The Barbary Coast
The Barbary Coast
1a. M. R. Werner’s biography of Brigham Young, page 229. [return]
1b. Brannan also published the first booster article about the advantages of California. On April 1, 1848 he issued a special number of his newspaper, the California Star, which contained an article prepared by Dr. Victor J. Fourgead, entitled: “The Prospects of California.” Two thousand extra copies of the issue were printed and sent to Missouri for distribution. [return]
1c. Described in Harpending’s autobiography: The Great Diamond Hoax, and Other Stirring Episodes in the Life of Asbury Harpending, edited by James H. Wilkins. San Francisco, 1913. [return]
1d. The exact date of the find has never been known. Marshall himself, at various times, gave three different dates—the 18th, the 19th, and the 20th of January. About 1905 the California Pioneers adopted January 24 as the proper date, on the authority of an entry in a diary kept by W. H. Bigler, a Mormon who had helped construct the mill. Bigler wrote: “January 24. This day some kind of metal that looks like gold was found in the tail race.” [return]
1e. The Gold Hunters, by J. D. Borthwick; 1924 edition; page 73. [return]
1f. Several writers have said that men were actually drowned in these quagmires, but I have been unable to verify these statements. [return]
1g. The Annals of San Francisco, by Frank Soulé, John H. Gihon, M.D., and James Nisbet; New York, 1855; pages 248, 249-50. [return]
1h. On January 11, 1848, about two weeks before the discovery of gold, the San Francisco authorities enacted an ordinance providing heavy fines for card-playing, and authorizing the seizure of all moneys found on gambling tables. The law was so unpopular, however, that it was never enforced. It was repealed at the next meeting of the Town Council. [return]
1i. Described in the San Francisco Call, April 11, 1886. [return]
1j. This letter was dated September 10, 1856, and is quoted in the introduction to the Reverend Mr. Taylor's book: Seven Years of Street Preaching in San Francisco; New York, 1856. The Reverend Mr. Taylor is also responsible for introducing the eucalyptus tree into California. While in Australia in 1863, he sent his wife several seedlings, which she duly planted. From them came the giants which now line the California highways. [return]
1k. At El Dorado, in 1849, began the career of America's greatest bartender—Professor Jerry Thomas, inventor of the Blue Blazer and of Tom and Jerry. A full account of Professor Thomas's life and works may be found in the present author's introduction to Professor Thomas's book: The Bon Vivant's Companion, or, How to Mix Drinks; New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1928. [return]
1l. California Inter Pocula, by Hubert Howe Bancroft; San Francisco, 1888; pages 705-6, 707, 708. [return]
1m. The name of this thoroughfare was originally Dupont Street. It was changed to Grant Avenue after the fire of 1906. To avoid confusion it will be called Grant Avenue throughout this book. [return]
1n. As described by John Philip Quinn, a reformed gambler who in 1892 published a book called: Fools of Fortune, or, Gambling and Gamblers. [return]
1o. The Annals of San Francisco, page 271. [return]
1p. A vara is a Spanish yard, about 33.5 inches. [return]
1q. San Francisco's pioneer dentist was Henry D. Cogswell, who arrived in 1849 with a capital of three thousand dollars and opened an office in California Street. He eventually retired with a fortune of about two million dollars and became the city's first active prohibitionist. His ambition was to erect a public fountain for every one hundred saloons. He had twenty constructed, each surmounted by a heroic statue of himself. Seven were set up in San Francisco, but none survived more than a few years. [return]
2b. The tendency of the pioneers to mate with ladies
of easy virtue is celebrated in a bawdy song which was very popular for
many years, and which is still sung by San Franciscans who do not take
their municipal glories too seriously. It begins:
|
The whores in fifty-one; And when they got together They produced the native son. |
[return]
2c. The Annals of San Francisco, page 248. [return]
2d. Written by Samuel C. Upham, of Philadelphia, author of Notes of a Voyage to California via Cape Horn, Together with Scenes in El Dorado, in the Years 1849-50; Philadelphia, 1878. [return]
2e. The Annals of San Francisco, pages 668-9. [return]
2f. Popular Tribunals, by Hubert Howe Bancroft, Volume I, page 92. [return]
3b. Bristol Bill’s real name was never known in this country. The London police knew it, but refused to divulge the information to the American authorities because of the prominence of the burglar’s family. [return]
