The Barbary Coast - Chapters 5-7



Chapter 5. "Where No Gentle Breezes Blow" 

With the disbanding of the second Vigilance Committee, life in San 
Francisco settled into its accustomed grooves. There it moved along more 
or less sedately for half a dozen years, a period of extraordinary growth 
in population, in commercial and financial activity, and in importance as 
a seaport. The very factors which contributed to the city's progress, 
however, not only opened the Golden Gate to a new influx of criminals, but 
lessened the probability of another uprising of a busy and prosperous 
citizenry. Consequently the human flotsam of the seven seas began to wash 
against the shores of San Francisco for the third time in its brief but 
eventful history. By 1862 old Sydney-Town and its environs were once more 
an Alsatia of dives, dancehalls, and depravity, and the transformation of 
the region into the more modern Barbary Coast had begun. The identity of 
the nomenclatorial genius who first bestowed this savage but glamorous 
designation upon San Francisco's underworld has not been preserved for 
posterity, but in all likelihood he was a sailor who had been impressed by 
the similarity of the quarter, in men if not precisely in methods of 
murder and robbery, to the Barbary Coast of Africa. In any event, the 
phrase was not generally used in San Francisco until the middle eighteen-
sixties. Soon afterwards the newspapers began referring to the dive-
operators and the thieves and swindlers who frequented the section as 
Rangers, an appellation which remained in use for almost twenty years. 

In later times the Barbary Coast meant only the single block on Pacific 
Street between Kearney and Montgomery streets, a short stretch of 
dangerous and disreputable thoroughfare, which was also widely known, 
after the middle eighteen-nineties, as Terrific Street. But originally, 
and until the Coast was devastated by the earthquake and fire of 1906, the 
term was applied to the entire area, including the red-light district, 
wherein criminals and prostitutes congregated.(*) Owing to periodic spasms 
of civic virtue, to the encroachments of residential and business 
developments, and to other causes, its limits naturally varied with the 
years. Roughly, however, it always occupied a greater or lesser portion of 
the territory bounded on the east by the waterfront and East Street, now 
the Embarcadero; on the south by Clay and Commercial streets; on the west 
by Grant Avenue and Chinatown; and on the north by Broadway, with 
occasional overflows into the region around North Beach and Telegraph 
Hill. During most of the long period in which the Barbary Coast was the 
almost universal synonym for debauchery, its most iniquitous features were 
confined within the rectangular district limited by Broadway and 
Washington, Montgomery, and Stockton streets. On November 28, 1869 the San 
Francisco Call described the Barbary Coast as commencing on Pacific Street 
near Montgomery and following the former through to Stockton, with various 
channels "leading into it from Kearney Street, Grant Avenue, and other 
thoroughfares. Within this area were innumerable alleys, a few of which 
have since been widened into streets, while others have vanished with the 
building up of the city. Among them were Murder Point, and Hinckley, 
Pinckley, Bartlett, China, Dupont, Sullivan, Bull Run, Moketown, and Dead 
Man's Alley. Many of these dismal little passages were culs-de-sac, and in 
all of them, as well as in the main thoroughfares from which they 
sprouted, were to be found what the Call described as scenes of 
wretchedness and pollution unparalleled on this side of the great 
mountains." The Call continued, on the same high note of horror: 

(* But not including the Uptown Tenderloin, a colony of gambling resorts, 
cabarets, and houses of prostitution which in later years flourished 
around Mason, Powell, Eddy, and Larkin streets and other thoroughfares 
which lead into Market Street.)

"The Barbary Coast! That mysterious region so much talked of; so seldom 
visited! Of which so much is heard, but little seen! That sink of moral 
pollution, whose reefs are strewn with human wrecks, and into whose vortex 
is constantly drifting barks of moral life, while swiftly down the 
whirlpool of death go the sinking hulks of the murdered and the suicide! 
The Barbary Coast! The stamping ground of the Ranger, the last resort of 
the blasé and ruined nymphe du pavé, the home of vice and harbor of 
destruction! The coast on which no gentle breezes blow, but where rages 
one wild sirocco of sin! . . .Night is the time to visit the Coast. In the 
daytime it is dull and unattractive, seeming but a cesspool of rottenness, 
the air is impregnated with smells more pungent than polite; but when 
night lets fall its dusky curtain, the Coast brightens into life, and 
becomes the wild carnival of crime that has lain in lethargy during the 
sunny hours of the day, and now bursts forth with energy renewed by its 
siesta." 

Some eight years later, in 1876, an indignant local historian, who made an 
extensive study of the district, was able to find no improvement. He thus 
described it: 

"The Barbary Coast is the haunt of the low and the vile of every kind. The 
petty thief, the house burglar, the tramp, the whoremonger, lewd women, 
cutthroats, murderers, all are found here. Dance-halls and concert-
saloons, where blear-eyed men and faded women drink vile liquor, smoke 
offensive tobacco, engage in vulgar conduct, sing obscene songs and say 
and do everything to heap upon themselves more degradation, are numerous. 
Low gambling houses, thronged with riot-loving rowdies, in all stages of 
intoxication, are there. Opium dens, where heathen Chinese and God-
forsaken men and women are sprawled in miscellaneous confusion, 
disgustingly drowsy or completely overcome, are there. Licentiousness, 
debauchery, pollution, loathsome disease, insanity from dissipation, 
misery, poverty, wealth, profanity, blasphemy, and death, are there. And 
Hell, yawning to receive the putrid mass, is there also."(*)

(* Lights and Shades of San Francisco, by Benjamin Estelle Lloyd; San 
Francisco, 1876) 

And in 1878 the New Overland Tourist, to an article giving minute 
directions for reaching the dens of the Barbary Coast, shudderingly added 
this solemn warning: 

"We give the precise locality so our readers may keep away. Give it a wide 
berth as you value your life!" 

* * * *

The first boat-landing on the San Francisco waterfront was at the 
northeast corner of Pacific and Davis streets, where a flight of slippery 
stone steps led downward to a rude bulkhead, at which skiffs and other 
small vessels were moored. During the first year or two of the gold rush, 
Pacific Street was thus the most important thoroughfare in San Francisco, 
and since it was the first street cut through the sand-hills behind Yerba 
Buena Cove, it was also the main highway to Portsmouth Square and the 
western part of the town. It declined rapidly in importance, however, as 
other streets were opened and wharves constructed, and soon abandoned all 
pretense of respectability. It was the heart of old Sydney-Town, and it 
was, likewise, the heart of the Barbary Coast throughout the years of its 
existence. For more than half a century practically the entire street was 
given over to vice and crime in one form or another. Eventually a few 
garages and cheap restaurants crept in between the dives and grog-shops, 
but for many years, and particularly during the eighteen-sixties and the 
eighteen-seventies, there were only two types of establishment which could 
by any stretch of the imagination be called legitimate enterprise. They 
were the cheap John clothing-stores, which catered principally to sailors 
and fleeced them unmercifully with shoddy and worthless merchandise; and a 
few auction places where goods of all sorts were disposed of at public 
outcry, at prices far above their actual worth. Various articles of 
wearing-apparel, called by the seamen" flags of Jerusalem," dangled from 
long poles above the doorways of the clothing-emporiums, while the 
sidewalks in front of them were cluttered with stuff of every description. 
One of the earliest stores of this type, and also one of the busiest, was 
that operated by Solomon Levy on the south side of Pacific Street between 
Montgomery and Sansome streets. Before Levy's door was an immense pile of 
old blankets, chained and padlocked to huge staples driven into the front 
of the building. Above hung his sign--an elaborate tailed overcoat, with 
brass buttons and an enormous moth-eaten fur collar. On the back and front 
of this impressive garment were pinned large pieces of cardboard bearing 
this legend: 

BOUGHT & SOLD 
SOLOMON LEVY. 

Every customer who bought more than a dollar's worth of goods received 
from Levy, with much ceremony, a card on which the storekeeper had 
painstakingly written a verse of his own composition. The sailors 
considered it very excellent poetry, and sang it to every tune to which 
they could fit the words: 

My name is Solomon Levy, 
And I keep a clothing store 
Away up on Pacific Street-- 
A hundred and fifty-four. 
If you want to buy an overcoat, 
A pair of pants or vest, 
Step up to Solomon Levy, 
And he'll sell you all the best. 

Levy's most troublesome competitor was Mrs. Dora Herz, who, with the able 
assistance of her son, Ittzy, ran a store half a block down the street and 
consistently undersold the poetic Solomon. Ittzy Herz was popularly 
believed to bear a charmed life. He appears to have spent at least half 
his time being knocked down by fire-engines, carts, and runaway horses; 
and when he was not thus engaged, he was falling from piers, boats, and 
windows. His accidents were innumerable, but he invariably emerged 
unscathed. The climax of his career of escape came in his twentieth year, 
when a Barbary Coast Ranger, to whom he had sold a pair of shoes which 
collapsed at the first wearing, tried to shoot him in a saloon on East 
Street. Although the muzzle of the pistol was within two feet of Ittzy's 
chest, the bullet missed him and killed a bystander. Several awed 
witnesses of the affray declared that an unseen force had twitched the 
Ranger's hand just before he pulled the trigger. Thereafter for several 
weeks, so many people came to see Ittzy that his mother locked him in a 
back room and charged ten cents to peek at him through a hole cut in the 
door. 

The most celebrated of the auction houses was the Great Eastern Auction 
Mart, of which Abe Fromberg was the presiding genius. It had neither doors 
nor windows, but was open to the street along its entire frontage. Inside, 
behind the pulpit from which Abe conducted his daily sales, were shelves 
piled high with goods--caps, jewelry, neckties, and other articles of wear 
and adornment which were much in demand by the shore-going sailors and 
others who frequented the Barbary Coast. Above the doorway was an immense 
stretch of canvas, about twenty-five feet long by eight feet wide, on 
which was painted a picture of the steamship Great Eastern driving before 
a gale. On the sidewalk outside the Auction Mart, where it served as an 
effective ballyhoo, was the first lung-testing machine ever seen in San 
Francisco. For five cents a man might blow into it, the strength of the 
blow being registered on a dial in pounds. This very popular apparatus was 
tended by Terry Shiner, who called himself Professor and claimed the 
blowing-championship of the world. To prove his right to the title he wore 
an enormous leather belt, studded with glittering pieces of vari-colored 
glass. For an additional fee of five cents Professor Shiner would himself 
blow into the machine, which promptly shivered as if it had been struck by 
a cyclone, while the pointer whizzed madly around the dial. 

* * * *

Except for the clothing-stores and the auction places, Pacific Street from 
the waterfront westward to Kearny Street and beyond was a solid mass of 
dance-halls, melodeons, cheap groggeries, wine and beer dens, which were 
popularly known as deadfalls; and concert saloons, which offered both 
dancing and entertainment. Most of the dance-halls and concert saloons 
were in cellars, and practically all of them, so far as physical 
appearance was concerned, were identical--a low-ceilinged, rectangular 
room, with a bar along one side, in the center a cleared space for 
dancing, and at one end a platform whereon the performers cavorted and the 
musicians dispensed more or less melodious sounds. In some of the cheaper 
places the only music came from a piano, but the more popular resorts 
boasted not only a piano but a squeaky fiddle and a blaring trombone and 
sometimes a clarinet. The melodeons resembled the dance-halls and concert 
saloons except that they had no dance-floors; they offered only liquor and 
theatrical diversion. Originally the melodeons were so called because, 
when first introduced in San Francisco, each was equipped with a musical 
instrument bearing that name--a small reed organ worked by treadles which 
acted upon a suction bellows, the air being drawn in through the reeds. In 
time, however, the word became the common designation of a type of resort 
which offered entertainment for men only, no women being permitted to 
enter except the performers and the waitresses. The shows consisted, 
usually, in bawdy songs, skits, and dances, principally the cancan; and, 
in a few places catering principally to Mexicans and Negroes, obscene 
poses by "finely formed females." 

Many resorts similar to those on Pacific Street were in operation on 
Montgomery, Kearny, and Stockton streets and on other thoroughfares within 
the purlieus of the Barbary Coast, while the northern limits of the 
quarter were marked by a row of Mexican fandango houses on Broadway 
opposite the County Jail. In these last-named places, which were 
particularly disreputable, the principal musical instrument was the 
guitar, and the favorite dance was a very torchy version of the fandango. 
From late afternoon until dawn all of the dives were thronged with a 
motley crew of murderers, thieves, burglars, gamblers, pimps, and 
degenerates of every description, practically all of whom were busily 
gunning for the sailors, miners, countrymen, and others who visited the 
district through curiosity or in search of women and liquor. Every variety 
of vice and crime was almost constantly on display. For many years, and 
especially during the eighteen-sixties and eighteen-seventies, it is 
doubtful if a night passed in which the Barbary Coast was not the scene of 
at least one murder and of innumerable robberies. 

