USA > California > California; an intimate history > Part 11
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It was in the spring of 1849 that a gang of young des- perados calling themselves "The Regulators," but soon rechristened "The Hounds," loudly proclaimed that they were an association formed to protect the weak against the strong, to succor those that were too "green" to bear the new burden of wealth alone-there being so little law in San Francisco-to be as a reliable squadron in times of danger. On Sundays they paraded the streets with flags flying and band playing. But busy and absorbed as San Francisco was during those exciting months, it did not take her long to define the status of the Regulators. They were, in truth, an admirably organized band of cut- throats, thieves, cowards, and bullies. Wise enough to avoid the muscular American, unless he was quite alone, they confined their attention to the Chilenos and other foreigners who lived in tents beyond the city limits. Their own headquarters were a large tent near the Plaza, which, in fond memory, no doubt, of the great city of the East, they called Tammany Hall. It is to be presumed that they slept by day, for every night, armed with clubs and bludgeons, they sneaked from their lairs on Tele-
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graph Hill to the isolated tents, taking the gold-dust of those more recently returned from the mines, and any- thing else they fancied, and beating all that presumed to resist. These foreigners, being far less robust than the Americans, remained at the mines only long enough to accumulate a bag of dust or nuggets; and, owing to the enterprise of the Hounds, seldom enjoyed the excitement of losing either at the gaming-tables. It was useless to appeal to the alcalde, for no alcalde could enforce laws without police. In those early days no wrongs were redressed until they became so abominable as to call for a mass-meeting of the citizens.
The citizens stood this infliction for several months with the notorious patience of Americans. They no longer ventured into the street at night, and barricaded their doors and windows; but their gorge rose slowly.
It was these very people scattered in tents over the hill- sides that the Hounds claimed to be waging war against for the benefit of the good American citizen; many of the men and all of the women of the tent colony were wayfarers of little character, and as they were Chileans, Peruvians, or Mexicans, no doubt it was that contempt of foreigners so ingrained in the American mind that per- mitted the outrages to last as long as they did.
The Hounds naturally grew bolder and bolder. On the afternoon of Sunday, the 15th of July, they returned from a piratical adventure among the ranchos across the bay; triumphant and very drunk, they suddenly deter- mined to outdo themselves. Flourishing firearms and bludgeons, and led by their "lieutenant," who wore a uniform of sorts, they paraded the streets shouting and screaming and occasionally discharging a gun into the
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air. At sundown they made a violent descent upon the foreign quarter, tore down the tents, plundered the ter- rified dwellers of their last dollar and everything port- able, then beat them until the hills resounded with groans and screams, pelted them with stones, and yelled like Indians as they saw the blood flow; finally, they let off their firearms, killing a number of those that were unable to hide in the brush or find refuge in the town. They kept this up all night.
On the following day San Francisco rose to a man. Alcalde Leavenworth, urged by Sam Brannan, a better citizen than Mormon, issued a proclamation calling a mass-meeting at three o'clock in the Plaza. At that hour all work was suspended, all shops and places of business closed. Every resident of San Francisco except the Hounds and their victims packed Portsmouth Square. Mr. W. D. M. Howard, one of the many Eastern men of education and ability who had settled in the country, was called upon to preside, and Dr. V. J. Fourgeaud was named secretary. Brannan addressed the meeting, ex- pressing the alarm and disgust of all at the criminal horde which they had permitted to attain full growth in their midst, and giving a terse but eloquent recital of the Hounds' many outrages. A subscription was taken up for the wounded and plundered foreigners, and then a volunteer force of twenty-three grim and determined citizens were organized as constables to dispose of the Hounds. They were armed to the teeth, and that same afternoon arrested twenty of the outlaws and imprisoned them on the United States ship Warren.
Another meeting meanwhile was held in the Plaza, and Dr. William J. Gwin and James C. Ward were elected
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associate judges to assist Alcalde Leavenworth, who has not left a very high record for efficiency; Horace Hawes was appointed district attorney, and Hall McAllister his associate counsel. Mr. McAllister, who soon afterward rose to the leadership of the California bar and maintained it until his death, won his spurs in this the first sensational lawsuit of his adopted city.
