Hatchet Men: The Story of the Tong Wars in San Francisco’s Chinatown (24 page)

It never seemed to occur to Farwell that much of the Chinese community lived in constant violation of municipal laws because of ignorance of them and of the English language, rather than because of wilful disobedience. He never made the obvious point that ignorance was no excuse. He and his associates reported that one-seventh of the city’s population (the Chinese) ignored and violated the law at every turn and were never chastized by its penalties. Of course he was referring to such ordinances as the cubicair requirement—not crimes of violence. But Farwell’s report promised a wholesale enforcement of existing laws and a promise of new and needed laws.

He was absolutely astounded by how healthy the Chinese appeared to be despite their violation of every known concept and rule of hygiene. They actually appeared to flourish in the miasmatic jungle of open cesspools and urinals, damp alleys and leaking sewers. The supervisor’s serious explanation for the lack of epidemics was that the pall of smoke which hung over Chinatown from its myriad stove pipes, braziers and open wood fires provided a constant fumigation from attics to subcellars. He even went so far as to credit the fumes from the ubiquitous cigars, pipes and opium pipes of the people as being contributory to the arresting of the spread of zymotic diseases, if not cholera itself. He described the atmosphere of Chinatown as being not only semiopaque but “tangible”—ever present not only to sight, taste and smell but also to touch. More than fifty years before Los Angeles discovered smog, Crusader Farwell accused the Chinese of San Francisco of “human defiance of chemical laws.”

Wryly, Farwell suggested that should the fumigating haze ever disappear from Chinatown skies Nature would resume her course and effectively “adjust” the Chinese problem without intervention of Congress or a treaty of the United States Senate.

To Farwell the most shocking area of the district was the so-called Palace Hotel on Jackson Street where the sewage of 400 people was carried off into the center of a courtyard to run into a common open cesspool Almost as bad was the vile den called the Dog Kennel where, in a loathsome basement on the east side of Bartlett Alley, Blind Annie and her cats lived in degradation and misery.

A careful scrutiny of the zone turned up 26 opium dens boasting 319 bunks, on 5 streets and 7 alleyways including now-vanished Dunscombe Alley. In even more obvious defiance of State and municipal laws—including some which Farwell had prepared himself as a State assemblyman—were 150 gambling dens apparently immune to laws which had closed down Caucasian gaming establishments. He found almost every one to be protected by heavy plank-andiron doors, grated windows and trap doors for quick escape. Some even had ironclad interior walls or partitions. On many doors he found the scars of police sledges and axes, but he noticed that the doors had usually held long enough for the players to flush the
tan
markers down the overworked, noisome toilets if there were not carefully kindled kitchen fires for just such an emergency.

The police response to this section of Farwell’s report was that there were not enough men on the whole force to patrol Chinatown effectively and at the same time watch and raid the gambling hells. They accused white businessmen of being all too willing to allow their buildings to be turned into bastions for the gambling fraternity of Chinatown. Farwell knew they were justified in this complaint, and accused the white owner of 806 Dupont Street of erecting what amounted to a police-proof gambling fortress. It was a stout brick building with door and street wall reinforced with boiler iron. All, in Farwell’s words, “to enable it to resist police attack and siege.” He listed 72 such barricaded gambling dens in an appendix to his report. Stout’s Alley (now Ross Alley, nicknamed the Street of the Gamblers) topped the list with 22 fortified fan-tan parlors.

The third building from Jackson Street on the west side of the Street of the Gamblers was perhaps typical. The first-floor gambling room was guarded by doors of stout planking covered with sheet iron; the hall partitions were of iron too. Escape was provided by a trap door leading to the upper first floor, a space above the ceiling, and then to the second floor. From there gamblers could flee through a plank-andiron door which led to a hall, and thence to the roof and other roofs, descending to the street farther down the block.

Farwell reported to his board that for weeks police had had to be stationed at each end of Chinatown’s alleys at night to search all passers-by and relieve them of concealed weapons. Of the tongs themselves, Farwell repeated the charges of the two committees which had sat nine years earlier, ending: “They exercise a despotic sway over one-seventh of the population.” He placed much of the earlier testimony back in the record.

For all his fanaticism, Farwell was wise enough to know that it would be difficult for much of the Chinese population to be strictly law abiding in the American sense. To some extent he excused them of deliberately superseding local and State authority, because the American system was alien to them. “The race is one which cannot readily throw off its habits and customs,” he admitted. “The fact that these customs are so widely at variance with our own makes the enforcement of our laws and compulsory obedience of our laws necessarily obnoxious and revolting to the Chinese.”

Farwell’s report and map of crime and vice in Chinatown was indicative of a trend away from the laissez-faire policy of policing the Chinese districts, and symptomatic of a future get-tough policy. By the close of the ’80s, the police would be fighting fire with fire, roughing up highbinders and suspected highbinders, breaking up crowds and smashing lodge halls. But before this drastic program was implemented the police found some new allies in a strange quarter. The women of the Protestant missionary societies made possible a two-pronged attack on one of the foundation stones of tong power—the institution of Chinese slave girls.

Usually the highbinders preferred trickery to violence when up against their missionary foes. They became most adept at concocting charges which caused the arrest of fleeing girls. As soon as the singsong girls were “safe” in jail they were repossessed by their masters who simply posted their bail and marched them back to more years of slavery under lock and key.