When the police patrolled the district, they went in pairs or in even 
greater numbers; they were no more welcome than they had been in old 
Sydney-Town. Nor were they any more successful in preserving order and 
protecting the lives and property of visitors; not only was it well-nigh 
impossible to obtain convincing evidence against habitués of the Coast, 
but the Rangers had plenty of political friends who came to their aid as 
promptly as earlier politicians had succored the Sydney Ducks in times of 
stress. The resorts ran wide open, and murders and robberies continued to 
occur, despite occasional regulatory statutes and frequent outbursts of 
journalistic horror and indignation. After an exposé of conditions in 
1869, in which the Barbary Coast dives were called "pest holes of 
debauchery and corruption," the San Francisco Call compelled the enactment 
of an ordinance prohibiting the employment of women in melodeons, dance-
halls, and concert saloons. Although the law was passed with a 
considerable fanfare of editorial hosannas, no effort was ever made to 
enforce it. Another ordinance of similar intent, enacted in 1876, suffered 
a like fate. Under its provisions the presence of any female in a drinking 
cellar or saloon between the hours of six p.m. and six a.m. was unlawful, 
and sufficient cause for the summary closing of the resort. The Barbary 
Coast, however, never even knew that such a regulation existed. Three 
years after this gesture, in 1879, at the behest of the San Francisco 
Chronicle, the police suddenly became greatly concerned over the horrific 
effects of the cancan, which was on exhibition in practically every 
melodeon and concert saloon on the Barbary Coast. They forbade its 
performance and arrested Mabel Santley, a member of the Rentz Troupe, 
which played an engagement at the Standard, a comparatively high-class 
theater, in March 1879. Miss Santley was accused of indecent exposure 
after Charles Warren Stoddard, a noted San Francisco journalist and 
historian then writing for the Chronicle, had described her rendition of 
the rollicking French dance as immodest and indecent. His principal 
objection appeared to be that although the dancer was decorously clad in 
long skirts, she failed to keep them down around her ankles, where, in his 
opinion, they belonged. A jury convicted Miss Santley, largely on 
Stoddard's testimony, and she was fined two hundred dollars. Satisfied 
with this notable victory, the Chronicle and the police relaxed their 
vigilance, and the Barbary Coast danseuses not only restored the cancan to 
their repertoires, but embellished it with new gestures. 

* * * *

The lowest type of deadfall employed only a few women, never more than 
half a dozen. They were, invariably, aged and infirm wrecks, attractive 
only to men of particularly myopic vision. In varying stages of 
dishabille, they sat at the tables, or on hard wooden benches placed 
against the walls, and acted as decoys. To each resort which offered 
dancing or entertainment, however, were attached from ten to fifty 
females, the number depending upon the popularity of the dive. Some were 
as young as twelve or fourteen years, while others were toothless old hags 
whose lives had been almost continuous saturnalias of vice and 
dissipation. At least ninety-nine per cent of them were harlots, even the 
children. Regardless of their youth or decrepitude, they were called 
pretty waiter girls. They wore gaudy costumes calculated to display or 
accentuate their charms, if any, and in some of the lower dance-halls and 
concert saloons a free-spending visitor who was dissatisfied with the 
degree of revealment was permitted, on payment of a small fee, which 
rarely exceeded fifty cents, to strip any girl he desired and view her 
unadorned. Many of the younger, prettier women were subjected to treatment 
of this sort every night, and even several times a night. During the early 
eighteen-seventies the manager of one of the Mexican fandango dens 
introduced an innovation in dress which he reasoned, and rightly, would 
enormously increase attendance at his resort. He clad his pretty waiter 
girls in short red jackets, black stockings, fancy garters, red slippers--
and nothing else. From the viewpoint of the customer, this was probably 
the most successful costume ever worn on the Barbary Coast. It was 
abandoned after a few weeks, however, partly because the girls complained 
of the cold and dampness and partly because such crowds visited the 
establishment that it was impossible to maintain even a semblance of 
order. 

As regular wages the pretty waiter girls were paid from fifteen to twenty-
five dollars a week. They also received a commission on the liquor they 
sold, usually twenty per cent; half the proceeds of their own prostitution 
if carried on during their hours of employment, and half the income from 
dancing, the price of which varied from ten to fifty cents. Occasionally a 
girl earned as much as fifty dollars a week, practically all of which she 
gave to her pimp, who promptly spent it on another woman, as has been the 
custom of his kind from time immemorial. In the melodeons, as well as in 
the concert saloons, the female performers were paid upon practically the 
same basis as the pretty waiter girls. Between their appearances upon the 
stage they were required to sell liquor, and, in most of the resorts, to 
prostitute themselves to any men who desired them. Very few possessed any 
histrionic ability, and scarcely any could sing or dance. Sometimes, 
however, their lack of talent was so obvious that they were, 
unconsciously, very comical, and so were in great demand as entertainers. 
In this category were six Barbary Coast artistes of the middle eighteen-
seventies, who were widely known as the Galloping Cow, the Dancing Heifer, 
the Roaring Gimlet, the Waddling Duck, Lady Jane Grey, and the Little Lost 
Chicken. The Galloping Cow and the Dancing Heifer, two enormous women who 
had forsaken the wash-tub for a fling at high life in the melodeons and 
the concert saloons, were a sister act; they performed a classical dance, 
lumbering about the stage like a brace of elephants. The Roaring Gimlet 
was very tall and extraordinarily thin, but from her scrawny throat issued 
a voice which would have shamed a bull of Bashan. Lady Jane Grey was a 
rather handsome, sad-faced woman of middle age, who was more than half-
cracked on the subject of the nobility. She confided to everyone who would 
listen that she was the illegitimate daughter of an English earl, and 
during her waking hours, on or off the stage, she wore a coronet fashioned 
from cardboard and embellished with bits of colored glass. The Waddling 
Duck was a singer, sinfully fat, who was advertised as the only female who 
could sing in two keys at one and the same time. As a matter of fact, she 
sang in none; she simply opened her mouth and screeched what she called 
scales, along which her voice bounded like a frightened mountain goat. She 
was, perhaps, the first crooner in San Francisco. The Little Lost Chicken 
was a tiny girl in her middle twenties. She knew but one song, a ballad 
which began: "The boat lies high, the boat lies low; she lies high and dry 
on the Ohio." This she sang in a quavering falsetto, invariably bursting 
into tears at the last note. She so obviously required protection against 
the cruel blasts of the world that many gentlemen very chivalrously 
offered it; but always to their financial distress, for in her artless way 
the Little Lost Chicken was a first-rate thief and pickpocket. All of 
these women were very popular for a brief period, but none made any 
lasting impression on the Barbary Coast except the Galloping Cow. She 
saved her money and, about 1878, opened a saloon on Pacific Street, in a 
large room shaped like a half-moon, with a balcony, in which were tables 
and benches. On the day she opened her establishment, the Galloping Cow 
announced that she had had enough of men during her career in the concert 
saloons and melodeons, and that anyone who tried to take advantage of the 
fact that she was a lone woman would rue the day he was born. Only one man 
ever violated her rule against flirtations. He chucked her under the chin 
one night when she served him a bottle of beer, and she promptly smashed 
the bottle against his head. Then she flung him over the balcony railing 
and broke his back. Next day a huge sign appeared above the bar:
NO BULLS WANTED. 
THIS MEANS YOU! 
(Signed) THE GALLOPING COW. 

* * * *

During the early days of the Barbary Coast, most of the dance-halls and 
concert saloons provided, in the building above their cellars or in a sub-
cellar, a large room which had been partitioned into tiny, stall-like 
cubicles, furnished only with cots or pallets on the floor. Thither the 
pretty waiter girls and female performers repaired with the men who had 
succumbed to their blandishments and wished to go further into the matter. 
In a few of the lowest resorts, instead of the cubicles, which provided at 
least a measure of privacy, the room upstairs contained only rows of cots 
placed side by side. To give the girls plenty of time in which to sell 
liquor and attend to their other duties, there was usually a fifteen or 
twenty-minute interval between dances, while the acts presented on the 
stage were similarly spaced. Also, before a man visited the cubicles or 
the rows of cots he paid the manager of the resort, or the bar-tender, the 
seventy-five cents or dollar which was the usual price for the woman's 
services. He was likewise required, by custom, to purchase two drinks at 
the bar, one for himself and another for his partner. Usually the bar-
tender made a great show of putting an aphrodisiac into the girl's glass, 
but in reality she was served cold tea at whisky prices. 

In none of the Barbary Coast dives of this early period--or, for that 
matter, of any other period--was a man's life or property safe. The first 
duty of the girl who served drinks to a visitor or with whom he danced was 
to determine if he possessed any considerable amount of money. If he did, 
the whole machinery of the place was set in motion to despoil him. So long 
as he spent freely and drank heavily, he was not molested, but if he once 
displayed an inclination to keep his pocketbook closed, or betrayed a 
restlessness which might presage departure, he was immediately drugged. 
The usual procedure was to invite him to have a few drinks at the expense 
of the house. If he drank beer, a pinch of snuff was dropped into it; if 
whisky was his tipple, it was liberally dosed with the juice of plug 
tobacco; if he chose a mixed drink, the bar-tender added a little sulphate 
of morphine. But if a man imbibed sparingly and showed no interest in the 
women, experiments were made upon him with cantharides, or Spanish fly, 
which in those days was highly esteemed as an aphrodisiac and was much 
used throughout the Barbary Coast. Thereafter he was either very sick or 
so much putty in the pretty waiter girl's hands and willingly turned his 
pockets inside out to obtain her favors. If the visitor survived the drugs 
and was of a particularly husky build and pugnacious disposition, he was 
allowed to depart. But as he made his way unsteadily through the narrow 
passage which almost invariably was the only entrance to the den, he was 
knocked senseless with a hickory club. He was then robbed and rolled into 
the gutter. 

Two handsome young girls attached to one of the Mexican fandango dives, 
neither of them more than twelve years old when they entered the resort, 
achieved considerable local renown during the late eighteen-sixties for 
the unvarying efficacy of their method of robbery. They always worked 
together, or in cahoots, as the slang phrase of the time had it, and it 
was their proud boast that no man had ever received from them what he had 
paid for. Selecting their victim, usually a sailor or a countryman, they 
excited him with caresses and, if necessary, a drink flavored with 
cantharides, and then invited him to accompany them to one of the 
cubicles, generously offering to halve the customary fee. Having reached 
one of these tiny stalls, he was invited to choose a partner for the 
initial flight into the delightful realms of love. Without hesitation, and 
also without suspicion, he clasped one of the girls in his arms, whereupon 
the other cracked him on the head with a slung shot. They then emptied his 
pockets and summoned the bouncer, who rolled the unconscious form of the 
victim into the alley, while the murderous little señoritas divided their 
loot and returned to the dance-floor, still their charming and vivacious 
selves. Several men are said to have died as a result of their attentions, 
but that, so far as anyone ever knew, worried them not at all. 

* * * *

No exact computation was ever made of the number of dance-halls, 
melodeons, concert saloons, and other dives which flourished during the 
twenty years that followed the reincarnation of the old Sydney-Town 
quarter as the Barbary Coast, but there must have been several hundred. 
Many of them, with various changes in name and ownership, maintained a 
continuous existence until the holocaust of 1906 devastated the entire 
district. They included such celebrated resorts as the Bull Run, 
Canterbury Hall, the Louisiana, the Thunderbolt, the Cock o' the Walk, the 
Opera Comique, the Dew Drop Inn, the Rosebud, Every Man Welcome, Brooks' 
Melodeon, the Tulip, the Occidental, the Arizona, the Montana; and the 
Coliseum, the management of which called it the Big Dive. During the 
middle eighteen-seventies there was also a particularly vicious deadfall 
in a cellar at Pacific and Kearny streets. It was known as the Billy Goat 
because of the peculiarly repulsive combination of odors, compounded of 
stale beer, damp sawdust, and unwashed humanity, with which its smoke-
laden atmosphere was permeated. The proprietor, bouncer, and chief bar-
tender of the Billy Goat was a middle-aged Irishwoman called, in the 
expressive nomenclature of the Barbary Coast, Pigeon-Toed Sal. She kept 
order in her establishment with a derringer and a hickory wagon-spoke and 
was very adept in the use of either. She not only encouraged but if 
necessary assisted in the commission of any sort of crime so long as she 
received half the proceeds. She sold beer at a dime for an enormous mug, 
and vile whisky at five cents a large glassful. When served to a man who 
was known to have a few dollars in his pockets, they were more likely than 
not to contain knock-out potions. 

For several years this fragrant den vied with the Bull Run for the 
distinction of being the toughest place in San Francisco. The police, 
however, were inclined to award the palm to the latter, which was also 
known as Hell's Kitchen and Dance Hall. This notorious dive opened its 
doors in the fall of 1868 and celebrated its first Christmas with a free-
for-all fight in which half a dozen men were seriously hurt. During its 
period of greatest popularity, in the eighteen-seventies, the Bull Run was 
managed by an Irishman called One Year Tim, who was master of ceremonies 
and chief bouncer. Its owner, however, was Ned Allen, called Bull Run 
Allen because he had fought in the Union Army at both the first and second 
battles of Manassas. Allen was a huge man who always wore a snow-white 
ruffled shirt, in the bosom of which sparkled an enormous cluster of 
diamonds. He also possessed a very large and very red nose, about which he 
was extremely sensitive and which might have outshone his gems if he 
hadn't kept it coated with flour. This he dusted upon his mighty proboscis 
from a large salt-shaker which he always carried in his pocket. He was at 
length killed by a Barbary Coast Ranger named Bartlett Freel, who stabbed 
him with a clasp-knife after Allen had run amuck in his dive with a large 
ivory tusk. Fred was sent to the penitentiary, although at his trial the 
judge remarked that Allen's death would work no hardship upon the 
community. 