There was little difficulty, however, in proving these wretches guilty. They were condemned to various periods of imprisonment; but as there was no prison in the city, the authorities were forced to set them at liberty. Their backbone was broken, however, and they feared lynching. Many of them left the country, others returned to the mines, where for the most part they were disposed of by buzzards while dangling from trees "up the gulch."
As the treasury was empty and there was a crying need for policemen, watchmen, and street-lighting, there was another mass-meeting; and after a furious debate a law was passed licensing the gambling-houses and imposing a heavy tax upon them as the likeliest source of revenue. Hundreds of gambling-houses were now flourishing, and every hotel had its tables: faro, monte, roulette, rouge-et- noir, vingt-et-un. Heavy taxes were also levied upon real estate, auction sales, and licenses of all kinds. The hulk of the brig Euphemia, then anchored at what is now the corner of Jackson and Battery streets, was bought and converted into a city prison. On August 31st a Baptist church was dedicated; and other denominations, which already had Sunday-schools, bestirred themselves to build stable places of worship, if only to counteract the licensed vice of the town. A little steamboat was sent out from Boston, and new town lots were surveyed. The streets
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and Plaza were now almost constantly filled with a changing throng, representing practically all the races of the world, many in their native costumes: Chinamen, Malays, Negroes, Abyssinians, Kanakas, Fiji-Islanders, Japanese, Russians, Turks, Jews, Spaniards, Mexicans, Peruvians, Chilenos, Englishmen, Italians, Frenchmen, and Americans.
Among this vast motley crowd [says Soulé] scarcely two men from any state in the Union could be found dressed alike. ... The long- legged boot with every variety of colored top, the buckled-up trousers, serapes, cloaks, pea-jackets, broad-brimmed slouch-hats and glazed hats. ... On one if not three sides of the Plaza were the open doors of the "hells" of San Francisco. On other portions stood hotels, stores, and offices, the custom-house and courts of law. ... The little open space which was left to the crowds was occupied by a multitude of nondescript objects, by horses, mules, and oxen dragging burdens along, boys at play, stalls with sweetmeats, newspapers, prints, toys, . . . occasionally even at this early period the crowd would make way for the passage of a richly dressed woman, sweeping along, apparently proud of being recognized as one of frail character, or several together of the same class mounted on spirited horses dashing furiously by, dressed in long riding-skirts or, what was quite common, male attire.
The average age of the men was twenty-five, and there were few, if any, over thirty. These men when they came in from the mines wore the usual red or blue flannel shirt, top-boots almost concealing the trouser-leg, a heavy leather belt in which two pistols and a knife were con- spicuously displayed, and on their heads a silk hat. This last, worn at all hours, was a sort of advertisement of its proud possessor's good luck at the mines.
In that year of '49 there were few decent women in the city, and no homes save those that had existed before the discovery of gold. The women of commerce had followed the invading army as ever, and those that did not go to the mining-camps to share the golden harvest without toil
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presided over the gambling-rooms or were employed as decoys for the restaurants and saloons. The young men returning from the mines heavy laden, eager for new excitements and any kind of civilization, sought the com- pany of these women, there being none other to seek. They paraded the streets with them by day, to the scandal of the few but increasing number of decent and permanent citizens, and crowded the gambling-rooms at night. San Francisco at that time was a sort of crucible in which human character became fluid, only the wildest and most lawless impulses crystallizing on the surface. Perhaps the human character never has been put to so severe a test. Most of these young men had been well brought up, many would return, if they did return, to a social position in their native town. But they were in a country almost without law, with none of the restraining influences of organized society, their brains reeling with sudden wealth taken from the earth in the most romantic surroundings, and further exhilarated by the electric air; all that was primitive in them became rampant.
To characters naturally strong came the inevitable reaction before harm had been done, and many of these wild young men lived to become "leading citizens " in San Francisco and elsewhere. But others formed habits never to be broken, squandered all they had on worthless women and in the gambling-halls, and either drifted whence they came or hid themselves under the brush of the sand- hills and blew out their brains. The mines themselves were a relentless clearing-house. It required not only physical strength but moral endurance to succeed greatly ; and hundreds of miners, weakened by hardships and the unsanitary conditions, and despairing of ever "striking it
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rich," crept back to the city to die of pneumonia, dysen- tery, or by their own hand; unless they had saved the price of the return voyage or could borrow it.
