The Barbary Coast

During the two years that followed the hanging of Whittaker and McKenzie, San Francisco was as peaceful and law-abiding a city as could be found on the American continent. The gambling houses continued to operate wide open under a strict licensing system, but their clientele was constantly decreasing, and against them was rising a strong tide of adverse public opinion. Comparatively few murders were committed, no more devastating fires occurred, and hold-ups and robberies were the exception rather than the rule. What remained of the underworld was moribund, palsied by the knowledge that for the first, and almost the last, time in an American city punishment for crime was swift, certain, and severe. The activities of the first Vigilance Committee had frightened even the judges and other officeholders; for a brief period they displayed great diligence in law-enforcement and discovered a new and absorbing interest in their proper duties.

But such social and governmental purity could not long endure in a city ruled by graduates of Tammany Hall. In October 1854 came the flight and exposure of Henry Meiggs, an Assistant Alderman, who had forged thousands of dollars’ worth of city warrants to finance an ambitious scheme for the development of North Beach, where he had constructed a two-thousand-foot wharf. (4a) The immediate collapse of Meiggs’s enterprises, with losses of approximately eight hundred thousand dollars to those who had purchased the fraudulent warrants or invested in his securities, was followed early in 1855 by the failure of several important financial institutions, and a paralyzing business depression which continued for almost a year and affected practically every line of commercial activity. A situation was thus created which necessarily focused the attention of San Francisco’s leading citizens—the men who had performed such valiant service in the great popular uprising of 1851—upon their own affairs; and the politicians promptly took advantage of it to increase their dippings into the public treasury, soon driving the city into such serious financial difficulties that bankruptcy was averted only by wholesale repudiation of the municipality’s bonds and warrants. The deficit for the single year ending March 12, 1855 was $840,000, and the annual message of the Mayor on that date showed that since the middle of 1851 obligations had been incurred amounting to $1,959,000, an enormous debt for a city with a population of less than fifty thousand. Later that same year a commission, appointed under an act of Legislature to fund the floating debt, recognized as valid indebtedness only a little more than $300,000. The remainder was repudiated.

By far the most powerful politician in early San Francisco was David C. Broderick, a New York saloon.keeper and Tammany henchman who became a United States Senator and was at length killed in a duel by Judge David S. Terry of the California Supreme Court. Partly because of the spectacular manner of his death, and partly because his career typified the traditional rise of the poor laborer’s son to fame and riches, Broderick became, and remains, one of the great popular heroes of the state. There exists a vast literature about him, but for the most part it is a worthless mass of fulsome panegyric. Only two California historians of importance have been able to view Broderick and his activities with proper detachment. One declares that “the truth of history demands the statement that for a long period his methods were utterly vicious, and that he shrunk from no infamy which would promote his objects.” (4b) The other points out that throughout his political life Broderick “looked upon the state as an oyster to be opened as one might,” that he accomplished no legislative work of lasting importance either in the state Legislature or in the United States Senate, and that his leadership in the struggle to prevent the extension of slavery to the Pacific Coast was more apparent than real. (4c) And not even his most adoring worshippers have been able entirely to conceal the plain fact that in the final analysis he must, more than any one man, shoulder responsibility for the municipal corruption which was the basic cause of the second uprising of a tormented and enraged citizenry. He was the one man who could have halted the thievish officials and politicians and stopped the looting of the city treasury; since he failed to do so, it is only fair to assume that he was pretty well tarred by the same brush. From the middle of 1851 to his death, in 1859, Broderick was, for all practical purposes, in absolute control of San Francisco’s political machinery. No man could be elected to office or even nominated unless he possessed Broderick’s consent and endorsement and unless he agreed to share with the boss the proceeds of the post to which he aspired. As Broderick’s most eulogistic biographer, Jeremiah Lynch, puts it:

“In San Francisco he became the dictator of the municipality. His political lessons and observations in New York were priceless. He introduced a modification of the same organization in San Francisco with which Tammany has controlled New York for lo! these many years. It was briefly this. At a forthcoming election a number of offices were to be filled; those of sheriff, district attorney, alderman, and places in the legislature. Several of these positions were very lucrative, notably that of the sheriff, tax-collector, and assessor. The incumbents received no specified salaries, but were entitled to all or a certain proportion of the fees. These fees occasionally exceeded $50,000 per annum. Broderick would say to the most popular or the most desirable aspirant: 'This office is worth $50,000 a year. Keep half and give me the other half, which I require to keep up our organization in the state. Without intelligent, systematic discipline, neither you nor I can win, and our opponents will conquer, unless I have money enough to pay the men whom I may find necessary. If you agree to that arrangement, I will have you nominated when the convention assembles, and then we will all pull together until after the election.’ Possibly this candidate dissented, but then someone else consented, and as the town was hugely Democratic, his selections were usually victorious. . . .When he came there was chaos, and he created order. There was no party system in the town, and he created one.” (4d)

Broderick’s political income from these and other sources was probably several hundred thousand dollars a year, and with such sums at his disposal he not only maintained his hold upon the city but furthered his ambition to be United States Senator, despite the slashing onslaughts of several of the newspapers. Particularly violent in its attacks upon Broderick and upon the corrupt political machine which Broderick had fathered was the Bulletin, which began publication in October 1855, under the editorship of James King of William, the martyr of the second Vigilance movement. (4e) From the beginning of his journalistic career King was Broderick’s implacable foe. He started his campaign against the boss in the first number of the Bulletin, and in subsequent issues named several men who had paid Broderick considerable sums of money in return for political nominations. He also accused Broderick of arranging the deal whereby the city purchased the old Jenny Lind Theatre at an exorbitant price, and of complicity in many other raids upon the public funds. “If we can only escape David C. Broderick’s hired bullies a little longer,” wrote King, “we will turn this city inside out, but what we will expose the corruption and malfeasance of her officiary.” As John P. Young said in his history of California journalism, King had no fear of a libel suit, “for the object of his assault did not dare to tempt the proof which he knew would be forthcoming in a court, even one to which justice miscarried as often as it did in San Francisco about this time.” (4f) But the danger of physical injury to the embattled editor was very great, for enlisted under Broderick’s banner were many former Tammany heelers and sluggers who successfully applied in San Francisco the same methods of intimidation, at the polls and elsewhere, which had always proved so efficacious in New York. Several of these bruisers held minor political posts, and those for whom Broderick was unable to find jobs were on his private pay-roll.

One of Broderick’s principal lieutenants was Charles P. Duane, better known as Dutch Charley, who for a brief period was Chief Engineer of the San Francisco Fire Department. A contemporary historian described Duane as "a born leader, ambitious, and a good mixer,” and wrote that “he is usually to be found in one of the gambling houses. A notorious politician as well, he has one thousand votes at his command, to be disposed of at elections by the simple plan of having his adherents vote three times in different sections of the city. Although he has no visible means of support, he lives regally on credit.” Duane narrowly escaped hanging by the Vigilance Committee in 1851 for shooting A. Fayole, manager of the French Theatre, because Fayole had refused to admit him free to the playhouse. Soon after the execution of James Stuart the nominal bail upon which Duane was at liberty was withdrawn at the insistence of the Vigilantes, but before he could be tried, Fayole suddenly decided to visit his old home in France—a decision which is said to have cost Broderick and other friends of Duane about fifty thousand dollars. The case against Dutch Charley was abandoned because of the absence of the prosecuting witness.

Scarcely less prominent in Broderick’s political ménage were such worthies as Bill Carr, Reuben Maloney, Mart Gallagher, Bill Lewis, Yankee Sullivan, a prize-fighter and at one time owner of a famous New York saloon, the Sawdust House in Walker Street; Woolley Kearney, equally notorious as a bar-room brawler and as the ugliest man in California; and Billy Mulligan, whom Warden Sutton of the Tombs called “a professional blackleg “ and “as desperate a character as could be found among the rowdy element of New York.” (4g) Mulligan was very thin and slight, only a little more than five feet tall and never weighing more than a hundred and twenty pounds, but he was a fierce fighter, especially when drunk. Armed only with a billiard cue, he once chased John Morrissey, heavy-weight champion of the world and a two-hundred-pound giant, out of a poolroom and down a flight of stairs. In San Francisco this redoubtable little man was one of Broderick’s pet sluggers and election workers, and he was amply rewarded for his services. For two years he held the lucrative job of collector for the county treasurer, and thereafter was keeper of the jail under Sheriff David S. Scannell, himself a Broderick man and another of the group of New York saloon-keepers who became prominent in early San Francisco.