Allen's resort occupied a three-storey building at Pacific Street and 
Sullivan Alley, with a dance-hall and bar in the cellar, another on the 
street floor, and an assignation house upstairs. Before the main entrance 
stood a large screen covered with violently colored wall-paper, which was 
renewed two or three times each week, so that it always appeared fresh and 
immaculate. But the moral tone of the establishment was anything but 
immaculate. Allen often said that the motto of his place was "Anything 
goes here." He employed between forty and fifty girls during the Bull 
Run's period of greatest prosperity, and they were notorious as the most 
brazen, hopeless, and abandoned women on the Barbary Coast. In most of the 
dives the drinks served to the pretty waiter girls and the female 
performers were innoxious, and it was considered right and proper for them 
to dispose of unwanted beverages by dumping them into the big brass 
spittoons which were scattered about the floors. At the Bull Run, however, 
the girls were given real liquor and were compelled to drink it, as their 
antics when drunk were considered an amusing feature of the resort, the 
more so since Allen was very liberal in the use of cantharides to 
stimulate those of his employees whom he considered sluggish. Practically 
all of the Bull Run women drank beer by choice, having full knowledge of 
the dynamitic effect of the dive's whisky and brandy. But regardless of 
the number of glasses which they poured down their throats, they were not 
permitted to leave the dance-floor or the stage often enough to obtain the 
relief which the consumption of large quantities necessitated. 
Consequently they wore diapers instead of the frilly undergarments which 
the prostitute, even more than her virtuous sister, prefers. If one of 
Bull Run Allen's pretty waiter girls or performers became unconscious from 
liquor, as frequently happened, she was carried upstairs and laid on a 
bed, and sexual privileges were sold to all comers while she lay helpless 
in a drunken stupor. The price ranged from twenty-five cents to one 
dollar, depending upon the age and beauty of the girl. For an additional 
quarter a man might watch his predecessor, an extraordinary procedure 
which was supposed to give an additional fillip to the senses. It was not 
unusual for a girl to be abused by as many as thirty or forty men in the 
course of a single night. She was supposed to receive half the revenue 
from this sort of prostitution, but she was invariably cheated. 

The Opera Comique, at Jackson and Kearny streets, better known as 
Murderer's Corner, employed French and Spanish women, both as performers 
and as pretty waiter girls, and offered the bawdiest and most obscene 
shows of any melodeon or concert saloon on the Barbary Coast. It was owned 
by Happy Jack Harrington, who was considered the Beau Brummel of the Coast 
and was invariably attired in the height of fashion. His favorite costume 
consisted of a high-crowned plug hat, beneath which his hair was puffed 
out in curls; a frock coat, a white shirt with a ruffled bosom, a fancy 
waistcoat, and cream- or lavender-colored trousers so tight that he looked 
as though he had been melted and poured into them. His principal adornment 
and greatest pride, however, was his silky brown mustache, which was so 
long that he could tie its ends under his chin. With the aid of a woman 
variously known as Dutch Louise and Big Louise, Happy Jack ran the Opera 
Comique for several years, but he was an earnest drinker and spent all 
their profits on liquor. Early in 1878, while recovering from an attack of 
delirium tremens, Happy Jack came under the influence of the Praying Band, 
a temperance organization of devout women who periodically invaded the 
Barbary Coast and annoyed the dive-keepers with their efforts to reclaim 
the debauched wrecks who lurched along the dismal thoroughfares. They were 
not particularly efficient, as their usual procedure was to surround a 
drunken man and ask him with great earnestness: "Have you seen Jesus? " 
Few had. They caught Happy Jack as he rebounded from the fearsome realms 
of the pink elephant and the purple crocodile; and almost before he knew 
it, he had professed religion, sold his dive, received a Bible with his 
name in it, and been installed as manager of a little restaurant in 
California Street, far from the temptations of the Barbary Coast. He 
announced that he had forsaken his erstwhile evil ways forever, much to 
the disgust of Big Louise, who flatly refused to accompany him on what she 
considered a perilous adventure. A few weeks later she married a rich 
miner and left San Francisco. She always retained a measure of affection 
for Happy Jack, however, and frequently sent him money. 

Having pointed out to Harrington the sunlit summit of the mountain of 
salvation, the ladies of the Praying Band left him to make his way upward 
as best he could. Naturally, he failed to make progress, since he was by 
nature a drunkard and a thief. Less than a month after his supposed 
regeneration he was found lying drunk in the gutter before his new 
restaurant, his Bible clasped to his breast. Within another few weeks he 
had abandoned the business, which in March 1878 was disposed of, lock, 
stock, and barrel, at a Sheriff's sale for less than two hundred dollars. 
Happy Jack returned to the Barbary Coast, where he opened a resort at 
Pacific and Sansome streets, and became again a shining light among the 
Rangers. He cherished a bitter hatred of the Praying Band, and soon after 
the opening of his new dive he engaged an auditorium, Platt's Hall, and 
announced that he would lecture on "The True Inwardness of the Gospel 
Temperance Movement, or, The Potato Peeled." He hired a brass band for the 
occasion, but when he mounted the rostrum, he found that his audience 
consisted of six newspaper reporters and one drunken tramp who had 
wandered in by mistake. Nevertheless, Happy Jack lectured, berating the 
Praying Band for luring him from his dive and the comforting warmth of the 
Barbary Coast and casting him, alone and unprotected, into the midst of 
comparatively honest men, among whom he knew not how to conduct himself. 
He complained that when he finally abandoned the restaurant project, he 
had not a cent in the world, and that only by putting through a little 
deal with marked cards had he been able to amass enough money to open 
another concert saloon. 

"Oh, King Alcohol! "cried Happy Jack." Great is thy sway! Thou makest 
meaner creatures, kings, and the unfortunate fellow of the gutter forget 
his miseries for a while! 

"Hooray!" applauded the drunk. "More wind to you!" 

"I was proprietor of one of those popular places of amusement known as 
dives," continued Harrington, "and all was serene and calm and I was 
happy, but they came down and took from me during the night my beautiful 
place where fortune and comfort in this life were to be mine. My beautiful 
soubrettes and Spanish dancers have gone, and when I look back on the 
scenic effects of those beautiful melodramas and the midnight dances with 
lighting effects, it's no wonder that I stand before you as a frightful 
example of the destructive effects of temperance. But though crushed to 
earth, I will rise again!" 

One of the favorite loafing and drinking places of the Barbary Coast 
Rangers, especially those of sporting proclivities, was Denny O'Brien's 
saloon, across the way from the Opera Comique. In the cellar below 
O'Brien's resort was a pit wherein were staged dog-fights and battles 
between terriers and rats, which the street boys trapped under the wharves 
and sold to O'Brien at from ten to twenty-five cents, depending upon the 
size and ferocity of the rodent. On a Saturday night about a month after 
his appearance upon the lecture platform Happy Jack Harrington went to 
O'Brien's and began drinking steadily. During the evening he became 
involved in a quarrel, over some trivial matter, with Billy Dwyer, who had 
just arrived in San Francisco from Virginia City, where he had acquired 
considerable renown as a prize-fighter and a rough-and-tumble brawler. 
Dwyer raised his arm to strike Harrington, and Happy Jack drew his bowie-
knife, which he carried slung under his left armpit, and stabbed the 
pugilist in the stomach. Dwyer died within a few hours, and Harrington was 
convicted of manslaughter and sent to San Quentin Prison. Nothing more was 
ever heard of him on the Barbary Coast. 

* * * *

Although Pacific Street was never actually toppled from its proud position 
as the heart of the Barbary Coast, there was a long period before the 
earthquake and fire of 1906 when its supremacy was seriously threatened by 
Kearny Street, which runs from Market Street northward past Telegraph Hill 
to the waterfront. But the fact that Kearny Street provides a direct route 
from the northern part of the city to the business and financial districts 
prevented it from superseding Pacific Street as the most sinful 
thoroughfare in San Francisco, for it increased rapidly in commercial 
importance, while Pacific Street, so far as legitimate business was 
concerned, declined steadily from the early days of the gold rush. 
Nevertheless, for some thirty years Kearny Street boasted many dives which 
were fully as low and disreputable as those for which Pacific Street was 
so deservedly notorious. During the middle eighteen-eighties, about a 
decade after the murder of Bull Run Allen and the elimination of the 
dashing figure of Happy Jack Harrington as a factor in underworld 
activities, the center of sin in San Francisco was the diagonally cut 
block bounded by Broadway and Kearny and Montgomery streets--a 
comparatively small area, but so reeking with depravity that it was known 
both to the police and to its habitués as the Devil's Acre. In its issue 
of February 28, 1886 the San Francisco Call described it as "the resort 
and abiding place of the worst criminals in town," and complained that 
respectable citizens could not traverse Kearny Street on their way to and 
from business without witnessing "the utter shamelessness of the 
denizens." Said the Call: 

"The women of the locality are of the lowest class. These females air 
themselves with offensive publicity and boldness. There is not an hour of 
the day or night when the vulgarity of the females. . .is not unveiled to 
everybody who happens to be going past. The wonder is that such 
exhibitions should have so long escaped the notice of those who ought to 
be able to suppress them, and have the authority to do so. . . .The 
inhabitants sun themselves at the doors of their dens and exchange 
Billingsgate. Drunkenness among these low creatures is common, and when 
they have imbibed too much liquor they are anxious to display their 
fighting tendencies on the thoroughfare, and their command of vituperative 
language. . . .For some reason the only occasion when police restraint is 
imposed on the female inhabitants of the quarter are when a brawl or fight 
has to be checked, or some noisy one has to be arrested for continuous 
disturbance of the peace. . . .Police officers who are acquainted with the 
history of the Devil's Acre say that it is the lowest spot of its kind in 
the city." 

Perhaps the most disreputable resorts in the Devil's Acre were the dozen 
or more bagnios, deadfalls, and cheap dance-halls on the eastern side of 
Kearney Street--a line of dens which was appropriately called Battle Row. 
Much of the Call's indignation arose from the fact that none of the 
windows in the brothels were equipped with shades or curtains, so that 
whatever went on inside was visible to whoever passed in the street. 
Otherwise there was nothing spectacular about these dives; they catered to 
the lowest of the Barbary Coast hangers-on and were chiefly remarkable for 
their sordidness and viciousness. Scarcely a day ever passed in which each 
of them was not the scene of at least one robbery and half a dozen brawls, 
many of which ended fatally; for many years Battle Row is said to have 
averaged a murder a week. Equally notorious was an underground saloon at 
the southern end of the row. Originally this dive was known as the 
Slaughterhouse, but later it was ceremoniously rechristened--on a night in 
the latter part of 1885 the proprietor served free drinks to all comers 
and at the conclusion of the festivities smashed a bottle of beer against 
an inebriated customer's head and announced that thenceforth his place 
would be called the Morgue. It was the particular rendezvous of the macks, 
or pimps, and of the lush-workers who thronged the Devil's Acre; that is, 
thieves who specialized in robbing drunken men, having first, if 
necessary, knocked them unconscious with a slung shot or a section of lead 
pipe. The Morgue was also headquarters for the many drug addicts, better 
known in those days as hoppies, who lived in the alleys of Chinatown and 
the Barbary Coast. They eked out a bare existence by panhandling, by 
running errands for the brothel-keepers and inmates, and by collecting 
wood and old boxes, which they sold to Chinese merchants and householders. 
Occasionally they earned a few pennies by showing the holes in their arms 
to tourists. Few of the hoppies could afford a hypodermic needle; instead, 
they used an ordinary medicine dropper, filling it with cocaine or 
morphine and forcing the point into their flesh. They obtained most of 
their supplies of narcotics at an all-night drug-store in Grant Avenue, 
where enough cocaine or morphine for an injection cost from ten to fifteen 
cents. 

A few blocks south of the Morgue, at Kearny and California streets, was a 
cellar deadfall and dance-hall which was opened during the middle eighteen-
eighties. It flourished for some ten years, and after the Bull Run and the 
Billy Goat had run their allotted courses, was described by the police as 
"the wickedest place in San Francisco." The resort was confined within one 
large rectangular room, half of which was filled with rough tables and 
chairs, while the remainder of the space was cleared for dancing. Against 
one wall was a row of hard benches, and along the other was a bar which 
extended the entire length of the room. Music for the dancing was provided 
by a pianist and a fiddler, who were enthroned upon a platform at the end 
opposite the entrance. Behind the platform were several curtained booths, 
each fitted with a table, chairs, and a dilapidated couch. A dozen pretty 
waiter girls were employed to serve drinks, dance with, and otherwise 
entertain the visitors. When the dive was first opened, these accomplished 
ladies were clad in short skirts and silk stockings, but wore nothing at 
all above the waist. After a few months, however, the police ordered them 
to don thin blouses, which were virtually useless for purposes of 
concealment, the more so since they were not required to keep them 
buttoned. The moral tone of this establishment is further indicated by the 
fact that the proprietor maintained a standing offer of five free drinks 
to any man who found one of his pretty waiter girls wearing undergarments. 