Only the clean tonic air of San Francisco saved it from hideous epidemics, for its population grew daily, and most of it was herded in bunk-houses made of lath and cotton, or was camping in tents. The refuse was left in the streets; there was a garbage-heap at every door. As it was, there were several light epidemics of cholera, and it is possible that even the keen Pacific winds would not have saved the city from sudden depopulation had not another element come to the rescue. Within eighteen months San Fran- cisco was almost burned to the ground six times. The first of these fires occurred on December 4, 1849, and a million dollars went up in flames, but with them a vast amount of germ-breeding filth. On the 4th of May, 1850, property was destroyed to the amount of four million dollars. The greatest of these fires was on the 14th of May, 1851, in which twelve million dollars' worth of business blocks and merchandise were consumed.
After each of these fires, almost before they were ex- tinguished, the citizens began to rebuild with dauntless courage and energy, and in spite of the cumulative effects of disasters seeming to hint that Nature had not lost her old spite against that coast of so many geological vicis- situdes. But the final result was, that after the most leveling fire in her history, not to be surpassed until April, 1906, she erected the greater number of her hotels and business houses of substantial materials and organ- ized a proper water system; an improvement entirely overlooked before. The indomitable spirit and enter- prise of that day can be laid to the survival of the fittest.
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The times needed strong men, strong of body and brain, and only the strong could survive in the face of unparal- leled hardships, trials, temptations, and disasters. These men, not all saints by any means, formed a nucleus which enabled San Francisco itself to survive and become the great city of the Western world.
It is to be remembered that although a year and a half is a negligible period in an old community, every month is a crowded year in such conditions as existed in San Francisco during and immediately after the gold-rush. Scarcely a day that men did not have their faculties and characters tried to the limit of human endurance. The strong men saw the weak falling on every side, dying like flies, creeping back from the mines unrecognizable wrecks of the men that had struck the trail a few months before with the insolent boast that they would sail for "the States" with a million in their pockets before the year was out. The men born to survive spent their days in keen business competition, money crises, and in a fever- ish atmosphere whose temperature never seemed to drop; their nights with one ear open for the horrid cry of fire and the sharp clang of alarm-bells. At the first signal they were out of bed, doctors, lawyers, merchants, politicians, mechanics rushing to the engine-houses, of which the greater number were enrolled members, thence to the hills to watch a sea of flame roll over all they possessed. They had their moments of despair, of wild excitement, but out of each succeeding conflagration they emerged more finely tempered, more grimly determined that this city of San Francisco should become as great a city as any they had left behind, and their own fortunes rise from the ashes seventy times seven if the Fates pursued them.
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When one remembers the character of these men and the spirit with which they animated the city and stamped it, one can the more easily understand the courage and energies which astonished the world after the great disaster of 1906.
But the sturdy citizens of San Francisco were not tested by fire alone and the demoralizing atmosphere of the times. No sooner had they disposed of the Hounds than they became aware of a new menace to their security, although these fresh additions to the young city's under- world were difficult to locate. Taking warning from the fate of the noisy and defiant Hounds, these scoundrels did not advertise themselves by a headquarters, nor did they parade. A few of this new band of criminals were Mexicans, but the greater number and by far the bolder were released criminals and ticket-of-leave men from Australia. At the end of 1849 a hundred thousand immi- grants had poured into the territory. A similar number arrived in 1850, advancing the population of San Fran- cisco alone from five thousand to nearly thirty thousand. Naturally, it was easy for criminals to slip in singly or in hordes, for all claimed to be bound for the mines, which were turning millions a month into the pockets of the industrious, the persistent, and the lucky. The "Sidney Coves," however, had no intention of working with pick and shovel at the mines; San Francisco was a gold-mine itself.
