The Barbary Coast

The Chinese invasion of San Francisco and California began in the summer of 1848, about five months after the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Fort, when three frightened subjects of the Son of Heaven—two men and a woman—disembarked from the brig Eagle and vanished in the foothills behind Yerba Buena Cove. So far as the records show, they were the first of their race to pass through the Golden Gate, at least in modern times. Soon thereafter the yellow torrent was raging in full flood. According to The Annals of San Francisco, ten thousand Celestials landed in 1852, and that same year a committee appointed by Governor John M. Bigler to study the question of Chinese immigration estimated the Chinese population of California at 22,000. The deluge of yellow men reached its peak in 1870, when the United States census showed a total of 71,328 scattered throughout the state. More than half, however, were in San Francisco. The number began to decline immediately after the passage of the Ten-year Exclusion Act in the spring of 1882, and the influx from the Flowery Kingdom was definitely stopped by the Scott Exclusion Act of 1888, which specifically forbade the importation of Chinese laborers. (7a)

During the first two years of the gold rush most of the Chinese who reached the Pacific Coast made their way as quickly as possible to the mines. About the beginning of 1851, however, increasingly large groups began to settle in San Francisco and engage in various occupations, while others drifted back to the city from the gold-fields, where they had met with scant success. In the early spring of 1851 the first Chinese laundry in the United States was opened at Washington Street and Grant Avenue by one Wah Lee, (7b) who leased the ground floor and basement of a building, flung out a sign bearing the legend: “Wash’ng and Iron’g,” and forthwith reduced the price of washing to two dollars a dozen pieces. Wah Lee was, immediately, almost overwhelmed by the deluge of shirts, collars, and other articles of apparel which poured into his establishment. Within a week he was working twenty washermen in three shifts, and in less than three months scores of laundries had been started by other Chinese throughout the city. During the eighteen-seventies and eighteen-eighties there were at least a thousand in San Francisco, and for many years washing was, in the popular mind, the principal vocation of the Chinese everywhere in the United States. But the invention and widespread use of steam and electrically driven apparatus spelled the doom of the Chinese laundry. Today it is doubtful if forty could be found in the city of their origin.

The authors of the Annals estimated the Chinese population of San Francisco in 1852 as 3,000, and a similar estimate was made by the San Francisco Herald. “Go where he [the visitor] will,” said the Herald on April 12 of that year, “he meets natives of the Celestial empire, and subjects of the uncle to the moon, with their long plaited queues or tails, very wide pantaloons bagging behind, and curiously formed head coverings—some resembling inverted soup plates, and others fitting as close to the scalp as the scalp does to the Celestial cranium it covers. We have no means of ascertaining the exact number of Chinese in San Francisco, but we should suppose that they numbered at least three thousand. They are not confined to any particular Street or locality, but are scattered over the city and suburbs.” Within a few years, however, the Chinese began to gather into a distinct colony of their own, which they have since maintained. They soon occupied the upper part of Sacramento Street, which in early days was cut through only a few blocks beyond Portsmouth Square, and the whole of Dupont Street, now Grant Avenue. During the eighteen-fifties this quarter was known as Little China, and its inhabitants as China Boys; not until after 1860 did San Franciscans begin calling the district Chinatown.

The Chinese settlement has always been confined within a small sliver of territory some seven blocks long and three blocks wide, and although for almost thirty years thousands of Orientals arrived in San Francisco every year, nearly all of them managed to find both lodging and business opportunity in this restricted area. In 1885 a special committee composed of W. B. Farwell, John E. Kunkler, and E. B. Pond, appointed by the Board of Supervisors to make an exhaustive survey of conditions in Chinatown, reported that a "safe minimum estimate of the population is about 30,000 Chinese living in twelve blocks." The committee visited every room in the district and found 15,180 sleeping-bunks, each of which was occupied by at least two persons. Four years later, in 1889, another official investigation placed the number of Chinese in San Francisco at 45,000, of whom about one-third were women and children, including slaves. Of the total, 5,000 men were employed as cooks and domestic servants in white households, 4,000 in cigar-making, 5,000 in the manufacture of men’s clothing and women's underwear, and only about 2,000 in laundries. Far many years, until soon after the beginning of the present century, practically every business enterprise in Chinatown was dominated by an organization of merchants called the Six Companies, (7c) which also exercised supervisory control over most of the Chinese in California, particularly those of the coolie or laboring class. Through their agents in China the Six Companies advanced money to emigrants who desired to come to the United States, and as early as 1852 had set aside a fund of two hundred thousand dollars which was used solely for this purpose. When the immigrant arrived in this country, the Six Companies obtained a job for him or outfitted him for the mines and then saw to it that he repaid the loan, with interest. According to various investigating committees, the organization also required him to pay into its coffers a certain proportion of his earnings as long as he remained in America.

