The Barbary Coast - Chapters 8-9



Chapter 8. The Slaves of Chinatown 

The underworld which naturally developed in San Francisco's Chinese 
quarter was never an integral part of the Barbary Coast, but remained a 
separate entity throughout its existence. Nevertheless, they were so 
closely allied and had so much in common that it was sometimes difficult 
to determine where one ended and the other began. White officials and 
politicians protected the purveyors of sin in Chinatown, just as they 
surrounded the dive-keepers of the Barbary Coast with their sheltering 
influence, in return for a share of the proceeds. For many years the 
payment of graft was a recognized and accepted custom. And as the Six 
Companies' memorial to President Grant in 1874 had intimated, many of the 
white men who thus enriched themselves occupied comparatively high 
positions in the municipal government. As late as 1901, only a few years 
before Chinatown was more or less purged of evil by earthquake and fire, a 
Legislative Committee appointed to investigate the rumored connection 
between the San Francisco police and the overlords of Chinese vice 
reported that it was apparent that graft was being paid in large amounts. 
Although the committee specifically accused no one, it strongly 
recommended that the Mayor, the Police Commissioners, and the Chief of 
Police "proceed forthwith to enforce the law." It further urged the 
District Attorney to take immediate action to bring about proper 
enforcement and requested the Grand Jury of San Francisco County to lay 
charges against any public official who neglected his duty. The dives and 
bagnios were closed for a few days while the committee was making 
inquiries and examining witnesses, but otherwise no attention was paid to 
it or to its recommendations. 

The seeker after thrills or depravity found in Chinatown no melodeons, no 
dance-halls, no concert saloons, and only an occasional bar-room, but he 
did find an abundance of opium-smoking resorts, houses of prostitution, 
and gambling hells, which in later years were clearing-houses for the 
disposal of millions of Chinese lottery tickets. Although the opium dives 
seldom received the full measure of white political protection granted to 
other resorts, they flourished in considerable numbers until well after 
the beginning of the present century. In 1885 the special committee of the 
Board of Supervisors found twenty-six of these places, with 320 bunks, 
open to the public in Chinatown; while there were then, and for many years 
thereafter, at least that many more to which the ordinary man could not 
hope to gain admittance. They were operated for the exclusive use of white 
and Chinese addicts, principally the former, who were able to pay for a 
certain degree of privacy. Many of the places wherein opium was smoked, or 
was supposed to be smoked, were fakes, tourist-shockers conducted by the 
professional guides to the quarter, who were licensed by the city and were 
organized as the Chinatown Guides Association. These abodes of synthetic 
sin were invariably in dank and dreary cellars, and the entrances to them 
were so arranged as to persuade the visitor that he was traversing 
innumerable and, of course, dangerous underground passages. In many of 
these dimly lighted ways evil-looking Chinamen, in the employ of the 
guides, slunk back and forth, carrying knives and hatchets and providing 
atmosphere and local color. It was this illusion, together with the tall 
tales told by tourists of their experiences in San Francisco, which gave 
rise to the belief that Chinatown was a veritable network of subterranean 
galleries. This fancy persisted until the district was destroyed in 1906. 
While it lay in ruins, the whole area was carefully explored and mapped. 
Not a single underground passage was discovered, and few cellars larger or 
deeper than are commonly found under dwellings and business houses. 

Prostitution was the principal, and by far the most remunerative, activity 
of Chinatown's criminal element, although gambling was the first of the 
popular vices to be introduced into the quarter and was, so far as the 
Chinese themselves were concerned, always the most liberally patronized. 
By the latter part of 1854, when the yellow population of San Francisco 
numbered only a few thousand, the upper end of Sacramento Street and the 
eastern side of Grant Avenue were lined with gambling houses. They were 
crowded both day and night, for the Chinaman is probably the most 
persistent and reckless gamester on earth; he will, ordinarily, bet on 
either side of any proposition, no matter how fantastic. Most of the 
Celestial gambling resorts of the early days were small and poorly 
furnished; in few was there room for more than three to six tables. Even 
fewer offered music or other entertainment. Said The Annals of San 
Francisco: 

"At the innermost end of some of the principal gambling places, there is 
an orchestra of five or six native musicians, who produce such 
extraordinary sounds from their curiously shaped instruments as severely 
torture the white man to listen to. Occasionally a songster adds his howl 
or shriek to the excruciating harmony. . . .Heaven has ordered it, no 
doubt, for wise purposes, that the windy chaos is pleasant to the 
auricular nerves of the natives. Occasionally a few white men will venture 
into these places, and gaze with mingled contempt and wonder upon the 
grave, melancholy, strange faces of the gamblers, and their curious mode 
of playing. There seems to be only one game in vogue. A heap of brass 
counters is displayed on the plain, mat-covered table, and the banker, 
with a long, slender stick, picks and counts them out one by one, while 
the stakers gaze with intense interest on the process. The game seems to 
be of the simplest nature, though white people scorn to know any thing 
about it." 