The citizens, after their exercise of summary justice by popular tribunal, had elected officers to keep the city in order, and returned to their personal avocations. But while the merchants, bankers, and other business men snatched the city again and again from ruin by fire, finan-
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cial shipwreck, and the still greater menace of moral evil, the judges, lawyers, and public officials in general were no credit to the community. The Hall McAllisters were rare, and lawyers of the order of shyster and shark had come to the new territory in droves, knowing that they could establish themselves unnoticed and make as much money with their dishonest wits as all but the luckiest at the mines. These men could be bought by the enter- prising members of the underworld with gold-dust and promise of votes, and the human vultures that now infested the city were able to conceal their individualities and their dwelling-places from the citizens as long as they chose, looting the town with such frequency and thoroughness that every man went to business with a pistol in his belt and slept with it under his pillow. Once more nobody stirred abroad at night; and those that patronized the gambling-rooms entered before dusk and remained until daylight.
Where the Hounds had dared to kill upon one occasion only, these desperados murdered nightly and often by day, partly because it amused them, partly to cover their tracks. The few police were terrorized and rarely inter- fered with their adventures. They were more than sus- pected of starting the fires that they might loot by whole- sale, and they even raided the gambling-houses in broad daylight, filling their hats with the gold on the tables and leaving a trail of blood behind them.
It is true that some were arrested, but their lawyers were well paid and specious, and it was seldom that a judge could be found to convict them. Theft, robbery, burglary, murder were all in the day's work, and as their contempt for law increased, a community of un-
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speakable wickedness and degradation called Sidney Town flourished openly on the outskirts of the city at Clark's Point. Its denizens seemed to increase with the malignant velocity of locusts. The busy harried citizens of the little community endured their outrages from the end of '49 to the beginning of '51, hoping against hope that the law would prove equal to its obligations and leave the good men free to build and rebuild and attend to their ever-increasing problems. But although the San Franciscan is noted for his philosophy and his pa- tience, he is equally distinguished for the sudden cessa- tion of those virtues and for his grim and immovable attitude when he has made up his mind to exterminate and reconstruct.
The citizens of San Francisco suddenly and without warning "sat up" in June, 1851, and formed the first of the two famous Committees of Vigilance.
One hundred and eighty-four of the wealthiest, most prominent, and, what was more to the point, as it meant neglect of business, the most industrious and enterprising of San Francisco's men formed themselves into a secret Committee of Vigilance for the purpose of cleaning up the city morally and restoring it to order. Although it had been mooted for some time, it was not organized until June, and then not until a desperate attempt had been made to induce the proper authorities to enforce the law. The patience of the general public being exhausted, there had been daily mass-meetings, and indignation reached its climax when two alleged murderers, an Englishman named James Stuart and a confederate, Joseph Windred, were taken to the City Hall for trial with little prospect of conviction. Eight thousand citizens surrounded the
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building, clamoring for justice. Fourteen of their num- ber-W. D. M. Howard, Samuel Brannan, A. J. Ellis, H. F. Teschemacker, W. H. Jones, B. Ray, G. A. King, A. H. Sibley, J. L. Folsom, F. W. Macondray, Ralph Dorr, Theodore Payne, Talbot H. Green, and J. B. Huie- were appointed a committee to consult with the authori- ties and guard the prisoners from public wrath until they should be tried. The situation may be indicated by the brief speech made by Mr. Brannan to the more conservative of the committeemen:
I am very much surprised to hear people talk about grand juries, recorders, or mayors. I'm tired of such talk. These men are mur- derers, I say, as well as thieves. I know it, and I will die or see them hung by the neck. I'm opposed to any farce in this business. We had enough of that eighteen months ago, when we allowed ourselves to be the tools of those judges who sentenced convicts to be sent to the United States. We are the mayor and the recorder, the hangman and the law. The laws and the courts never yet hung a man in Cali- fornia, and every morning we are reading fresh accounts of murders and robberies. I want no technicalities. Such things are devised to shield the guilty.