Many of the dwellings and business houses occupied by the Chinese in early San Francisco were shipped in sections from China and erected in Chinatown by the men who had imported them. Although they were small and incommodious, an incredibly large number of Chinese managed to crowd into them and live in comparative comfort. Practically all of these structures were destroyed in the great conflagrations of 1849-51, and thereafter, until the earthquake and fire of 1906 wiped out Chinatown and compelled the erection of more modern structures, the district was crowded with flimsy shacks and odorous cellars, which lined dirty, narrow streets and alleys. For almost twenty years between four hundred and five hundred Chinese men, women, and children lived in an enormous cellar, opening on an underground court into which the denizens of the place descended from the street by means of rickety ladders, on Washington Street just north of Kearny. This extraordinary habitation, which lacked even the most primitive comforts and conveniences, was called the Devil’s Kitchen and Ragpicker’s Alley and, by facetious journalists, the Palace Hotel. Almost as many more Orientals occupied another underground chamber, known as the Dog Kennel, on the east side of Bartlett Alley.

For several years prior to the holocaust of 1906 the Dog Kennel was the home of a Chinatown character named Lem Duck, who was better known to the tourists as Happy Hooligan. He was not so bright as he might have been and consequently was the natural target of abuse by both whites and Chinese. When Happy felt sufficiently aggrieved at his tormentors, he sought the protection of his friend Detective George McMahon, who gained considerable renown in 1910 by preventing the assassination of Prince Tsai Hsun, brother of the Emperor of China and commander of the Imperial Chinese Navy, as the Prince stepped from a train at the Oakland mole. McMahon defended Happy Hooligan against the pack of practical jokers which forever bayed at the Chinaman’s heels, and the grateful Happy at length offered the detective his greatest pride and most valuable possession—a large and shiny gold tooth. McMahon agreed to accept the tooth when it fell out of its own accord, and promised to fashion from it a miniature police whistle for Happy to blow when he needed protection. One night, however, two debased Chinese crept into the Dog Kennel, and while one held Happy Hooligan, the other pulled the cherished tooth with a pair of pliers. ‘When his assailants had fled, Happy ran through the streets, crying: "Georgie man! Georgie man! Highbinder stealum whistle!”

Although white San Franciscans regarded most of the living-quarters in Chinatown as pest holes of filth and squalor, no attempt was made to cleanse them until the bubonic-plague scare of 1901, when health officers invaded the district and fumigated it with three hundred pounds of sulphur. As a matter of fact, however, even such dismal places as the Dog Kennel and the Palace Hotel were superior to the accommodations which the same class of people would have been able to obtain in China.

The Chinese ultimately found their place in the California sun, and in time were recognized as, in the main, a sober, industrious, and picturesque element of the population. But this status was not reached for many years, and then only after the Chinese had survived innumerable campaigns of persecution even more systematic and cruel than those which had been directed against the Spanish-Americans. Except for occasional outbreaks, the abuse of the “greaser” was confined almost entirely to the gold-fields, while ill treatment of the Chinese was carried on in the towns and cities as well. Throughout the state, for almost half a century, John Chinaman was buffeted from pillar to post. He was everywhere discriminated against; he was robbed, beaten, and frequently murdered, and no punishment was meted out to his assailant; he was brutally and unceremoniously ejected from whatever mining or agricultural property he had managed to acquire; in the courts he was classed lower than the Negro or the Indian; and scores of laws were enacted for the sole purpose of hampering him in his efforts to earn an honest living. As the authors of The Annals of San Francisco put it in 1854:

“The manners and habits of the Chinese are very repugnant to Americans in California. Of different language, blood, religion, and character, inferior in most mental and bodily qualities, the Chinaman is looked upon by some as only a little superior to the negro, and by others as somewhat inferior. . . .In short, there is a strong feeling—prejudice it may be—existing in California against all Chinamen, and they are nicknamed, cuffed about, and treated very unceremoniously by every other class. . . .It was only in 1851 and 1852 that their rapidly increasing numbers began to attract much attention. Considerable apprehension then began to be entertained of the supposed bad effect which their presence would have on the white population. Large bands of Chinese were working at the mines upon conditions which were supposed to be closely allied to a state of slavery. Much misunderstanding arose on the subject. It was believed that the gangs were receiving only subsistence and nominal wages—some four or five dollars a month for each man—and that speculators, both yellow and white, were setting them to work on various undertakings which free white laborers conceived should be executed only by themselves. If these vast inroads of Chinese were to continue, the white miner considered that he might as well leave the country at once, since he could not pretend to compete with the poverty-stricken, meek and cheap 'coolie,' as so John Chinaman was now called by many. It was true that the latter never sought to interfere with the rich claims which the American miner wrought, while he submitted very patiently to be violently driven away from whatever neglected spot he might have occupied, but which the white man suddenly chose to fancy. It was true also that the Chinaman regularly paid, as a foreigner—and was almost the only foreigner that did so—his mining license to the state; and was a peaceable and hard-working subject. These things did not matter. . . .Angry words, much strife, and perhaps some bloodshed, were generated in the mining regions, and the hapless Chinese were driven backwards and forwards and their lives made miserable.”

