Hatchet Men: The Story of the Tong Wars in San Francisco’s Chinatown (7 page)

Evidence of the importance of the opium trade in the Pacific are the two wars forced upon China by John Bull to keep the trade booming. A whole fleet of swift vessels came to be called opium clippers—lean rivals of the tea clippers and Gold Rush clippers. San Francisco was their major American port of call. It became a market almost entirely for the prepared product but a little crude opium came in from time to time, to be refined (boiled) in Chinatown for local consumption.

Frisco bought only the finest opium—the Patna variety from India. With only 6 or 7 percent morphia, it was superior to the acrid-tasting Persian or Turkish opium whose 10 percent of the alkaloid induced headaches and skin rashes in its consumers. The opium was prepared by the Fook Hung Company in Hong Kong, a well-to-do firm which paid the Colonial Government $200,000 to $300,000 per annum just for the privilege of doing business. The refined smoking opium—a dark fluid of the appearance and consistency of molasses—was put up in five tael tins which sold in San Francisco for $8 each.

The Burlingame Treaty of 1868 between the United States and China held that no Chinese resident of the United States or American resident of China might import opium. But nothing was said of the keeping of opium dens. It was not until the 1880s and 1890s that strong legislation began to be applied to the problem. Earlier, an honest and efficient Customs officer lost his job and nearly his life when his efforts to expose the enormity of the racket led him too far down the trail. Like many other crooked big businesses of the nineteenth century, its ramifications extended far beyond the confines of Chinatown. By a section of the State Penal Code, denkeepers eventually were made guilty of a misdemeanor punishable by a $500 fine and 6 months in jail. A few keepers, and even customers, were locked up in the 80s, as a result. Since San Francisco was the American capital of opium debauchery, the city’s Board of Supervisors also joined the attack. Their 1890 ordinance made even visiting an opium den an act punishable by a fine of from $250 to $1,000 and a jail term of 3 to 6 months, or both. By 1892, white visitors to opium dens were being given jail terms of 3 months and no option of a fine. Reverend Masters, however, reported fewer and fewer Caucasians as denizens of opium joints as the century wore on. Opium like the tong wars, was a Chinese problem. It attracted Caucasians briefly for what later would be called “kicks,” but as a sociological or health problem it never amounted to much except for the Chinese. It was a problem which the Chinese community solved with surprising ease and dispatch. Opium was never a big problem after the 1906 earthquake and fire.

But none of the legislative maneuvers stamped out opium. Prior to 1887, the opium provision of the Burlingame Treaty was not even enforced. An immense quantity of the drug was shipped through the Golden Gate to the wharves of the Embarcadero. In late 1886, agents suddenly swooped down on a $750,000 shipment and seized it. During the following February, Congress passed an act to prohibit the importation of opium by Chinese. Surely this was one of the most healthy of the various acts promulgated to harass the Oriental minority. What this actually meant was that Chinatown’s needs would have to be met in the future by smuggling and by white firms fronting for Chinese customers. These companies placed large orders for the drug, supposedly for medicinal purposes.

The Deputy Collector of Customs estimated that between 1884 and 1892, a total of 477,550 pounds of prepared opium entered San Francisco. Despite the efforts of hard-working Customs men, half of all the opium imported entered the Golden Gate illegally. Factories in Chinatown where the crude opium was refined were raided. Smugglers were apprehended. The Government increased duties from $6 to $10 a pound on the prepared product. The result was failure. From an average of 60,000 pounds per year, the illicit traffic increased to 100,000 pounds a year by 1888. The Government struck at the trade again in 1892 by placing a $12-a-pound duty on the drug to literally price it out of existence except for legitimate medicinal purposes. But the situation showed no signs of improvement. In fact it grew worse.

The Grand Jury horrified the decent population by reporting that “white girls between the ages of thirteen and twenty are enticed into these opium dens, become regular habitués, and finally are subject wholly to the wishes of the Oriental visitors.”

