Hatchet Men: The Story of the Tong Wars in San Francisco’s Chinatown (40 page)

The stage was set but the “star” did not appear. Someone had tipped off Chan. Older had a private detective look for him, but he had disappeared. Older phoned Bowes and told him to ask a friend of Chan’s to call him. A meeting was arranged; Bowes kidnapped Chan in a hack and drove off, telling him that he was an officer of the Grand Jury. He took Chan to the Occidental Hotel and stood guard over him, keeping him in the dark as to what was going on and keeping him off opium. The next day he brought Chan to the Grand Jury room, the Chinese shaking from nervousness, fright and the effects of opium deprivation.

The district attorney knew his lines perfectly. “Chan Cheung, you think that you are going back to China to live the rest of your days in comfort and prosperity with your children. This will never happen. You will be hanged.” The impassive Chinese did not blink an eye. The highbinders entered, identified Chan as their murder broker, and were excused. The district attorney then went into his carefully rehearsed speech. “Chan Cheung, we don’t want to hang you. We don’t want you to die in prison, on a scaffold with a rope around your neck. Tell us who takes the money from you for protecting the gambling and we will let you go. You can go back to China and live in peace and comfort and plenty all your days… We know how much you paid to Chief Wittman and how much you paid to the officers. But you are a merchant, a man of standing in the community, and your word will go far and will help us. The police have told us, but we want your word. If you tell, you will not be hurt and you will not suffer. You will simply be called as a witness. But unless you tell us what we wish, we will indict you for murder.”

All eyes were on the gambler. Those watching him leaned forward expectantly as he began to speak. He looked at the police committee of the Grand Jury and said, “Where you nineteen men? One, two, three, four… Grand Jury nineteen men. I
no sabe.”
Chan would not say another word.

The news was rushed to Fremont Older. The latter was far from nonplussed. “Give him his nineteen men,” he said. Older secured the use of a Superior courtroom to impress Chan, seated the nineteen Grand Jurymen with Foreman Andrews on the judge’s bench. The foreman demanded that Big Cheung tell them about the payoffs to Chief Wittman. But he refused to speak. “All right,” snapped Andrews, “you don’t tell us; we will indict you for those murders and hang you.” Handcuffs were clamped on Chan’s wrists and he was loudly and dramatically indicted for a part in the murder of Tom Yick. But the wily Chan would not be tricked. He said only, “Gentlemen, this is your country and if you can indict me for murder, go ahead.” No threats could elicit anything further from him. Chan was not long in jail.

San Francisco’s great crusader appeared to have been routed. He had to watch Ellis go before the Grand Jury and demand his bribe money back, and get it. But Ellis was found guilty of bribe-taking and was dismissed from the police department in 1905. Shortly thereafter Chief Wittman was also dismissed. Ruef and Schmitz themselves were evicted by Older with the help of Hiram Johnson and Francis J. Heney.

In 1905, Lieutenant Price, the Terror of Chinatown and the White Devil to the tongs, retired. The
boo how doy
breathed sighs of relief. But they had little time left. Neither they nor
Lo Mo
herself could guess that another female would align herself with the latter in her crusade against Chinatown vice and crime. It was Mother Nature. On April 18 of that year she rearranged the city of San Francisco more to her satisfaction with the help of the San Andreas Fault which underlies the city. In purging San Francisco with earthquake and fire she cleansed it of its blighted Chinatown by wiping out the Queen’s Room, the tongs, every sorry brothel—and everything else—in the Quarter. Like the very tongs which controlled them and waxed fat upon their profits, the bagnios and gambling dens were never able to make a comeback.

The exact number of dead in the 28,000 structures destroyed in San Francisco’s four days of tribulation is not known but is estimated to have totaled 450. Undoubtedly a good number of these were Chinese trapped in their tenements and warrens.

Chinatown would have been wiped out no matter what steps might have been taken, but its actual destruction on the first night of the four days of fire was accidental. In an attempt to stop the blaze from spreading west of Kearny Street—one of several thoroughfares vainly designated as firebreaks—a demolition crew planted a charge of black powder in a drugstore on the corner of Kearny and Clay Streets when they ran out of dynamite. When the charge was ignited the blast sent burning grains of powder and shredded, blazing bedding flying across Kearny Street from the windows of an upstairs room. The far side of the street was quickly aflame and Chinatown was doomed. It was a tinder-dry wooden city. The heat was so intense across Kearny from Chinatown that a group of prominent citizens who gathered in the Hall of Justice to offer their help in the emergency had to leave the oppressive, stifling building and make their way via Portsmouth Square to Chinatown and then to the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill. There they perfected their plans for the Relief Committee of Fifty which was to do yeoman work during the days of crisis.