The persecution of the Chinese in California acquired an official tinge in 1852, when Governor Bigler, at the behest of the white miners, sent a message to the Legislature in which he characterized the Chinese as "coolies" and urged the immediate passage of laws to restrict, if not entirely to prevent, their immigration. According to the Annals, “the terms of this message were considered offensive and uncalled for by most of the intelligent and liberal-minded Americans.” After much bombastic oratory the Legislature declined to enact the statutes demanded by Bigler; but the continued influx of Chinese during the next twenty years, and several serious riots in Shasta and other mining towns, kept the question very much alive. Various governors who followed Bigler repeated his recommendations, but an element of hypocrisy was easily discernible in the attitude of many of them, notably Leland Stanford, the founder of Stanford University, who was Governor of California from 1861 to 1863. In a message to the Legislature in January 1862, Stanford declared that Chinese immigration should be discouraged by every legitimate means, and expressed the opinion that “the presence of numbers of that degraded and distinct people would exercise a deleterious effect upon the superior race.” Throughout the state Governor Stanford was acclaimed for his forthright utterances upon the most important issue of the period, but enthusiasm for him waned when it was disclosed that while he was so boldly expressing his solicitude for the welfare of the white race, the corporation of which he was president was importing thousands of Chinese laborers to build the Central Pacific railroad. (7d)

A few months after Stanford retired as Governor, in 1863, the Legislature passed a law prohibiting the giving of testimony by Chinese in any legal action in which a white man was involved, and repealed a statute, passed in 1850, which had thus discriminated against only Negroes, mulattoes, and Indians. Despite the activities of the steamship and railroad companies, the constitutional convention of 1878 was overwhelmingly anti-Chinese, and the state constitution as ratified by the voters of California in the spring of 1879 reflected the prevailing attitude. It forbade the employment of Chinese by corporations, debarred them from the suffrage, annulled all contracts for coolie labor, directed the Legislature to provide for the punishment of any company which imported Chinese, and imposed severe restrictions upon their residence in the state. The popularity of these stringent provisions was further attested in September 1879, when a secret ballot was taken at the regular election on the question of permitting the entry of the Chinese. Only 833 votes, out of a total of 155,471, were cast in favor of unlimited settlement by the Orientals.

For some fifteen years after the Chinese began coming to California the attitude of San Francisco toward the yellow man was much more tolerant than that of the remainder of the state. By the late eighteen-sixties, however, considerable anti-Chinese feeling had developed, particularly among the laborers and other members of the lower social orders, and it increased in intensity until effective exclusion laws were passed by Congress. On April 5, 1874 a gigantic mass meeting, attended by more than twenty thousand persons, was held in San Francisco, at which various city and state officials delivered violent harangues against the Chinese. The meeting also adopted resolutions demanding the immediate ejection of the Chinese from California and making very definite charges against them as a race. Copies of the resolutions and also of the speeches were sent to Congress and President Grant by a special committee. Some of the accusations were:

That not one virtuous Chinawoman had been brought to America, and that here the Chinese had no wives or children.
That the Chinese had purchased no real estate.
That the Chinese ate rice, fish, and vegetables, and that otherwise their diet differed from that of white men.
That the Chinese were of no benefit to the country.
That the Six Companies had secretly established judicial tribunals, jails, and prisons, and secretly exercised judicial authority over the Chinese.
That all Chinese laboring men were slaves.
That the Chinese brought no benefits to American bankers and importers.

Several months later the Six Companies submitted to President Grant a memorial signed by the presidents of each of the companies and by Lee Tong Hay, president of the Chinese Young Men’s Christian Association. In this document the charges made by the mass meeting were categorically denied, and it was pointed out, among other things, that the Chinese owned eight hundred thousand dollars’ worth of real estate in San Francisco alone, and that they paid more than two million dollars in customs duties each year, and an annual poll-tax of two hundred thousand dollars to the California state treasury, besides the foreign miners’ tax and many thousands of dollars in personal-property taxes. Concerning the accusation that there were no virtuous Chinawomen in California, the memorial said:

“The fact is, that already a few hundred Chinese families have been brought here. They are all chaste, pure, keepers-at-home, not known on the public street. There are also among us a few hundred, perhaps a thousand, Chinese children born in America. The reason why so few of our families are brought to this country is because it is contrary to the custom and against the inclination of virtuous Chinese women to go so far from home, and because the frequent outbursts of popular indignation against our people have not encouraged us to bring our families with us against their will. Quite a number of Chinese prostitutes have been brought to this country by unprincipled Chinamen, but these at first were brought from China at the instigation and for the gratification of white men. And even at the present time it is commonly reported that a part of the proceeds of this villainous traffic goes to enrich a certain class of men belonging to this honourable nation—a class of men, too, who are under solemn obligations to suppress the whole vile business, and who certainly have it in their power to suppress it if they so desired. A few years ago, our Chinese merchants tried to send these prostitutes back to China, and succeeded in getting a large number on board the outgoing steamer, but a certain lawyer of your honourable nation (said to be the author and bearer of these resolutions against our people), in the employ of unprincipled Chinamen, procured a writ of habeas corpus, and the courts decided that they had a right to stay in this country if they so desired. Those women are still here, and the only remedy for this evil, and also for the evil of Chinese gambling, lies, so far as we can see, in an honest and impartial administration of municipal government, in all its details, even including the Police Department. If officers would refuse bribes, then unprincipled Chinamen could no longer purchase immunity from the punishment of their crimes." (7e)

