The Barbary Coast

For half a century after the beginning of the gold rush one of the most dangerous areas in San Francisco was the waterfront, along the eastern and northeastern fringes of the Barbary Coast. Murderers, footpads, burglars, hoodlums, and Rangers prowled the streets in such numbers and carried on their depredations with such boldness that the police walked their beats in pairs and went in even greater force whenever they found it necessary to enter any of the dives with which the district abounded. Every policeman assigned to waterfront duty was specially chosen for strength, bravery, and huskiness. He was equipped with the regulation night-stick and pistol and also carried, in a large outside breast-pocket within easy reach of his hand, a huge knife a foot or more in length. This fearsome weapon was infinitely more effective at close quarters than a club or the cumbersome, unreliable fire-arm of the early days. Nor did the police hesitate to use it. Several battles occurred in which beleaguered policemen chopped off the hands of their assailants or inflicted other wounds equally frightful, and at least one in which an attacking hoodlum was decapitated. This latter feat was performed by Sergeant Thomas Langford, for many years one of the best-known men of the harbor precinct. Attacked in a second-hand-clothing store in Pacific Street by several men whom he had found ransacking the place, Sergeant Langford drew his knife and rushed them in the face of a heavy pistol-fire. He struck wildly in the darkness, and with his first blow neatly sheared the head of one of the thieves from his shoulders. The remainder of the gang, several of them badly wounded by the Sergeant’s slashing knife, fled in terror, and thereafter Sergeant Langford was held in greater fear by the denizens of the Barbary Coast than any other policeman in San Francisco.

Innumerable alleys and many comparatively important thoroughfares on or near the waterfront, including Davis, Drum, East (now the Embarcadero), Front, and Battery streets, and the eastern ends of Pacific, Jackson, and Washington streets, were crowded with brothels, saloons, and boarding-houses catering especially to sailors, wherein the luckless seaman was invariably robbed and frequently murdered, and from which he was shanghaied aboard an outgoing ship. It was in these resorts that the word ”shanghai” was probably first used as a verb. In early times there were no ships sailing directly from Shanghai to San Francisco, and a man who wanted to travel from the Chinese port to the Pacific coast of North America had to sail round the world to reach his destination. Almost as extensive a journey was required to go from San Francisco to Shanghai, which was then little more than a fishing village. Consequently, when a ship started on a long and hazardous cruise, she was said to be making a “Shanghai voyage”; and, likewise, a sailor who had been forcibly impressed into a vessel’s crew was “sent to Shanghai.” Later, as the expression was naturally shortened, he was said to have been shanghaied. As early as 1852 twenty-three gangs were more or less openly engaged in this nefarious trade in San Francisco, and for many years shanghaiing was one of the most lucrative activities of the boarding-house masters, or crimps, and their natural allies, the dive-keepers of the Barbary Coast.

Until small craft driven by steam or gasoline came into general use, communication between shore and the ships anchored in the Bay of San Francisco was maintained by professional boatmen who plied back and forth in large skiffs, called Whitehall boats. They transferred pilots to and from the vessels and carried as passengers the sailors and officers who had been given shore liberty. Many of them, in later years, became important figures in San Francisco's commercial and shipping circles, but others were scoundrels and remained so throughout their lives. In this latter category were such celebrated boatmen and waterfront characters as Old Activity, so called because he was always deeply involved in some gigantic undertaking, seldom honest; a Mexican known as Red Shirt, who was at length shot by a policeman while robbing a sailor whom he had knocked unconscious with a bludgeon; Old Buzz, shrewd but illiterate, who talked almost continuously in a low, buzzing monotone; and Solly, a gigantic ruffian who carried a revolver, a slung shot, and a pair of brass knuckles, while round his neck a knife was slung on a lanyard. Solly was one of the most accomplished and successful crooks on the waterfront, and for a small fee he would do anything from scuttling a ship to cutting a throat. One of his favorite methods of acquiring wealth was to row into the middle of the Bay and threaten to throw his passenger overboard unless he were paid double or triple the fare which had been agreed upon. There was seldom any argument, for Solly’s appearance was, to say the least, terrifying. Moreover, he had a well-earned reputation for carrying out his threats. He was never jailed, as he should have been, although the police always believed that he was responsible for the deaths of several men whose bodies were washed ashore soon after they had embarked in his boat. Eventually, however, Solly met his destined fate. He was engaged to take the mate of a British schooner out to the ship, which was anchored just inside the Golden Gate, and in mid Bay made his usual demand for more money. The mate promptly shot him and rowed the boat to the schooner, where the smaller craft was cast adrift with Solly’s body draped over the gunwale.

The best customers of the boatmen were the runners who worked for the sailors’ boarding-houses, from one to half a dozen being attached to each place, according to the size and popularity of the resort. The principal duty of the runner was to bring seamen into the establishment of his employer, and for each man so delivered he was paid from three to five dollars, depending upon supply and demand. Whenever a ship was reported outside the Golden Gate, the Whitehall boatmen took the runners down the Bay, where they clambered over the vessel’s side, sometimes while she was still under headway, and in any event soon after she had dropped her anchor. Once aboard, the runners stopped at nothing short of murder, and not always at that, to induce or compel the sailors to desert the vessel and accompany them to the boarding-houses. “They swarm over the rail like pirates,” said the San Francisco Times of October 21, 1861, “and virtually take possession of the deck. The crew are shoved into the runners’ boats, and the vessel is often left in a perilous situation, with none to manage her, the sails unfurled, and she liable to drift afoul of the shipping at anchor. In some cases not a man has been left aboard in half an hour after the anchor has been dropped.”

The wages paid to sailors shipping out of San Francisco varied with the years, but from gold-rush days to the turn of the present century they probably averaged around twenty-five dollars a month and found. Occasionally a seaman of unusual sobriety and intelligence found his own berth, but the great majority of sailors, even those who were not shanghaied, were shipped through the boarding-house masters. When a man signed his name or put his mark to a ship’s articles, he received, in theory at least, two months’ pay in advance, so that he might outfit himself and not have to depend upon what he could purchase from the captain's slop-chest. It was seldom, however, that any of this money actually passed into the possession of the seaman; almost invariably it went into the pockets of the crimps, ostensibly in payment for lodging and other shore expenses. The balance of the sailor’s wages was not paid until the ship had completed her voyage and dropped anchor in her home port, which in sailing-ship days might mean anywhere from four months to four years. If the seaman deserted, he forfeited the entire amount. During all the time he was at sea or in port he was dependent for pocket-money upon the good nature of the captain; the latter could advance funds or withhold them, as he pleased. In San Francisco some ship captains arranged with the owners of second-hand-clothing stores, where the sailors purchased most of their supplies, to pay the bills contracted by members of their crews. The storekeeper charged exorbitant prices for everything and occasionally advanced the sailor a few dollars spending money, putting double or triple the amount on the bill. Just before the ship sailed, the captain paid the amount, deducting the sum from the seaman’s wages and usually receiving a share of the graft from the storekeeper.

