The Age of Gold (38 page)
Authors: H.W. Brands
For a time their depredations went unheeded by San Francisco’s honest folk. Thomas Cary, one of those honest folk, pondered this tolerance for crime.
It will be asked why the more respectable part of the community did not exert themselves to put a stop to these proceedings. The answer is simple. The influential citizens, the merchants, lawyers and others, lived around what had been known as Yerba Buena Cove, while the Mexicans and Chileans lived at the back of the town among the sand-hills. They, therefore, knew little of what was going on out of sight and out of hearing. Everyone was too much interested in his own affairs to trouble himself about the misfortunes of others, and besides this, the Spanish-Americans were looked upon at that time very much as the Chinese are at the present moment [Cary was writing in the 1880s], as interlopers who should properly have been sent back to their own country, and these “Hounds,” or “Regulators” as they now called themselves, professed to be the guardians of the community against the encroachments of all foreigners.
With no one else to look out for them, the Chileans looked out for themselves. “Compliant in their own country,” Pérez Rosales explained of his compatriots, “Chileans cease to be so abroad, even in the face of a pistol aimed at their hearts, provided only they can lay hand on the knife at their belts.” Pérez added that the Chileans “detested the Americans, whom they constantly averred to be cowards.”
In late June 1849 two young men linked to the Hounds entered the shop of a Chilean merchant. Employing a favorite tactic, they began quarreling with the shopkeeper over a debt they said he owed them, and which he denied owing. As their attempted extortion grew louder and more
threatening, the shopkeeper pulled a pistol. One of the pair tried to grab the gun; the other headed for the door. In the struggle for the pistol, the weapon went off and the fleeing man was shot. He died the next day.
The Hounds proclaimed their intention of bringing the murderous Chileans to account. Contriving a set of ill-matched military uniforms, they began parading and drilling. During the first two weeks of July, tensions between Americans and Chileans escalated sharply.
On July 15 a company of the Hounds crossed the bay to Contra Costa for additional drilling and marching. On their return, the company leader, a man named Sam Roberts—who, as it happened, had lived in Valparaiso and shipped aboard a Chilean man-of-war—discovered his Chilean girlfriend, a prostitute appropriately named Felice, entertaining another man. Roberts viciously assaulted the fellow, beating him with his riding whip and raking his face with his spur. Roberts then returned to Tammany Hall and summoned reinforcements for a general venting against the Chileans. For the rest of that day and into the night, the gangsters marauded through Clark’s Point, breaking, burning, looting, shooting, slashing. Several people were wounded; at least one died.
This orchestrated anarchy finally aroused the American community of San Francisco. Leading the response was Sam Brannan, who had expanded his mercantile operations to San Francisco, and who now called for stern measures against the Hounds. “Boiling with indignation,” as Pérez Rosales described Brannan, “he strode up to the roof of his house and shouted for the town to gather below. Briefly and energetically he asserted that it was high time to make an example of the perpetrators of these unheard-of outrages against the citizens of a friendly nation that daily exported to San Francisco not only the finest flour, but the best hands in the world at making bricks!” More than two hundred citizens answered Brannan’s call. Armed with their own weapons and with sixty muskets supplied by one of Brannan’s merchant allies, the posse went after the Hounds, arresting twenty, including Sam Roberts.
Another public meeting, at Portsmouth Square, nominated and elected two judges to try the cases. A prosecutor was appointed and a grand jury empaneled. Roberts was convicted of conspiracy, riot, robbery, and assault
with intent to kill. Eight others were convicted on one or more of the same counts. Roberts and a second man were sentenced to ten years at hard labor; the rest received lesser sentences.
For various reasons, starting with the lack of a prison but including a feeling that popular justice had made its point by the arrests and convictions, Roberts and the other prisoners never served their sentences. Yet the Brannan-led crackdown broke the strength of the Hounds as an organized gang and was widely interpreted as a positive precedent.