A case of this nature which concluded differently from most occurred in the summer of 1896. Officer McGrayan was startled to see a handsome young girl in Oriental costume running down Clay Street, blowing a police whistle as she ran. He followed and managed to coax her from under a restaurant table where she had taken refuge. No sooner had he done so than he found himself surrounded by shouting and gesticulating highbinders who claimed that the girl was drunk. As they jabbered at him to hold his attention some of their companions surreptitiously seized the girl and began to drag her back to Fish Alley. Suddenly the prostitute broke away. She ran to the policeman, fell on her knees, and threw both arms around his legs. As she clung to the startled officer she piteously begged him to save her. McGrayan was quite touched by the girl’s desperation, and tried to lead her away. But now the toughs changed their tactics and assaulted him while they tried to tear the girl from his grasp. In the scuffle the girl lost both shoes and had most of her clothes torn off. But the highbinders could not get her away from the Irishman. The crowd which formed around her protector demanded that the prostitute be taken to California Street station and booked as a drunk. The battle was becoming too much for the lone officer, so he made a pretense of agreeing. But instead of taking her to the precinct house for booking and the usual bailing out by her oppressors, McGrayan took her to Margaret Culbertson at the Presbyterian Mission. For once, the highbinders were thwarted. But most girls were not that fortunate in finding a protector, even when they made their escapes to the streets.

When slave girls had safely reached either of the two missions, the hatchet men sent police with warrants for their arrest, charging them with the theft of the jewelry they wore, actually baubles given them by visitors or their owners—the very complainants. Attorneys were frequently duped into lending their services to distortion and corruption of the law. Patrick Mogan was one example. He was supposedly hired to defend two of the “maculate females” on theft charges. Actually the bagnio operators had no intention of letting the girls come to trial. Henry Monroe, attorney for the Presbyterian Mission, warned the court of this and explained the old, sure-fire, bail-posting scheme of the highbinders; and Mogan found himself with no clients to defend. The lawyer did not appreciate being used in this fashion and he told the judge, “When Mr. Monroe made that crack in court today, that’s the first I knew about the story. If he’d come and told me that last Friday, I might have taken a different stand. All I can say is, if I’d known these things at first, I wouldn’t have had anything to do with the case.” But the eyes of Mogan and the judge were opened too late. The girls were gone, and for good.

An agent of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children uncovered one avenue of supply of prostitutes when he raided a bordello on Bartlett Alley. There he rescued Toy Gum, a pretty little fifteen year old. He learned that she had been brought to the United States supposedly to dance in the Chinese pavilion at the Atlanta Fair. (Donaldina Cameron found this same trick was worked during the Omaha Exposition of 1889.) Toy Gum’s theatrical career had been brevity itself. She was quickly sold into slavery, and just before being saved she had been sold to Wong Fook third hand for a neat $2,000. This was very good money. The going rate was far less. Kem Ying, brought to San Francisco from Portland by a pair of chaperoning highbinders, went on the block that year for $500, and Don Sun Yet brought a mere $350.

The men and women who struggled to eliminate the nefarious trade in prostitutes fought the highbinders with some of their own tactics. Kem Ying’s cousin had her arrested on a vagrancy charge in order to secure her escape. Minnie Brown smuggled Ah Yoke into the outbound steamer
Peru
as a stowaway to guarantee her getaway from the tong men watching the Embarcadero. But the chief weapon of the anti-vice crusaders was the raid. Violence often had to be met with violence. Police officers sometimes had to shoot their way into or out of a building in order to rescue slave girls kept prisoners by hatchet men.

The long crusade against Chinatown’s slave traders was that part of the bigger general battle against the tongs which really seized the public’s imagination. It was not just another vice drive. The prostitutes were of exotic dress and features. Many of them were frail, childlike creatures. Indeed, most of them were of very tender years. Most important was the fact that a great number of the girls were unwilling captives of brutal masters—they were slaves in a very real sense. These girls had been entrapped into the oldest profession and they wanted to get out of it. Many were tricked into sailing for San Francisco by promises of quick marriages to rich merchants. Others were kidnapped. Even those who came with their eyes open, under signed contracts, soon found that their owners did not intend to abide by the terms of the documents. There was no way out of the business for the girls but death unless they could somehow escape to the sanctuary of either the Presbyterian or Methodist Mission Asylum. An old Chinatown hand, Police Officer David Supple, testifying in one of the several Government investigations of the Quarter, was asked, “Is it possible for these women to escape that life?” His answer was, “Sometimes the chief of police can give some protection, but it is customary for the owners to charge them with crimes in order to get possession of them again. Sometimes they kidnap them, and even unscrupulous white men have been found to assist them.” “Do you know what they do with them when they become sick or helpless?” Supple was asked. “Yes, they put them out on the street to die.”

Often a real attachment would develop between a girl and one of her customers and she would run away with him. The brothel owners in some cases had the temerity to appeal to American courts for repossession of their property. More often they just turned the case over to the hatchet men of the tong. The flesh importers threw a lot of business to the
boo how doy
of the Temple of United Justice, the Hip Yee tong particularly. About $40 a head was paid on girls imported, and a small but steady weekly consideration was also bled from the earnings of the girls and given to the hatchet men once they were set up in San Francisco. Part of this money went to line the pockets of friendly policemen. Some of these protectors of the law were obliging to the point of standing guard over newly arrived girls to see that they did not escape from the
barracoon
(the detention house or so-called Queen’s Room) where they awaited bidders. Officer Andrew McKenzie testified that one such officer was James R. Rogers.