Dutch Charley Duane, Kearney, Maloney, Mulligan, and Carr were among the criminals and trouble-makers expelled from San Francisco by the second Vigilance Committee, and Yankee Sullivan committed suicide while confined in the committee’s headquarters, awaiting trial for various crimes. Sullivan became so panic-stricken when he heard a Vigilante say that he would probably be hanged on the morrow that he opened a vein in his wrist and bled to death before a physician could reach him. This was on May 31, 1856, four days before Duane, Mulligan, Carr, Kearney, and several others were put aboard the ship Golden Age, bound for New York. Within a year after his arrival in the metropolis Mulligan tried to shoot the proprietor of a Manhattan gambling house and was sentenced to two years in Sing Sing Prison. He was pardoned in three months, however, and immediately returned to San Francisco, where he was not molested, the Vigilance Committee having long since completed its work and dissolved its organization. For several years Mulligan was a familiar figure around the saloons and gambling houses and was often in trouble with the police for fighting. It was his habit to go on protracted drinking sprees, which usually ended with an attack of delirium tremens. At such times he was very dangerous, and nothing would soothe him but a dose of valerian. Finally, during one of these debauches, he escaped his friends and barricaded himself in a room in the old St. Francis Hotel on Grant Avenue, where he began shooting from the window at passing pedestrians. He killed two men—one a stranger and the other a friend who tried to quiet him—before he was himself shot through the heart by Policeman Hopkins from a room across the street.

With an almost unbelievably corrupt political machine in the ascendancy, and with honest citizens distracted by business failures and the prospective loss of their money and property, the underworld of San Francisco naturally acquired a new lease on life. Under the protection of the politicians the dives, bagnios, and hide-aways of Sydney-Town began to reopen, and the Sydney Ducks and other criminals who had been deported or frightened away by the Vigilantes of 1851 gradually returned. By the middle of 1855 San Francisco was again a hell-roaring swirl of crime and debauchery; once more the city swarmed with murderers, thieves, burglars, gamblers, prostitutes, and swindlers of every degree. And within another six months conditions were at least as bad as they had ever been at any time during the early days of the gold rush. “Assassinations, murders, and hangings constitute the leading materials of the budget of news in San Francisco,” said a New York newspaper in January 1856. “The papers devote large space to the particulars of these horrors, showing a state of things, especially in San Francisco, which carries one back to the days of vigilance.” A recapitulation of California’s crime statistics for the year ending January 1, 1856, published by this journal, showed that 489 murders had been committed, about two-thirds of them in San Francisco. In the then largest city of California no murderer had been punished, although in other parts of the state six had been legally executed and forty-six hanged by mobs. Another writer thus described the situation in San Francisco:

“Masked men appeared openly in the streets and garrotted citizens, apparently defying law or resistance; the rough element had apparently banded together for the purpose of preying upon the wealth held by honest hands. . . .Politics was in fact accountable for this chaotic condition of city affairs. . . .Society was sore diseased. Villainy wielded the balance of power, and honesty was at a discount. ‘The law’s delay, the insolence of office,’ became the chafing cause of much discomfort. Honest voters on election day felt that it was but ill-spent time to cast a vote. Ballot-box stuffing, not vox populi, placed men in office. In short, the town was ruled by gamblers, rowdies, and state-prison convicts. Sydney Ducks again were cackling in the pond." (4h)

On the evening of Thursday, November 15, 1855 Charles Cora, an Italian gambler, attended the performance at the American Theatre, where the Ravels were playing in Nicodemus, or, The Unfortunate Fisherman. He was accompanied by his mistress, variously known as Belle Cora and Arabella Ryan, who was the daughter of a Baltimore clergyman. She had long since abandoned the habits of the parsonage, however, and was notorious in San Francisco as the proprietor of a house of prostitution in Pike Street, now Waverly Place, which offered the handsomest and most skillful girls, at the highest prices, of any bagnio in the city. Also in the audience assembled to see the play were General W. H. Richardson, United States Marshal for the Northern District of California; his wife, and a woman friend of Mrs. Richardson. Righteously indignant that a woman of Belle Cora’s character should display herself in public, General Richardson demanded that she be ejected from the theater. The manager of the house refused, and General Richardson and his party left after a heated exchange of words with Cora.