Several years before the mass meeting which called forth this protest, the city authorities of San Francisco, hearkening to the voice of the masses, began to enact laws calculated to annoy and harass the patient Celestial. Among these regulatory measures was an ordinance, adopted in 1870, which prohibited the carrying of baskets suspended from or attached to poles borne across or upon the shoulders. It was in this manner that the Chinese laundrymen transported the soiled linen of all San Francisco. Several were arrested for violating this curious statute, but in police court the charges against them were dismissed because the ordinance failed to declare the act a nuisance and had provided no penalty. Another law forbade the disinterment of bodies and was intended to prevent the Chinese from following their immemorial custom of shipping their dead to China for permanent burial. A third ordinance, passed over the veto of Mayor William Alvord, levied a special tax of fifteen dollars a quarter upon every person employed in a Chinese laundry. Still another imposed a fine of from ten to fifty dollars upon “any person found sleeping in a room containing less than five hundred cubic feet of space for each person.” This law made the slumbers of practically every Chinaman in San Francisco illegal. The final ordinance of this persecutory series, adopted by the Board of Supervisors on June 14, 1876, was aimed at the Chinaman’s most cherished adornment—his pigtail. It provided that the hair of every male imprisoned in the county jail be “cut or clipped to an uniform length of one inch from the scalp.”

Soon after the passage of this statute the police arrested one Ho Ah Kow for violating the sleeping-ordinance, and Matthew Noonan, a keeper at the jail, immediately cut off his queue. Ho Ah Kow promptly brought suit against Noonan and the Supervisors for ten thousand dollars damages, alleging that the loss of his queue had exposed him to public contempt and ridicule and had irreparably injured him in the eyes of his countrymen. In 1879 the United States Circuit Court held that the queue ordinance was invalid, in that its provisions exceeded the powers of the Board of Supervisors. The claims of the victorious Ho Ah Kow were settled by the payment of a few hundred dollars, and the authorities molested no more pigtails, either in or out of prison. The Chinese retained their queues until the success of the revolt against the Manchu dynasty filled them with zeal for modernity and progress and impelled them to apply their own shears.

The most industrious persecutors of the Chinese in San Francisco were the hoodlums, young thieves and brawlers who were a veritable thorn in the flesh of the police for more than a quarter of a century. They ranged in age from twelve to thirty years and operated in organized groups which, with the exception of the Sydney Ducks and the Hounds of gold-rush days, were the only criminal gangs that the San Francisco underworld has ever produced. In general characteristics, and especially in deportment and dislike of honest labor, the hoodlums were identical with the larrikins of Australia, the hooligans of London, and the roughs and bullies of the Bowery and Five Points districts of New York. But the name by which they were designated was of San Francisco coinage. It was first used by newspaper men there during the latter part of 1868, and for at least two years always appeared in print spelled with a capital H and enclosed within quotation marks. Its first appearance as a common noun was probably in 1872, when the Sacramento Weekly Union of February 24 asked editorially if the boys of that city were to be “trained as polite loafers, street hounds, hoodlums, or bummers?” Within five years the word was in general use throughout the United States and had taken its proper place in the American language as the peculiarly apt designation of a young rowdy of criminal tendencies. The exact derivation of "hoodlum” is unknown, and probably always will be, in common with many other words and phrases of journalistic parentage. During the autumn of 1877 various newspapers and magazines attempted to trace its origin, but none succeeded in obtaining any definite information. In its issue of September 26, 1877 the Congregationalist published this account:

“A newspaper man in San Francisco, in attempting to coin a word to designate a gang of young Street Arabs under the beck of one Muldoon, hit upon the idea of dubbing them ‘noodlums,’ that is, simply reversing the leader’s name. In writing the word, the strokes of the ‘n’ did not correspond in height, and the compositor taking the ‘n’ for an ‘h’ printed it hoodlums.” (7f)

On October 27, 1877 the San Francisco Call contributed this bit of philological lore:

“Before the late war there appeared in San Francisco a man whose dress was very peculiar. The boys took a fancy to it, and organizing themselves into a military company adopted in part the dress of this man. The head-dress resembled the fez, from which was suspended a long tail. The gamins called it a ‘hood,’ and the company became known as the ‘hoods.’ The rowdy element of the city adopted much of the dress of the company referred to, and were soon designated as hoodlums.”