The white man may have scorned to acquire knowledge of Chinese gambling, 
but he was little less than avid in his desire to learn all there was to 
know about the Chinese prostitute--she was originally brought to San 
Francisco for his amusement, and he remained her best customer until both 
yellow and white prostitution were officially abolished by the California 
Legislature in 1914. The importation of Chinese girls for immoral purposes 
was begun about the middle of 1850, some two years after the arrival of 
the first Chinamen, and by 1869 the trade had reached such proportions 
that the San Francisco Chronicle referred to it as "the importation of 
females in bulk" and said that "each China steamer now brings consignments 
of women, destined to be placed in the market." During the middle and late 
eighteen-seventies, when Chinatown's underworld was at the peak of its 
activity, the number of Chinese prostitutes in San Francisco was 
conservatively estimated at between fifteen hundred and two thousand, 
while there were at least a thousand at the beginning of the present 
century. Until the passage of the exclusion laws in the eighteen-eighties, 
neither the federal nor the city authorities attempted any effective 
interference with the traffic, although occasionally, at the request of 
the Six Companies or an American reform agency, the police boarded ships 
from China and sent to asylums or mission homes girls who had been 
destined for the bagnios of Chinatown. On one of these vessels, visited in 
June 1868 upon complaint of the Six Companies, the police found forty-
three girls, ranging from eight to thirteen years, and consigned to 
brothel-keepers and dealers who were described by a contemporary 
journalist as "notorious old harridans of this place." All of the girls 
were sent to the Magdalen Asylum, and the police announced that jobs would 
be found for them in domestic service. However, many eventually appeared 
in the houses of prostitution. 

The various laws which forbade Chinese immigration acted as a check upon 
the traffic in Chinese girls, but failed to stop the shipments entirely. 
Thereafter they were smuggled into San Francisco, and large numbers were 
always available with which to replenish the stock in the bagnios. Some 
arrived in heavily padded crates, billed as freight, and were admitted by 
bribed customs and immigration officials. Others landed at Canadian ports 
and were brought to San Francisco by train, carriage, and, in later years, 
automobile. Still others, carefully coached, disembarked openly from the 
China steamers and succeeded in convincing state and federal inspectors 
that they were natives of California and had only been visiting in the 
land of their ancestors. When the authorities found women in the Chinese 
dives who had entered the country illegally, there were always plenty of 
Chinamen to claim them as wives; and, likewise, there were plenty of white 
lawyers and politicians to fight their battles in the courts. In 1901, 
when the United States Marshal raided the dens in Baker Court and Sullivan 
Alley and arrested thirty-four girls, each was claimed as wife by half a 
dozen Chinamen before deportation proceedings could even be begun. 

Some historians appear to have taken it more or less for granted that the 
Six Companies were large importers of girls, and that they were also 
financially interested in the bagnios, the opium joints, and the gambling 
houses. Such accusations are clearly unjust. The fact is that the Six 
Companies always actively opposed anything that might hamper the 
commercial growth of Chinatown, which the exploitation of vice certainly 
did. For many years the organization attempted to procure the deportation 
of notorious prostitutes and dealers in women, often complained that the 
laws were not enforced, and furnished much of the information upon which 
the police and federal agents based their infrequent raids. During the 
late eighteen-nineties and the early years of the present century the Six 
Companies were joined in their fight to rid Chinatown of vice by the 
Chinese Society of English Education, the Chinese Students' Alliance, the 
Chinese Native Sons, and the Chinese Cadet Corps. The Society of English 
Education, composed principally of prominent Chinese merchants and 
teachers, was especially active and employed an American lawyer to assist 
them in trying to prevent the landing of Chinese prostitutes. They 
succeeded in having a few girls deported, and so aroused the ire of the 
slave-dealers that the latter announced publicly that the leading members 
of the society would be killed unless they ceased their interference. 
Several threatening letters were received at the headquarters of the 
society, in 709½ Commercial Street, and the final one of the series gave 
the names of the first victims of the slavers' fury. The missive was thus 
translated: 

