USA > California > California; an intimate history > Part 13
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By this time James King of Wm. was as well known to his fellow-citizens, good and bad, as a pronounced individu- ality ever must be in a small community. His honor, in spite of his unfortunate association with Adams & Co., was unchallenged; he never had hesitated to express his opinion openly of the civic and individual corruptions of San Francisco and to suggest remedies; hot-tempered
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and argumentative, he had refused to fight when challenged to a duel, but no one thought of questioning his personal courage. When he declined, however, he added that, while he was opposed on principle to dueling, and had a family to consider, he went armed and certainly should defend himself if assaulted.
Therefore when the public heard that King was about to edit a paper of his own they were far more interested than was usual in that day of many and hapless journalistic ventures. It knew that his paper would be interesting, virile, a new departure, and that it would be as fearless as himself, waging relentless war upon the forces of evil that were devastating the city. In short, lively times were anticipated, and no one was disappointed.
He began with light satiric fencing; but in the fourth issue he took off his gloves. Certain banking-firms, alive and defunct, were shown up in all their rottenness. No other paper had dared to attack them-Sam Brannan had retired from journalism and Mormonism long since, and was now engaged in becoming a millionaire-but when King had finished his exposures, written as they were by one who had grown up in the banking business, the most friendly, indifferent, and doubting were con- vinced. He next paid his respects to Broderick, whom he called David Cataline Broderick, accusing him of the most flagrant election frauds, of striving by corrupt means only to get himself elected United States Senator, and of complicity in the Jenny Lind Theater swindle, one of the financial disasters of the moment. He finished one of his attacks with a sentence that may have sealed his fate; for, although Broderick himself was above compassing the death of any man save in fair fight, the evil forces of
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the city were growing more uneasy and angry with every issue of the Bulletin.
"We have every confidence," wrote King, "that the people will stand by us in this contest; and if we can only escape David C. Broderick's hired bullies a little while longer we will turn this city inside out, but we will expose the corruption and malfeasance of her officiary."
But, although threatened and challenged, no attempt was made upon his life for a time, and he attacked every man and every institution given to corrupt practices, paying particular attention to the large gambling-houses (whose advertisements kept most of the newspapers going) and other traps for the weak and unwary. It is unnecessary to add that an attempt was made to muzzle him, by the offer of large and remunerative advertise- ments, from the most notorious of these concerns, and that he paid as little attention to them as to threats and black looks. Nor had he any hesitation in showing up the other newspapers.
Even the strongest and most upright among his friends were aghast and uneasy; in the whole history of journal- ism no editor had ever gone as far as this. But he was quite justified in anticipating public support. Everybody bought the Bulletin-those that hoped it would air the evils of the city and probe its sores until the disease had disap- peared, and those that execrated it yet were afflicted with a morbid desire to read what might be written about themselves or their friends. By the end of the year its circulation was larger than that of all the other news- papers combined, and none had ever compared with it in swaying public opinion. While undeniably sensa- tional, it was not vulgar nor blatant, and it was invariably
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well written and interesting. Above all, it furnished at last what many had long more or less vaguely desired- a rallying-point toward which all the decent element in the city could converge for purposes of organization.
But still nothing happened. All that he exposed was known or suspected already, and until some fresh enor- mity occurred it hardly would be possible for King to hasten those converging but lagging footsteps into a dead run. He knew that such an opportunity must come; and come it did, long before the public had time to tire of his exposure of well-known abuses against which the laws were powerless.
In less than six weeks after the first issue of the Bul- letin, and while little else was discussed but the topics it furnished daily, and the people were in just the right frame of mind to burst into frenzy upon provocation, United States Marshal William H. Richardson was mur- dered by a notorious gambler named Charles Cora. The two men drank more than their tempers could stand in a saloon, got into an altercation, and left the place still wrangling. Richardson, it is assumed, had attacked the system of ballot-box stuffing, in which Cora was a con- spicuous expert. When the two men reached the neigh- borhood of California and Leidersdorff streets they paused suddenly, and a bystander saw Cora grasp the collar of Richardson's coat and point a pistol at his breast. Rich- ardson, who had his hands in his pockets, exclaimed: "You would not shoot me, would you? I am not armed." Before any one seems to have been able or disposed to go to the rescue Cora had fired and shot him dead.