A
PRECEDENT IT WAS
, but hardly a solution. The decline of the Hounds simply made room for other thugs, including a gang of Australians known as the Sydney Ducks, or Sydney Coves, who by 1850 had a reputation worse than the Hounds’. To some extent the Australians’ evil name owed to their country’s history as the outdoor prison for British felons, but to some extent it was honestly—which was to say, dishonestly—earned in California. Frank Soulé explained the Australians’ preeminence in crime:
The voyage from Sydney to San Francisco was neither a very tedious nor an expensive one; and great numbers of “ticket-of-leave” men and old convicts who had “served their time,” early contrived to sail for California. There the field seemed so rich and safe for a resumption of their quondam pranks that they yielded to the temptation, and forthwith began to execute villainies that in magnitude and violent character far exceeded those for which they had been originally convicted. Callous in conscience, they feared nothing save the gallows.
But that they had little reason to dread in merciful, gentle, careless California, where prosecutors and witnesses were few, or too busy to attend to the calls of justice; where jurors, not knowing the law, and eager to be at money-making again, were apt to take hasty charges from the bench as their sole rule of conduct; where judges, chosen by popular election, were either grossly ignorant of law, or too timid or careless, corrupt or incapable, to
measure out the full punishment of crime; and where the laws themselves had not yet been methodically laid down, and the forms and procedure of legal tribunals digested into a plain, unerring system.
The center of the Australian criminal activity was the “Sydney Town” district between Broadway and Pacific Streets. Saloons and brothels were the principal establishments of the neighborhood; prostitutes and professional gamblers (by no means all of them from Australia) were the primary entrepreneurs. In this congenial atmosphere the Sydney Ducks plied their criminal trade. Armed robbery was a daily occurrence; resistance often resulted in murder. Decent men and women weren’t safe in the district at any hour of day or night. When the police dared to enter, they did so only en masse and retreated quickly to their fortified station houses.
As in the case of the Hounds, the American community initially ignored the Ducks. But when the Australian gangsters began roaming beyond Sydney Town, committing burglaries in the neighboring districts, the prominent merchants and their friends were forced to take notice. And when evidence relating to the great fires pointed to Australian complicity—with the Ducks profiting by plunder and looting amid the general confusion of the fires—these city fathers felt compelled to take action.
They were urged on by the city mothers. As San Francisco continued to evolve—from the caravansary of 1849 to the commercial hub of 1851— its permanent population continued to grow. Merchants, artisans, and professionals made the city their home, and many brought their wives and children (typically via the isthmus, where the anarchic crossing conditions of 1849 had been replaced by relatively reliable transit service). As the ladies took up residence, they smoothed off some of the city’s rough edges and contributed to an expansion of cultural opportunities. Thomas Cary described what had changed—and what hadn’t:
With the families came a sense of home-life, and the general reck lessness which had been a marked feature in the early days was be ginning to disappear. The gambling houses were still open to the
public, and did a thriving trade, but were not, as formerly, frequented by all classes of men, many of whom went there because there was nowhere else to go. There were theatrical entertainments and concerts, not terribly good, to be sure, but affording amusement to those who for a long time had seen no other tragedy than a street-fight with pistols, or heard better music than a brass- band in a gambling saloon.
The comforts of life, and of good living, had also improved very much, both in private houses and in restaurants. Farmers and gardeners had found they could make more money by digging for vegetables and raising fruit than they could get by prospecting for gold at the “diggings.” The absurdly high prices which had formerly been charged were reduced to what at the time appeared to be quite reasonable, and strangers from Europe or the Atlantic States were surprised to find, together with the activity and bustle of a western city, all the luxury and gayety of a highly civilized metropolis.
This, however, was the bright side of the picture. The continued increase of crime in San Francisco made it evident to every thinking man that the time was not far distant when self- preservation would make it necessary for the people to assert their rights and take the law into their own hands.