If the captain of a ship intended to sail within a few days or a week after arrival, it was to his interest and that of his owners to keep his crew intact, since to obtain other men he would usually have to pay out, in advance wages and bonuses to the crimps and runners, more than he would save through forfeiture of wages. But if a ship was to lay up in harbor for several weeks or months, as frequently happened, the desertion of the sailors would result in a considerable saving. A skipper who thus faced the prospect of maintaining a crew in idleness usually welcomed the runners and did whatever he could to help them get the men off the ship. A week or ten days before the vessel made port, he and the mates began to pave the way for the activities of the runners by inaugurating a process called “running the men out“—they were deliberately cruel, compelled the ship’s cook to serve rotten and scanty rations, and put the sailors at unnecessary and back-breaking tasks, and otherwise sought to make their lives as miserable as possible, hoping so to enrage and disgust them that they would leave the ship at the first opportunity. If they failed to do so, or if they resisted the importunities of the runners, as they sometimes did when large sums were owing to them, the captain announced that no shore liberty would be granted so long as the ship remained in port. The prospect of spending several weeks or months aboard the vessel while the bright lights of the Barbary Coast beckoned was usually more than a sailor could stand. Almost invariably, no matter how their resolve, they deserted within a few days and made their way to shore in small boats which a falsely sympathetic ship’s officer had made available to them. They landed with no money and no place to go and were easy prey for the crimps and runners, who gave them drugged liquor and then lugged them off to the boarding-houses. Quite often even a captain who intended to remain in port only a short time would run his men out, and after they had deserted, and so forfeited their pay, he reshipped them through arrangements previously made with the boarding-house masters. The sailors would thus, and sometimes within a few hours, find themselves aboard the vessel they had just left, unable to collect the money they had earned during the previous voyage and with their pay for two months of the new cruise in the hands of the crimps.

When the runners went down the Bay to board an incoming ship, their equipment was so nearly identical as to be practically standardized. It consisted, usually, of a revolver, a knife, a blackjack or a slung shot, a pair of brass knuckles, a flask of liquid soap, obscene pictures, and as many bottles of rum and whisky, all liberally dosed with Spanish fly, as could be crowded into their pockets. And, of course, a complete assortment of lying promises. If the runner clambered over the side of a vessel about meal-time, his first care was to empty his flask of liquid soap into the kettle of soup or stew which was usually to be found simmering on the galley stove. When the resultant offensive mess was served, it naturally increased the traditional enmity between the sailor and the ship’s cook and put the former in a proper frame of mind to listen to the runner’s arguments, which were as often physical as vocal. He began by giving the sailors as much whisky and rum as they could drink, and when the drugged liquor began to take effect, he produced his obscene pictures and embarked upon a glowing account of the amorous pleasures which awaited them in the dives and brothels of the Barbary Coast. He offered to provide whatever money might be required, and told the sailors that the proprietor of the boarding-house of whose staff he was such an ornament had engaged the prettiest and most skillful harlots in all San Francisco for their amusement. These ladies, the runner said, were waiting impatiently. Moreover, he promised that when the seamen had caroused to their hearts’ content, the generous boarding-house master would sign them for a voyage with a kind-hearted ship’s captain who was going on a pleasure cruise in the South Seas. To men who had been at sea for months, or even years, this sort of ta!k sounded like news from heaven and was usually very effective. As soon as a sailor showed signs of wavering, the runner rushed him across the deck and shoved him into the waiting Whitehall boat. If he came willingly, the boatman gave him a drink; if he showed fight, the boatman hit him with a slung shot or club to keep him quiet. Sailors who stubbornly maintained their right to stay with their ship were threatened with revolvers or knocked down and beaten and not infrequently were carried off the vessel by main force. The runners operated under a sort of code by which a sailor was anybody’s game until he was actually in a boat or until he had uttered the name of a boarding-house master, whereupon he became the property of the runner representing that particular crimp and was no longer molested by the others. It was not uncommon for two opposing runners to seize a sailor’s ears between their teeth and hang on, biting hard, until the bewildered and frightened seaman cried out the name of the boarding-house master which had been most forcibly impressed upon his mind.

Honest shipmasters, especially those in command of foreign vessels, were frequently warned by "certain interested parties,” as the San Francisco Times put it in 1861, meaning politicians and lesser city officials, that if they interfered with the runners they would not be permitted to ship crews when they were ready to sail. Nevertheless, many tried to keep the rascals off their vessels, although they were seldom successful, because they were helpless against the rush of a dozen or more heavily armed thugs. Usually the officers of a ship were sufficiently cowed by a display of force and the brandishing of fire-arms, but if they persisted in their opposition, the runners sometimes drove them to their quarters and compelled them to remain there until the sailors had been rushed overside and were on their way to San Francisco and the boarding-houses. The boarding of the British ship Loch Err in September 1870 by runners who ignored the captain’s protests was thus described by one of her passengers:

“I had noticed several small boats containing two or three men in each, who with boat hooks and ropes attached had made fast and were being dragged along-side of our ship, which was now proceeding slowly into the harbour of San Francisco, and who had been told once or twice to let go and leave the ship. But they flatly refused to do so. . . .Whilst the crew was busy furling the sails, the men not only climbed on deck but mounted the rigging, and were soon seen very assiduously to importune, and at the same time hand bottles from which the sailors took long draughts. At first the sailors evaded them, but as the liquor began to work its effect, they gradually gave way, and allowed themselves to be cajoled. The captain several times called them down and threatened to have them arrested if they did not leave the ship. Two of them not only refused, but actually pointed a revolver at him, and told him that he was not in a ‘B— Lime Juice’ country, but in God’s own free land, where one man was as good as another. The captain appeared to be cowed, and did not interfere with them again. . . .At short intervals I noticed that the sailors climbed over the side and lowered themselves into the boats, accompanied by the villains, and were being rowed ashore. . . .I arose earlier than usual the next morning to pack my baggage preparatory to going ashore. Whilst partaking of coffee I heard the second officer calling all hands on deck, but receiving no response except from Dick [the oldest member of the crew, fifty of whose seventy years had been spent at sea] and the apprentices, he looked into the forecastle and found all the berths empty. I told him that the crew had been taken ashore by those who had boarded us. . . .After partaking of breakfast I was about to leave, when I saw two men drag old Dick towards the companion ladder. I attempted to stop them, but received curses and several blows on my face. I returned the insult, and letting go of old Dick we engaged in a close contest, during which I knocked him down. Meanwhile, Dick was not idle, but fought with his man in order to free himself. I was about to spring to his assistance, but on account of the hatch which was close behind him, the impetus in trying to free himself caused him to reel backwards, and before I could grasp him poor old Dick fell headlong down, striking his head against the keel of the ship. I called for assistance, and after securing the two men, we descended and found poor Dick quite dead, his head and body being frightfully mangled. The captain at once hoisted a police flag, which was quickly responded to by two water-policemen, who took the two villains in custody. I was requested to appear as a witness at the trial, which took place three days afterward. . . .The two culprits being well represented by counsel, got off with a light sentence of six months hard labour." (9a)