Despite the notoriety acquired by this extraordinary dive and the dens of 
Battle Row, the most celebrated resorts on Kearny Street, at least during 
the pre-earthquake period, probably were the Eureka Music Hall, a few 
doors north of Pacific Street, and the Strassburg Music Hall, which was at 
Jackson Street, near the site of Happy Jack Harrington's old Opera 
Comique. The Strassburg was operated for some twenty years before the fire 
of 1906 by Spanish Kitty, a tall, dark, strikingly handsome woman who was 
also known as Kate Lombard and Kate Edington. Although her place provided 
liquor, dancing, and bawdy shows, much of its fame was founded on the 
proficiency of Spanish Kitty at fifteen-ball pool, at which she was the 
recognized champion of the Barbary Coast. After the great conflagration, 
in which the Strassburg Music Hall was destroyed, Spanish Kitty retired 
with a fortune. She resumed her real name, which was neither Lombard nor 
Edington, and built an imposing home in an exclusive residential section. 
Her old haunts knew her no more. 

The Eureka, an enormous barn-like structure, combined the worst features 
of the deadfall, the dance-hall, and the concert saloon, although it never 
ventured so deeply into depravity as did the resorts at Kearny and 
California streets. Its pretty waiter girls are said to have been really 
pretty, and many very noted Barbary Coast artistes appeared in its shows, 
particularly during the late eighteen-nineties. Among them were the Four 
Fleet Sisters, Little Josie Dupree, Dago May, and Big Louise Marshall. The 
Fleet Sisters, who did a dance act, were so called because they had 
married four chief petty officers of the United States Navy while the 
fleet was in the harbor about the time of the Spanish-American War. One of 
the husbands finally killed three of the sisters and himself. Dago May was 
also given to marrying sailors, but she had no use for the Navy. She 
preferred whalers or men of the merchant marine, who were less likely to 
return to San Francisco. She once boasted that she had twenty husbands 
scattered throughout the Seven Seas. Big Louise Marshall weighed three 
hundred pounds, possessed unusually long blond hair, of which she was very 
proud, and sang sentimental ballads and cowboy songs. She also had an 
extremely irascible disposition and was almost continuously embroiled with 
the other ladies of the establishment. Her strategy was both simple and 
effective--she seized her opponent, hugged her as tightly as possible, and 
then fell on her. She met her Waterloo, however, in the summer of 1899, 
when she attempted to chastise Little Josie Dupree, a dancing girl who 
weighed but 115 pounds, but made up in agility what she lacked in heft and 
strength. Big Louise seized her and toppled to the floor as usual, but 
Little Josie squirmed from beneath the ballad-singer's bulk. Then she 
clambered astride Big Louise's back and belabored her on the head with a 
heavy beer-mug. To treat the serious scalp-wounds inflicted by Little 
Josie, the physician found it necessary to shave Big Louise's head, and 
the loss of her blond locks broke her proud spirit. She refused to return 
to the Eureka from the hospital and was never again seen on the Barbary 
Coast. 

* * * *

The crime and debauchery of the early days of the Barbary Coast was 
accompanied by the gurgle of enormous quantities of liquor, the 
consumption of which probably reached its peak in 1890. In that year the 
city granted the right to sell beer, whisky and other intoxicating 
beverages to 3,117 places, or one for every ninety-six inhabitants. And 
there were at least two thousand blind pigs, or blind tigers, as 
speakeasies were called in those days, which operated without licenses. 
The municipal authorities estimated the annual expenditure for liquor over 
the legal bars at $9,124,195. Although San Francisco more than doubled its 
population before prohibition went into effect, some thirty years after 
the publication of these figures, the number of saloon licenses never 
again exceeded three thousand. 



Chapter 6. The Bella Union 

Besides the establishments which were quite frankly dives, wherein the 
sole purpose of every employee and hanger-on was to separate the unwary 
visitor from his money with the greatest possible dispatch, other resorts 
abounded during the early days of the Barbary Coast which were a trifle 
more respectable. They were also called melodeans and sometimes concert 
saloons, but were in reality low variety and music halls. Among them were 
the Bella Union, the Olympic, the Pacific, Bert's New Idea Melodeon, the 
Adelphi, and Gilbert's Melodeon. They catered to stag audiences only, and 
occasionally offered very ambitious programs, but their performances, 
while coarse and vulgar and presented with what the Gilbert's 
advertisements called "freedom from constrained etiquette," were not 
particularly obscene. In these places there was no dancing. They charged 
admission, ranging from a bit, or twelve and one-half cents, to fifty 
cents, and their revenue was derived solely from this source and from the 
sale of liquor. They employed no pretty waiter girls, and discouraged 
drugging and robbery upon their premises. As elsewhere on the Coast, 
however, the female performers were required to sell drinks between their 
appearances on the stage, and in the curtained boxes which were a feature 
of each house they were permitted to do whatever in their judgment might 
persuade a reluctant customer to buy. 

It was seldom that a prostitute appeared in any of the resorts of this 
type, for with the additional income from admission fees they were able to 
engage entertainers of some slight professional standing. Many, indeed, 
who trod the boards at the Bella Union and other Barbary Coast melodeons 
became in later years outstanding dramatic, vaudeville, and musical comedy 
stars of the American stage. Such well-known players as Ned Harrigan, 
Lotta Crabtree, James A. Hearne, J. H. O'Neill, Maggie Brewer, Eddie Foy, 
Junie McCree, Pauline Markham, Jefferson de Angelis, and Flora Walsh 
received at least a part of their early training there. Harrigan was a 
ship-calker at Vallejo when he became ambitious for a career behind the 
footlights and obtained a job singing at Gilbert's Melodeon. He was 
discharged after his third performance, and it was not for several weeks 
that he was able to get another chance, at the Bella Union. There he was 
an immediate success, and within a year he was receiving fifty dollars a 
week, a large salary for a variety actor in those days. When he played in 
the East a few years later, he and Tony Hart formed a song-and-dance team 
which soon became the most celebrated vaudeville act in the United States. 

The Bella Union, at Washington and Kearny streets, was probably the most 
popular resort ever operated on the Barbary Coast. It was the favorite 
haunt of the young bloods of the town whenever they wanted to see a bit of 
life in the raw, or at least what they regarded as raw, and no sailor 
considered his shore liberty in San Francisco complete unless it included 
a visit to the Bella Union. Originally the place was opened as a gambling 
house about the middle of 1849. It was destroyed several times by the 
great fires which devastated San Francisco during the reign of the Sydney 
Ducks. In 1868 the building which had been erected after the conflagration 
of June 1851 was demolished and a new one constructed which stood until 
the earthquake and fire of 1906. Despite these vicissitudes and many 
changes in name and management, the Bella Union maintained a continuous 
existence for almost sixty years. During most of this period it was a 
variety house playing to men only, but there were also times when it was a 
family theater presenting melodrama at fifty cents top. In its later years 
it was called successively the Haymarket Theatre and the Imperial Concert 
Hall and finally ended its days as the Eden Musee, housing a penny arcade 
and a waxworks exhibit. 

An occasional theatrical performance was staged in the Bella Union during 
gold-rush days, but gambling remained the principal business of the resort 
until 1856.(*) It was closed after the Vigilante uprising of that year, 
but was soon reopened as a melodeon by Samuel Tetlow, who operated the 
house successfully until 1880, when he shot and killed his partner, Billy 
Skeantlebury. Tetlow was acquitted on a plea of self-defense. A few months 
later he sold the Bella Union and retired to private life, but his wife 
died, and he became enamored of a chorus girl, who soon reduced him to 
poverty. He died a pauper. Under Tetlow's management the Bella Union was 
advertised mainly by dodgers thrown about the streets. The beauty and 
shapeliness of the female performers were not mentioned, nor was the fact 
that the performance might be highly objectionable to the sensitive 
indicated in any way. A typical Tetlow dodger, issued in 1862, thus 
described the Bella Union's theatrical fare:

BELLA UNION MELODEON 
NIGHTLY 
A CONSTANTLY VARIED ENTERTAINMENT 
Replete with FUN and FROLIC 
Abounding in SONG and DANCE 
Unique for GRACE and BEAUTY 
Wonderful ECCENTRICITY 
And Perfect in Its Object of Affording 
LAUGHTER FOR MILLIONS! 

In Which 
HARRY COURTAINE 
Sally Thayer, Maggie Brewer, Sam Wells, J. H. 
O'Neill, William Lee, J. Allen, Marian Lee, 
Nellie Cole, A. C. Durand, J. H. McCabe, 
C. Staderman, Amanda Lee, Ellie Martell, 
H. D. Thompson, Joe Mabbot, T. M. Wells, 
G. Woodhull, and a host of the Best 

DRAMATIC, TERPSICHOREAN AND MUSICAL 
TALENT WILL APPEAR 

Emphatically the 

MELODEON OF THE PEOPLE 

Unapproachable and Beyond Competition.

(* The first minstrel show in San Francisco was given in the Bella Union 
on October 22, 1849, by the Philadelphia Minstrels)
 
Despite Tetlow's conservatism in advertising, the Bella Union was crowded 
practically every night, and the shows were sufficiently bawdy to cause 
considerable journalistic comment. A reporter for the San Francisco Call 
visited the resort late in 1869 and thus recorded his impressions: 

"Who has not heard of the Bella Union? Go to the farthest end of our sage 
brush in the mountain country, and you will meet some antique miner of the 
primeval days who will tell, with glistening eye, of the many queer sights 
he enjoyed at the ancient Bella Union. . . . We enter, and passing through 
a large bar room find ourselves seated in a very pretty little theater, 
surrounded by a circle of curtained boxes, that resemble so many pigeon 
holes. After giving the audience time to admire a drop curtain execrably 
painted, it is drawn up and exposed to view is a semi-circle of male and 
female performers seated on the stage; the latter generally quite pretty 
and in no way diffident in displaying their charms to the audience. Songs 
and dances of licentious and profane character while away the hours of the 
evening, and all that can pander to that morbid desire of the rabble for 
obscenity is served in superior style. If you have remained long enough 
below we will intrust ourselves to a pigeon hole above. No sooner are you 
seated than the curtain drops on some broad farce and the orchestra 
prepares for the interlude. But what is this? Don't be alarmed, my friend; 
this is simply the pretty little danseuse who performed the evolutions in 
the hornpipe in the last act come to solicit the wherewithal to purchase a 
bottle of champagne. The request is a modest one, partaking of the 
character of the fair petitioner. 'Only $5, now don't be stingy.' But you 
are stingy, and the request drops to a bottle of claret. 'No?' Under the 
depressing influence of your meanness it continues to drop until it at 
last reaches the humble solicitation of 'at least, a whiskey straight.' In 
the next box are seated three or four young men of respectable family 
connections, said respectable connections dozing away in their residences 
on Rincon Hill and elsewhere, under the hallucination that their worthy 
scions are attending a levee of the Young Men's Christian Association. How 
shocked they would be could they but see them as they sit there now, 
'playing particular smash,' as they are pleased to term it, with the 
feminine attaches of the Bella Union. Well, night gives license to many 
strange things; but we won't moralize, although that pretty girl with the 
intellectual forehead that sits near one of the centers on the stage might 
tell you some very queer stories about some very worthy people, but she 
won't." 

The popularity of the Bella Union declined when Samuel Tetlow left the 
resort, but its ancient glories were revived for a few years by Ned 
Foster, an able showman who always drove a team of black Shetland ponies 
harnessed to a gaudy dog-cart and was invariably attended by his Negro 
bodyguard, called Deacon Jones. Foster assumed control of the house in 
July 1887 and operated it profitably until 1892, when the City Council 
enacted a law prohibiting the sale of liquor in theaters. Unlike most 
statutes directed at the Barbary Coast, it was enforced. It was a lethal 
blow to the Bella Union and other places of its type, and they gradually 
passed into oblivion, although the Bella Union survived much longer than 
any of the others. The shows that Foster presented were no bawdier than 
those offered by Tetlow had been, but he made them seem so by his 
advertising, which had a smirking, small-boy-writing-on-the-barn quality 
curiously like that of the modern motion-picture ballyhoo. All of his 
street dodgers, in design if not in actual wording, were similar to this 
one of 1890:

FULL-GROWN PEOPLE 
Are Invited to Visit the 
BELLA UNION 

If you Want to "Make a Night of It." 
The Show is Not of the Kindergarten Class, 
But Just Your Size, if You are In- 
Clined to be Frisky and Sporty. 
It is rather Rapid, Spicy and Speedy--As 
Sharp as a Razor, and as Blunt at Times 
as the Back of an Axe. At the 

BELLA UNION 

You will Find 
PLAIN TALK AND BEAUTIFUL GIRLS! 

REALLY GIRLY GIRLS! 

No Back Numbers, but as Sweet and Charming 
Creatures As Ever Escaped a Female 
Seminary. 
Lovely tresses! Lovely Lips! Buxom Forms! 
at the 

BELLA UNION 

And Such Fun! 
If You Don't Want to Risk Both Optics, 
SHUT ONE EYE. 

As For the Program, it is Enough to Make 
A Blind Man See--It Is An 
EYE-OPENER! 