3c. Brannan referred to the affair of the Hounds, in July 1849. In his The Beginnings of San Francisco Zoeth Skinner Eldredge says that “in ridding San Francisco of the thieves, gamblers and desperadoes that infested it none were more active, outspoken and fearless than Brannan; and he lashed the malefactors and their official supporters with a vigor of vituperation that has rarely been equalled.” [return]
3d. The Annals of San Francisco, page 612. [return]
4b. San Francisco, a History of the Pacific Coast Metropolis, by John P. Young; Volume 1, page 214. [return]
4c. California, from the Conquest in 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco, by Josiah Royce; page 497. [return]
4d. A Senator of the Fifties, David C. Broderick of California, by Jeremiah Lynch; pages 68-9. [return]
4e. King was born in Georgetown, Maryland, and was the son of William King. As a youth he worked in Washington, where he found thirteen other James Kings. To avoid confusion he called himself James King the son of William, which he soon shortened to James King of William. [return]
4f. Journalism in California, by John P. Young; page 27. [return]
4g. The New York Tombs, Its Secrets and Mysteries, by Charles Sutton, Warden; edited by James B. Mix and Samuel MacKeever; page 62. [return]
4h. Metropolitan Life Unveiled, or, The Mysteries and Miseries of America’s Great Cities, by J. W. Buel; pages 258-9. [return]
4i. According to Jeremiah Lynch, Broderick once said: “To sit in the Senate of the United States as a Senator for one day, I would consent to be roasted in a slow fire on the plaza.” [return]
5b. Lights and Shades of San Francisco, by Benjamin Estelle Lloyd; San Francisco, 1876. [return]
6b. San Franciscans generally believe that their Oofty Goofty originated this phrase, but, as a matter of fact, a Dutch comedian named Phillips called himself Oofty Goofty Gus long before the time of the San Francisco hero. Phillips was shot by his mistress in 1879. [return]
7b. According to Idwal Jones in the American Mercury, August 1926. [return]
7c. They were the Sam Yup, Yung Wo, Kong Chow, Wing Yung, Hop Wo, and Yan Wo companies. [return]
7d. Publicly Stanford remained violently anti-Chinese, but privately he continued to employ them. As late as 1888 Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography, describing the Stanford estate in Tehema County, said: “It is divided into 500-acre tracts, and most of the labor is performed by Chinamen." [return]
7e. The memorial in full may be found in Metropolitan Life Unveiled, or, The Mysteries and Miseries of America’s Great Cities, by J. W. Buel. (San Francisco, 1882). [return]
7f. This derivation is also given in An American Glossary, by Richard H. Thornton; An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, by Ernest Weekley, M. A.; A Dictionary of Americanisms, by John Russell Bartlett; and similar works. [return]
7g. Curtis Tobey, 654 Thirteenth Street, Oakland, California, in a letter dated April 4, 1932. [return]
7h. One of the members of the Pick Handle Brigade was Denis Kearney, who, later in that same year, became one of the most violent of all San Francisco’s agitators against the Chinese. He acquired a certain fame as the Sandlot Orator, and as the founder of the Workingmen’s party, the platform of which was, principally: “The Chinese must go!” For a brief period Kearney and his party exercised considerable power in California politics. An extensive, though not wholly accurate, account of the Kearney movement may be found in the second volume of Lord Bryce’s American Commonwealth. [return]
7i. At least a dozen old-time San Franciscans, whose names cannot be published for obvious reasons, told the present author that they remembered having seen Riley’s photographs in the houses of prostitution. Many also recalled Riley’s black satchel and his selling-trips from house to house. [return]
8b. Some of the Chinese considered it an honor to possess a woman whom their fathers had also possessed. [return]
8c. Report of the Special Committee of the Board of Supervisors, 1885, page 13. [return]
8d. Chop suey is said to have been invented in 1894. At a banquet in New York, at which Li Hung Chang, the great Chinese statesman, was the guest of honor, he was asked to have his private chef contribute one dish to the feast. Fearing that the white men would not like real Chinese food, Li Hung Chang instructed the chef to prepare a stew of meat and vegetables, which the chef called “chop suey" and flavored with a pungent sauce made from the soya bean, salt, and molasses. The concoction was immediately popular, and within a few years chop-suey parlors had sprung up all over the United States. Very few Chinese will eat it. According to Webster’s dictionary the name of the dish is a corruption of the Cantonese “shop sui,” meaning "odds and ends.” [return]