Most of the seamen who succumbed to the blows or blandishments of the runners were taken immediately to the boarding-houses by which the runners were employed, although, as the San Francisco Times pointed out in 1861, “in more than one instance the crew of a newly arrived foreign vessel have actually been driven like slaves over the ship’s side, stupefied with drugged liquor, and taken on board some other vessel and sent to sea, fit subjects for scurvy, without putting their feet upon land.” Ordinarily the work of the runner was completed when the sailors stepped across the threshold of the boarding-house. Thereafter they were handled by the crimp, and if they proved intractable, by strong-arm bruisers who beat them into submission with slung shots and bludgeons. Once a sailor was actually in the clutches of a boarding-house master, he hadn’t even the proverbial Chinaman’s chance of regaining his liberty. As soon as he arrived, the bag containing his few possessions was taken from him and locked up. He was then given a bunk and as much cheap, vile whisky as he could drink. The liquor was usually dosed with laudanum or opium, Spanish fly having already served its purpose. On rare occasions women were brought in from the houses of prostitution to entertain the sailors, but more often the captives, if they had any money, were escorted by the crimp’s strongarm men to the dives and brothels of the Barbary Coast, where they were promptly robbed by the harlots and other attachés of the resorts. The crimp always received a share of the spoil and was thus relieved of the trouble, and sometimes the danger, of himself robbing the sailor.

While a seaman remained in the boarding-house, which was seldom longer than twenty-four hours, he was kept as drunk as possible. In due course a shipmaster appeared to engage a crew. As many men as he desired were produced by the crimp and were told that a ship had at last been found for them. If they were sober enough, they were permitted to sign their names to the articles and also, though they seldom knew it at the time, to a document which assigned their two months’ advance pay to the crimp. If they were drunk or semi-conscious from drink, the boarding-house master signed for them. Occasionally a sailor objected to being shipped aboard a vessel of which he knew nothing for a voyage he didn’t want to make, whereupon the crimp’s thugs dragged him into another room and beat him until he was willing to do anything to escape further punishment. The formality of signing the articles having been completed, the captain returned to his ship, while the sailors were given more liquor, so heavily drugged that they were soon in a sodden daze. They were then carefully searched, and all valuables found were appropriated by the crimp and his hirelings. If any of the seamen wore good clothing, it was stripped from their bodies, and they were dressed in shoddy, worthless cast-oils or wrapped in old blankets. Their dunnage-bags were kept by the crimp, and the contents sold for whatever they would bring. As a final step in this phase of shanghaiing, the sailors were driven or carried to the waterfront, loaded into boats, and rowed out to the ship. There they were hoisted aboard as if they had been so many sacks of meal. One of the ship’s officers checked them as they came over the rail, and when the proper number lay about the deck, the captain appeared and paid to the crimp the advance wages which had been assigned by each man of the crew. The captain also paid the crimp a bonus, ranging from twenty-five dollars to a hundred dollars, for each man delivered on board. Sometimes he had to pay more. During the eighteen-fifties, when the rush for the gold-fields made it extremely difficult for outgoing ships to obtain crews, an able-bodied man was worth as much as three hundred dollars. Whatever sum was paid in bonuses was always, on one pretext or another, deducted from the sailor’s pay.

There were plenty of state and city laws under which the activities of the runners and crimps could have been controlled or even prevented, one municipal ordinance in particular imposing a fine of a hundred dollars upon any person who boarded a vessel without the consent of the captain. But little or no attention was paid to these statutes. Few runners or boarding-house masters were ever arrested, and even fewer convicted, for the politicians and city officials protected them just as they did the purveyors of vice in other parts of the Barbary Coast. Consequently both runners and crimps waxed fat and sassy. In busy seasons, when the port of San Francisco was crowded with shipping, and sailors were both plentiful and much in demand, some of the runners earned as much as five hundred to eight hundred dollars a week, while many of the boarding-house masters banked fifty thousand dollars a year clear profit over a long period. There is no record, of course, of the number of sailors who passed through the hands of these villains, but the annual turnover must have been several thousand. Of British seamen alone it was estimated (9b) that during the eighteen-nineties between eight hundred and eleven hundred deserted their ships each year and were immediately shanghaied out again by the crimps. The Britishers were easiest of all sailors to influence, for the standard wage out of English ports was two pounds and ten shillings a month, while out of San Francisco it was between four and five pounds. Most of the difference went into the pockets of the crimps, and in the long run the sailor actually earned little more out of one port than out of another.

In this more or less enlightened age it is difficult to understand why the sailors submitted with such docility to the fearful abuse meted out to them by both runners and crimps. The answer probably lies in the fact that in those early days the vast majority of seamen were great stupid, hulking brutes of scant sensitivity and little or no intelligence. Aboard ship they were held under iron discipline and were accustomed to brutality from their officers. They naturally expected the same sort of treatment from everyone else and were seldom disappointed. Moreover, they had no legal rights that anyone, including the authorities, recognized, and no knowledge of how to obtain justice, even if it had occurred to them that they were entitled to it. The practice of enslaving sailors began to decline only with the gradual disappearance of the tramp sailing-ship; the formation of the Seaman’s Union, the Seamen’s Institute, and other labor and welfare organizations; the enactment of additional legislation for the protection of sailors and the regulation of shipping; and the effective enforcement of laws which already existed, particularly “An Act to Prohibit Shanghaiing in the United States,” passed by Congress in 1906, which imposed, upon conviction of the offense, a fine of a thousand dollars or one year in prison or both. During the past twenty-five or thirty years shanghaiing has seldom been heard of, although it probably still occurs occasionally in San Francisco and other American seaports.