But moderation prevailed for the moment. After an- other appeal to the assembled people it was decided to choose a jury from their number, as well as a sheriff, judges, a clerk, and a public prosecutor. Men of the high- est standing were immediately elected for these offices: William T. Coleman, prosecuting attorney; Hall McAl- lister and D. O. Shattuck, counsel for the prisoners; J. R. Spence, presiding judge; H. R. Bowie and Charles L. Ross, associate judges; John E. Townes, sheriff; and W. A. Jones, clerk. While the whole town was still in an uproar the two prisoners were tried and defended, but the jury disagreed, and in spite of the shouts of "Hang them! Hang them!" from without, "The ma-
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jority rules!" they were handed over to the authorities to be tried in due legal form. The result was what no doubt even those stern but still patient men may have expected: Windred, who was sentenced to fourteen years' imprisonment, found no difficulty in cutting his way out of jail and escaping; and Stuart (who turned out to be the wrong man and innocent) was sent to Marysville to stand his trial for murder.
It was then that patience ceased to be a virtue and the Vigilance Committee was organized.
They chose as headquarters rooms on the corner of Battery and Pine streets. The Monumental Fire Com- pany was to toll the bell (instead of ringing it wildly, as for fires) as a signal for the committee to meet and try a prisoner. It was on the night of the roth of June that the bell tolled for the first time; and its deep solemn note filled the city. Thousands of citizens who had the merest inkling of what was on foot tumbled out of their houses and gathered in the street before the lighted room to await the verdict, for they soon learned that a prisoner, John Jenkins, a "Sidney Cove," was on trial for his life.
The proceedings within were thorough but brief. At midnight the bell tolled again as a signal that the death- sentence had been passed and that the execution would take place at once. Mr. Brannan came out and addressed the crowd, telling them what had been done, that all evidence had been sifted, and asking their opinion of the verdict. The crowd expressed its unanimous approval in a shout which drowned the slow clanging of the bell. A clergyman went in to talk to the condemned man, and at two o'clock Jenkins was brought out, closely pinioned and surrounded by the members of the committee, who were
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armed to the teeth. The waiting crowd silently fell into line behind and marched through Sansome, California, Montgomery, and Clay streets to the Plaza. The noose was adjusted and the other end thrown over a beam projecting from an adobe house. Scarcely a word was spoken, but many hands volunteered at the rope until the wretch's struggles ceased. The man was one of the most notorious of the desperados infesting the city, but had he been obscure it is doubtful if "the law" would have taken more than a perfunctory notice of this act of summary justice, being now fully aware that the majority of San Francisco's population was on the side of the Vigilantes.
The committee then emerged from its secrecy, published its roll of names in full, and, invoking an old Mexican law which forbade the immigration of any person convicted of crime in another country, ordered the Cove population to leave California at once. Some were shipped off; others, terrified by the fate of Jenkins, fled without further invitation.
Meanwhile the Committee of Vigilance had found the true James Stuart and ordered the miserable creature shivering in the Marysville jail to be set at liberty. Of all the villains of that day Stuart seems to have been dyed with the darkest and most indelible pigment. He had begun his career of crime at the age of sixteen and omitted none in the calendar. When, staring down at those rows of determined men, with their set grim faces, and at the armed body-guard against the walls, at the doors, and on the stairs, he realized that the game was up he deter- mined to retire from the world in a blaze of glory, and told of his hundred crimes vividly and in horrid detail. After he had finished he was given two hours for repentance.
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At the end of that time the big bell tolled; manacled and surrounded by drawn pistols to prevent any attempt at rescue, he was escorted to the wharf at the foot of Market Street and hanged.
At this point the governor, John McDougal, although secretly in sympathy with the committee, felt that he must make a show of upholding the law, and when it was known that two other prisoners had been taken to the rooms on Battery Street he counseled the sheriff to rescue them and take them to the official lockup. The sheriff effected the rescue by a coup; but immediately the bell tolled, and the committee hastened to their headquarters. A few hours afterward they broke into the jail, brushed aside the guards, and hurried the prisoners into a coach. A whip was freely applied to the horses, which galloped down to Battery Street, while the bell tolled the announcement that the men, Whittaker and McKenzie, were about to die. The crowd ran after the carriage, but when they reached the place of execution the two bodies, hooded and pinioned, were swinging in the air.
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