A third theory, favored by the present Chief of the San Francisco Police Department, William Quinn, describes the word as a corruption of Hoodler, the family name of several boisterous brothers who were frequently the objects of police attention. Another has it that the term was first applied to girls who wore a hood-like bonnet and were called “hoodlum girlums” by the street boys, who had invented a sort of pig-Latin by adding the syllable “lum” to every word. Still another, and the most plausible of all, was thus given in the Los Angeles Express of August 25, 1877:

"A gang of bad boys from fourteen to nineteen years of age were associated for the purpose of stealing. These boys had a rendezvous, and when danger threatened them their words of warning were ‘Huddle ‘em! Huddle ‘em!’ An article headed ‘Huddle ‘Em,’ describing the gang and their plans of operation, was published in the San Francisco Times. The name applied to them was soon contracted to hoodlum.”

The man who gave this information to the Express had been a reporter on the staff of the Times, and the article referred to appeared in the latter newspaper about the middle of 1868, after the police had obtained evidence implicating the gang in more than forty robberies and had arrested several of the youngsters. The juvenile miscreants were regularly organized, and operated under the leadership of an elected captain, who planned the crimes and assigned members of the band to commit them. Their rendezvous was an abandoned shack on an old wharf, with an entrance underneath. They stole whatever they could lay their hands on and sold their loot to fences and dealers on the Barbary Coast, in the dives of which they spent their gains. The doings of the gang occupied considerable space in the newspapers for a brief period, and the boys were called, and likewise called themselves, the “Huddle ‘ems.” Journalists soon began referring to other youthful scoundrels as “huddle ‘ems,” then as huddlems and hudlems, and finally as hoodlums. The transition to hoodlum was a perfectly logical development, the more so since a majority of unlettered men are prone to lengthen their vowels, and, in particular, to pronounce the short “u“ as "oo.” A striking example of this tendency is the fact that the name of the former heavy-weight champion of the world is pronounced Tooney quite as often as Tunney, especially among his former associates. Another is the widespread pronunciation of “gums “ as “gooms.” A California writer whose memory goes back to the early days of the hoodlums and who has delved deep into the little-known phases of San Francisco life, says that he distinctly remembers the pronunciation of the word by his parents and others as “hudlem.” “To my knowledge,” he wrote, “it was never a police call or cry of warning, but was a password or cue for gang action—to surround, push and force the victim or victims of rowdyism into an advantageous position for mauling. I never saw a hood worn by anyone but girls and women. The appearance of a boy or man with his coat-tails turned back and up, inside out, over his head—a rough custom of the time—may account for the hood theory.”  (7g)

The memberships of many of the early hoodlum gangs included girls, and several were captained by maladjusted representatives of the so-called gentler sex. Curiously enough, or perhaps not so curiously, these girls were almost invariably more ferocious than their male companions, and their fertile minds devised most of the unpleasant methods of torture which the hoodlums employed upon their victims. One feminine rowdy who flourished during the latter part of 1878 was a thirteen-year-old girl known as Little Dick, who led a gang of more than twenty boys of about the same age. She was finally sent to a corrective institution, after she had stolen a hundred revolvers from a gun-shop, distributed some among her followers, and sold the remainder on the Barbary Coast. She said frankly that she found her greatest delight in throwing red pepper into a Chinaman’s eyes or in hanging him up by his queue.

All of these hoodlums, of whatever age, possessed a violent antipathy to the Chinese and tormented them at every opportunity and in every conceivable way. A favorite pastime of the younger hoodlums was to board street cars on which Chinese were riding, tie the yellow men’s queues together, and, if possible, cut off the ends. They were as proud of these bits of Oriental hair as a savage Indian was of an enemy’s scalp. There was great rivalry among the gangs as to which could accumulate the greatest number of queue ends, which the hoodlums made into belts or cap tassels or used to decorate the walls of the shacks or rooms where they made their headquarters. The more mature hoodlums sometimes indulged also in these mischievous practices, but in the main their activities were much more criminal and vicious. They set fire to the laundries and wash-houses; invaded these and other Chinese business establishments and robbed and beat the proprietors; stole the earnings of the slave girls, and stormed the houses wherein the latter were on display and compelled them to submit to frightful abuses. Without provocation, they attacked every Chinese who ventured into parts of the city where the hoodlums were especially numerous and powerful, notably the waterfront, the Telegraph Hill district and the northern purlieus of the Barbary Coast, and the section known as Tar Flat, near the gas-works south of Market Street. A typical exploit of the hoodlums occurred during the summer of 1868, when a score of youthful rowdies captured a Chinese crab-catcher and dragged him beneath a wharf. There they robbed him, beat him with a hickory club, branded him in a dozen places with hot irons, and then slit his ears and tongue. “There was apparently no other motive for this atrocity,” said the San Francisco Times of July 30, 1868, “than the brutal instincts of the young ruffians who perpetrated it. Such boys are constantly hanging about our wharves eager to glut their cruelty upon any Chinaman who may pass.”