This man, of uncertain nationality, was a well-known figure about town, being good-looking, young, well
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dressed, always to be seen on Kearney and Montgomery streets at the promenade hours, in the fashionable res- taurants, and, during San Francisco's madder hours, in one or other of the great gambling-houses. He also walked the fashionable thoroughfares openly with the most famous woman of commerce in the town, Belle Cora, who had impudently assumed his name in exchange for the funds that gratified his exquisite tastes, when luck failed him at the tables. When the news flew through the city that an upright citizen and servant of the Federal government whose only weakness was the one most easily excused in mining communities had been murdered in cold blood by a creature whom all decent men regarded with abhorrence as a maquereau, to say nothing of his degraded life in all respects, there was immediate and in- tense excitement. Cries of "Lynch him!" resounded from the crowds that filled the principal streets in less than half an hour; men already inflamed by King's daily exposures were in no mood to endure philosophically the thought that this man Cora could command all the cor- rupt machinery of the law in his defense.
Cora had been hurried off to jail and locked up under a heavy guard; but, although the city that night held its breath as the old tocsin of the California Engine Com- pany's No. 4 bell tolled suddenly and imperatively, and although many of the Vigilantes of 1851 promptly an- swered the call-the first being the fiery Sam Brannan- it was decided after several hours of debate to give the law one last opportunity to redeem itself.
On Monday the coroner's inquest pronounced that the murder had been premeditated and without a mitigating circumstance. No other verdict was possible without
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rousing the town to frenzy, and a few hoped for a real trial and conviction. But not James King of Wm.
That no effort will be spared to get Cora clear [he wrote in the Bulle- tin] begins now to be apparent. His friends are already at work. Forty thousand dollars, it is said, have been subscribed for the purpose. Of this some five thousand will be sufficient to cover the lawyers' fees and court charges, and the balance can be used as occasion may re- quire. One bad man on the jury will be sufficient to prevent an agree- ment. Look well to the jury! . .. What we propose is this: If the jury which tries Cora is packed either hang the sheriff or drive him out of town. ... If Mr. Sheriff Scannell does not remove Billy Mulligan from his present post as keeper of the county jail, and Mulligan lets his friend Cora escape, hang Billy Mulligan, or drive him into banish- ment. That's the word! . . . Oh, Heaven, it is a mortification to every lover of decency and order in and out of San Francisco, to think that the sheriff of this county is an ex-keeper of a gambling-hell; that his deputy, who acts as keeper of the county jail, is the notorious Billy Mulligan, the late "capper" at a "string game" table.
Belle Cora had retained several lawyers more eminent for brains and legal ability than bitter virtue. When they discovered that the smoldering virtue of the citizens was aroused and growing a hotter white every instant they tried to withdraw, particularly Col. E. D. Baker, who was really an estimable person, and who distinguished himself later in the Civil War. But San Francisco was a motley city where abilities of some sort were necessary to pre-eminence, and Belle Cora was not queen of the night life for nothing. She held her lawyers to their bargain- they had accepted heavy retainers-and they were obliged to make their appearance in court with their client, who was got up like a hero of melodrama. He wore a gorgeous waistcoat, light gloves, a new suit of pale material, a jaunty overcoat; his mustache was little and black, and he lolled with the gambler's air of well-bred indifference. The insolent bearing of this creature, fresh from a wanton
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murder, caused every one that saw him to hiss, and the crowd in the court-room was with difficulty kept in order.