In the main the crimp who operated along the waterfront of San Francisco was so thoroughly a crook that he refused to play fair even with his confederate the shipmaster. Quite often the men who signed the articles in the presence of the ship’s captain were strong, husky specimens, obviously sailors, while the ones actually shipped were just as obviously physical weaklings, puny little dock rats whom the crimp’s runners had picked up along the waterfront. It was comparatively easy thus to impose upon a ship’s captain, for all of the men delivered to his ship were invariably so sodden with drink or drugs that they appeared to be lifeless. Sometimes, also, the crimp included a dead man or two among the crew. The presence of a corpse was seldom discovered until the ship was at sea, and then the captain usually thought it that of a sailor who had died of acute alcoholism. The body was heaved overboard and nothing more thought of it. Nor did the captain report the matter to the police when, if ever, he again dropped anchor in the Bay of San Francisco, for the death of a sailor was a matter of little importance. Many murder mysteries in early San Francisco were never solved because of this practice of shipping the corpus delicti to sea as a live sailor; many crimps did a flourishing business in so disposing of the victims of criminals who had found that the easiest way to rob a man was to kill him first. Another way in which the crimp fleeced the shipmasters was to include a dummy among the sailors whom he delivered. A suit of clothes was stuffed with straw and properly weighted, while that part of the dummy which represented the head was swathed in mufflers or other heavy cloths. This fraud was not much easier to detect than the inclusion of a corpse, although when it was found out, the ship’s captain didn’t merely fling the dummy overboard and forget about it. The fact that he had paid a hundred dollars or more for a bundle of straw was usually enough to embitter him for years. But he had no recourse.

The first man to sell a dummy to an unsuspecting shipmaster is said to have been a wizened little Laplander known as Nikko, for many years runner and right-hand man for Miss Piggott, a ferocious old woman who operated a saloon and boarding-house in Davis Street during the eighteen-sixties and the eighteen-seventies. No one ever knew her first name; she insisted upon being addressed, with proper respect, as Miss Piggott. Her only rival of importance as a female crimp was Mother Bronson, whose establishment was in Steuart Street. Both these ladies were worthy compeers of Pigeon-Toed Sal and the Galloping Cow, who were then rising to fame elsewhere on the Barbary Coast. Like these celebrated personages, Miss Piggott and Mother Bronson were their own bouncers and chief bar-tenders, but neither enforced her edicts with a bludgeon or a slung shot, as did Sal and the Cow. Miss Piggott remained faithful to the bung-starter, and in the use of this implement as a weapon she developed amazing skill. On the other hand, Mother Bronson, who was nearly six feet tall and broad in proportion, scorned to use any other than Mother Nature’s weapons. She possessed a fine and strong set of sharp teeth, which she was delighted to sink into the anatomy of an obstreperous customer; her enormous feet were encased in No. 12 brogans, and her fist was as hard as a rock and in size resembled a small ham. With the toe of her boot she once hoisted a Chinaman from the floor of her saloon to the top of the bar, and she often boasted that she could fell an ox with one blow of her fist, although no one ever saw her do it. Nor did anyone dispute the statement.

Sometimes Miss Piggott lacked enough sailors to round out an order, whereupon Nikko prowled through the Barbary Coast until he found a likely-looking prospect, and enticed him into the Davis Street saloon. There he was nudged along the bar until he stood upon a trapdoor built into the floor. Then Nikko called loudly for drinks, which were served by Miss Piggott in person. The Laplander received beer, while for the stranger Miss Piggott prepared a concoction much used in shanghaiing circles and called a Miss Piggott Special. It was composed of equal parts of whisky, brandy, and gin, with a goodly lacing of laudanum or opium. While the victim was shivering under the terrific impact of this beverage, Miss Piggott leaned across the bar and tapped him on the head with a bung-starter, while Nikko made matters certain with a blow from a slung shot. As the prospect began to crumple to the floor, Miss Piggott operated a lever behind the bar and dumped him into the basement, where he fell upon a mattress which Miss Piggott had thoughtfully provided, realizing that the man might receive an injury which would lessen his value. When the object of all these attentions awoke, he was usually in a ship bound for foreign climes, with no very clear idea as to how he got there. All of Miss Piggott’s regular customers knew the exact location of the trapdoor and kept away from it, for it was an unwritten law of the establishment that any man who stood upon the fatal spot was fair game. The spectacle of Miss Piggott drugging and then slugging a stranger and dropping him into the basement excited no particular attention. The bystanders might comment judiciously upon the force and accuracy with which the old lady delivered the knock-out blow, but that was about all. It never occurred to anyone to go to the victim’s assistance or to call the police. What happened to him was his own affair.

Nikko is said to have sold mare than a score of dummies to shipmasters during his long and busy career as a runner for Miss Piggott. He devoted a great deal of time to building them and made them more lifelike by imprisoning a rat in each of the coat sleeves, so that when the dummy lay upon the deck of the ship the efforts of the rodents to escape produced very satisfactory twitchings, while their muffled squeaks passed muster as the groans of a very sick man. When, in the early eighteen-seventies, Miss Piggott passed to whatever reward awaited her, Nikko became a bartender for Olaf Frisson, who operated a saloon in Harrison Street which was much frequented by Norwegian sailors and ships’ officers. Olaf’s resort was an honest drinking place, with no shanghaiing done on the premises, and Nikko virtually had to begin life anew. He became, instead of a runner and a slugger, an oracle, and was soon known far and wide for the uncanny accuracy of his prophecies. For drinks to the assembled company, Nikko would predict in detail the happenings of any given year in any man’s life. Olaf himself was seven feet tall in his socks and was a man of tremendous bulk besides, weighing more than three hundred pounds. He was healthy and popular and owner of a prosperous business; nevertheless he nursed a secret sorrow. He often complained that no woman had ever loved him for himself alone, and this distressing situation he attributed to the fact that he had practically no neck—his head jutted abruptly from between his shoulders, and he was never able to find a collar narrow enough for him. However, he had one great gift of which he was extremely proud and which made him famous all along the waterfront. He could, and frequently did, drink a gallon of whisky at one sitting—and a very short sitting, at that—and feel no ill effects.

