Hatchet Men: The Story of the Tong Wars in San Francisco’s Chinatown (18 page)

“Why are they called hatchet men?”

Officer Smith explained. “A great many of them carry a hatchet with the handle cut off. It may be about six inches long, with a handle and a hole cut in it. They have the handle sawed off a little, leaving just enough to keep a good hold...”

Pixley asked Smith about police raids on the transient headquarters of the hatchet men.

Smith described how he operated. “Very often I go up there with two or three officers and get inside of the room and search each Chinaman as he comes in, and sometimes arrest quite a number of these Chinamen for carrying concealed weapons such as hatchets, knives and pistols—”

Pixley interrupted, “You say these people are the terror of the Chinamen?”

“Oh yes. Business Chinese come to me very often and tell me where they [the highbinders] are. And sometimes new men get among them and point them out. They are the terror of Chinatown.”

George Duffield was called and reported his pay came to $25 or $50 a week. He stated that six or seven other specials were on duty in Chinatown besides himself.

Bee asked him, “If the Chinese did not support them [the special police] voluntarily, would they be there at all?” “No, sir, they would not.”

Meade then asked him, “You collect what you please?” “Yes, sir,” answered Duffield. Then Sargent had his turn. The Senator asked Duffield, “Have you not received as high as five hundred dollars some months?”

“No, sir, I think not.”

At this time Chairman Morton asked, “Would it not be in the power of a [special] policeman to oppress the people? That is, to make exactions upon them by threats, and otherwise make large contributions?”

“No, sir. I do not think it would.”

“Is it not a position capable of being greatly abused?”

“It might be,” Duffield finally admitted, “if the party saw fit to do it.”

Later James R. Rogers, a regular officer, began his statement. “Some two or three years ago, we had an institution—whether it exists today, or not, I do not know—called the Hip Yee tong. We used every means and exertion to break it and tried to find out the bottom of it, but we failed... I think the same institution exists today but under another name.”

Many witnesses now began to be called, representing agriculture, the railroads, trades, the anti-coolie associations and even evangelists.

A most interesting exchange ensued when Benjamin S. Brooks testified that many of the anti-coolie men were bummers. Asked what a bummer was, he answered, “A bummer is a man who pretends to want something to do and does not want anything to do. He never begs, but borrows with no intention of repaying. He hangs around saloons with the expectation of somebody inviting him to take a drink. These are his principal characteristics. If there is a building being erected, or a dog fight, or a man falls down in a fit, or a drunken man is carried off, it is necessary for him to be there to see that it is done right.”

Pixley was no easy antagonist. He was a fanatic and he had marshaled a good deal of evidence to support his views. In the “Memorial” which he prepared with Eugene Casserly and Philip A. Roach, he used it to claim that the Chinese criminal classes were growing rapidly and breaking away from the restraint of the Six Companies. In this respect Pixley showed remarkable clarity of vision. Because of the wild accusations he was accustomed to make, this quite accurate evaluation of the Chinatown situation was either ignored or disparaged. This was so even though he cited the testimony of intelligent and law-abiding Chinese who also denounced these “most abandoned and dangerous of criminals.” He quoted them as saying, ‘This class is dangerous and a constant source of terror to their own people, embracing as it does gamblers, opium eaters, hangers-on upon dens of prostitution, men of abandoned and violent character who live upon their countrymen by levying blackmail and exacting tribute from all classes of Chinese society.”

Brooks answered Pixley partially by blaming the squalor of Chinatown on city authorities who made no attempt to clean the Quarter’s streets. (The corrupt Chinatown special police were supposed to have men to keep the streets clean but few of these dollars ever went to the street cleaners.)

Brooks cited the poll tax as primarily a harassment of the Chinese. He might as well have suggested the queue and laundry ordinances or the old (1861) ordinance which raised the taxes on street peddlers from $10 a quarter to $100 a quarter. This hit hard at the poor Chinese hucksters who hawked tea through San Francisco’s streets.

The attorney took Pixley’s figures apart. “There are no ten thousand criminals nor two thousand prostitutes nor anything like it. The proportion of criminals is not greater, if as great, as among other people. There are not over five hundred prostitutes—about the same proportion to the population as whites.” He then contrasted bitterly the treatment of white and Chinese trollops. Of the former he said, “No laws oppress
them
—they live in sumptuous luxury.”

Finally, Brooks did not think there was an alarming increase in the number and power of Chinese criminals in Chinatown. But the tragedy of the tong decades ahead would show how wrong the counselor was and how right journalist Pixley was when he intoned:

“This criminal [highbinder] class is beyond the control of the Six Companies, and by their number and desperation are becoming equally dangerous to the better Chinese as to the whites; [they] live off their countrymen by blackmailing, enforced by threats and violence, supplementing their indiscriminate thieving and pillaging.”

The tongs started out in life with a show of good intentions, like the similar patriotic societies of old China. They may have meant what they said at first. The
Call
thought so, describing the politically oriented Chee Kong tong as a benevolent society at its start, although “gradually hard characters crept in, absorbed the office, and for years past have used it as a weapon for the purpose of levying war.” It was difficult for a tong to turn down an appeal for help from a member; just being asked brought the tong prestige. Winning the appellant’s battle against an individual or a rival tong raised its stock in the community enormously. There was plenty of room for them to expand their power. They existed in what was, governmentally (the Six Companies notwithstanding) a near vacuum.