We could Tell You More About It, but It 
Wouldn't Do Here. Seeing is Be- 
Lieving, and if You Want 
Fiery Fun, and a 
Tumultuous 
Time, 
Come to The 

BELLA UNION THEATER.
 
The principal rival of the Bella Union during the Foster régime was, 
curiously enough, not a Barbary Coast resort, but a place on Market 
Street, between Third and Fourth streets, which was opened originally as 
the Cremorne and later was called the Midway Plaisance. This was the first 
melodeon or music hall in San Francisco to make a special feature of 
hoochy-coochy dancers, or, as the the theatrical weekly Variety calls 
them, "torso-tossers and hipwavers." Some of the most noted cooch artistes 
of the day appeared at the Midway Plaisance, among them the Girl in Blue 
and the original Little Egypt, who first danced in San Francisco in 1897, 
a few years after her triumphs in the Streets of Cairo show at the first 
Chicago World's Fair. The admission charge at the Midway Plaisance was ten 
cents, slightly lower than at the Bella Union, and it was tougher in every 
way; its shows were bawdier, and virtue among its female entertainers was 
considered very detrimental to the best interests of the establishment. 
Like practically all of the other melodeons, it had a mezzanine floor cut 
up into booths, before which hung heavy curtains. A visitor who engaged a 
booth for the evening was entertained between acts by the female 
performers, and his conduct was not questioned so long as he continued to 
buy liquor. 

One night early in 1890 a lumberjack who had come to San Francisco from 
the redwood forests to spend half a year's wages became enamored of a 
Midway dancer. He not only bought half a dozen bottles of champagne, on 
each of which she received her proper commission, but stuffed several bank-
notes into her stocking, a privilege which gentlemen in those days 
considered quite a treat. Naturally, they became very much engrossed in 
each other; so much so, in fact, that the dancer failed to appear on the 
stage when the time came for her turn. Presently one of the resort's 
assistant managers rushed into the booth, threatened to discharge her for 
neglecting her art, and forthwith snatched her from the lumberjack's lap. 
Thereupon the hardy woodsman drew a revolver, fired a shot into the 
ceiling, and cried: "Put that back!" The frightened assistant manager 
quickly restored the lady to her perch, and the performance was delayed 
until she and the lumberjack had finished their conversation. 

* * * *

Perhaps the most fantastic of the many queer characters who delighted 
audiences at the Bella Union and other Barbary Coast melodeons were Big 
Bertha, a sprightly lass of two hundred and eighty pounds who sang 
sentimental ballads in a squeaky soprano; and Oofty Goofty, a stringy 
little man who, for a while at least, fancied himself as a dramatic actor. 
So far as journalistic or public knowledge went, Oofty Goofty had no other 
name than this singular appellation, which he acquired during his first 
appearance before his San Francisco public, as a wild man in a Market 
Street freakshow. From crown to heel he was covered with road tar, into 
which were stuck great quantities of horsehair, lending him a savage and 
ferocious appearance. He was then installed in a heavy cage, and when a 
sufficiently large number of people had paid their dimes to gaze upon the 
wild man recently captured in the jungles of Borneo and brought to San 
Francisco at enormous expense, large chunks of raw meat were poked between 
the bars by an attendant. This provender the wild man gobbled ravenously, 
occasionally growling, shaking the bars, and yelping these fearsome words: 
"Oofty goofty! Oofty goofty!"(*)

(* San Franciscans generally believe that their Oofty Goofty originated 
this phrase, but, as a matter of fact, a Dutch comedian named Phillips 
called himself Oofty Goofty Gus long before the time of the San Francisco 
hero. Phillips was shot by his mistress in 1879.) 

He was, naturally, immediately christened Oofty Goofty, and as such was 
identified to the day of his death. For a week or so he was a veritable 
histrionic sensation, the wildest wild man ever exhibited on the Pacific 
Coast. Then, since he could not perspire through his thick covering of tar 
and hair, he became ill and was sent to the Receiving Hospital. There 
physicians vainly tried for several days to remove Oofty Goofty's costume 
without removing his natural epidermis as well. He was at length liberally 
doused with a tar solvent and laid out upon the roof of the hospital, 
where the sun finally did the work. 

Thereafter Oofty Goofty eschewed character parts and decided to scale the 
heights of theatrical fame as a singer and dancer. He obtained a place on 
the bill at Bottle Koenig's, a Barbary Coast beer hall which also offered 
a low variety entertainment. There he danced once and sang one song. He 
was then, with great ceremony, thrown into the street. In reality this was 
a very fortunate experience, as it indicated his future career, or, as he 
termed it, his "work." Oofty Goofty was kicked with considerable force, 
and landed heavily upon a stone sidewalk, but to his intense surprise he 
discovered that he was, apparently, insensible to pain. This great gift he 
immediately proceeded to capitalize, and for some fifteen years, except 
for occasional appearances at the Bella Union as a super, and a short 
engagement as co-star with Big Bertha, he eked out a precarious existence 
simply by letting himself be kicked and pummeled for a price. Upon payment 
of ten cents a man might kick Oofty Goofty as hard as he pleased, and for 
a quarter he could hit the erstwhile wild man with a walking-stick. For 
fifty cents Oofty Goofty would become the willing, and even prideful, 
recipient of a blow with a baseball bat, which he always carried with him. 
He became a familiar figure in San Francisco, not only on the Barbary 
Coast, but in other parts of the city as well. It was his custom to 
approach groups of men, in the streets and in bar-rooms, and diffidently 
inquire: "Hit me with a bat for four bits, gents? Only four bits to hit me 
with this bat, gents." 

Oofty Goofty was knocked off his feet more times than he could remember, 
but he continued to follow his peculiar vocation until John L. Sullivan 
hit him with a billiard cue and injured his back. Not long afterwards 
Sullivan's pugilistic standing was impaired by James J. Corbett, the pride 
of San Francisco, and Oofty Goofty always felt that Corbett had acted as 
his agent in the matter. Oofty Goofty never entirely recovered from his 
encounter with Sullivan. He walked with a limp thereafter, and the 
slightest blow made him whimper with pain. With his one claim to 
distinction gone, he soon became a nonentity. He died within a few years, 
but medical authorities said that Sullivan's blow had not been a 
contributing cause. 

Big Bertha arrived in San Francisco in the middle eighteen-eighties, 
posing as a wealthy Jewish widow searching for a good man to take care of 
her money, which she described as being far more than she could count. 
Gentlemen by the score volunteered for this arduous service, and many 
strove to meet the test with which she proposed to determine their worth 
and financial standing. She required each suitor to transfer to her a sum 
of money, to be added to an equal sum of her own, the whole to be risked 
on an investment of which she alone knew the nature. In this extraordinary 
manner she collected several thousand dollars from a score of lovelorn 
males, not a penny of which was ever seen again by its rightful owner. She 
was at length arrested, but none of her victims felt inclined to brave the 
torrent of publicity that would result from prosecution, and she was 
released on nominal bail, and the case against her dropped. She then 
decided to ornament the stage and sought an engagement from Ned Foster of 
the Bella Union, and Jack Hallinan, manager of the Midway Plaisance, then 
the Cremorne. These far-sighted impresarios promptly took her under their 
joint management, rented an empty store on Market Street, and exhibited 
her as Big Bertha, the Queen of the Confidence Women, admission ten cents. 
At stated intervals during her hours of exhibition Big Bertha rose from 
the specially constructed chair in which she reclined, and recited the 
story of her career of crime in San Francisco and other cities, 
embellishing her account with many vivid details. 

Having thus established herself as a villainess of the deepest dye, she 
lifted her voice in song, rendering the only two songs she ever knew: A 
Flower from My Angel Mother's Grave and The Cabin Where the Old Folks 
Died. 

When the furor over Big Bertha as Queen of the Confidence Women had 
subsided, she played a brief engagement at Bottle Koenig's and then went 
to the Bella Union, where she achieved considerable renown as a singer who 
couldn't sing, a dancer who couldn't dance, and an actress who couldn't 
act. Her work in the drama, indeed, was so remarkably bad that she 
attracted audiences from all over San Francisco and brought to the Bella 
Union and the Barbary Coast hundreds of citizens who had never visited the 
quarter before and never did again. Her greatest triumph was achieved in 
Romeo and Juliet, in which she co-starred with Oofty Goofty. They played 
the balcony scene with Romeo in the balcony, and Big Bertha herself, as 
Juliet, standing firmly upon the stage. This was probably the most popular 
production that Ned Foster ever staged, but within a week he was compelled 
to take it off the boards, for Big Bertha complained that as a lover Oofty 
Goofty was entirely too rough. She flatly refused to act with him any 
longer. Soon thereafter Foster presented her in a condensed version of 
Mazeppa, in which she made her entrance strapped to the back of a donkey. 
This was also greeted with great acclaim, until one night the donkey fell 
over the footlights, carrying Big Bertha with him, and well-nigh 
exterminated the orchestra. During the excitement Big Bertha, scratched 
and angry, crawled from beneath the braying donkey and, in language which 
she had doubtless learned during her career as an adventuress, indicated 
that she would never again play the role of Mazeppa. Thereafter she 
confined her stage work to singing, with an occasional dance, and appeared 
at various melodeons until 1895, when she obtained control of the Bella 
Union. Unable to sell liquor because of the law of 1892, she couldn't make 
the resort pay. After a few months she quit in disgust and so passed from 
the Barbary Coast picture. 



Chapter 7. The Chinese and The Hoodlums 

The Chinese invasion of San Francisco and California began in the summer 
of 1848, about five months after the discovery of gold at Sutter's Fort, 
when three frightened subjects of the Son of Heaven--two men and a woman--
disembarked from the brig Eagle and vanished in the foothills behind Yerba 
Buena Cove. So far as the records show, they were the first of their race 
to pass through the Golden Gate, at least in modern times. Soon thereafter 
the yellow torrent was raging in full flood. According to The Annals of 
San Francisco, ten thousand Celestials landed in 1852, and that same year 
a committee appointed by Governor John M. Bigler to study the question of 
Chinese immigration estimated the Chinese population of California at 22,
000. The deluge of yellow men reached its peak in 1870, when the United 
States census showed a total of 71,328 scattered throughout the state. 
More than half, however, were in San Francisco. The number began to 
decline immediately after the passage of the Ten-year Exclusion Act in the 
spring of 1882, and the influx from the Flowery Kingdom was definitely 
stopped by the Scott Exclusion Act of 1888, which specifically forbade the 
importation of Chinese laborers.(*) 

(* The Chinese in California are now far outnumbered by the Japanese, 
although until the turn of the present century the latter were so few as 
to attract little attention)

During the first two years of the gold rush most of the Chinese who 
reached the Pacific Coast made their way as quickly as possible to the 
mines. About the beginning of 1851, however, increasingly large groups 
began to settle in San Francisco and engage in various occupations, while 
others drifted back to the city from the gold-fields, where they had met 
with scant success. In the early spring of 1851 the first Chinese laundry 
in the United States was opened at Washington Street and Grant Avenue by 
one Wah Lee,(*) who leased the ground floor and basement of a building, 
flung out a sign bearing the legend: "Wash'ng and Iron'g," and forthwith 
reduced the price of washing to two dollars a dozen pieces. Wah Lee was, 
immediately, almost overwhelmed by the deluge of shirts, collars, and 
other articles of apparel which poured into his establishment. Within a 
week he was working twenty washermen in three shifts, and in less than 
three months scores of laundries had been started by other Chinese 
throughout the city. During the eighteen-seventies and eighteen-eighties 
there were at least a thousand in San Francisco, and for many years 
washing was, in the popular mind, the principal vocation of the Chinese 
everywhere in the United States. But the invention and widespread use of 
steam and electrically driven apparatus spelled the doom of the Chinese 
laundry. Today it is doubtful if forty could be found in the city of their 
origin. 

(* According to Idwal Jones in the American Mercury, August 1926)

The authors of the Annals estimated the Chinese population of San 
Francisco in 1852 as 3,000, and a similar estimate was made by the San 
Francisco Herald. "Go where he [the visitor] will," said the Herald on 
April 12 of that year, "he meets natives of the Celestial empire, and 
subjects of the uncle to the moon, with their long plaited queues or 
tails, very wide pantaloons bagging behind, and curiously formed head 
coverings--some resembling inverted soup plates, and others fitting as 
close to the scalp as the scalp does to the Celestial cranium it covers. 
We have no means of ascertaining the exact number of Chinese in San 
Francisco, but we should suppose that they numbered at least three 
thousand. They are not confined to any particular Street or locality, but 
are scattered over the city and suburbs." Within a few years, however, the 
Chinese began to gather into a distinct colony of their own, which they 
have since maintained. They soon occupied the upper part of Sacramento 
Street, which in early days was cut through only a few blocks beyond 
Portsmouth Square, and the whole of Dupont Street, now Grant Avenue. 
During the eighteen-fifties this quarter was known as Little China, and 
its inhabitants as China Boys; not until after 1860 did San Franciscans 
begin calling the district Chinatown. 

