, to civilization and to Christianity.
    Unimpressed by the good intentions of the group, the California Police Gazette lampooned it as a society for the prevention of cruelty to Chinese. Then the newspaper’s editor