Next day the gambler and General Richardson met in the Cosmopolitan Saloon. Under the mellowing influence of good whisky they agreed to forget the incident of the theater, and left the bar-room arm-in-arm. In the street, however, they resumed the quarrel, and General Richardson told Cora that if they met again, he would slap his face. Three days after their first encounter, on November 18, Cora was drinking in the Blue Wing Saloon when General Richardson entered. As the latter approached the bar, with the evident intention of carrying out his threat, Cora drew a derringer and shot him through the heart. The Coroner's jury, impaneled next day, reported that General Richardson had been “deprived of his life by Cora, and from the facts produced, the jury believe that the said act was premeditated, and that there was nothing to mitigate the same.” The gambler was immediately arrested, and Belle Cora engaged for his defense a formidable array of lawyers, his chief of counsel being Colonel E. D. Baker, an Englishman who later became a United States Senator from Oregon and was killed during the Civil War while leading a Pacific Coast regiment at the battle of Ball’s Bluff. The gambler’s mistress agreed to pay Colonel Baker thirty thousand dollars for defending her lover, and as a retainer gave him immediately fifteen thousand dollars in gold, which the Colonel lost at faro that same night. Later he tried to withdraw from the case because of the pressure of public opinion, but since he was unable to repay the money he had already received from Belle Cora, he was compelled to continue.

Although the killing of General Richardson aroused a storm of public indignation and resentment, it is quite likely that Cora would have gone unpunished had it not been for James King of William and his violent editorials in the Bulletin. No sooner had Cora been lodged in jail than King began calling for the infliction of the death-penalty, at the same time predicting that the gambler’s political friends would never let him be convicted. Thereafter King daily called attention to the many wild rumors which swept through the town. It was reported that Cora was to be permitted to escape through the connivance of Billy Mulligan, then keeper of the county prison; or, if that scheme failed because of the vigilance of the people, the jury was to be bribed with a fund of forty thousand dollars which had been raised by Cora’s friends.” Look well to the jury,” advised the Bulletin. “If the jury is packed, either hang the Sheriff or drive him out of town and make him resign. If Billy Mulligan lets his friend Cora escape, hang Billy Mulligan or drive him into banishment” Again, King wrote, “If Mr. Sheriff Scannell does not remove Billy Mulligan from his present post as keeper of the county jail and Mulligan lets Cora escape, hang Billy Mulligan; and if necessary to get rid of the Sheriff, hang him—hang the Sheriff!”

Such extraordinary journalism so stirred up the town that Cora was brought to trial within two months after the murder—unprecedented speed for the San Francisco courts. The jury promptly justified King’s fears, reporting a disagreement after forty-one hours of deliberation. Cora was remanded to jail to await a second trial, which no one had any idea would ever be held. Next day the Bulletin said:

“Men were placed upon that jury who should never have been there. They went upon it to defeat the ends of justice, in other words, to ‘tie‘ the jury. This they effectually did. It is not pleasant for us to comment upon the depravity which has been brought to light in the trial. It is not very agreeable to state that the conviction is almost universal, that crime cannot be punished in San Francisco. But it is, nevertheless, a duty which we owe to the public community, as journalists, to put the people upon their guard. It is well for every man to understand that life here is to be protected at the muzzle of the pistol. The best man in San Francisco may be shot down tomorrow by some ruffian who does not like what he has said or done; yet the chances are an hundred to one that that ruffian will escape punishment. He may go through the farce of a trial, but nothing more. Now, what is to be the end of this? Crime will become so frequent that it can no longer be endured. Then will come lynch law, then men even suspected of crime will be hung; for people cannot live as things are now running. No man’s life is safe, in our opinion, for a single moment.”