While the unquestioned abilities of Miss Piggott and Mother Bronson were recognized and generously applauded by the critical population of the Barbary Coast, the ladies were more or less regarded as freaks because they were women. As a general rule, despite an occasional bold stroke and the unflagging industry of Nikko and their other runners, they were forced to content themselves with the leavings of the masculine shanghaiers. The dominant figure of the waterfront during the years in which Miss Piggott and Mother Bronson flourished, and perhaps the most successful and dangerous crimp who ever operated in San Francisco, was a short, thick-set Irishman, with flaming red hair, a bristling red beard, and an irascible disposition. Throughout the underworld, and wherever sailors gathered, he was known and feared as Shanghai Kelly. Of scarcely less renown were such crimps as Jimmy Laflin, who with Bob Pinner operated a place at No. 35 Pacific Street and specialized in crews for whaling vessels; George Reuben, who kept a boarding-house for German sailors; Horseshoe Brown, who at length killed his wife and himself in front of their resort in Kearny Street; Shanghai Brown, whose place was in Davis Street; Calico Jim, a Chileno who conducted a particularly low saloon and crimping joint at Battery Point; Johnny Fearem, Patsy Corrigan, and Michael Connor, who had saloons and boarding-houses in East Street, now the Embarcadero; and Billy Maitland, of Front Street. Some time during the eighteen-nineties Calico Jim is said to have shanghaied six policemen who were sent, one after another, to arrest him. Soon afterwards he left San Francisco. When his victims returned from their enforced cruise, they pooled their resources, chose one of their number by lot, and sent him to South America to search for the crimp. After several months the policeman came upon Calico Jim in the streets of Callao, Chile, and shot him six times, once for each shanghaied officer. (9c)

In his latter years, about 1880, Michael Connor abandoned East Street and opened the Chain Locker Saloon and Boarding House at Main and Bryant streets. While Connor was a crimp and a shanghaier, he was also a deeply religious man, and his proudest boast was that he never told a lie, though when in his cups he would admit that he sometimes stretched or garnished the truth. In those days a man was not considered a real sailor until he had made the perilous Cape Horn passage, and a shipmaster who could be convinced that a seaman had been round the Horn was usually willing to pay a few dollars more for him than for an ordinary man who had not undergone this tremendous experience. Whenever Connor assembled a crew, he always swore upon the Bible that each man had been round the Horn. In one sense this was true enough, for the first thing Connor did when a sailor was brought into his house was to lay a cow’s horn upon the floor and make the seaman walk round it. In his back yard Connor also installed a ship’s steering-wheel and a mast with flying jib, main halyards, truck, and rigging, upon which he gave his landlubber victims a few lessons in seamanship before loading them aboard a vessel.

Shanghai Kelly’s saloon and boarding-house was a three-storey frame structure at No. 33 Pacific Street, between Drum and Davis streets, under part of which tidewater flowed. Kelly preferred to handle bona fide sailors, partly because they were more docile and partly because there was seldom any danger of reprisal, no matter how they were treated. But, in common with his co-workers in the crimping field, he would, if necessary to fill out a crew, shanghai whoever fell into his hands. And for a price he would shanghai any man whose enemies wanted him out of the way. Kelly’s runners and strong-arm men went into the streets or the dives of the Barbary Coast and blackjacked the men they wanted, or induced them to visit Kelly’s saloon. There they were drugged, blackjacked, and dropped through trapdoors, of which there were three in the floor in front of the bar, into a boat which was always tied up to a pillar of the house. In his drugging operations this prince of shanghaiers used the Miss Piggott Special and also gave his victims a concoction of his own invention, compounded of schnapps and beer and seasoned with opium or laudanum. Besides these quieting doses he used a cigar heavily doped with opium, which was known as “the Shanghai smoke” and was manufactured especially for him by a Chinese cigar-maker.

Kelly’s boarding-house was usually filled with sailors, many of whom put themselves in his power of their own accord and with full knowledge of what would undoubtedly happen to them, because he provided free women as well as free liquor and permitted any sort of debauchery a man might fancy—and sometimes men who had been several years at sea came ashore with very exotic ideas. Once during the middle eighteen-seventies, however, Shanghai Kelly found his place practically bare of seamen at a time when three ships anchored off the Heads, outside the Golden Gate, wanted crews immediately. One of these vessels was the Reefer, a notorious hell-ship out of New York, which was commanded by a captain with whom no sailor in his right mind would ship if he could avoid it. Confronted by the necessity of shanghaiing strangers in wholesale lots, Kelly performed the exploit which set the cap-stone to his fame and which is still talked about along the San Francisco waterfront as the most daring job of crimping in the history of the city. He chartered the Goliah, an old paddle-wheel steamer which had wheezed about the Bay for many years, and announced that he would celebrate his forthcoming birthday with a picnic, at which there would be free liquor and other attractions. He issued a blanket invitation to the Barbary Coast, and the riff-raff of that quarter answered in droves. As his guests came aboard, however, Shanghai Kelly counted them, and when ninety men stood on deck, he cast off, and the Goliah chugged down the Bay and outside the Golden Gate into the broad Pacific. Barrels of beer and whisky were broached, and the picnickers began to drink Kelly’s health with great enthusiasm. But the liquor was heavily drugged, and within two hours every man on board, excepting Kelly and his henchmen, was asleep. Thereupon the Goliah steamed alongside the Reefer and the two other ships, and a crew for each vessel was hoisted aboard, although there was scarcely a man among the ninety who knew one end of a ship from the other. On her way back to San Francisco the Goliah took off the survivors of the ship Yankee Blade, which had been wrecked on a rock off Point Conception, west of Santa Barbara. The landing of the rescued men at the Market Street wharf caused great excitement, and no one seemed to notice that Shanghai Kelly had returned without his picnic guests.

The most celebrated of the runners who made the port of San Francisco a byword in all the Seven seas was Johnny Devine, better known as the Shanghai Chicken, who was described by the San Francisco Call in 1871 as “one of the most dangerous of the habitués of the Barbary Coast.” Devine was a New Yorker, and no one in San Francisco, at least so far as the police ever learned, knew anything about his early life except that he had been shanghaied out of the metropolis in 1859, when he was twenty years old. About two years later, in 1861, he appeared in San Francisco and soon became one of the principal ornaments of the waterfront and the Barbary Coast. He was a bold and industrious burglar, footpad, sneak-thief, pickpocket, and pimp.

At one time he had seven women walking the streets for him or entertaining men whom he brought to their quarters. He was a real artist with the blackjack, the slung shot, and brass knuckles and for a small sum would commit, upon whoever was pointed out as the proper recipient of his attention, any sort of physical outrage from mauling to mayhem. In nine months he was arrested twenty-seven times for as many different crimes, but the only punishment meted out to him by the courts during this period was fifty days in jail. He had been hired for fifty dollars to attack a man against whom another and more cautious man held a grievance, and had done his work so well that his victim was in a hospital for several months.