8e. Tong War, by Eng Ying Gong and Bruce Grant; page 17. [return]
8f. Buckley was in absolute control of San Francisco for some twenty years, probably the most corrupt period in the history of the city. He came to San Francisco in 1862, at the age of seventeen, and became a bar-tender at Duncan Nichols’s Snug Café, which he later owned. He lost his eyesight through illness in his thirtieth year. He had already gained considerable influence in politics, and his career was not halted by his misfortune. Within another five years he dominated the Democratic machine and began plundering the city for the benefit of himself and his friends. He always sat in the rear of his saloon and recognized visitors by the way they shook hands. He was finally ousted from control by a group of insurgents headed by Gavin McNab and James D. Phelan, and his power declined when Phelan was elected Mayor in the middle eighteen-nineties. Buckley died in April 1922, in his seventy-seventh year. [return]
9b. By the Reverend James Fell, an English clergyman who conducted a mission in San Francisco from 1892 to 1898 and wrote a book called British Merchant Seamen in San Francisco (London, 1899). [return]
9c. The story of Calico Jim has been current in San Francisco for many years, but I was unable to find any verification of it. The Police Department has no record of the shanghaiing of six policemen. [return]
9d. Underground, or Life Below the Surface, by Thomas W. Knox, page 253. During my stay in San Francisco I tried industriously, even desperately, to find some of this rare liquor, but, so far as I could learn, no recognizable Pisco brandy has been seen there since Prohibition. The speakcasy bar-tenders had never heard of it. Pisco brandy was also used in a drink called Button Punch, which Rudyard Kipling, in his From Sea to Sea (1899), described as the “highest and noblest product of the age. . . .I have a theory it is compounded of cherubs’ wings, the glory of a tropical dawn, the red clouds of sunset, and fragments of lost epics by dead masters." [return]
10b. Abe Ruef was a lawyer and originally a Republican. He was active in politics for several years, but his influence was slight until 1901, when he took advantage of labor disturbances and formed the Workingmen’s party, which gave him control of the city by electing Mayor Schmitz and a new Board of Supervisors. [return]
10c. In 1917 Flannery was convicted of selling liquor to soldiers in uniform and was sentenced to a year in prison. Later he was adjudged incompetent, and his saloon fixtures were sold at auction. A mahogany bar for which he had paid ten thousand dollars sold for $127. [return]
10d. Tessie Wall’s effects were sold at auction soon after her death. The huge bed was bought for $105 by Sheriff Ellis W. Jones of Sacramento. [return]
10e. This exhibition is said to have been first seen in the United States on the Midway at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. [return]
10f. In April 1895 Durrant murdered and mutilated two young girls—Minnie Williams and Blanche Lamont—and hid their bodies in the library and belfry of Emanuel Baptist Church. He was hanged January 7, 1898. [return]
10g. The San Francisco Call, January 19, 5907. So great was Father Caraher’s influence that the Board of Supervisors promptly adopted an ordinance prohibiting anyone under sixteen years of age to enter a skating rink. [return]
10h. The Grand Jury returned 383 indictments, of which 129 were against Ruef and 47 against Mayor Schmitt. Most of the others were against various members of the Board of Supervisors. Few of the indictments were tried, and only one conviction was obtained, that of Ruef, who in December 1908 was found guilty of bribing Supervisor John J. Furey to vote for a trolley franchise. Ruef was sentenced to fourteen years in San Quentin Prison. When he was released, he returned to San Francisco, where he is now engaged in the real-estate business. [return]
10i. Before Chief Cook became a policeman, he was a tumbler and an acrobat, with the troupe of Renaldo, Cook, and Orr. He also played in the first road company of The Black Crook, in 1875. [return]
10j. A full account of the work of the clinic may be found in Our Nation’s Health; the Protective Work of the Municipal Clinic of San Francisco and Its Fight for Existence; by Dr. Julius Rosenstirn (San Francisco, 1913). [return]
12b. Where they did go remains one of the mysteries of the crusade. The San Francisco Federation of Women’s Clubs opened a rehabilitation office in Montgomery Street and offered to provide assistance and, if possible, a job for every prostitute who applied. But only five appeared, although more than a thousand women were turned out of the brothels. [return]