San Francisco, 7th Month, 1st Date (July 28, 1897) 

To the Chinese Society of English Education: 

Lately, having learned that the Chinese Society of English Education has 
retained an attorney to prevent girls imported for immoral purposes from 
landing and made efforts to deport them to China, in consequence of which 
there is a great loss of our bloodmoney. As you are all Christianized 
people, you should do good deeds, but if you keep on going to the 
Customhouse trying to deport girls brought here for immoral purposes from 
China, and trying to prevent them from landing, your lives of your several 
people are not able to live longer than this month. 
Your dying day is surely on hand. 
Your dying day is surely on hand. 
The dying men's names are as follows: Dear Wo, Lee Hem, Ong Lin Foon, Chin 
Fong, Chin Ming Sek, Hoo Yee Hin. 

A few days later the slave-dealers announced, by means of placards posted 
upon the billboards of Chinatown, that twelve tong killers had been 
employed to dispose of the six members of the society. For several weeks 
the latter were guarded by the police and by men of their own race whom 
they had employed, and the murderous plans of the slavers were frustrated. 
Nevertheless the threatening letters accomplished their purpose, for there 
was a noticeable lessening of enthusiasm on the part of the Chinese 
Society for English Education. Thereafter this organization was content to 
leave the enforcement of the law to the constituted authorities, who were 
not particularly interested in the suppression of Chinese prostitution. 
Some seven years after the intimidation of the society direct action 
against the brothels was attempted by members of the Chinese Students' 
Alliance, the Native Sons, and the Cadet Corps. In September 1904, groups 
of earnest young crusaders invaded several houses of prostitution in 
Jackson Street, among them a particularly vile dive owned by an old 
Chinese woman called Mon Op, and succeeded in smashing the windows and 
wrecking the interiors before they were driven away by the police. In that 
same month the Chinese Consul-General formally complained about the fake 
opium dens and accused the white guides in Chinatown of staging immoral 
exhibitions in the Chinese bagnios for the delectation of the tourists. 
The Board of Police Commissioners, expressing great indignation at such a 
state of affairs, promptly adopted a resolution to revoke the license of 
any guide who "escorted any person to lewd, immoral or indecent practices, 
or to a place where opium was smoked." This gesture satisfied the Consul-
General, and the guides continued to operate their bawdy shows. No 
licenses were revoked. 

* * * *

Two of San Francisco's golden courtesans--Ah Toy and Selina--achieved 
great fame in public amatory circles and made a considerable stir during 
their respective careers in Chinatown's underworld. Ah Toy came to San 
Francisco in the summer of 1850 and is said to have been the first Chinese 
prostitute to ply her ancient trade within the confines of Chinatown. As 
The Annals of San Francisco put it, "everybody knew that famous or 
infamous character, who was alternately the laughing-stock and the plague 
of the place." Ah Toy soon became amorously involved with several white 
men of more or less wealth and prominence, and as a result of their 
benefactions was able to buy her freedom and establish herself in business 
as an importer of girls for the bagnio trade. Thereafter she was known as 
Madame Ah Toy and for several years was one of the principal and most 
prosperous dealers in Chinese prostitutes in California. In addition, she 
operated a chain of dives in San Francisco, Sacramento, and other cities. 
Eventually she sold her various properties and returned to China to spend 
her declining years in comfort. Neither Madame Ah Toy nor the other 
traders who brought girls into California had any difficulty in disposing 
of their consignments at good prices. Said the San Francisco Chronicle of 
December 5, 1869: 

"The particularly fine portions of the cargo, the fresh and pretty females 
who come from the interior, are used to fill special orders from wealthy 
merchants and prosperous tradesmen. A very considerable portion are sent 
into the interior under charge of special agents, in answer to demands 
from well-to-do miners and successful vegetable producers. Another lot of 
the general importation offered to the Chinese public are examined 
critically by those desiring to purchase, and are sold to the 'trade' or 
to individuals at rates ranging from $500 down to $200 per head, according 
to their youth, beauty and attractiveness. The refuse, consisting of 'boat-
girls' and those who come from the seaboard towns, where contact with the 
white sailor reduces even the low standard of Chinese morals, is sold to 
the proprietor of the select brothels, or used in the more inferior dens 
of prostitution under the immediate control of the 'swell companies.' 
Those who are afflicted with disease, who suffer from the incurable 
attacks of Asiatic scrofula, or have the misfortune of possessing a bad 
temper, are used in this last-mentioned manner." 