When he first came to San Francisco, the Shanghai Chicken fancied himself as a prize-fighter. He defeated Patsy Marley in a bout at Point Isabel, and a little later he fought Soapy McAlpine at San Mateo. Soapy was a much better pugilist than Devine, and a bit more imaginative. He introduced kicking, biting, and butting into the fray and soon stretched the Shanghai Chicken unconscious on the floor. When he was able to walk, Devine said with great firmness that he was through with the prize-ring. He became a runner for a crimp named Johnny Walker and later was a sort of chief of staff for Shanghai Kelly, on whose behalf he performed great deeds. He was particularly adept at hi-jacking sailors whom other runners had captured and were escorting to the boarding-houses of their employers. He once tried to take a drunken sailor away from Tommy Chandler, one of Shanghai Brown’s runners, and Chandler promptly knocked him down with a hearty punch to the jaw. The Shanghai Chicken got to his feet, carefully felled the sailor with a slung shot so that he couldn’t escape, and then drew an old pepper-box pistol and shot Chandler in the left breast and right hand. He then lugged his booty to Shanghai Kelly’s boarding-house. The shooting ruined a promising career in the prize-ring, for Chandler had shown considerable ability as a fighter and had already defeated Dooney Harris, a well-known English pugilist, and Billy Dwyer, who was murdered by Happy Jack Harrington. Chandler never fully recovered the use of his right hand, and never again entered the ring. Nevertheless, he refused to appear as a witness against the Shanghai Chicken, and the latter escaped punishment.

On June 13, 1868 Devine went on a spree with Johnny Nyland, another of Shanghai Kelly’s runners. Both had guns, and Nyland also carried a huge knife which he boasted had been stolen from the dead body of a waterfront policeman. They shot and knifed several men—none seriously, however—in Billy Lewis’s saloon, on Battery Street, and then swaggered into the bar-room attached to Billy Maitland’s boarding-house, in Front Street, near Vallejo Street. There Nyland cut two men with his knife, while the Shanghai Chicken fired half a dozen shots at the bottles behind the bar, and several at the bar-tender. Devine was thus engaged when Billy Maitland, a huge man of tremendous strength and with a wide reputation as a rough-and-tumble fighter, came into the saloon. Maitland took Nyland’s knife away from him and kicked him into the street. With the knife in his hand he returned to the bar-room to find the Shanghai Chicken unsteadily aiming a pistol at him. Maitland lunged forward, Devine dropped the gun and raised his left arm to protect his throat, and the heavy knife sheared cleanly through the flesh and bone of his wrist. While the Shanghai Chicken screamed in pain, Maitland tossed him into the street beside Nyland and slammed the door. Devine struggled to his feet, shrieked curses at Maitland for a moment, and then cried:

“Hey, Billy, you dirty bastard! Chuck out me fin!”

Maitland opened the door of his saloon and threw Devine’s severed hand onto the sidewalk. Supported by Nyland, the Shanghai Chicken carried it to Dr. Simpson’s drug-store, at Pacific and Davis streets, where he flung the gory member on the counter.

“Say, Doc,” he said, “stick that on again for me, will you?”

Before Simpson could tell him that such surgery was impossible, Devine collapsed. He was sent to a hospital, where his left arm was amputated a few inches above his wrist. When he recovered, he had a large iron hook attached to the stump and thereafter was more dangerous than ever. He sharpened the point of the hook to needle fineness, and in his fights used it as an offensive weapon, inflicting terrible wounds. He began to drink more and more after his injury, however, and soon became so unreliable that Shanghai Kelly not only discharged him, but tried to shanghai him. Several attempts failed, although once Kelly’s strong-arm men captured him and got him as far as the boat-landing. There the Shanghai Chicken broke his bonds and went into action with his iron hook. He soon had Kelly’s sluggers fleeing for their lives. Then Devine rowed Kelly’s boat down the Bay and sold it to another crimp.

As a criminal, the Shanghai Chicken sank pretty low after his hand had been cut off by Billy Maitland. His women left him, and he managed to eke out an existence only by robbing drunken men and committing small thefts. About 1869 he served a year in the county jail for larceny and soon afterwards was imprisoned for thirty days for stealing three pigs’ feet from a lunch-room. A few weeks after he had served this sentence, in May 1871, he committed the final crime of his career. He shot a German sailor at Bay View, in South San Francisco, and then threatened to kill a woman because she refused to hide him from the police. He was not caught until the next morning, however, when Patrolman John Coulter found him aboard the steamer Wilson G. Hunt, which was about to sail from Meiggs Wharf. He was wearing his victim’s cap, having left his own black sombrero at the scene of the crime. While Coulter was taking him to police headquarters, the Shanghai Chicken said:

“John, you’re a damned good fellow, but I’m afraid you’ll have me hung.”
“Why so?” asked Coulter.
“Well,” said Devine, “I shot a son of a bitch at Bay View yesterday, and I think they’ll make me swing for it."
He was right. They did.

Not every seaman who sailed into the Bay of San Francisco fell into the hands of the runners and crimps. There were many who were given shore leave by their captains and returned to their ships when it expired; many who deserted of their own accord and came in contact with the boarding-house masters only when their money was gone and they were ready to ship out again; and many who ended their voyage at San Francisco and were paid off there. These men, especially those in the last-named class, always came ashore with a little money, which they were anxious to spend. For many years they provided a large share of the revenue which flowed into the bar-rooms, dance-halls, concert saloons, and brothels of the Barbary Coast. They were always welcome in any of the resorts, while scores of places made special efforts to attract their custom. Some of the dives catered particularly to the Souwegians, as the Scandinavian sailors were called, and provided the sort of women and entertainment which these sons of the north were likely to prefer; others sought to entice the German or the Englishman or the Frenchman; while perhaps a score bent their energies to the amusement of the Negro. Curiously enough, a Negro sailor in San Francisco was always called Mister Peters, a queer bit of nomenclature which persisted for years, but of which no one appears to know the origin.