One of James King’s most indefatigable journalistic enemies, and by the same token one of the most rabid supporters of Broderick and the machine, was James P. Casey, editor of a weekly political paper and a member of the Board of Supervisors. Early in November 1855, at a court hearing which grew out of an election brawl the preceding August, Casey admitted that he had served eighteen months in Sing Sing Prison for larceny. All the newspapers published this admission, and the California Chronicle supplemented it with a denunciatory editorial accusing Casey, among other things, of having had the ballot-boxes stuffed and himself reported as elected Supervisor from a district in which he was not even a candidate. A few days later King reprinted this attack in the Bulletin, and thereafter for several months he and Casey took frequent editorial pot-shots at each other, Casey in particular berating King for his attitude toward Cora. Early in May 1856 Casey’s paper declared that King’s brother had been refused the appointment as United States Marshal to succeed General Richardson, and that King himself had tried unsuccessfully to make a deal with the political machine of which, ostensibly, he was such a bitter foe. Both King and his brother demanded a retraction, which Casey declined to make. On May 14 the Bulletin published the most violent of all King’s onslaughts upon Casey, again referring to the latter’s prison record and asserting that he deserved “having his neck stretched” for the fraudulent manner in which he had procured his post as Supervisor. Ordinarily Casey would have replied in kind even to an attack of this sort, but friends of Cora, anxious to create a diversion that would take the popular mind off the gambler, convinced him that only King’s death would wipe out the affront to his honor. When King left his office to go home on the afternoon of the day upon which the editorial had appeared, Casey met him at the entrance to the Bulletin building, shoved a pistol against his chest, and fired the shot which precipitated the activities of the second Vigilance Committee. King fell to the sidewalk, mortally wounded, and Casey immediately surrendered to the police. He was lodged in the city prison, but two hours later was removed to the stronger county jail on Broadway.

King was not the most popular man in San Francisco, but he was easily the most forthright and the most spectacular and perhaps the best-known. He was shot at five o’clock in the afternoon, when the streets were filled with people, and within an hour the news was all over the town, arousing a sensation such as San Francisco had not experienced since the turbulent days of 1851. By seven o’clock mobs had begun to form in various parts of the city, and soon thereafter the county jail was surrounded by a restless crowd of at least ten thousand men. Throughout the night they swarmed and howled before the stone walls. Lack of a leader alone prevented the immediate storming of the jail, which was guarded by the city’s entire police force and two troops of militia, hastily called into service when the attitude of the mob became threatening. About dawn word was received that King’s condition had improved, and the crowd gradually dispersed.

Meanwhile a score of leading citizens, practically all of whom had been prominent in the work of the Vigilance Committee of 1851, had held a secret meeting and had decided once more to take matters into their own hands. The morning after King was shot the newspapers published a call for a mass meeting at No. 105½ Sacramento Street, in rooms previously occupied by the Native American party. There, under the leadership of William T. Coleman, the Vigilance Committee was reorganized, and a constitution adopted similar to that under which the earlier Vigilantes had operated. During the forenoon a thousand men enrolled for whatever service the committee might see fit to demand of them, and by nightfall as many more had joined the membership list. The militiamen on duty at the jail sent their resignations to the Governor, stacked their rifles in the State Armory in Grant Avenue, and marched in a body to join the committee. Horsemen carried the news into the rural and mining districts, and within a few days mass meetings at Sacramento, Placerville, Folsom, Nevada, and Marysville had denounced the shooting of King and offered to send armed assistance if the Vigilantes desired.