Witnesses to the fire’s leapfrogging across Kearny were Frank W. Aitken and Edward Hilton, who described the scene: “Quickly it crossed from Kearny to the little arm of Chinatown that reached down the hill beside Portsmouth Square, and beyond Chinatown with its huddled houses and narrow passages and overhanging porches… During the evening, too, the fire from the wholesale district, having thrust out an arm into Chinatown, stretched down along Montgomery Street… Before the night was far advanced Chinatown was in the grasp of the destroying flames and the Chinese joined the throng. It was a motley procession, sprung from many places, its ranks filling with homeless, footsore legions, orderly and nearly silent... By midnight a solid wall of fire stretching from Market Street to Chinatown was working steadily out toward Powell Street and Nob Hill.”

Charles Keeler recalled that “Chinatown was ablaze early in the evening and had burned throughout the night, the fire sweeping fiercely through the flimsy Oriental city, scattering the inhabitants... in helpless bands. Out of the narrow alleyways and streets they swarmed like processions of black ants. With bundles swung on poles across their shoulders, they retreated, their helpless little women in pantaloons following with the children, all passive and uncomplaining… [though] in every quarter the night was full of terror. The mighty column of smoke rose thousands of feet in the air, crimsoned by the wild sea of flame below it.”

Exhausted after trudging about the city all day, James B. Stetson had gone to bed at 1 A.M. on the first night of the fire; but he could only sleep until 2:30. He got up, pulled on his clothes again, and went out to see what was left of his city. He stood at the corner of California and Mason Streets. “From there I could see that Old St. Mary’s Church and Grace Cathedral were on fire. To the north, Chinatown was in a whirlpool of fire.”

California author Mary Hunter Austin wrote: “I remember the sigh of the wind through windows of desolate walls, and the screech and clack of ruined cornices in the red, noisy night, and the cheerful banging of pianos in the camps, the burials in trenches and the little, bluish, grave-long heaps of burning among the ruins of Chinatown.”

Before midnight of that terror-filled first day 10,000 Chinese had fled the Quarter. Soon the remainder would follow, Donaldina Cameron saw sharp-eyed highbinders watching for their prey among the refugees driven from hiding, even in the midst of the confusion and chaos. They fled to Washington Square in North Beach, to Fort Point, to the Ferry Building and across the bay to Oakland. A special camp was set up for Chinese at Fort Winfield Scott and most of the refugees ended up there. The Chinese Minister came from Washington to tour the camp with agents of the Six Companies and was completely satisfied with the care and help being given his nationals. Major General Adolphus W. Greeley, in a special report to Washington on relief operations, said, “It is gratifying to report that neither in San Francisco nor in Oakland has any relief committee showed discrimination against the Chinese, and this line of action of the civilian organization has been consistently followed by the Army.” Another observer also remarked on this point. Edward Livingstone, a San Francisco businessman wiped out by the fire, said, “I was impressed by the fact that caste and creed were thrown to the winds. There were no rich, no poor, no capitalists and laborers, no oppressed and oppressors. All facing a common peril, men and women who had lived in elegance stood in the breadline with Chinese and colored people.”

Many of the Chinese servants who lived in Chinatown rushed to rejoin their white households out of loyalty. They proved of great aid in salvaging valuables, bedding and clothing. Twenty years later James W. Byrne recalled that “Chinese servants rose nobly to the exigencies’ of the catastrophe. We had no vehicle, no means of transporting the mattresses and commissariat otherwise than in our arms or on our backs until the Chinese boys solved the difficulty. They went out foraging in their own quiet way and presently returned to the house with a couple of children’s four-wheeled wagons… [which] we piled with mattresses, bedding, hams and other essentials, and then we started out with the convoy, up and down hill to the Presidio, as the Chinamen pulled....”