An anonymous police captain confirmed the Grand Jury’s report and said darkly, “It is only we detectives who know the extent to which the opium habit has caught on amongst high-toned women in San Francisco. And the trouble is that the high-spirited and most adventurous women seem to succumb first.”

The attacks on the traffic continued. Late in 1896, a $200,000 shipment arrived on a steamer for H. R. Davidson, an accountant of the Bank of British Columbia. Two new Custom agents, completely unknown to Bay area narcotics smugglers, were sent for. They were Caleb West of Washington and Leslie Cullin of Oregon. The two men discovered not only the supplier, Rosano & Company, but tailed the shipment and found its true destination to be the firm of Kwong Fong Tai. The Collector of the Port, John H. Wise, then stepped in and ordered all opium in port—from $300,000 to $400,000 worth of it—into bonded warehouses. Even with the ubiquitous smugglers working around the clock, the price of the poppy-seed paste doubled in San Francisco.

The San Francisco
Call,
about this time, estimated the number of opium rooms in the city to be 300. Most were in Chinatown, bearing red signs over their doors reading in Chinese calligraphy PIPES AND LAMPS ALWAYS CONVENIENT, or similar phrases. But some were in other sections of the city. They served some 3,000 hopheads or opium fiends, as the addicts were usually called. The newspaper would have had to be the size of
The New York Times
just to have listed and described the innumerable holes in the wall, garrets and subterranean huts which were opium dens. The
Call
contented itself with the more notorious dens, especially those which catered to whites.

Blind Annie’s Cellar was one such den still frequented by Caucasians. It was a noisome sinkhole of depravity between—and below—718 and 720 Jackson Street. Ah King’s place at 730 Jackson Street was probably the most notorious of all those resorted to by white hopheads. Hop Jay’s smoking establishment was on the second floor of a tenement which was so outstandingly filthy that waggish reporters dubbed it the Palace Hotel.

Other dens clustered on Waverly Place, Church Alley, Washington Alley or Fish Alley, and on Duncombe Alley. This last was a narrow cavern from Jackson Street to Pacific Street and the Barbary Coast. Its doors bore no numbers, nor were any habitations listed there, but midway along the dank and slimy passage was a hidden opium hang-out.

One of San Francisco’s great journalistic scoops was the expedition of Frank Davey, the crack photographer of the
California Illustrated Magazine.
He invaded the filthy dens under the guard of Officer Chris Cox and took the first flash photographs of them. His was one of the first photo-stories to appear in the San Francisco press. His pictures and those of the Department of Public Health document the degradation of the opium dens, all of which were wiped out by the quake and fire of 1906. They never made a comeback, and opium ceased to be a major problem. But it was the change in mores of the Americanizing Chinese rather than the crackdown by officials—or even the physical destruction of the dens by the holocaust—which brought an end to the opium evil. The American-Chinese abandoned opium before they jettisoned their pajama-like costume, their queues or even their concubines.

While opium was growing into a major problem for Federal agents and police the latter found their hands increasingly full with anti-Chinese hoodlumism. Trouble broke out on this new front in 1865 with the first serious anti-coolie riot. A mob of laborers drove off a party of Chinese who were at work excavating a lot south of Market Street. The crowd swelled to some three or four hundred men, marched on Tubbs & Company’s ropewalk, and drove the firm’s Chinese workers away. Only two Chinese were hospitalized, luckily, after the mob stoned the workers. The most seriously injured person was the ropewalk’s foreman who had tried to protect his Chinese workers. He was knocked down, his lip and eye cut and his chest badly bruised. Chief Patrick Crowley led his men to the scene of the riot and personally dispersed the toughs. He arrested the mob’s leaders on charges of riot.

There was nothing funny about the riot to those law-abiding Chinese concerned, but one defendant brought a bit of humor to an otherwise grim courtroom when he hired J. P. Dameron as his attorney. The latter employed all the tear-jerking tricks of the shyster in his pleading. At one point he cried out oratorically, “Did not our forefathers destroy Chinese tea in Boston Harbor? Why, Sir-r-r, these Chinamen live on rice, and, Sir-r-r-, they eat it with sticks!” This was too much even for the culprit Burke. He forfeited his $50 bail and took off.