Hundreds of more or less similar attacks were reported to the police during the next twenty or thirty years, but the most serious of all the hoodlum outbreaks against the Chinese took place some nine years after the capture and torturing of the crab-catcher. Throughout the summer of 1877 San Francisco labored in the throes of a business depression that began with the closing down of several of the mines in the Comstock Lode, with resultant heavy losses to San Francisco investors and business men; and which was intensified by crop failures and the railroad strikes that were bringing riots and bloodshed to the Eastern states. Throughout the Bay district scores of factories and retail establishments closed their doors, and the streets of San Francisco were soon thronged by unemployed men, many of whom joined the ranks of the hoodlums. Although several factors had combined to cause the lull in business activity, political demagogues preached the gospel that it was due entirely to the presence of the Chinese in California, declaring that the pestiferous Orientals were filling thousands of jobs which should have gone to white men. For weeks almost every vacant lot in San Francisco was the scene of daily meetings at which irresponsible, crack-brained spellbinders denounced the Chinese and demanded that they be ejected from the sacred soil of California by fair means or foul.

Such violent harangues, delivered to audiences which were largely composed of hoodlums and restless discontented men without work, soon bore their natural fruit. On the night of July 24, 1877 a gang of several hundred hoodlums attacked Chinese laundries and wash-houses in various parts of the city, wrecking several and setting fire to a washhouse at Turk and Leavenworth streets. The police were not numerous enough to disperse the rioters, and throughout the night the hoodlums surged howling through the streets, attacking every Chinaman who hadn’t barricaded himself within doors. Half a dozen were badly beaten before they could find shelter, and several Chinese prostitutes were dragged from their houses and horribly abused by large gangs of men. Next morning San Francisco awoke to face a situation very similar to those which in former years had caused the formation of the Vigilance committees, with the machinery of law-enforcement practically helpless and the city in danger of domination by the criminal element.

At the request of Mayor Edwin Bryant, the Governor ordered all members of the San Francisco companies of the National Guard to report at their armories for immediate duty, and several prominent citizens met and hurriedly formed a Committee of Safety under the leadership of William T. Coleman, who had been head of the second Vigilance organization. Mayor Bryant also issued a proclamation calling upon all San Franciscans to obey and support the law, and announcing that the National Guard would patrol the streets to protect life and property. During the early afternoon several companies of the Guard, armed with rifles and ball cartridges, marched from the armories and took up positions in various districts in which it was believed that rioting was likely to occur. A few hours later the Guardsmen were reinforced by some two hundred men who had enrolled under the standard of the Committee of Safety. This latter detachment, during the early period of the trouble with the hoodlums, was armed only with hickory pick-handles, a circumstance which caused it to be known as the Pick Handle Brigade. (7h)

Despite the presence of this considerable force in the streets, the hoodlums attacked several Chinamen during the afternoon of July 25 and demolished the interiors of half a dozen Chinese stores and laundries. Soon after dusk a mob estimated at five hundred men attempted to burn the docks of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, which operated the vessels that had brought most of the Chinese to the Pacific Coast. The company’s property was vigorously defended by the police, the National Guardsmen, and the Pick Handle Brigade, and although the battle raged for several hours, they finally succeeded in driving away the hoodlums and saving the docks. More than a score of men were shot and otherwise wounded, but none seriously. That same night the hoodlums burned a lumber yard where several Chinese had been employed. Two days later a man named James Smith was arrested, accused of setting the fire, and held in twenty-thousand-dollar bail when arraigned in police court. Conclusive evidence against him could not be obtained, however, and he was released within a few days.

Next morning, July 26, hundreds of San Franciscans flocked to join the Pick Handle Brigade and enroll as members of the Committee of Safety. As soon as each man had signed, he was armed and sent out on patrol. By mid afternoon the streets of San Francisco again echoed to the tread of an embattled citizenry determined to resist the onslaughts of the rowdies. Between 3,500 and 4,000 men, including the members of the police force and the National Guard, were on duty. This display of power soon broke the backbone of the hoodlum revolt, although several small incendiary fires occurred during the next few nights, and there were a few minor skirmishes between the hoodlums and the patrolling citizens, the latter being victorious in every engagement. By July 30 San Francisco was quiet, and that afternoon the Committee of Safety disbanded its armed forces and dissolved its organization, while the companies of the National Guard stacked their rifles in the armories and returned to their vocations as private citizens.