The Chinese settlement has always been confined within a small sliver of 
territory some seven blocks long and three blocks wide, and although for 
almost thirty years thousands of Orientals arrived in San Francisco every 
year, nearly all of them managed to find both lodging and business 
opportunity in this restricted area. In 1885 a special committee composed 
of W. B. Farwell, John E. Kunkler, and E. B. Pond, appointed by the Board 
of Supervisors to make an exhaustive survey of conditions in Chinatown, 
reported that a "safe minimum estimate of the population is about 30,000 
Chinese living in twelve blocks." The committee visited every room in the 
district and found 15,180 sleeping-bunks, each of which was occupied by at 
least two persons. Four years later, in 1889, another official 
investigation placed the number of Chinese in San Francisco at 45,000, of 
whom about one-third were women and children, including slaves. Of the 
total, 5,000 men were employed as cooks and domestic servants in white 
households, 4,000 in cigar-making, 5,000 in the manufacture of men's 
clothing and women's underwear, and only about 2,000 in laundries. Far 
many years, until soon after the beginning of the present century, 
practically every business enterprise in Chinatown was dominated by an 
organization of merchants called the Six Companies,(*) which also 
exercised supervisory control over most of the Chinese in California, 
particularly those of the coolie or laboring class. Through their agents 
in China the Six Companies advanced money to emigrants who desired to come 
to the United States, and as early as 1852 had set aside a fund of two 
hundred thousand dollars which was used solely for this purpose. When the 
immigrant arrived in this country, the Six Companies obtained a job for 
him or outfitted him for the mines and then saw to it that he repaid the 
loan, with interest. According to various investigating committees, the 
organization also required him to pay into its coffers a certain 
proportion of his earnings as long as he remained in America. 

(* They were the Sam Yup, Yung Wo, Kong Chow, Wing Yung, Hop Wo, and Yan 
Wo companies)

Many of the dwellings and business houses occupied by the Chinese in early 
San Francisco were shipped in sections from China and erected in Chinatown 
by the men who had imported them. Although they were small and 
incommodious, an incredibly large number of Chinese managed to crowd into 
them and live in comparative comfort. Practically all of these structures 
were destroyed in the great conflagrations of 1849-51, and thereafter, 
until the earthquake and fire of 1906 wiped out Chinatown and compelled 
the erection of more modern structures, the district was crowded with 
flimsy shacks and odorous cellars, which lined dirty, narrow streets and 
alleys. For almost twenty years between four hundred and five hundred 
Chinese men, women, and children lived in an enormous cellar, opening on 
an underground court into which the denizens of the place descended from 
the street by means of rickety ladders, on Washington Street just north of 
Kearny. This extraordinary habitation, which lacked even the most 
primitive comforts and conveniences, was called the Devil's Kitchen and 
Ragpicker's Alley and, by facetious journalists, the Palace Hotel. Almost 
as many more Orientals occupied another underground chamber, known as the 
Dog Kennel, on the east side of Bartlett Alley. 

For several years prior to the holocaust of 1906 the Dog Kennel was the 
home of a Chinatown character named Lem Duck, who was better known to the 
tourists as Happy Hooligan. He was not so bright as he might have been and 
consequently was the natural target of abuse by both whites and Chinese. 
When Happy felt sufficiently aggrieved at his tormentors, he sought the 
protection of his friend Detective George McMahon, who gained considerable 
renown in 1910 by preventing the assassination of Prince Tsai Hsun, 
brother of the Emperor of China and commander of the Imperial Chinese 
Navy, as the Prince stepped from a train at the Oakland mole. McMahon 
defended Happy Hooligan against the pack of practical jokers which forever 
bayed at the Chinaman's heels, and the grateful Happy at length offered 
the detective his greatest pride and most valuable possession--a large and 
shiny gold tooth. McMahon agreed to accept the tooth when it fell out of 
its own accord, and promised to fashion from it a miniature police whistle 
for Happy to blow when he needed protection. One night, however, two 
debased Chinese crept into the Dog Kennel, and while one held Happy 
Hooligan, the other pulled the cherished tooth with a pair of pliers. 
'When his assailants had fled, Happy ran through the streets, crying: 
"Georgie man! Georgie man! Highbinder stealum whistle!" 

Although white San Franciscans regarded most of the living-quarters in 
Chinatown as pest holes of filth and squalor, no attempt was made to 
cleanse them until the bubonic-plague scare of 1901, when health officers 
invaded the district and fumigated it with three hundred pounds of 
sulphur. As a matter of fact, however, even such dismal places as the Dog 
Kennel and the Palace Hotel were superior to the accommodations which the 
same class of people would have been able to obtain in China. 

* * * *

The Chinese ultimately found their place in the California sun, and in 
time were recognized as, in the main, a sober, industrious, and 
picturesque element of the population. But this status was not reached for 
many years, and then only after the Chinese had survived innumerable 
campaigns of persecution even more systematic and cruel than those which 
had been directed against the Spanish-Americans. Except for occasional 
outbreaks, the abuse of the "greaser" was confined almost entirely to the 
gold-fields, while ill treatment of the Chinese was carried on in the 
towns and cities as well. Throughout the state, for almost half a century, 
John Chinaman was buffeted from pillar to post. He was everywhere 
discriminated against; he was robbed, beaten, and frequently murdered, and 
no punishment was meted out to his assailant; he was brutally and 
unceremoniously ejected from whatever mining or agricultural property he 
had managed to acquire; in the courts he was classed lower than the Negro 
or the Indian; and scores of laws were enacted for the sole purpose of 
hampering him in his efforts to earn an honest living. As the authors of 
The Annals of San Francisco put it in 1854: 

"The manners and habits of the Chinese are very repugnant to Americans in 
California. Of different language, blood, religion, and character, 
inferior in most mental and bodily qualities, the Chinaman is looked upon 
by some as only a little superior to the negro, and by others as somewhat 
inferior. . . .In short, there is a strong feeling--prejudice it may be--
existing in California against all Chinamen, and they are nicknamed, 
cuffed about, and treated very unceremoniously by every other class. . . .
It was only in 1851 and 1852 that their rapidly increasing numbers began 
to attract much attention. Considerable apprehension then began to be 
entertained of the supposed bad effect which their presence would have on 
the white population. Large bands of Chinese were working at the mines 
upon conditions which were supposed to be closely allied to a state of 
slavery. Much misunderstanding arose on the subject. It was believed that 
the gangs were receiving only subsistence and nominal wages--some four or 
five dollars a month for each man--and that speculators, both yellow and 
white, were setting them to work on various undertakings which free white 
laborers conceived should be executed only by themselves. If these vast 
inroads of Chinese were to continue, the white miner considered that he 
might as well leave the country at once, since he could not pretend to 
compete with the poverty-stricken, meek and cheap 'coolie,' as so John 
Chinaman was now called by many. It was true that the latter never sought 
to interfere with the rich claims which the American miner wrought, while 
he submitted very patiently to be violently driven away from whatever 
neglected spot he might have occupied, but which the white man suddenly 
chose to fancy. It was true also that the Chinaman regularly paid, as a 
foreigner--and was almost the only foreigner that did so--his mining 
license to the state; and was a peaceable and hard-working subject. These 
things did not matter. . . .Angry words, much strife, and perhaps some 
bloodshed, were generated in the mining regions, and the hapless Chinese 
were driven backwards and forwards and their lives made miserable." 

The persecution of the Chinese in California acquired an official tinge in 
1852, when Governor Bigler, at the behest of the white miners, sent a 
message to the Legislature in which he characterized the Chinese as 
"coolies" and urged the immediate passage of laws to restrict, if not 
entirely to prevent, their immigration. According to the Annals, "the 
terms of this message were considered offensive and uncalled for by most 
of the intelligent and liberal-minded Americans." After much bombastic 
oratory the Legislature declined to enact the statutes demanded by Bigler; 
but the continued influx of Chinese during the next twenty years, and 
several serious riots in Shasta and other mining towns, kept the question 
very much alive. Various governors who followed Bigler repeated his 
recommendations, but an element of hypocrisy was easily discernible in the 
attitude of many of them, notably Leland Stanford, the founder of Stanford 
University, who was Governor of California from 1861 to 1863. In a message 
to the Legislature in January 1862, Stanford declared that Chinese 
immigration should be discouraged by every legitimate means, and expressed 
the opinion that "the presence of numbers of that degraded and distinct 
people would exercise a deleterious effect upon the superior race." 
Throughout the state Governor Stanford was acclaimed for his forthright 
utterances upon the most important issue of the period, but enthusiasm for 
him waned when it was disclosed that while he was so boldly expressing his 
solicitude for the welfare of the white race, the corporation of which he 
was president was importing thousands of Chinese laborers to build the 
Central Pacific railroad.(*)

(* Publicly Stanford remained violently anti-Chinese, but privately he 
continued to employ them. As late as 1888 Appleton's Cyclopedia of 
American Biography, describing the Stanford estate in Tehema County, said: 
"It is divided into 500-acre tracts, and most of the labor is performed by 
Chinamen.")

A few months after Stanford retired as Governor, in 1863, the Legislature 
passed a law prohibiting the giving of testimony by Chinese in any legal 
action in which a white man was involved, and repealed a statute, passed 
in 1850, which had thus discriminated against only Negroes, mulattoes, and 
Indians. Despite the activities of the steamship and railroad companies, 
the constitutional convention of 1878 was overwhelmingly anti-Chinese, and 
the state constitution as ratified by the voters of California in the 
spring of 1879 reflected the prevailing attitude. It forbade the 
employment of Chinese by corporations, debarred them from the suffrage, 
annulled all contracts for coolie labor, directed the Legislature to 
provide for the punishment of any company which imported Chinese, and 
imposed severe restrictions upon their residence in the state. The 
popularity of these stringent provisions was further attested in September 
1879, when a secret ballot was taken at the regular election on the 
question of permitting the entry of the Chinese. Only 833 votes, out of a 
total of 155,471, were cast in favor of unlimited settlement by the 
Orientals. 

* * * *

For some fifteen years after the Chinese began coming to California the 
attitude of San Francisco toward the yellow man was much more tolerant 
than that of the remainder of the state. By the late eighteen-sixties, 
however, considerable anti-Chinese feeling had developed, particularly 
among the laborers and other members of the lower social orders, and it 
increased in intensity until effective exclusion laws were passed by 
Congress. On April 5, 1874 a gigantic mass meeting, attended by more than 
twenty thousand persons, was held in San Francisco, at which various city 
and state officials delivered violent harangues against the Chinese. The 
meeting also adopted resolutions demanding the immediate ejection of the 
Chinese from California and making very definite charges against them as a 
race. Copies of the resolutions and also of the speeches were sent to 
Congress and President Grant by a special committee. Some of the 
accusations were: 

That not one virtuous Chinawoman had been brought to America, and that
here the Chinese had no wives or children. 
That the Chinese had purchased no real estate. 
That the Chinese ate rice, fish, and vegetables, and that otherwise their
diet differed from that of white men. 
That the Chinese were of no benefit to the country. 
That the Six Companies had secretly established judicial tribunals, jails,
and prisons, and secretly exercised judicial authority over the Chinese. 
That all Chinese laboring men were slaves. 
That the Chinese brought no benefits to American bankers and importers. 

Several months later the Six Companies submitted to President Grant a 
memorial signed by the presidents of each of the companies and by Lee Tong 
Hay, president of the Chinese Young Men's Christian Association. In this 
document the charges made by the mass meeting were categorically denied, 
and it was pointed out, among other things, that the Chinese owned eight 
hundred thousand dollars' worth of real estate in San Francisco alone, and 
that they paid more than two million dollars in customs duties each year, 
and an annual poll-tax of two hundred thousand dollars to the California 
state treasury, besides the foreign miners' tax and many thousands of 
dollars in personal-property taxes. Concerning the accusation that there 
were no virtuous Chinawomen in California, the memorial said: 

"The fact is, that already a few hundred Chinese families have been 
brought here. They are all chaste, pure, keepers-at-home, not known on the 
public street. There are also among us a few hundred, perhaps a thousand, 
Chinese children born in America. The reason why so few of our families 
are brought to this country is because it is contrary to the custom and 
against the inclination of virtuous Chinese women to go so far from home, 
and because the frequent outbursts of popular indignation against our 
people have not encouraged us to bring our families with us against their 
will. Quite a number of Chinese prostitutes have been brought to this 
country by unprincipled Chinamen, but these at first were brought from 
China at the instigation and for the gratification of white men. And even 
at the present time it is commonly reported that a part of the proceeds of 
this villainous traffic goes to enrich a certain class of men belonging to 
this honourable nation--a class of men, too, who are under solemn 
obligations to suppress the whole vile business, and who certainly have it 
in their power to suppress it if they so desired. A few years ago, our 
Chinese merchants tried to send these prostitutes back to China, and 
succeeded in getting a large number on board the outgoing steamer, but a 
certain lawyer of your honourable nation (said to be the author and bearer 
of these resolutions against our people), in the employ of unprincipled 
Chinamen, procured a writ of habeas corpus, and the courts decided that 
they had a right to stay in this country if they so desired. Those women 
are still here, and the only remedy for this evil, and also for the evil 
of Chinese gambling, lies, so far as we can see, in an honest and 
impartial administration of municipal government, in all its details, even 
including the Police Department. If officers would refuse bribes, then 
unprincipled Chinamen could no longer purchase immunity from the 
punishment of their crimes."(*)

(* The memorial in full may be found in Metropolitan Life Unveiled, or, 
The Mysteries and Miseries of America's Great Cities, by J. W. Buel. (San 
Francisco, 1882).)) 