Selina flourished for a few years during the middle eighteen-eighties, 
when she was from sixteen to twenty years old, and many of San Francisco's 
old-time citizens still recall her as one of the most beautiful courtesans 
of her time. She was especially celebrated for the extraordinary symmetry 
of her figure, as well as for her amiability and a comprehensive knowledge 
of her art. She never rose from what might be called the ranks, but she 
did enjoy the distinction of a house of her own--a little three-room brick 
structure in Bartlett Alley. No Chinaman was ever admitted to her 
quarters; she was the particular pet of the white man, and her favors were 
so much in demand that during her period of greatest popularity it was 
customary for appointments to be made several days in advance. Her fee was 
one dollar, instead of the seventy-five cents which was the top price in 
other Chinese establishments, and her visitors always paid it without 
protest. 

To gaze upon Selina's beautiful form, without the annoying intervention of 
garments, cost fifty cents, whereas other bagnio girls in Chinatown 
accorded the sightseer this privilege, known as a "lookee," for twenty-
five cents or, in some of the lowest dens, a dime. The "lookee" was always 
a source of considerable revenue, because of the widespread belief, still 
curiously prevalent among white men, that there are important anatomical 
differences between the Oriental woman and her Occidental sister. For 
purposes of the record, this question was definitely settled in 1882 by a 
writer who visited the Chinese dives in Washington Street and conducted 
what appears to have been a very painstaking and scientific inquiry. He 
wrote in his book: 

"Being bent upon investigation, we enter and observe the surroundings, 
paying. . .for the privilege of witnessing the physical configuration of 
these poor, degraded creatures. . .In order to set at rest a question 
which has been fiercely debated by students of nature, our investigation 
justifies the assertion that there are no physical differences between the 
Chinese and American women, their conformation being identical."(*)

(* Metropolitan Life Unveiled, by J. W. Buel; page 276) 

There were two types of bagnio in San Francisco s Chinatown--the parlor 
house and the crib. The former, comparatively few in number, was to be 
found principally in Grant Avenue, Ross Alley, Waverly Place, and a few 
other important thoroughfares in or adjacent to Chinatown. Many of them 
were sumptuously furnished with a great clutter of teakwood and bamboo, 
embroidered hangings, soft couches, and cushions of embroidered silk, 
while exotic paintings and clouds of fragrant incense emphasized the 
languorous atmosphere of the Orient. The number of girls in each house 
ranged from four to twenty-five, all richly clad and seductively perfumed. 
Cribs existed in great profusion in Jackson and Washington streets and in 
China, Bartlett, Stout, Church, and other alleys throughout the quarter--
they lined both sides of China Alley, a dingy, fifteen-foot passage which 
extended from Jackson to Washington Street. Several other alleys were 
likewise entirely given over to cribs. In Brooklyn Alley, off Sacramento 
Street near Stockton, were half a dozen cribs which during the late 
eighteen-nineties were occupied by Japanese girls, the first prostitutes 
of their race in San Francisco. In these places several ancient customs of 
the Yoshiwara were observed--a visitor was required to remove his shoes at 
the threshold; and when he departed, he received a gift, usually a good 
cigar, while his shoes were returned to him cleaned and polished. The 
Japanese cribs and the Chinese parlor houses were for white men only, but 
the ordinary Chinese bagnio catered to men of all races and colors. The 
wealthy and influential Chinaman was seldom seen in the public houses, 
except in a few operated for his exclusive use, the inmates of which were 
white women who had succumbed to the fascinations of opium. These resorts, 
however, were not so elegantly furnished as were the Chinese parlor 
houses. Most of them were one-storey buildings with long hallways, on 
either side of which were small cubicles with barred windows. When not 
otherwise engaged, the prostitute stood or sat in the center of her room, 
with parts of her body exposed, while Chinese in quest of amorous 
adventure strolled along the corridor and inspected her through the bars. 
Such resorts were not notably prosperous, however, as the Chinaman of 
means usually maintained his own harem, with from one to a dozen 
concubines, according to his prosperity and desires. He replenished his 
stock of girls whenever fresh shipments arrived from China, selling or 
trading those of whom he had tired or who had failed to come up to his 
expectations. White girls rarely became inmates of these establishments, 
partly because they lacked sufficient docility and partly because the 
Chinese in general preferred women of their own race. 