Judge Alfred Rix handed the ringleaders stiff fines of $500 and sentences of from 90 days to 11 months in jail. This swift punishment only served to spawn another anti-coolie meeting at the American Theatre and the formation of anti-coolie clubs in each of the city’s twelve wards. Worse, after the brave show of justice presided over by Judge Rix, the rioters were liberated by a decision of California Chief Justice John Currey on writs of
habeas corpus
based on legal defects in the commitment judgments. Most of the press stood by the Chinese, calling the Potrero district riot “a murderous and disgraceful onslaught.” Reporters pointed out that one of the laborers, supposedly driven to riot by starvation, had no trouble digging into his levi’s and coming up with $500 when his fine was pronounced. The
Alta California
blamed the miscarriage of justice on the inadmissibility of Chinese testimony in court—“the laws of California are such that the most intelligent Chinamen in the community could not testify against a white assailant, even if he were the vilest cutthroat who ever disgraced San Quentin with his presence.” Ironically, shortly after the Potrero riot, Chinese testimony was finally admitted, but only in the county court.

As the decade of the ’60s waned the Chinese population began to rise rapidly in numbers. The signal for the increase was Leland Stanford’s clumsy swing at the Golden Spike at Promontory Point. With the East Coast linked to the West Coast by rail, thousands of “Crocker’s Pets,” as the Chinese gandy dancers were called, began to drift down to San Francisco. Drifting with them were hundreds of unemployed Irishmen from the Union Pacific Railroad. Some of these Chinese newcomers sailed for home, some went to Texas and Massachusetts, but most stayed on in Chinatown. At the same time a new wave of immigration developed out of Hong Kong. On May 13, 1869, alone, 1,276 Chinese arrived on the Embarcadero from the S.S.
Japan.
The new, big steamers brought them in like cattle, jammed below-decks. The City Directory guessed there were 8,600 Chinese in San Francisco at the end of the ’60s. The Federal census figure was 11,817. Most accurate was the figure of the Chinese Protective Association (the Six Companies)—17,000.

Like a corollary to the increase in Chinese population, there was an increase in anti-Chinese incidents and riots. The people of Chinatown found themselves between the jaws of a vise: the growing tong underworld in Chinatown itself forming one jaw; the mounting pressure of hoodlums, labor and eventually a large segment of the city’s population, forming the other.

Thus it was no surprise that the decade went out violently. The year 1869 was one of turbulence. It really belonged to the bitter decade ahead rather than to the fairly peaceful ’60s. On January 24, Tong Moon Yun was shot dead on Dupont Street. On February 8, the corpse of a Chinese girl was found under a house on Cooper Alley. The 9th of April saw Ah Kow, sentenced to death for the murder of one of his countrymen, cheating the gallows by suicide in his cell. Eight days later a riot broke out among the Chinese population and many men were wounded. On May 20, Customs officials seized a cache of opium worth $15,000 on the S.S.
China.
On June 2, Werner Hoelscher was shot down by a Chinese. And so it went. The prestorm lull was over.

Violence was on the increase even though the Emperor of China himself, via an envoy Chi Tajen, warned the population of Chinatown through its quasi government, the Six Companies: “Be careful to obey the laws and regulations of the nation in which you reside. If you do so and at the same time pursue your callings in accordance with the principles of right and propriety, success cannot fail to attend your labors, while a contrary course will infallibly bring on you failure and misfortune.” The underworld laughed at His Majesty. Anarchy might have prevailed but for the calming influence of the Six Companies. They would preserve the peace for another decade. To understand Chinatown and its past, a knowledge of this organization—which kept the fighting tongs in check for so long—is necessary. The story of the Six Companies’ success is the story of Chinatown’s growth; the story of the Six Companies’ failure is the key to Chinatown’s shame—the tong wars.