On the second day anything that had escaped the earlier flames was destroyed as the fire fanned back over the skeleton of Chinatown again. Aitken and Hilton wrote, “Soon the flames were racing down the western slope of Nob Hill, racing across California Street to meet the fire on the south, racing pellmell beyond Sacramento Street and back to the purlieus of the destroyed Chinatown. There was no wind to drive them [back], and no man there to stay them….” By the fourth day the Quarter was a blackened ruin. The two men wrote: “The bright lanterns, the little grated windows, the balconies that whispered of romance, the flaring dragons, were gone. Gone, too, the ill-smelling fish markets and cellar shops, the bazaars, the gambling dens, the places where opium was smoked in guarded secrecy. Everything that had made the little foreign section a tradition throughout the world had disappeared.”

Amidst the general sorrowing, the erasure of Chinatown was hailed as a blessing. In the
Overland Monthly
a writer exclaimed: “Fire has reclaimed to civilization and cleanliness the Chinese ghetto, and no Chinatown will be permitted in the borders of the city. Some provision will be made for the caring of the Orientals.” The
Independent
thought that they would be settled at Hunter’s Point. In Britain
Blackwood’s Magazine,
in commenting upon what it called the purification of San Francisco, applauded Chinatown’s disappearance: “...a sink and sewer of the city, tainted in every vein and vessel, a relic of a former existence nourished solely on the evil traditions of the past… The maze of ramshackle tenements, lean-to joss houses, gaudy brothels and disgusting dives is no more.”

True. Gone were the houses of the singsong girls, the opium dens, the fan-tan parlors, the packed tenements and the moldy Globe Hotel and decaying Mansion House. The headquarters of every tong were completely demolished too. Most of them never came back. It is said of the Kwong Duck tong, for example, that it boasted only one member after the earthquake and fire—Wong Sing, a man who guarded the tong seal, the society’s flag and its book of oaths, and held all offices. The ranks of the hatchet men, already thinned by old age, extradition, voluntary return to China, and death, scattered after 1906. Some went to Oakland; others to Portland and Seattle. Many went to San Jose or south to Los Angeles, and a considerable number went on East to Chicago or New York to cause trouble there. Many never returned to plague San Francisco again. When the San Francisco police force had to be reduced by one-fifth as an economy measure after the disaster (most of the taxable property had been destroyed) there was a crime wave, but not in Chinatown. It was the quietest sector in the city. The slate had been wiped clean and a fresh start made possible.

The Chinese drifted back to Dupont Gai and its smoking rubble. They shrugged off the demands that they move to the periphery of the city. The
Overland Monthly
recognized the inevitable and predicted a better Chinatown. “It may lack the familiar holes, corners and smells… but it will be more agreeable to the eye if not so piquant to the nose… Possibly the new San Francisco will not be so joyous a place to the unregenerate nor so painful a spot to the pious as formerly....”

Fine, handsome buildings of Oriental design, many with pagoda-like roofs, were designed by men like T. Patterson Ross and A. W. Burgren and built along what was coming to be called Grant Avenue (old Dupont Street). The structure at Grant and California, kitty-cornered from Old St. Mary’s, for example, was constructed at a cost of $135,000 and leased to the Sing Fat Company. At 32 Spofford Alley, Charles M. Rousseau designed a new $25,000 home for the Chinese Society of Free Masons, the Chee Kong tong, with much Oriental detail and Chinese tile. Apartments and hotels sprang up and the population crowded back into the Quarter. With the tong ranks thinned, many people lost their fear and the population began to curve upward again until it would reach 25,000 in 1950 and 36,445 in 1960.

But the tongs and tong violence were not completely dead. A Suey Sing vs. Bing Kong war flared up; then a two-year struggle between the Hop Sings and Bing Kongs. As late as 1914, the Hop Sings and Suey Sings were even using motor cars and a machine gun to try to settle their quarrel. But these were the last spams of dying organisms. By 1909, the Chinese League of Justice in America was taking up problems of concern to the Chinese and settling them via legal means. The days of the tongs were numbered. The formation of the Chinese Republic in 1912, World War I and America’s entry into it in 1917, all speeded up the integration process. These factors finally forced the citizens of Chinatown to make up their minds whether to return to China or to become Americans. Most chose the latter course, abandoned their queues and Oriental costumes and habits to a large degree, and acclimatized. They turned their backs on the old vendetta codes. The heads of the tongs—older men now—saw the handwriting on the walls of Chinatown, and in 1913 the tong chiefs themselves formed a Peace Association—the Wo Ping Woey—to end intertong strife.