The crib was exactly what its name implies--a small, one-storey shack some 
twelve feet wide and fourteen feet deep, divided into two rooms by heavy 
curtains of coarse material. It was occupied by from two to six girls, 
each of whom wore the traditional costume of her trade--a black silk 
blouse with a narrow band of turquoise, on which flowers had been 
embroidered, extending across the front and back. In cold weather the 
girls were also clad in black silken trousers, but usually their attire 
consisted of nothing but the blouse. The back room of the crib was 
meagerly furnished with a wash-bowl, a rickety bamboo chair or two, and 
hard board shelves or bunks covered with matting. The front room was 
usually carpeted, and contained a cheap bureau, more chairs, and perhaps a 
wall mirror. The only entrance to the crib was a narrow door, in which was 
set a small barred window. Occupants of the den took turns standing behind 
the bars and striving to attract the attention of passing men. When an 
interested male stopped before the crib, the harlot displayed the upper 
part of her body and cajoled him with seductive cries and motions. 

"China girl nice! You come inside, please?" 
She invariably added to her invitation this extraordinary information, 
seldom, if ever, correct: 
"Your father, he just go out."(*)

(* Some of the Chinese considered it an honor to possess a woman whom 
their fathers had also possessed) 

These vocal enticements she varied with a more direct advertisement of her 
wares, a complete list of prices and services. Until the late hours of the 
night, in all the narrow, dirty by-ways of Chinatown, the plaintive voice 
of the Chinese crib girl could be heard crying in a shrill, monotonous 
singsong: 

"Two bittee lookee, flo bittee feelee, six bittee doee!" 

So far as her own person was concerned, the Chinese prostitute, even when 
she occupied the lowest crib, was cleanly; she shaved her entire body 
daily and took frequent baths. But her master always compelled her to 
entertain every man who applied, and in consequence at least ninety per 
cent of the Oriental harlots in San Francisco were diseased. Moreover, 
although the parlor houses refused to admit boys of sixteen or seventeen, 
the cribs made no such distinction. During an inquiry conducted by a 
special committee of the Board of Supervisors in 1885, several policemen 
and special watchmen testified that they had often found white boys of ten 
and twelve years in the cribs, and some of the youngsters regularly 
visited the dens two or three times a week. A member of the Board of 
Health, a physician, testified that he had seen white boys of eight and 
ten with diseases which had been contracted in the Chinese dives of 
Jackson Street, where prices were lower than elsewhere in Chinatown. In 
these cribs a man could have his choice of girls for twenty-five or fifty 
cents, while special rates as low as fifteen cents were offered to boys 
under sixteen. 

"I have never seen or heard of any country in the world," this doctor 
said, "where there are as many children diseased as in San Francisco."(*)

(* Report of the Special Committee of the Board of Supervisors, 1885, page 
13) 

Other physicians gave similar testimony, describing a situation to which 
the special committee, as well as city officials, pointed with horror, but 
which they did little or nothing to remedy. 

The backbone of Chinese prostitution in San Francisco was a system of 
slavery under which girls were owned and bartered as if they had been so 
many cattle; as, indeed, they were in the eyes of their masters. 
Practically every inmate of the Chinese parlor houses and cribs was a 
slave, and many had been in bondage since infancy. Usually they were owned 
by syndicates of Chinamen, or by women like Madame Ah Toy, who had 
themselves been prostitutes and had purchased their freedom. The slave 
holdings of some of these groups were extremely large. Four Chinamen in 
the middle eighteen-seventies owned eight hundred girls, ranging in age 
from two to sixteen years. They had been bought in China at an average 
price of about eighty dollars, but were worth from four hundred to a 
thousand dollars each in San Francisco. At late as 1895 a slave-dealer 
named Charley Hung, together with an old Chinese woman called Dah Pa Tsin, 
kept a hundred girls, all under fourteen, in pens in the rear of a 
building in Church Alley. This precious pair not only bought and sold, but 
rented girls to owners of cribs for a percentage of their earnings. 
Another noted slaver of this period was Suey Hin, who ordinarily kept in 
stock no fewer than fifty girls of various ages. Suey Hin became converted 
to Christianity in 1898, and in preparation for the good life sold all of 
her girls but seven, who were valued at about eighty-five hundred dollars. 
These she decided to retain for a while, in case she found the white man's 
religion impracticable. Eventually, however, at the behest of the 
Salvation Army, she gave them their freedom. One of these girls was only 
ten days old when Suey Hin bought her from her parents for a few coins. 
She was three years old when the converted slaver placed her in the 
Salvation Army mission, and could easily have been sold for three hundred 
dollars, for she was a very pretty child and free from blemishes or 
deformities. 