The vast majority of San Franciscans greeted the formation of the Vigilance Committee with rejoicing and hailed it as the only possible cure for the evils which beset the city. The politicians, naturally enough, opposed it to a man, and with great vehemence, for it threatened their very existence; while a considerable number of respectable citizens sincerely believed that such an illegal usurpation of authority was a greater source of danger than a continuation of the corruption under which San Francisco was laboring. Among the latter was William T. Sherman, then engaged in the banking business, who later became General in the United States Army. The attitude and demeanor of David C. Broderick was exactly what might have been expected of so astute a politician. He recognized immediately the potential magnitude of the movement and realized that any hindrance he might offer to its operation would, in the long run, only lessen his hold upon the city and affect adversely his campaign to become United States Senator, always the goal of his ambition. (4i) Throughout the life of the committee Broderick maintained an ostensibly neutral position; he neither assisted in the cleansing of San Francisco, nor was he active in the councils of the Law and Order party, as the opponents of the Vigilantes, with unconscious irony, called themselves. From the middle of May until the middle of August 1856, while the committee was supreme in San Francisco, Broderick was rarely seen in the city; most of that period he spent in other parts of the state, busily bringing the whole of California under his domination. When the Vigilantes at length disbanded, Broderick again appeared in San Francisco, only slightly less high in the estimation of its citizens, and an even greater political force than before, for he had gained almost complete control of the state Legislature. It was not until three years later that it became known, chiefly through his own admissions, that he had given money and advice to the Law and Order element; that he had done what he could, under cover, to hamper the Vigilantes; and that he had paid the San Francisco Herald two hundred dollars a week to publish editorials in defense of Judge David S. Terry, then his friend, after Terry had been arrested for stabbing an agent of the committee. The Herald, founded by John Nugent in 1850, and for several years San Francisco’s leading newspaper, was the only journal which actively and outspokenly opposed the Vigilantes, and the enraged citizens promptly wreaked vengeance upon it. A great number of copies were publicly burned in Front Street, and then the merchants and other business men withdrew their advertising, despite the protests of William T. Coleman, who insisted that freedom of the press was one of the cardinal principles of the whole Vigilance movement. Almost overnight the Herald shrank from forty to sixteen columns, and within a month it had suspended publication. It was revived a year or so later, and struggled valiantly to regain its former position. It failed and in 1862 finally passed from the journalistic picture.

For several days after the shooting of James King business in San Francisco was practically suspended while the entire city awaited the outcome of the editor’s wounds. Great throngs continued to threaten the county jail, and thousands of men stood silent in the street before King’s residence. Detachments of armed men sent out from the headquarters of the Vigilance Committee purchased every fire-arm to be found in the hardware-stores and gun-shops, and seized the rifles, pistols, and swords in the State Armory, as well as two pieces of artillery and a large quantity of ammunition. During the afternoon of the second day the Vigilante leaders began organizing their forces, appointing a special troop to handle the confiscated guns and forming the remainder of the men into cavalry and infantry companies of one hundred each. They immediately began drilling under the command of former soldiers, who had offered their services. Alarmed by the seriousness of the situation and fearful of immediate trouble, Governor J. Neely Johnson hurried to San Francisco from Sacramento, but after a brief conference with the executive committee of the Vigilance organization he instructed Sheriff Scannell to permit a small body of Vigilantes to encamp within the prison walls, to make certain that Casey was not spirited away or permitted to escape. In an effort to enlist a strong guard for the jail, Sheriff Scannell went into the streets and served upon every man he met a court order to report at the jail and assist in repelling the attack which the Vigilance Committee was obviously planning. The Sheriff summoned several hundred men, but only fifty responded. Most of them were criminal lawyers and heelers of Broderick’s political machine. Such was the temper of San Francisco’s citizens that they were safer in jail than out.

On the Saturday night following the shooting King’s condition became worse, and his physicians said that he had no chance of recovery. The excitement engendered by this news was increased by persistent rumors that Casey was to be rescued by his political friends before the sun had set again. At nine o’clock the next morning, when it was expected that King might die any minute, a signal upon the bell of the Monumental Engine Company summoned the Vigilantes to their headquarters, where arms were distributed and each man reported to his company commander. At noon twenty-six hundred well-armed, disciplined men, led by William T. Coleman as chairman of the committee. marched through the streets and surrounded the jail. The two pieces of artillery which had been taken from the Armory were loaded with powder and ball and trained upon the stone gates of the prison. Then Coleman and several other members of the committee rode forward and formally demanded the surrender of both Casey and Cora. With fewer than forty men under his command, Sheriff Scannell wisely offered no resistance. Heavily manacled, Casey and Cora were placed in carriages and taken to the headquarters of the committee, escorted by the whole force of Vigilantes and followed by almost the entire population of San Francisco, a howling mob which incessantly demanded that the two men be hanged at once. At the Sacramento Street rooms Casey and Cora were locked in hastily prepared cells, and three hundred men were assigned to guard them and prevent the rescue which their friends certainly contemplated.