Colonel Baker was one of the chief exponents of the inflamed oratory of the day, and, being trapped by a woman cleverer than himself, made up his mind to save the murderer if words could do it. His closing speech was a masterpiece, judging it by the standards of the time; and, carried away by his own eloquence, he sud- denly held up Belle Cora as a model for all men to admire; picturing her as wronged, misunderstood, unfortunate, yea, but admirable. Her devotion to her lover redeemed her of frailty in the eyes of all men, particularly of himself, and he almost wept as he paid her his tribute. This speech enraged the public, but it served its purpose with the jury, which, "fixed " beforehand, could plead that it had been convinced by the great lawyer's eloquence, and that the defendant had been actuated by the highest motives in killing a marshal of the United States for objecting to the stuffing of ballot-boxes. After being out for twenty- four hours it failed to agree; in other words, the seven men that were above being "fixed," voted for murder, one for manslaughter, and four for acquittal.
The Bulletin rushed out an extra invoking the heavens to drape themselves in black.
The money of the gambler and the prostitute has succeeded, and Cora has another respite. The jury cannot agree and has been dis- charged. Will Cora be hung by the officers of the law? No. Even on this trial one of the principal witnesses was away, having sold out his establishment for twenty-four hundred dollars and left the state. It is said that another trial cannot be had this term, and by that time where will the other witnesses be? Rejoice ye gamblers and harlots! Rejoice with an exceeding gladness! Assemble in your dens of infamy to-night, let the costly wine flow, let the welkin ring with your shouts of joy. Your triumph is great-oh, how you have
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triumphed! Triumphed over everything that is holy and virtuous and good; and triumphed legally-yes, legally! Your money can accomplish anything in San Francisco, and now you have full per- mission to run riot at pleasure. Talk of safety in the law? It is a humbug. ... Rail at the Vigilance Committee and call it an illegal tribunal? What scoundrel lost his life by their action who did not richly deserve it? Many complain of vigilance committees and say we should leave criminals to be dealt with by the law. Dealt with by the law indeed! How dealt with? Allowed to escape when ninety-nine men out of a hundred believe the prisoner to be guilty of murder? Is not this very course calculated to drive an exasperated people to madness, and, instead of a vigilance committee with all its care and anxiety to give a fair trial without the technicalities of the law, to call into action the heated blood of an outraged community; that, rising in its might, may carry everything before it, and hang the wretch without even the semblance of a trial? We want no vigilance committee if it can be avoided, but we do want to see the murderer punished for his crimes.
Day after day King poured forth his indignation in the newspaper that every man read and an ever-increasing number looked to for guidance. It speaks well for the stern school of those few years in a new and unprecedented community that the men of San Francisco restrained themselves as long as they did. They were law - abid- ing citizens and determined to give their law every op- portunity to vindicate itself; but King knew that there was no hope in the law unless it could be shamed into vengeance upon such men as Cora and others of his ilk; into action over murders committed daily, not only in San Francisco, but throughout the lawless state. Two com- mitted on prominent citizens under circumstances of peculiar atrocity while traveling in the country served to press his arguments home, although he needed no fresh fuel to feed his own horror and disgust.
King knew his danger, knew that his enemies, who numbered not only the entire underworld, but the corrupt
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in his own class, were eager to have him out of the way. They experienced the sensation of being marooned in the crater of a live volcano with upright and unscalable walls. At any moment the muttering lava tides beneath might shoot up and deprive any one of them of power and even of life. One more earthquake and their fate would be sealed. If they could reach down and choke the daunt- less little stoker of that bubbling furnace all might yet be well. Life was very busy, memories were short, the other newspapers could be relied upon. Who were in the plot to eliminate James King of Wm. will never be known; possibly because the directing brains were too clever to commit themselves to anything but whispered directions in back-rooms, conveyed through an inconspicuous tool. But that it was a conspiracy deliberately planned and executed no one may doubt. And it furnished the final earthquake they sought at any price of blood or con- science to avoid.