The hoodlum of the eighteen-seventies and the eighteen-eighties seldom carried a fire-arm, but depended upon his fists, a stout hickory bludgeon, a set of brass or iron knuckles, and sometimes a knife. Usually this was ample armament, for the hoodlums ran in packs and were never known to attack even inoffensive Chinamen unless they vastly outnumbered their victims. They spent their spare time in the dives and dance-halls of the Barbary Coast, and many of them were pimps, or macks, and had girls walking the streets or entertaining all comers in the lower-class bagnios. The beau ideal of the hoodlum was the Barbary Coast Ranger and, to a lesser extent, the dive-keeper. The latter, however, was a demigod who stood proudly upon an eminence of power and prosperity such as the ordinary hoodlum could scarcely hope to reach. But he could aspire to notoriety and a long and sinful life as a man-about-the-Coast, and to that end he imitated the Ranger in deportment, as far as possible; and particularly in dress, to which he added various articles of personal adornment according to individual taste and fancy. The San Francisco hoodlum toiled not, neither did he spin, yet he was always attired in raiment of fashionable cut and usually of good material. His most elaborate costume burst upon a startled city during the late eighteen-eighties, when he swaggered about with his hair oiled, puffed, curled at the sides, and parted in the middle; and clad in a velvet vest, a black or olive frock coat with a peaked sleeve which rose to his ear, knee-high boots of calfskin, a sombrero, a ruffled white shirt with a low collar, a black string tie, and tight fawn-colored trousers. It might be added that the ear which appeared above the peaked sleeve of the coat was invariably dirty, for the typical hoodlum had nothing in common with the soap-maker.

These felonious dandies, as well as their more soberly attired brethren of previous decades, were very proud of the appellation by which they were popularly known. Sometimes when they sallied forth on their nefarious errands, they heralded their progress through the streets of San Francisco by cries of “The Hoodlums are coming! “ and “Look out for the Hoodlums!” Many of them apparently had the curious idea that the very sound of the word “hoodlum” terrified the police, and that by so identifying themselves they automatically became immune to arrest. Of this delusion they were, in time, disabused. In June 1871, when a policeman captured one of the members of a gang which had committed twenty-two burglaries and tried to blow up a church with giant powder, all within ten days, the youthful desperado struck the officer with a slung shot and cried indignantly: “You can’t arrest me! I’m a Hoodlum!” The remainder of his pronunciamento would doubtless have been equally informative, but it was never known, for the policeman closed the argument with his night-stick. Such effective repartee by the police, however, was rare; usually the hoodlum was accorded comparatively gentle treatment. Not until about 1890 did the San Francisco police learn what the New York police had already known for more than fifty years—that the best cure for hoodlumism is the frequent application of locust or hickory to the hoodlum’s skull. Once the police had acquired this knowledge, the power of the rowdies rapidly declined.

The most notorious hoodlums that San Francisco ever produced were Billy Smith and James Riley, who were active for a brief period during the early and middle eighteen-seventies. Smith was the leader of a gang which was variously known as the Rising Star Club and the Valley Boys. His followers numbered about two hundred, all of them thugs and rowdies of the first water. Smith himself was as expert a rough-and-tumble fighter as ever gouged out an eye or chewed off an ear. He scorned to use either a club or a knife, but went into battle equipped only with his fists and a pair of corrugated iron knuckles which covered the entire back of his hands. With glancing blows from these fearsome weapons, he could rip an opponent’s face to shreds. Smith led the Valley Boys on many a successful foray, but he finally met his Waterloo on the Alameda ferry-boat in the early spring of 1871. On Sunday, April 9, the Rising Star Club, with Smith in command and with several kegs of whisky and beer, went on an outing to Faskin’s Park, near the Encinal station at Alameda, across the Bay of San Francisco. The Swiss Guard, a volunteer military organization, held its annual picnic at Alameda on that day, at Schuetzen’s Park, a mile or so from Faskin’s. The Guard mustered about two hundred members, but on the trip to Alameda they were accompanied by their wives, children, and friends, so that the party was about one thousand strong. Fortunately for themselves, they also took along their muskets and bayonets, although they had no ammunition for the former.

Both picnic parties returned to the ferry slip on the same train, and trouble threatened to develop almost as soon as the Valley Boys, most of whom were drunk, came aboard. The principal recreation of the Swiss Guards was singing, and they broke into song as soon as the train had started, to the outspoken disgust of the hoodlums. Billy Smith sent an emissary to inform William Hartmeyer, president of the Guard Glee Club, that the Guardsmen would be thrown off the train if they didn’t stop. Hartmeyer paid no attention to the warning, but harsh words were exchanged between the hoodlums and several members of the Guards. There was no actual violence, however, until all of the picnickers had been transferred to the ferry-boat and the trip across the Bay had begun. The members of the Glee Club gathered in the boat’s cabin and renewed their singing, whereupon Billy Smith and a score of his followers tried to stop them. Billy Smith was promptly ejected from the cabin, but returned to the assault with the entire membership of the Rising Star Club at his heels, all armed with clubs, brass knuckles, and knives. A general fight ensued, while the women and children fled to the after part of the cabin. Most of the windows were soon broken, and practically all of the furniture in the cabin was smashed. The Guardsmen finally fixed bayonets and succeeded in prodding the hoodlums out of the cabin and to the after deck, where they were surrounded. The rowdies attacked again as the ferry-boat neared its San Francisco slip, but were again driven back by the bayonets. When the boat docked, the Guardsmen massed near the bow and refused to allow anyone to go ashore until the arrival of the police. The latter arrested a dozen or more hoodlums, but most of them escaped by clambering over the boat’s guards and swimming to the dock. Among the prisoners, however, were Billy Smith and his chief lieutenant, Jimmy Collins. Several policemen had seen Smith strike a Swiss Guardsman with his iron knuckles, and he was locked up charged with assault with a deadly weapon. Later he was convicted and sent to prison, and while he renewed his activities as a hoodlum when he returned to San Francisco, he was never again a power among the rowdies. Several members of the Guard were badly cut and bruised by the clubs and metal knuckles of the hoodlums, while many of the latter were painfully pierced by the Guardsmen's bayonets, which had very sharp points.