James King died on Tuesday, May 20, 1856, six days after Casey had fired the historic shot, and Casey was immediately placed on trial by the Vigilantes. The verdict called the shooting “premeditated and unjustifiable,” and by a unanimous vote of the committee Casey was condemned to death. Cora was likewise tried, and sentenced to be hanged for the murder of General Richardson. Two days later King was buried. A vast crowd, estimated at from fifteen thousand to twenty thousand men and women, followed the editor to his grave, and before the last of them returned from the cemetery at Lone Mountain both Casey and Cora had been hanged from the windows of the Vigilante headquarters, on makeshift gallows such as had been used five years before in the execution of Whittaker and McKenzie. An hour before he stepped upon the beam from which he was to plunge to his death, Cora, with the consent of the Vigilance Committee and upon the advice of the priest who attended him in his last hours, married the woman on whose account the quarrel with General Richardson had started. After the gambler’s death Belle Cora remained for a month locked in her room. When she emerged, she sold her house of prostitution and thereafter lived alone with her servants. She became widely known for her gifts to charity and had thus disposed of the bulk of her fortune when she died, on February 17, 1862. Casey was buried by his friends, and upon his tombstone in a San Francisco cemetery the curious tourist may still read the inscription: “May God Forgive My Persecutors."

On June 3, 1856 Governor Johnson issued a proclamation declaring San Francisco to be in a state of insurrection and ordering the Vigilance Committee to surrender its arms and disband its organization. The Vigilantes met this challenge with characteristic energy and determination. They immediately removed their headquarters to a small square near the waterfront, on which were a few buildings. In these structures they established cells, guard-houses, court-rooms, and a meeting-place for the executive committee, a large room profusely decorated with bunting and American flags. A stone wall was constructed, facing the open portion of the square, and twenty feet from the wall the Vigilantes built sand breastworks, ten feet high and six feet wide, through which a narrow, winding passage led to the interior. Upon the roof of the main building were placed a large alarm-bell and the committee’s two field-pieces, which were kept loaded with powder and ball and manned day and night by a volunteer gun-crew. The place was officially called Fort Vigilance, but was popularly known as Fort Gunnybags. It was strong enough to resist successfully any attack not supported by artillery—and the Vigilantes possessed the only cannon in San Francisco, excepting those in the military and naval stores at the Presidio and on Mare Island. The officers in command of these stations had already been asked for assistance by the Governor and by the leaders of the Law and Order party, but had declined to interfere in the absence of instructions from the War and Navy departments. The President, at Washington, had also refused Governor Johnson’s request for advice and aid.

The Governor’s proclamation had appointed William T. Sherman, who had gained considerable fame as a soldier during the Mexican War, as Major-General of militia and had commanded the members of all volunteer companies and all other persons subject to military duty, to report to General Sherman and assist in subduing the insurgents. Fewer than a hundred men answered the summons. Equipped with whatever arms they happened to possess, they garrisoned the State Armory and other points about the city which General Sherman considered of strategic importance. In less than a week, however, General Sherman had resigned his commission and withdrawn from active participation in the fight against the Vigilantes. He was disgusted with the Governor’s vacillating course, and particularly by his refusal to order companies from other parts of the state to proceed to San Francisco. To succeed him Governor Johnson appointed Volney E. Howard, a former Texas Congressman who had been in San Francisco about two years. About the middle of June 1856 the Governor sent Reuben Maloney, one of Broderick’s political henchmen, from Sacramento in charge of a large quantity of arms and ammunition for the use of General Howard’s troops and the adherents of the Law and Order party. The munitions were carried down the Sacramento River aboard a flat-boat, but the Vigilantes, learning of the shipment, boarded the vessel in the Bay of San Francisco and confiscated the entire cargo, which was stored in the arsenal at Fort Gunnybags. Next day the Vigilantes seized another shipment of rifles and pistols, which agents of the Governor were attempting to smuggle into San Francisco. They were found hidden beneath a cargo of bricks aboard a small schooner.