On May 14 (1856), four months after the farce of the Cora trial, King published an article in the Bulletin attacking the appointment of & man named Bagley to a position in the United States custom-house. This man had been engaged not long before in a disreputable elec- tion fight with James P. Casey, one of the San Francisco supervisors. The editorial was aimed not so much at Bagley as at Casey, who was one of the most "undesirable citizens" in the town.
It does not matter [remarked Mr. King] how bad a man Casey has been nor how much benefit it might be to the public to have him out of the way, we cannot accord to any one citizen the right to kill him nor even beat him without justifiable personal provocation. The fact that Casey has been an inmate of Sing Sing prison, in New York, is no offense against the laws of this state; nor is the fact of having
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stuffed himself through the ballot-box and elected to the board of supervisors from a district where it is said he was not even a can- didate, any justification why Mr. Bagley should shoot Mr. Casey, however richly the latter may deserve to have his neck stretched for his fraud on the people.
Shortly after this article appeared Casey presented him- self at the Bulletin office, which was on Merchant between Montgomery and Sansome streets, and walking in with- out ceremony, demanded in a loud voice:
"What do you mean?"
King, who was writing at his desk, glanced up casually. "Mean?"
"What do you mean by saying that I was a former in- mate of Sing Sing?"
"And were you not?"
"That's not the question. I don't want my past raked up. On that point I am sensitive," added Mr. Casey, naïvely.
"Have you finished?" King had not laid down his pen. "There is the door. Go. Never show your face here again."
Casey glanced through an open door. There were men in the next room. If King had been quite alone it is possible that he would have lost no time. As it was, he merely struck a belligerent attitude and exclaimed, in a loud voice, "If necessary I shall defend myself."
King rose and pointed to the door. "Go. Never show your face here again."
He did not even take the trouble to remind the hired assassin, who stalked out, that he might have selected a more plausible pretense for his indignation than the Bul- letin's allusion to his sojourn in Sing Sing, since in the trial
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following his election fight with Bagley he had, under cross-examination, admitted the fact, and the news had been commented upon by every newspaper in town. Casey was a thoroughly bad man of violent temper, quite ready to commit a cowardly murder for a consideration, secure in the protection of an element that, in a later battle for municipal decency, came to be known as the "higher ups."
King was under no illusions, and when he left the office saw that his pistol was in his hip pocket.
San Francisco will always be a gray city, for although her winds-poetically but incorrectly known as "the trades"-make her uncommonly healthy, the fogs that roll down from the tule lands of the north and in from the sea impress their sad hue on the imagination of the builders. This may be because the Californians are an artistic people, and the law of harmony demands that the city landscape shall mate with the soft-gray tides that sweep and curl about the shelters of men, often obliterating them; or the fog-bank that marches through the Golden Gate like a mighty ship, to wreck itself upon the hills in a thousand fantastic shapes.
The streets of San Francisco are almost, and often wholly, deserted when the fogs invade the city, giving them an unspeakably dreary aspect and afflicting delicate throats. When the hour for closing comes in the business district, hundreds of men swarm down to the ferry-boats at the foot of Market Street eager to reach their homes under the sun and set with flowers; those living in the city hurry along like black ghosts, with their heads down, looking neither to the right nor the left and longing for their warm firesides.
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At five o'clock on that evening of May 14th King left the Bulletin office to walk to his home on the corner of Pacific and Mason streets. He wore a slouch-hat and a cloak called "talma," which he had a habit of holding together across his chest. It is possible that he had quite forgotten Casey and the advisability of being on the alert, particularly when the fog was drifting through the city, for his hands were in their usual position and far from his pistol-pocket. He was crossing Montgomery Street di- agonally between Washington and Clay, and was more than half-way across, when Casey, who had been skulk- ing behind an express-wagon, suddenly stepped out of the fog, threw off his cloak, and pointed a large navy re- volver at King's breast. Even he, it would appear, had his nerves, for he cried out excitedly:
"Are you armed? Defend yourself! Come on! De- fend yourself !"