Large numbers of sailors could invariably be found in the audiences of the Bella Union on the Barbary Coast, and the Midway Plaisance in Market Street, particularly the latter after it had begun to feature hoochy-coochy dancers. Bottle Koenig’s concert saloon, where the immortal Oofty Goofty made his theatrical debut and which was noted for the beauty and amiability of its pretty waiter girls, was also a place of resort for sailors, although it probably would have been more popular if the bouncers had been a little less enthusiastic in their use of hickory bludgeons. There was no dancing at Bottle Koenig’s or at any of the other resorts of that type; they strove to hold the sailors’ interest with liquor and bawdy shows. Seamen who desired to dance went to the scores of dance-halls which flourished throughout the Barbary Coast. On the floor of any of these places, with a fair damsel clasped in his arms, the frolicsome sailor was encouraged to express himself in any manner which might seem to him best suited to the occasion; he was not molested, indeed, if he chose to execute dance movements which might with more propriety have been performed behind the closed doors of a sleeping-chamber.

When a sailor with money in his pockets had tired of women and entertainment and wanted to do some serious drinking, he was welcome in many famous saloons, among them the Balboa, the Foam, the Bowhead, the Grizzly Bear, and Sverdrup’s, all on East Street; the Cowboy’s Rest, in Pacific Street near Kearney; and the Whale, also in Pacific Street. Excepting the Cowboy’s Rest and the Whale, these were decent enough drinking places. The Whale, which was run by Johnny McNear during its period of greatest renown, was as tough a bar-room as San Francisco ever harbored. Sailors were encouraged to come there and drink because they were notoriously free spenders and not overcaptious about the quality of the liquor served them, but no one not a recognized criminal was permitted to make the place a regular haunt and rendezvous. Any murderer, burglar, or footpad whom the police might be seeking was almost sure to be found in the Whale, but it usually required several policemen to get him out. A list of the criminals who sought refuge there would be a roster of San Francisco’s worst citizens during a period of some ten or fifteen years. One of the most notable of the Whale’s habitués was Cod Wilcox, who in the late eighteen-seventies stole a sloop and enjoyed a brief but prosperous career as a pirate in the Bay of San Francisco before he was caught and sent to San Quentin Prison for twenty years. Another was Tip Thornton, a pickpocket, burglar, sneak-thief, and footpad, who usually worked with his brother, Mush Thornton. Although he was a slim, soft-spoken little man, Tip Thornton was acclaimed as one of the most ferocious fighters on the Barbary Coast and as a very dangerous man to annoy. He always carried a long knife with a narrow blade, but sharp as a razor, and when he became involved in an altercation, his sole idea was to slice off his opponent’s nose. If he couldn’t get a nose, he’d take an ear. He is said to have cut off at least a score of noses in the Whale and elsewhere on the Barbary Coast, and almost as many ears. But he finally sliced off one nose too many, and Patrolman Jack Cleary, one of the few policemen who dared enter the Whale alone, went to the saloon, fought off the bar-tender and half a dozen other men, and came out dragging Tip Thornton at the end of a pair of nippers. The nose-slicer was sent to San Quentin.

The Cowboy’s Rest, the site of which is now a dairy lunch-room, was operated by Maggie Kelly, a large and voluptuous blonde who was variously known as Cowboy Mag and the Queen of the Barbary Coast. No women were regularly attached to her place, but she operated a rooming-house in connection with her saloon, and whoever rented one of her rooms was never asked any embarrassing questions. She flourished after Pigeon-Toed Sal, the Galloping Cow, Mother Bronson, and Miss Piggott had been gathered to their fathers, but she was in every way their equal. Like these ferocious females of an early day, she was her own bouncer, and whenever a customer became obstreperous, she relieved him of his weapons and ran him into the street. Her place was destroyed by the holocaust of 1906, and when the police searched the ruins, they found, behind the bar, a neat pile of some fifty revolvers and a score of knives, besides many slung shots, blackjacks, and brass knuckles. Cowboy Mag was arrested frequently and became the subject of critical comment in the newspapers because of the extreme excitement and irregularity of her love life—in the course of her somewhat hectic career she found it necessary to shoot one husband and one lover, to discipline with a club several other men who had enjoyed her favors, and to administer sound thrashings to various ladies who attempted to trespass upon her amorous preserves. Fortunately for her, the husband and the lovers were too gentlemanly to appear in court against her, and the other women dared not. Her greatest public renown came in 1898, when several Negro regiments were waiting in San Francisco for transports to take them to Manila. Other Barbary Coast dive-keepers welcomed the black soldiers, for they had money to spend, but Cowboy Mag remained true to her principles. Each morning until the regiments had embarked, she mounted guard at the door of her saloon with a revolver and remained there throughout the day, threatening to shoot every Negro who tried to enter. When a newspaper reporter suggested that she wasn’t being very patriotic, she said, simply:

“I hate niggers! I’ll blow the head off any nigger that comes into my place!”

The commanders of the ships which anchored in the Bay of San Francisco seldom frequented the Whale, the Cowboy’s Rest, and the other dives of that character at which the common sailors were such welcome guests. During their hours ashore the shipmasters were usually to be found spinning their yarns in the innumerable respectable bar-rooms, along the waterfront and elsewhere, which did much toward increasing and spreading the fame of San Francisco as a cosmopolitan and hospitable city. One of the most famous of these places was the Bank Exchange, in Montgomery Street near California Street, a magnificently appointed saloon paved with marble and decorated with oil paintings valued at a hundred thousand dollars. M. S. Latham, a San Francisco capitalist, eventually bought one of these pictures for $10,500. The Bank Exchange was especially noted for Pisco Punch, invented by Duncan Nichol, who was second only to Professor Jerry Thomas as bar-tender. During the eighteen-seventies it was by far the most popular drink in San Francisco, although it was sold for twenty-five cents a glass, a high price for those days. The secret of its preparation died with Nichol, for he would never divulge it. But descriptions of the San Francisco of the period abound with lyrical accounts of its flavor and potency, and it must have been the crème de la crème of beverages. Its base was Pisco brandy, which was distilled from the grape known as Italia, or La Rosa del Peru, and was named for the Peruvian port from which it was shipped. And the brandy itself, even without the other ingredients which made it into punch, must have been something to write home about. It was thus described by a writer who first tasted it in 1872:

“It is perfectly colourless, quite fragrant, very seductive, terribly strong, and has a flavour somewhat resembling that of Scotch whiskey, but much more delicate, with a marked fruity taste. It comes in earthen jars, broad at the top and tapering down to a point, holding about five gallons each. We had some hot, with a bit of lemon and a dash of nutmeg in it. . . .The first glass satisfied me that San Francisco was, and is, a nice place to visit. . . .The second glass was sufficient, and I felt that I could face small-pox, all the fevers known to the faculty, and the Asiatic cholera, combined, if need be." (9d)