Sterling A. Hopkins, a Vigilante policeman, was ordered to arrest Maloney and bring him before the executive committee for questioning. Accompanied by two assistants, Hopkins went to the office of Doctor H. P. Ashe, United States Naval Agent, where he found Maloney, Judge David S. Terry, and Doctor Ashe. Judge Terry and Doctor Ashe told Hopkins that they would not permit him to arrest Maloney, and Hopkins returned to Fort Gunnybags for reinforcements, while Maloney, Terry, and Ashe started for the State Armory on Grant Avenue to seek the protection of the Law and Order troops. About a block away from this refuge they were overtaken by Hopkins and several other Vigilantes, and a street fight occurred, in which Judge Terry stabbed Hopkins in the throat. During the excitement Judge Terry and Maloney escaped and made their way to the Armory, while Doctor Ashe returned to his office. Hopkins was carried into a physician’s residence for treatment, and the entire membership of the Vigilance Committee was immediately summoned by a signal upon the alarm-bell at Fort Gunnybags. Within an hour after the stabbing several thousand Vigilantes had surrounded the Armory, which was promptly surrendered by the few Law and Order men who comprised the garrison. The arms and ammunition found in the Armory were seized, but all the captives were released excepting Maloney and Judge Terry, who were confined in Fort Gunnybags to await the outcome of the wound Judge Terry had inflicted upon Hopkins. During the same afternoon the Vigilantes captured, in rapid succession, every building in the city that housed a detachment of Law and Order adherents or state militia, and by nightfall the committee was in unquestioned control of San Francisco. Not a shot had been fired.

Maloney was deported by the Vigilance Committee within the next few days, but the trial of Judge Terry was delayed for a week, until Hopkins had recovered. Judge Terry was then accused not only of stabbing Hopkins but of participation in several other affrays. The Vigilance court continued in session for seven weeks, during which time one hundred and fifty witnesses were examined. Judge Terry was finally found guilty on three counts of the indictment, and not guilty on three, but, “the usual punishments in their power to inflict not being applicable in the present instance,” the committee voted to discharge him from custody. The Vigilantes further expressed the opinion that “the interests of the state imperatively demand that the said David S. Terry should resign his position as Judge of the Supreme Court.” Not for three years, however, did Terry do so, and then only after his duel with Broderick.

During the two months that followed the hanging of Cora and Casey not a single murder was committed in San Francisco, and not more than half a dozen robberies or holdups of importance were reported. No action by the Vigilance Committee was necessary until July 24, when one Joseph Heatherington shot and killed Doctor Andrew Randall, who was trying to collect a court judgment for twenty thousand dollars. That same day the Vigilante police captured a man named Brace, who had killed another man two years before and escaped and who had also been involved in several other crimes. Heatherington and Brace were hanged together, after trial, on July 29, 1856, on a gallows erected in the center of Davis Street, near Sacramento Street. Heatherington tried to make a speech from the scaffold, but was constantly interrupted by Brace, who had been screaming in his cell for two days. Brace’s head was at length tightly covered by a large cloth, but until the trap was sprung he continued to mutter curses and blasphemy.

The hanging of Brace and Heatherington completed the work of the second Vigilance Committee. Besides instilling a wholesome fear into the corrupt politicians and city officials, the Vigilantes had hanged four men and banished twenty-six, while the number of criminals and other undesirable characters who had been frightened away has been variously estimated at from five hundred to eight hundred. By August 12, 1856 the last captive malefactor had been placed aboard an out-bound vessel, and the cells of Fort Gunnybags were empty. With San Francisco basking in the glow of municipal righteousness, the Vigilance Committee decided to disband and transfer the command of the city to the duly elected representatives of the people. On Monday, August 18, the entire population gathered to watch the final parade of the Vigilante Army, an impressive display of preparedness and power. More than eight thousand well-equipped men marched through the city, deposited their weapons in the arsenal at Fort Gunnybags, and returned without disorder to their respective vocations. A few guards remained on duty at the Vigilance headquarters until September 1, when they were withdrawn, the flags of the committee lowered, and the sandbag breastworks removed. On November 3 the arms and ammunition which had been captured from the militia and the Law and Order party were formally surrendered to the Governor, who withdrew his proclamation of insurrection.