Several years before the mass meeting which called forth this protest, the 
city authorities of San Francisco, hearkening to the voice of the masses, 
began to enact laws calculated to annoy and harass the patient Celestial. 
Among these regulatory measures was an ordinance, adopted in 1870, which 
prohibited the carrying of baskets suspended from or attached to poles 
borne across or upon the shoulders. It was in this manner that the Chinese 
laundrymen transported the soiled linen of all San Francisco. Several were 
arrested for violating this curious statute, but in police court the 
charges against them were dismissed because the ordinance failed to 
declare the act a nuisance and had provided no penalty. Another law 
forbade the disinterment of bodies and was intended to prevent the Chinese 
from following their immemorial custom of shipping their dead to China for 
permanent burial. A third ordinance, passed over the veto of Mayor William 
Alvord, levied a special tax of fifteen dollars a quarter upon every 
person employed in a Chinese laundry. Still another imposed a fine of from 
ten to fifty dollars upon "any person found sleeping in a room containing 
less than five hundred cubic feet of space for each person." This law made 
the slumbers of practically every Chinaman in San Francisco illegal. The 
final ordinance of this persecutory series, adopted by the Board of 
Supervisors on June 14, 1876, was aimed at the Chinaman's most cherished 
adornment--his pigtail. It provided that the hair of every male imprisoned 
in the county jail be "cut or clipped to an uniform length of one inch 
from the scalp." 

Soon after the passage of this statute the police arrested one Ho Ah Kow 
for violating the sleeping-ordinance, and Matthew Noonan, a keeper at the 
jail, immediately cut off his queue. Ho Ah Kow promptly brought suit 
against Noonan and the Supervisors for ten thousand dollars damages, 
alleging that the loss of his queue had exposed him to public contempt and 
ridicule and had irreparably injured him in the eyes of his countrymen. In 
1879 the United States Circuit Court held that the queue ordinance was 
invalid, in that its provisions exceeded the powers of the Board of 
Supervisors. The claims of the victorious Ho Ah Kow were settled by the 
payment of a few hundred dollars, and the authorities molested no more 
pigtails, either in or out of prison. The Chinese retained their queues 
until the success of the revolt against the Manchu dynasty filled them 
with zeal for modernity and progress and impelled them to apply their own 
shears. 

* * * *

The most industrious persecutors of the Chinese in San Francisco were the 
hoodlums, young thieves and brawlers who were a veritable thorn in the 
flesh of the police for more than a quarter of a century. They ranged in 
age from twelve to thirty years and operated in organized groups which, 
with the exception of the Sydney Ducks and the Hounds of gold-rush days, 
were the only criminal gangs that the San Francisco underworld has ever 
produced. In general characteristics, and especially in deportment and 
dislike of honest labor, the hoodlums were identical with the larrikins of 
Australia, the hooligans of London, and the roughs and bullies of the 
Bowery and Five Points districts of New York. But the name by which they 
were designated was of San Francisco coinage. It was first used by 
newspaper men there during the latter part of 1868, and for at least two 
years always appeared in print spelled with a capital H and enclosed 
within quotation marks. Its first appearance as a common noun was probably 
in 1872, when the Sacramento Weekly Union of February 24 asked editorially 
if the boys of that city were to be "trained as polite loafers, street 
hounds, hoodlums, or bummers?" Within five years the word was in general 
use throughout the United States and had taken its proper place in the 
American language as the peculiarly apt designation of a young rowdy of 
criminal tendencies. The exact derivation of "hoodlum" is unknown, and 
probably always will be, in common with many other words and phrases of 
journalistic parentage. During the autumn of 1877 various newspapers and 
magazines attempted to trace its origin, but none succeeded in obtaining 
any definite information. In its issue of September 26, 1877 the 
Congregationalist published this account: 

"A newspaper man in San Francisco, in attempting to coin a word to 
designate a gang of young Street Arabs under the beck of one Muldoon, hit 
upon the idea of dubbing them 'noodlums,' that is, simply reversing the 
leader's name. In writing the word, the strokes of the 'n' did not 
correspond in height, and the compositor taking the 'n' for an 'h' printed 
it hoodlums."(*)

(* This derivation is also given in An American Glossary, by Richard H. 
Thornton; An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, by Ernest Weekley, 
M. A.; A Dictionary of Americanisms, by John Russell Bartlett; and similar 
works)

On October 27, 1877 the San Francisco Call contributed this bit of 
philological lore: 

"Before the late war there appeared in San Francisco a man whose dress was 
very peculiar. The boys took a fancy to it, and organizing themselves into 
a military company adopted in part the dress of this man. The head-dress 
resembled the fez, from which was suspended a long tail. The gamins called 
it a 'hood,' and the company became known as the 'hoods.' The rowdy 
element of the city adopted much of the dress of the company referred to, 
and were soon designated as hoodlums." 

A third theory, favored by the present Chief of the San Francisco Police 
Department, William Quinn, describes the word as a corruption of Hoodler, 
the family name of several boisterous brothers who were frequently the 
objects of police attention. Another has it that the term was first 
applied to girls who wore a hood-like bonnet and were called "hoodlum 
girlums" by the street boys, who had invented a sort of pig-Latin by 
adding the syllable "lum" to every word. Still another, and the most 
plausible of all, was thus given in the Los Angeles Express of August 25, 
1877: 

"A gang of bad boys from fourteen to nineteen years of age were associated 
for the purpose of stealing. These boys had a rendezvous, and when danger 
threatened them their words of warning were 'Huddle 'em! Huddle 'em!' An 
article headed 'Huddle 'Em,' describing the gang and their plans of 
operation, was published in the San Francisco Times. The name applied to 
them was soon contracted to hoodlum." 

The man who gave this information to the Express had been a reporter on 
the staff of the Times, and the article referred to appeared in the latter 
newspaper about the middle of 1868, after the police had obtained evidence 
implicating the gang in more than forty robberies and had arrested several 
of the youngsters. The juvenile miscreants were regularly organized, and 
operated under the leadership of an elected captain, who planned the 
crimes and assigned members of the band to commit them. Their rendezvous 
was an abandoned shack on an old wharf, with an entrance underneath. They 
stole whatever they could lay their hands on and sold their loot to fences 
and dealers on the Barbary Coast, in the dives of which they spent their 
gains. The doings of the gang occupied considerable space in the 
newspapers for a brief period, and the boys were called, and likewise 
called themselves, the "Huddle 'ems." Journalists soon began referring to 
other youthful scoundrels as "huddle 'ems," then as huddlems and hudlems, 
and finally as hoodlums. The transition to hoodlum was a perfectly logical 
development, the more so since a majority of unlettered men are prone to 
lengthen their vowels, and, in particular, to pronounce the short "u" as 
"oo." A striking example of this tendency is the fact that the name of the 
former heavy-weight champion of the world is pronounced Tooney quite as 
often as Tunney, especially among his former associates. Another is the 
widespread pronunciation of "gums " as "gooms." A California writer whose 
memory goes back to the early days of the hoodlums and who has delved deep 
into the little-known phases of San Francisco life, says that he 
distinctly remembers the pronunciation of the word by his parents and 
others as "hudlem." "To my knowledge," he wrote, "it was never a police 
call or cry of warning, but was a password or cue for gang action--to 
surround, push and force the victim or victims of rowdyism into an 
advantageous position for mauling. I never saw a hood worn by anyone but 
girls and women. The appearance of a boy or man with his coat-tails turned 
back and up, inside out, over his head--a rough custom of the time--may 
account for the hood theory."(*)

(* Curtis Tobey, 654 Thirteenth Street, Oakland, California, in a letter 
dated April 4, 1932) 

* * * *

The memberships of many of the early hoodlum gangs included girls, and 
several were captained by maladjusted representatives of the so-called 
gentler sex. Curiously enough, or perhaps not so curiously, these girls 
were almost invariably more ferocious than their male companions, and 
their fertile minds devised most of the unpleasant methods of torture 
which the hoodlums employed upon their victims. One feminine rowdy who 
flourished during the latter part of 1878 was a thirteen-year-old girl 
known as Little Dick, who led a gang of more than twenty boys of about the 
same age. She was finally sent to a corrective institution, after she had 
stolen a hundred revolvers from a gun-shop, distributed some among her 
followers, and sold the remainder on the Barbary Coast. She said frankly 
that she found her greatest delight in throwing red pepper into a 
Chinaman's eyes or in hanging him up by his queue. 

All of these hoodlums, of whatever age, possessed a violent antipathy to 
the Chinese and tormented them at every opportunity and in every 
conceivable way. A favorite pastime of the younger hoodlums was to board 
street cars on which Chinese were riding, tie the yellow men's queues 
together, and, if possible, cut off the ends. They were as proud of these 
bits of Oriental hair as a savage Indian was of an enemy's scalp. There 
was great rivalry among the gangs as to which could accumulate the 
greatest number of queue ends, which the hoodlums made into belts or cap 
tassels or used to decorate the walls of the shacks or rooms where they 
made their headquarters. The more mature hoodlums sometimes indulged also 
in these mischievous practices, but in the main their activities were much 
more criminal and vicious. They set fire to the laundries and wash-houses; 
invaded these and other Chinese business establishments and robbed and 
beat the proprietors; stole the earnings of the slave girls, and stormed 
the houses wherein the latter were on display and compelled them to submit 
to frightful abuses. Without provocation, they attacked every Chinese who 
ventured into parts of the city where the hoodlums were especially 
numerous and powerful, notably the waterfront, the Telegraph Hill district 
and the northern purlieus of the Barbary Coast, and the section known as 
Tar Flat, near the gas-works south of Market Street. A typical exploit of 
the hoodlums occurred during the summer of 1868, when a score of youthful 
rowdies captured a Chinese crab-catcher and dragged him beneath a wharf. 
There they robbed him, beat him with a hickory club, branded him in a 
dozen places with hot irons, and then slit his ears and tongue. "There was 
apparently no other motive for this atrocity," said the San Francisco 
Times of July 30, 1868, "than the brutal instincts of the young ruffians 
who perpetrated it. Such boys are constantly hanging about our wharves 
eager to glut their cruelty upon any Chinaman who may pass." 

Hundreds of more or less similar attacks were reported to the police 
during the next twenty or thirty years, but the most serious of all the 
hoodlum outbreaks against the Chinese took place some nine years after the 
capture and torturing of the crab-catcher. Throughout the summer of 1877 
San Francisco labored in the throes of a business depression that began 
with the closing down of several of the mines in the Comstock Lode, with 
resultant heavy losses to San Francisco investors and business men; and 
which was intensified by crop failures and the railroad strikes that were 
bringing riots and bloodshed to the Eastern states. Throughout the Bay 
district scores of factories and retail establishments closed their doors, 
and the streets of San Francisco were soon thronged by unemployed men, 
many of whom joined the ranks of the hoodlums. Although several factors 
had combined to cause the lull in business activity, political demagogues 
preached the gospel that it was due entirely to the presence of the 
Chinese in California, declaring that the pestiferous Orientals were 
filling thousands of jobs which should have gone to white men. For weeks 
almost every vacant lot in San Francisco was the scene of daily meetings 
at which irresponsible, crack-brained spellbinders denounced the Chinese 
and demanded that they be ejected from the sacred soil of California by 
fair means or foul. 

Such violent harangues, delivered to audiences which were largely composed 
of hoodlums and restless discontented men without work, soon bore their 
natural fruit. On the night of July 24, 1877 a gang of several hundred 
hoodlums attacked Chinese laundries and wash-houses in various parts of 
the city, wrecking several and setting fire to a washhouse at Turk and 
Leavenworth streets. The police were not numerous enough to disperse the 
rioters, and throughout the night the hoodlums surged howling through the 
streets, attacking every Chinaman who hadn't barricaded himself within 
doors. Half a dozen were badly beaten before they could find shelter, and 
several Chinese prostitutes were dragged from their houses and horribly 
abused by large gangs of men. Next morning San Francisco awoke to face a 
situation very similar to those which in former years had caused the 
formation of the Vigilance committees, with the machinery of law-
enforcement practically helpless and the city in danger of domination by 
the criminal element. 

At the request of Mayor Edwin Bryant, the Governor ordered all members of 
the San Francisco companies of the National Guard to report at their 
armories for immediate duty, and several prominent citizens met and 
hurriedly formed a Committee of Safety under the leadership of William T. 
Coleman, who had been head of the second Vigilance organization. Mayor 
Bryant also issued a proclamation calling upon all San Franciscans to obey 
and support the law, and announcing that the National Guard would patrol 
the streets to protect life and property. During the early afternoon 
several companies of the Guard, armed with rifles and ball cartridges, 
marched from the armories and took up positions in various districts in 
which it was believed that rioting was likely to occur. A few hours later 
the Guardsmen were reinforced by some two hundred men who had enrolled 
under the standard of the Committee of Safety. This latter detachment, 
during the early period of the trouble with the hoodlums, was armed only 
with hickory pick-handles, a circumstance which caused it to be known as 
the Pick Handle Brigade.(*)

(* One of the members of the Pick Handle Brigade was Denis Kearney, who, 
later in that same year, became one of the most violent of all San 
Francisco's agitators against the Chinese. He acquired a certain fame as 
the Sandlot Orator, and as the founder of the Workingmen's party, the 
platform of which was, principally: "The Chinese must go!" For a brief 
period Kearney and his party exercised considerable power in California 
politics. An extensive, though not wholly accurate, account of the Kearney 
movement may be found in the second volume of Lord Bryce's American 
Commonwealth.) 