Among other famous saloons wherein sea captains were wont to forgather and flavor the atmosphere with the tang of their salty reminiscences were the Cobweb Palace, on the northern end of Meiggs Wharf; the Cottage Bar, in Stevenson Street, then a dingy alley; the Martin and Horton saloon, in Clay Street near Montgomery; and John Denny’s grocery and bar, at Salmon and Pacific streets, which was also a noted political rendezvous. In the alley behind Denny’s place hung a large bell, which was rung by a push-button under the bar. Whenever a politician entered, particularly one who was running for office, Denny pressed the button, the bell rang, and everyone within hearing rushed into the saloon to drink the politician’s health—at the politician's expense. The Cottage was run by Barney Schow, who was celebrated both for the length and luxuriance of his mustache and for his great strength—he could juggle a thirty-gallon barrel of beer with one hand. His most prodigious feat was performed in 1898, when he lifted the anchor of the bark Elsie Thurston, after the vessel’s donkey-engine had broken down. He saved the lives of six men who had been caught in the anchor chain, but injured his own back so seriously that thereafter he walked with a cane. Schow’s saloon was popular at a time when one of the ambitions of every young man was to own a meerschaum pipe, although few were willing to do the almost continuous smoking required to color it properly. Barney Schow contracted to do this work and loaned the pipes to shipmasters bound for the Orient, who kept them burning to China and back.

The Cobweb Palace, a favorite resort of those who liked hot toddies concocted of boiling whisky, gin, and cloves, was opened in 1856 by Abe Warner and operated continuously by him until he retired, in 1897, at the age of eighty years. It was really an extraordinary place. Warner had a great liking for spiders and never interfered with one when it started to spin. As a result, the interior of his place was a mass of cobwebs; they hung in festoons from the walls and ceiling, covering the lighting fixtures and decorations and even extending to the row of bottles behind the bar. Set against the wall under the cobwebs were rows of cages containing monkeys, parrots, and other small animals and birds which Warner had purchased from sea captains and sailors. One parrot, which had the freedom of the saloon and frequently imbibed too much liquor, called Warner Grandfather and cursed in four languages. During the course of his career Warner also acquired one thousand garish paintings of nude women, a few of which were faintly visible beneath the masses of cobwebs on the walls; and a unique collection of walrus tusks and the teeth of the sperm whale, all handsomely carved with patriotic scenes, which is now in the Museum of Golden Gate Park. A frequent visitor to the Cobweb Palace was William Walker, the famous Central American filibuster who, with his long, black cloak and big, floppy hat, was a familiar figure in San Francisco for several years. Once when Walker poked with his cane at a cobweb, Warner remarked: “That cobweb will be growing long after you’ve been cut down from the gibbet.” It was only about three years later that Walker was shot by a firing squad in Honduras.

The Martin and Horton saloon was an unpretentious place with long, bare tables and sawdust-covered floors, but the liquor and free lunch were unexcelled anywhere in San Francisco, and prices were extremely low. Beer never cost more than a dime for a large glass, and whisky and other spirituous liquor sold for a bit, or twelve and one-half cents, a drink. This bar-room was the favorite loafing place of most of the queer characters who were seen about the streets of San Francisco during the two decades that followed the Civil War, but it was even more than that to Willie Coombs, who thought he was George Washington and always wore a Continental uniform of tanned buckskin. To Willie Coombs the saloon was both General Headquarters and the White House. He appeared there each night with his maps and his state papers and over a glass of beer planned his battles and composed messages to Congress and foreign nations. Once he almost starved himself to death before his friends could convince him that he was no longer at Valley Forge.

Old Orthodox and Hallelujah Cox, street preachers who sometimes descended from their soap-box pulpits long enough to absorb a sustaining ration of beer, were among the regulars at Martin and Horton’s; and so was their nemesis, Crisis Hopkins. Although he wore a high clerical collar and a ministerial frock coat, Crisis Hopkins was a scornful free-thinker. He followed Old Orthodox and Hallelujah about the streets and heckled them, and when they had finished their stints, he mounted a soap-box and delivered a reply. He always began with: “The hell-fire and damnation preachers are gone, friends; now listen to reason.” For a few months Crisis Hopkins strove unsuccessfully to convert to free-thinking a shy little man, calling himself Charles E. Bolton, who often came into Martin and Horton’s and drank beer, retiring to the remotest corner of the room. This same shy little man was at length, in 1883, unmasked as Black Bart, a famous road-agent who prowled the Western highways for some seven years and held up innumerable stage-coaches with an unloaded shot-gun. At the scene of each robbery he left a bit of verse, signed “Black Bart, the PO8.” Another habitue of Martin and Horton’s, and an occasional visitor at the Cobweb Palace, was an itinerant healer who called himself the King of Pain. He was probably the most ornate personage in the San Francisco of his time—his customary attire was scarlet underwear, a heavy velour robe, a high hat bedecked with ostrich feathers, and a heavy sword. When he went abroad, he rode in a coal-black coach drawn by six snow-white horses. The King of Pain made a fortune selling aconite liniment from a pitch at Third and Mission streets, but he lost all his money at the gaming tables and finally committed suicide.

By far the best known of all San Francisco’s queer characters, however, was the Emperor Norton, whose real name was Joshua A. Norton. He was born in England in 1819 and at the age of thirty came to San Francisco with forty thousand dollars, with which he established himself as a real-estate operator and broker. Within ten years he had increased his fortune to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, all of which he lost in an unlucky investment. The financial disaster unbalanced his mind, and on September 17, 1859 he sent to the newspapers an announcement that the California Legislature had chosen him Emperor of the United States, and that henceforth he must be addressed by his proper title. For a while he also called himself Protector of Mexico. For nearly thirty years he was one of the best-known men in San Francisco. Each afternoon he promenaded the down-town streets, graciously greeting his subjects. He wore a blue military uniform with tarnished gold-plated epaulets, which had been given him by the officers at the United States Army post, the Presidio, and a beaver hat decorated with a feather and a rosette, and he always carried both a cane and an umbrella. When his uniform began to look shabby, the Board of Supervisors, with a great deal of ceremony, appropriated enough money to buy him another, for which the Emperor sent them a gracious note of thanks and a patent of nobility for each Supervisor. He ate without paying at whatever restaurant, lunch-room, or saloon took his fancy; and whenever he wanted cash, he issued bonds in the denomination of fifty cents and sold them to his subjects. He also drew an occasional check for that amount, and it was invariably honored by the San Francisco bankers and merchants. On January 8, 1880 the Emperor died, leaving an estate which consisted of a two-dollar-and-a-half gold piece, three dollars in silver, a franc piece of 1828, and 98,200 shares of stock in a worthless gold mine.