But he was probably unconscious of his words, for he fired as he spoke. His victim had no time to draw his pistol.
King staggered into the Pacific Express building on the corner. The only other person visible seems to have been Casey's friend, "Ned" McGowan, who scuttled up Wash- ington Street; and no one behind walls noticed anything so common as a pistol-shot until King appeared, stum- bling and fainting, in the office of the Pacific Express Company. Then he was tenderly cared for, messengers were despatched post-haste for surgeons, and a bed was improvised. When the surgeons arrived they found that the ball had entered the left breast and gone out of the body under the left shoulder-blade. There could be no doubt that the wound was mortal. He was in great
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pain; anesthetics were administered, and his wife was sent for.
Casey had hastened to give himself up, knowing that the only safe place for him was the jail guarded by his friends and protected by "the law." He was none too soon. Although that was long before the day of the tele- phone, the news that King had been mortally wounded by Casey flew over the city as if there had been a town crier in every street, and in an incredibly short time there was a howling shrieking mob "down - town," composed of men as hysterical as only men can be under strong provocation, demanding that Casey be lynched on the moment. The prison officials, sure that the jail would be rushed by the black howling mass in the Plaza, sent for a carriage; and Casey, accompanied by the city marshal and the captain of police and several police officers, ran down Dunbar's alley and entered it at the corner of Wash- ington Street. The coachman whipped his horses into a gallop, and the hack with the prisoner and his guards inside, and another friend, the chief engineer of the fire department, clinging on behind, dashed furiously into Kearney Street toward the county jail, on Broadway near Dupont Street. The crowd, shrieking "Hang him! Kill him!" ran after, but the man was safely within the stronger walls before they could catch up with the horses.
In front of the jail stood three of Casey's friends armed to the teeth, Charles Duane, Daniel Aldrich, and Edward McGowan. Thomas King, the dying man's brother, harangued the crowd of furious men, inflaming their pas- sions further until they made an attempt to rush the jail. They were repulsed, and while they were making ready for another attack the rumor flew about that the Vigilance
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Committee was organizing. At the same time Mayor Van Ness appeared and demanded to be heard; he made a speech, counseling patience and promising justice, and, although frequently interrupted with derision, managed to keep them quiet until three separate companies of armed citizens, willing to see Casey hung but opposed to violence, arrived and not only surrounded the jail, but stationed themselves in the corridors and on the roof. The crowd, having no leader, finally turned its back and, still cursing, went down to Montgomery Street and halted before the building where King lay. In a short time not less than ten thousand men stood there, anxious for news of the sufferer, and the police were obliged to stretch a rope in front of the Pacific Express office. Bulletins were issued every few minutes; but as the men could not con- tain themselves, they finally adjourned to the Plaza, where speeches could be made and some method of vengeance determined upon. But again there was no leader; and, once more hearing that the Vigilance Committee was assembling, they finally adjourned to the space in front of the county jail. About three hundred men were now on guard there.
At eleven o'clock Frederick W. Macondray and John Sime, two friends of King, and themselves citizens of the highest type, obtained admittance to the jail. When they came out they informed the crowd that it was impossible for Casey to escape or to be rescued. A half-hour later a mounted battalion under Major Rowell, consisting of the California Guards, the First Light Dragoons, and the National Lancers, reinforced the guard of citizens, and the crowd finally dispersed. Casey for the moment was safe from lynch law.
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But the next morning the same crowd, full of undimin- ished fury, resenting the lack of leadership and action, assembled again, drawing together like so many magnets and utterly disregarding business. Then suddenly they received a piece of news that caused them to march as one man down to Sacramento Street near Leidersdorff and stand in silence before the walls of the American, or "Know Nothing," Club. The rumors of the night before that had served to keep their passions in leash had been founded upon the futile meeting of several of the members of the Vigilance Committee of 1851. Within those walls an entirely new organization was forming, and the grim, sober, indignant citizens assembled there had found their leader.
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