Despite the presence of this considerable force in the streets, the 
hoodlums attacked several Chinamen during the afternoon of July 25 and 
demolished the interiors of half a dozen Chinese stores and laundries. 
Soon after dusk a mob estimated at five hundred men attempted to burn the 
docks of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, which operated the vessels 
that had brought most of the Chinese to the Pacific Coast. The company's 
property was vigorously defended by the police, the National Guardsmen, 
and the Pick Handle Brigade, and although the battle raged for several 
hours, they finally succeeded in driving away the hoodlums and saving the 
docks. More than a score of men were shot and otherwise wounded, but none 
seriously. That same night the hoodlums burned a lumber yard where several 
Chinese had been employed. Two days later a man named James Smith was 
arrested, accused of setting the fire, and held in twenty-thousand-dollar 
bail when arraigned in police court. Conclusive evidence against him could 
not be obtained, however, and he was released within a few days. 

Next morning, July 26, hundreds of San Franciscans flocked to join the 
Pick Handle Brigade and enroll as members of the Committee of Safety. As 
soon as each man had signed, he was armed and sent out on patrol. By mid 
afternoon the streets of San Francisco again echoed to the tread of an 
embattled citizenry determined to resist the onslaughts of the rowdies. 
Between 3,500 and 4,000 men, including the members of the police force and 
the National Guard, were on duty. This display of power soon broke the 
backbone of the hoodlum revolt, although several small incendiary fires 
occurred during the next few nights, and there were a few minor skirmishes 
between the hoodlums and the patrolling citizens, the latter being 
victorious in every engagement. By July 30 San Francisco was quiet, and 
that afternoon the Committee of Safety disbanded its armed forces and 
dissolved its organization, while the companies of the National Guard 
stacked their rifles in the armories and returned to their vocations as 
private citizens. 

* * * *

The hoodlum of the eighteen-seventies and the eighteen-eighties seldom 
carried a fire-arm, but depended upon his fists, a stout hickory bludgeon, 
a set of brass or iron knuckles, and sometimes a knife. Usually this was 
ample armament, for the hoodlums ran in packs and were never known to 
attack even inoffensive Chinamen unless they vastly outnumbered their 
victims. They spent their spare time in the dives and dance-halls of the 
Barbary Coast, and many of them were pimps, or macks, and had girls 
walking the streets or entertaining all comers in the lower-class bagnios. 
The beau ideal of the hoodlum was the Barbary Coast Ranger and, to a 
lesser extent, the dive-keeper. The latter, however, was a demigod who 
stood proudly upon an eminence of power and prosperity such as the 
ordinary hoodlum could scarcely hope to reach. But he could aspire to 
notoriety and a long and sinful life as a man-about-the-Coast, and to that 
end he imitated the Ranger in deportment, as far as possible; and 
particularly in dress, to which he added various articles of personal 
adornment according to individual taste and fancy. The San Francisco 
hoodlum toiled not, neither did he spin, yet he was always attired in 
raiment of fashionable cut and usually of good material. His most 
elaborate costume burst upon a startled city during the late eighteen-
eighties, when he swaggered about with his hair oiled, puffed, curled at 
the sides, and parted in the middle; and clad in a velvet vest, a black or 
olive frock coat with a peaked sleeve which rose to his ear, knee-high 
boots of calfskin, a sombrero, a ruffled white shirt with a low collar, a 
black string tie, and tight fawn-colored trousers. It might be added that 
the ear which appeared above the peaked sleeve of the coat was invariably 
dirty, for the typical hoodlum had nothing in common with the soap-maker. 

These felonious dandies, as well as their more soberly attired brethren of 
previous decades, were very proud of the appellation by which they were 
popularly known. Sometimes when they sallied forth on their nefarious 
errands, they heralded their progress through the streets of San Francisco 
by cries of "The Hoodlums are coming! " and "Look out for the Hoodlums!" 
Many of them apparently had the curious idea that the very sound of the 
word "hoodlum" terrified the police, and that by so identifying themselves 
they automatically became immune to arrest. Of this delusion they were, in 
time, disabused. In June 1871, when a policeman captured one of the 
members of a gang which had committed twenty-two burglaries and tried to 
blow up a church with giant powder, all within ten days, the youthful 
desperado struck the officer with a slung shot and cried indignantly: "You 
can't arrest me! I'm a Hoodlum!" The remainder of his pronunciamento would 
doubtless have been equally informative, but it was never known, for the 
policeman closed the argument with his night-stick. Such effective 
repartee by the police, however, was rare; usually the hoodlum was 
accorded comparatively gentle treatment. Not until about 1890 did the San 
Francisco police learn what the New York police had already known for more 
than fifty years--that the best cure for hoodlumism is the frequent 
application of locust or hickory to the hoodlum's skull. Once the police 
had acquired this knowledge, the power of the rowdies rapidly declined. 

The most notorious hoodlums that San Francisco ever produced were Billy 
Smith and James Riley, who were active for a brief period during the early 
and middle eighteen-seventies. Smith was the leader of a gang which was 
variously known as the Rising Star Club and the Valley Boys. His followers 
numbered about two hundred, all of them thugs and rowdies of the first 
water. Smith himself was as expert a rough-and-tumble fighter as ever 
gouged out an eye or chewed off an ear. He scorned to use either a club or 
a knife, but went into battle equipped only with his fists and a pair of 
corrugated iron knuckles which covered the entire back of his hands. With 
glancing blows from these fearsome weapons, he could rip an opponent's 
face to shreds. Smith led the Valley Boys on many a successful foray, but 
he finally met his Waterloo on the Alameda ferry-boat in the early spring 
of 1871. On Sunday, April 9, the Rising Star Club, with Smith in command 
and with several kegs of whisky and beer, went on an outing to Faskin's 
Park, near the Encinal station at Alameda, across the Bay of San 
Francisco. The Swiss Guard, a volunteer military organization, held its 
annual picnic at Alameda on that day, at Schuetzen's Park, a mile or so 
from Faskin's. The Guard mustered about two hundred members, but on the 
trip to Alameda they were accompanied by their wives, children, and 
friends, so that the party was about one thousand strong. Fortunately for 
themselves, they also took along their muskets and bayonets, although they 
had no ammunition for the former. 

Both picnic parties returned to the ferry slip on the same train, and 
trouble threatened to develop almost as soon as the Valley Boys, most of 
whom were drunk, came aboard. The principal recreation of the Swiss Guards 
was singing, and they broke into song as soon as the train had started, to 
the outspoken disgust of the hoodlums. Billy Smith sent an emissary to 
inform William Hartmeyer, president of the Guard Glee Club, that the 
Guardsmen would be thrown off the train if they didn't stop. Hartmeyer 
paid no attention to the warning, but harsh words were exchanged between 
the hoodlums and several members of the Guards. There was no actual 
violence, however, until all of the picnickers had been transferred to the 
ferry-boat and the trip across the Bay had begun. The members of the Glee 
Club gathered in the boat's cabin and renewed their singing, whereupon 
Billy Smith and a score of his followers tried to stop them. Billy Smith 
was promptly ejected from the cabin, but returned to the assault with the 
entire membership of the Rising Star Club at his heels, all armed with 
clubs, brass knuckles, and knives. A general fight ensued, while the women 
and children fled to the after part of the cabin. Most of the windows were 
soon broken, and practically all of the furniture in the cabin was 
smashed. The Guardsmen finally fixed bayonets and succeeded in prodding 
the hoodlums out of the cabin and to the after deck, where they were 
surrounded. The rowdies attacked again as the ferry-boat neared its San 
Francisco slip, but were again driven back by the bayonets. When the boat 
docked, the Guardsmen massed near the bow and refused to allow anyone to 
go ashore until the arrival of the police. The latter arrested a dozen or 
more hoodlums, but most of them escaped by clambering over the boat's 
guards and swimming to the dock. Among the prisoners, however, were Billy 
Smith and his chief lieutenant, Jimmy Collins. Several policemen had seen 
Smith strike a Swiss Guardsman with his iron knuckles, and he was locked 
up charged with assault with a deadly weapon. Later he was convicted and 
sent to prison, and while he renewed his activities as a hoodlum when he 
returned to San Francisco, he was never again a power among the rowdies. 
Several members of the Guard were badly cut and bruised by the clubs and 
metal knuckles of the hoodlums, while many of the latter were painfully 
pierced by the Guardsmen's bayonets, which had very sharp points. 

* * * *

James Riley was better known to the San Francisco police as Butt Riley and 
as King of the Hoodlums. He was born in New York about 1848, and after a 
thorough grounding in the arts of hoodlumism as practiced in the 
metropolis, he became a sailor. The work was hard, however, and one voyage 
sufficed him. He landed in San Francisco in the late summer of 1868, liked 
the town, and remained to become one of its principal criminal ornaments. 
Thereafter, except when he was in prison, he never performed a single 
stroke of honest work. He was a much more celebrated hoodlum than even the 
redoubtable Billy Smith and was in every respect a superior man. He was a 
little more than six feet tall and weighed about two hundred pounds. In a 
coarse fashion he was extraordinarily handsome, and he appears to have 
possessed to a superlative degree that elusive quality which the moving 
pictures have popularized as "it." He was eagerly sought as a lover by the 
inmates of the houses of prostitution, and by the pretty waiter girls in 
the dives and dance-halls of the Barbary Coast, and it was his proud boast 
that whenever he granted his favors, he reversed the usual procedure and 
collected a fee from the lady. In this unique manner he received a 
substantial and fairly certain income, which he augmented by the sale of 
his photographs to the harlots for twenty-five cents each, in cash. To his 
particular favorites he sold, for fifty cents cash, pictures of himself in 
the nude. The greatest pride of scores of San Francisco's most popular and 
prosperous courtesans was the signed photograph of the King of the 
Hoodlums which hung above their beds. Riley had new photographs of himself 
made every Monday, and once a week he made a selling-trip throughout the 
red-light districts, carrying the pictorial proofs of his desirability in 
a small black satchel slung over his shoulder.(*)

(* At least a dozen old-time San Franciscans, whose names cannot be 
published for obvious reasons, told the present author that they 
remembered having seen Riley's photographs in the houses of prostitution. 
Many also recalled Riley's black satchel and his selling-trips from house 
to house.) 

So far as the San Francisco police ever knew, Riley was never the leader 
of any particular gang. But he had a widespread reputation in hoodlum 
circles as a fierce fighter and was a very inventive fellow in matters of 
torture; in fact, he gained his sobriquet as King of the Hoodlums because 
there wasn't a band of rowdies in the city that wouldn't flock to his 
support when he called upon it. Riley always carried a set of brass 
knuckles, a hickory bludgeon, a slung shot, and a big knife, but he seldom 
used any of these weapons. He depended principally upon his head, which he 
claimed had the thickest skull in Christendom. His method of fighting was 
to rush his opponent and butt him in the stomach or on the point of the 
chin, a procedure which soon rendered an enemy hors de combat. When he led 
hoodlums in raids upon Chinese houses or slave dens, he always demolished 
the doors with his head; and when his men had captured a Chinaman, it was 
his pleasure to see how far he could butt the poor Celestial. He was eager 
to establish a record in this sport, and probably did so, for with a 
running start he once butted a Chinaman, weighing about a hundred and 
sixty pounds, ten feet. The King of the Hoodlums also commercialized his 
gift, splintering doors with his head for fifty cents or a dollar, 
depending upon the thickness of the planks. He abandoned this particular 
aspect of his career, however, after he had, on a five-dollar bet, butted 
a hole in a door constructed of heavy oaken timbers. For the first time in 
his life he had a headache, and it frightened him. 

For some three years the King of the Hoodlums continued to butt his way to 
fame, but in September 1871 he butted one man too many. During a row at 
Dora and Harrison streets he twice crashed his thick skull against the 
unprotected stomach of John Jordan, a twenty-two-year-old carriage-
painter, and as he rushed forward for a third collision Jordan shot him in 
the breast with an English self-cocking revolver, one of the first weapons 
of that type ever seen in San Francisco. Riley was taken to the county 
hospital, where physicians said that he had been fatally wounded. But when 
the Coroner came to his bedside to take an antemortem deposition, the King 
of the Hoodlums said: 

"By Jesus! I ain't agoin' to die. There's a chance for me yet. I know of 
lots of men who are alive with leaden bullets in their belly." 

Riley recovered, but his health was poor, and he was never afterwards so 
prominent in hoodlum circles as he had been before Jordan shot him. Nor 
was he as popular among the prostitutes, for he no longer possessed the 
strength and beauty which had endeared him to them. He became, after a few 
years, a common house-breaker, and some five years after his encounter 
with the carriage-painter he was caught committing a robbery. He was 
convicted and sent to San Quentin Prison for fifteen years, and the reign 
of this human billy-goat as King of the Hoodlums and pet of the 
prostitutes was ended.