The anniversary fire of May 1851 prompted these thinking men to reenage the engines of popular justice. In early June a self-appointed association styling itself the Committee of Vigilance adopted a charter pledging its members to “the maintenance of the peace and good order of society, and the preservation of the lives and property of the citizens of San Francisco.” The members bound themselves to uphold the law and back the legal authorities. “But we are determined,” they added significantly, “that no thief, burglar, incendiary or assassin shall escape punishment, either by the quibbles of the law, the insecurity of prisons, the carelessness or corruption of the police, or a laxity of those who pretend to administer justice.”
The Committee of Vigilance soon had opportunity to demonstrate its
seriousness. On the evening of June 10 a store near the waterfront reported a small safe missing. Shortly thereafter a Sydney Duck named John Jenkins was seen leaving the neighborhood of the theft with an unwieldy and obviously heavy object slung over his back. On being accosted, he stole a boat and rowed out into the bay. Several other boats gave chase and eventually caught Jenkins, but not before he dumped his burden into the bay. The water, however, was shallow, and the object was retrieved; it proved to be the missing safe.
Jenkins was taken to the meeting room of the Vigilance Committee. The bell of the Monumental Engine Company sounded the alarm: two quick clangs, followed by a minute’s rest, then repeated. Some eighty members of the committee converged on the meeting place, and upon Jenkins. For two hours the committee weighed the evidence against the accused; at midnight it handed down the verdict and the sentence: guilty, and death by hanging. The condemned man was asked if he had a last wish. He requested, and received, a cigar and a glass of brandy. Shortly before one o’clock on the morning of June 11, Sam Brannan announced the verdict to the city at large. He inquired of the several hundred people gathered outside the informal courtroom whether they endorsed the judgment of the committee. “Great shouts of Ay! Ay! burst forth, mingled with a few cries of No!” recorded Frank Soulé.
Just before two o’clock, Brannan and other committee members brought the prisoner out for the execution. They marched him to the south end of the old adobe building at the northwest corner of the plaza. At this point the sheriff and some deputies made a feeble attempt to intervene. “They were civilly desired to stand back, and not delay what still was to be done,” Soulé wrote. The sheriff complied. The crowd, by now grown to more than a thousand, applauded by look and gesture as the committee completed its business. A noose was placed about Jenkins’s neck, and his arms were tied behind his back. The loose end of the rope was thrown over a beam projecting from the adobe building. Several men seized the rope and yanked it sharply, pulling Jenkins off his feet and hoisting him in the air. Within minutes he was dead. But those holding the rope didn’t let go, instead keeping the corpse high where all could see it. When the original
hangmen tired, others took their place; the body was kept swinging till nearly dawn.
Later that morning the sheriff, his confidence somewhat restored with the coming of day and the dispersal of the crowd, ordered an inquest. Brannan was summoned as first witness. He defended the actions of the Vigilance Committee, irregular though they might have been. “I believe the man had a fair and impartial trial,” he declared. “He was tried before from sixty to eighty men. I believe the verdict of guilty was unanimous, and they came to the conclusion unanimously to hang him.” Asked how the jury was empaneled, Brannan responded, “They empaneled themselves.” How were the members of the committee selected? “A man is admitted to the committee on a motion by a friend who vouches for his character, and that he will devote a portion of his time to watching for burglars and other scoundrels.” Was secrecy involved in the selection? “I don’t know of any other secrecy than that of an honest man.” Then perhaps Mr. Brannan wouldn’t mind revealing the names of the committee members? “I object to give the names of any of the committee. I have understood that threats have been made against their property and lives. I have heard the threats made, have heard it said that my own house would be burned. Threats have come to me from the prisoners in the county prison that I should not live ninety days.”
The next day the inquest board reported its finding that Jenkins had met his death “by violent means, by strangulation, caused by being suspended by the neck.” The responsible parties were members of “an association of citizens styling themselves a Committee of Vigilance.” The board went on to identify Brannan and nine others as leaders of this committee. However, the inquest board at this time declined to recommend legal action against Brannan or the others.
Lest the board change its mind, the Vigilance Committee passed a resolution condemning the “invidious verdict”—such as it was—of the inquest board. The resolution was signed by 184 members who claimed equal responsibility for Jenkins’s execution with Brannan and those named by the board.