Perhaps the first recruits for these fighting tongs were men of small and weak clan associations who were either jealous or fearful of the power and prestige of such clans as the Wongs, Chins, Lees, Yees and the Four Brothers, all of whom tended to dominate Six Companies’ affairs. (The Four Brothers Clan was a multifamily association of long and close ties which acted like a single family unit.) According to New York tongman, Eng Ying (Eddie) Gong, the tongs were organized primarily by See Yup district men.

There was crime and murder in Chinatown before, during and after the heyday of the tongs—crime which was quite independent of their activities. The murders of Captain Charles Barbcouch, of the prostitute Celina Boudet, or of Officer John Coots, were crimes which could have occurred in any sector of the city. The murders in which both attacker and victim were Chinese were usually lumped, out of slovenly journalism, as “tong killings,” whereas a number were nothing of the sort. Thus the 1896 killing of Ah Foo by Sing Lin was done in the heat of a personal quarrel. The hatcheting of a Stockton Street Chinese woman in 1899, was done by her paramour, a professional thief, when she refused him money. The stalking and killing of young Jue Do Hong by Jue Lin Ong in 1901 was the culmination of a family feud which had begun in China but which was in no sense a tong vendetta.

But increasingly the tongs tended to corner the market on crime—at least crime that yielded any considerable profit—in the Quarter. And by the 1890s, the fighting tongs had secured a near monopoly on murder in Chinatown.

The tongs as militantly organized bands of criminals and killers are far from unique in the record of mankind. Among their historical antecedents the earliest were probably the Assassins of Persia. Their name was carried to Europe by the Crusaders as a new synonym for “murderers.” These hashish addicts of the Ismaili sect were terrorists who were convinced that their sacred duty lay in the murder of their enemies. They were wiped out by the Mamelukes in the thirteenth century. The Thugs of India were similar professional killers and they, too, contributed a new word to the dictionary. Like the Assassins of Persia—and the tongs of San Francisco—they were addicted to religious ritual, secret language and signs. Their weapon differed from that of the highbinders in that it was a pickax. The Thugs were crushed by the British in the mid-nineteenth century.

Most familiar to Americans of all the societies which resembled the deadly tongs was the Mafia. This brotherhood of evil erupted in Sicily in Napoleonic times to exercise despotic, criminal power. Much like the original tongs in China, the Mafia and the similar Camorra began as patriotic resistance movements against invaders and conquerors. Like the tongs, the Mafia emigrated to America, and long before entering into Chicago gangsterdom, murdered the New Orleans chief of police, David Hennessy (1890), and terrorized a jury into the acquittal of the killers. The people of New Orleans were not terrified, however. They stole a leaf from San Francisco’s book. A vigilance committee was formed, the jail was stormed, and all eleven Mafiusi lynched.

It did not take long for the tongs to show their true colors, although the public was slow to realize how deadly they were becoming. The Belgian forty-niner, Dr. Jean Joseph Francois Haine, sized them up accurately. He said, “Among the Chinese is to be found a body of assassins called Highbinders or Bravos which is always ready, for the sum of a few hundred piasters, to exterminate the poor wretches who are pointed out to them.”

Perhaps no more desperate breed of fighting men were developed in the Old West than the 20 percent or so of the tong membership who were “salaried soldiers” or
boo how doy.
These were the real highbinders—the professional hatchet men. Unlike the anarchical road agents, cattle thieves and brigands of the Hispano-American and Anglo-American frontier, the killers of this Sino-American frontier were fanatical and militarily disciplined. It was not mere bravado or vanity which led them to call themselves salaried soldiers; that is just the role they played. Their battlegrounds were the alleys off Jackson and Sacramento streets, and their enemy the rival tongs.

These hatchet men were not all of a kind, however. When the correspondent for
Blackwood’s Magazine
toured the San Francisco city jail before the earthquake he was shown two cells containing tong “soldiers” all of whom were likely to pay the extreme penalty of the law. The first cell contained 6 men; 4 were stoically playing cards while the other 2 kibitzed over their shoulders. The Englishman had never seen men who appeared more callous or indifferent to their fate. On the other hand, the second cell was part of Solitary. The lone man in it, a tong murderer, paced back and forth like a caged animal. To the correspondent his face reflected cunning, cruelty and ruthless brutality.

The hatchet men were usually fearless and were often fair to good shots. They frequently ate wildcat meat before a battle or an assassination in hopes of acquiring the keen vision of the bobcat. When Jack London was in grammar school in Oakland he heard of the large sums of money the San Francisco tong men paid for wildcat meat. He and a friend periodically armed themselves with slingshots to go trekking over the hills of Piedmont to try to make a fortune out of the demands created by tong troubles.

Before the tongs took root on the West Coast a journal like the
Scientific American
(1850) could write: “This [Chinese] population is the most orderly, industrious and prudent of any class in the city. You never catch any of the long queues in any of the haunts of dissipation, and per consequence, none of them in the police books.” By 1875, the
Scientific American
, thanks to the malevolence of the
boo how day,
was ready to eat its words; by 1885 it was thoroughly sickened by tong warfare.