James Riley was better known to the San Francisco police as Butt Riley and as King of the Hoodlums. He was born in New York about 1848, and after a thorough grounding in the arts of hoodlumism as practiced in the metropolis, he became a sailor. The work was hard, however, and one voyage sufficed him. He landed in San Francisco in the late summer of 1868, liked the town, and remained to become one of its principal criminal ornaments. Thereafter, except when he was in prison, he never performed a single stroke of honest work. He was a much more celebrated hoodlum than even the redoubtable Billy Smith and was in every respect a superior man. He was a little more than six feet tall and weighed about two hundred pounds. In a coarse fashion he was extraordinarily handsome, and he appears to have possessed to a superlative degree that elusive quality which the moving pictures have popularized as “it.” He was eagerly sought as a lover by the inmates of the houses of prostitution, and by the pretty waiter girls in the dives and dance-halls of the Barbary Coast, and it was his proud boast that whenever he granted his favors, he reversed the usual procedure and collected a fee from the lady. In this unique manner he received a substantial and fairly certain income, which he augmented by the sale of his photographs to the harlots for twenty-five cents each, in cash. To his particular favorites he sold, for fifty cents cash, pictures of himself in the nude. The greatest pride of scores of San Francisco’s most popular and prosperous courtesans was the signed photograph of the King of the Hoodlums which hung above their beds. Riley had new photographs of himself made every Monday, and once a week he made a selling-trip throughout the red-light districts, carrying the pictorial proofs of his desirability in a small black satchel slung over his shoulder. (7i)

So far as the San Francisco police ever knew, Riley was never the leader of any particular gang. But he had a widespread reputation in hoodlum circles as a fierce fighter and was a very inventive fellow in matters of torture; in fact, he gained his sobriquet as King of the Hoodlums because there wasn’t a band of rowdies in the city that wouldn’t flock to his support when he called upon it. Riley always carried a set of brass knuckles, a hickory bludgeon, a slung shot, and a big knife, but he seldom used any of these weapons. He depended principally upon his head, which he claimed had the thickest skull in Christendom. His method of fighting was to rush his opponent and butt him in the stomach or on the point of the chin, a procedure which soon rendered an enemy hors de combat. When he led hoodlums in raids upon Chinese houses or slave dens, he always demolished the doors with his head; and when his men had captured a Chinaman, it was his pleasure to see how far he could butt the poor Celestial. He was eager to establish a record in this sport, and probably did so, for with a running start he once butted a Chinaman, weighing about a hundred and sixty pounds, ten feet. The King of the Hoodlums also commercialized his gift, splintering doors with his head for fifty cents or a dollar, depending upon the thickness of the planks. He abandoned this particular aspect of his career, however, after he had, on a five-dollar bet, butted a hole in a door constructed of heavy oaken timbers. For the first time in his life he had a headache, and it frightened him.

For some three years the King of the Hoodlums continued to butt his way to fame, but in September 1871 he butted one man too many. During a row at Dora and Harrison streets he twice crashed his thick skull against the unprotected stomach of John Jordan, a twenty-two-year-old carriage-painter, and as he rushed forward for a third collision Jordan shot him in the breast with an English self-cocking revolver, one of the first weapons of that type ever seen in San Francisco. Riley was taken to the county hospital, where physicians said that he had been fatally wounded. But when the Coroner came to his bedside to take an antemortem deposition, the King of the Hoodlums said:

“By Jesus! I ain’t agoin’ to die. There’s a chance for me yet. I know of lots of men who are alive with leaden bullets in their belly.”

Riley recovered, but his health was poor, and he was never afterwards so prominent in hoodlum circles as he had been before Jordan shot him. Nor was he as popular among the prostitutes, for he no longer possessed the strength and beauty which had endeared him to them. He became, after a few years, a common house-breaker, and some five years after his encounter with the carriage-painter he was caught committing a robbery. He was convicted and sent to San Quentin Prison for fifteen years, and the reign of this human billy-goat as King of the Hoodlums and pet of the prostitutes was ended.