* * * *

The girls who filled the bagnios of Chinatown were, for the most part, 
bought or kidnapped in China by agents of the San Francisco dealers, 
although kidnapping was seldom necessary. Chinese parents, especially 
those in the seaports, generally regarded their daughters as nuisances and 
were usually willing to sell them. The girls were shipped to San Francisco 
in batches of from three to a hundred and, once there, were either placed 
in dives operated by their masters or offered for sale in the open market. 
Dealers and owners of cribs and parlor houses were notified when a 
consignment had arrived, and those who were interested assembled at an 
appointed place, usually a cellar or other chamber which offered 
comparative safety from the prying eyes of white men, and, particularly, 
of the white women who operated the Chinatown missions and waged unceasing 
warfare against the slavers. When the sale began, the girls were brought 
in one by one to the block. They were stripped, punched, and prodded and 
in some cases examined by Chinese physicians who had, more likely than 
not, been bribed to warrant them sound in wind and limb. A price having 
been agreed upon for a given girl, the amount, in gold or currency, was 
placed in her outstretched palms. She immediately handed it to the man who 
had offered her for sale. She was then required to sign a contract, in 
which it was set forth that she had received the money into her own hands, 
and that in return she agreed to serve as a prostitute for a specified 
number of years. During the eighteen-seventies and the eighteen-eighties 
this was the usual form of contract: 

For the consideration of [whatever sum had been agreed upon], paid into my 
hands this day, I, [name of girl], promise to prostitute my body for the 
term of -- years. If, in that time, I am sick one day, two weeks shall be 
added to my time; and if more than one day, my term of prostitution shall 
continue an additional month. But if I run away, or escape from the 
custody of my keeper, then I am to be held as a slave for life. 
(Signed) ---------

Another type of contract or agreement, which was also much in use, 
stipulated that the girl become a prostitute to repay the money which had 
been advanced for passage to the United States and for other expenses. One 
of these documents was introduced in evidence before the Senate Committee 
which in 1876 investigated the whole question of Chinese immigration: 

"An agreement to assist a young girl named Loi Yan, because she became 
indebted to her mistress for passage, board, etc., and has nothing to pay. 
She makes her body over to the woman Sep Sam to serve as a prostitute, to 
make out the sum of $503. The money shall draw no interest, and Loi Yan 
shall receive no wages. Loi Yan shall serve four and one-half years. . . .
When the time is out Loi Yan shall be her own master and no man shall 
trouble her. . . .If she is sick fifteen days she shall make up one month 
for every ten days. If Sep Sam should go back to China Loi Yan shall serve 
another master until her time is out." 

Under the then existing laws of California such contracts might 
conceivably have been held by the courts to be valid instruments. The real 
jokers, of course, were the clauses relating to illness. The regular 
physical disturbance which every woman experiences was reckoned as within 
the meaning of the agreement, and the prostitute was held to be 
incapacitated three or four days a month on that account. At least one 
month, therefore, was added to every month of service under the terms of 
the contract, so that a Chinese girl who entered a crib or a parlor house 
was at once caught in a vicious circle from which there was no escape. 

The prices paid for prostitutes in the San Francisco market varied with 
the years and with the quality of the merchandise and was naturally 
dependent to a great extent upon supply and demand. Before the passage of 
the exclusion acts the prettiest Chinese girls could be purchased for a 
few hundred dollars each, but after about 1888, when it became necessary 
to smuggle them into this country, prices rose enormously. During the 
early eighteen-nineties they ranged from about $100 for a one-year-old 
girl to a maximum of $1,200 for a girl of fourteen, which was considered 
the best age for prostitution. Children of six to ten brought from $200 to 
$800. About 1897 girls of twelve to fifteen sometimes sold for as high as 
$2,500 each. The record price was probably $2,800 in gold, which Charley 
Hung and Dah Pa Tsin paid for a fourteen-year-old girl in the early part 
of 1898. At whatever price a sale was made, the transaction was completed 
in regular form, and the purchaser received a bill of sale in which the 
girl was usually mentioned in a list of other commodities, which may or 
may not have changed hands. A typical document of this sort, conveying a 
nine-year-old girl, came into the hands of the Salvation Army in 1898 and 
was published in the San Francisco Call: 

BILL OF SALE 
Loo Wong to Loo Chee  
April 16--Rice, six mats, at $2............. 
April 18--Shrimps, 50 lbs., at 10c........ 
April 20--Girl...................................... 
April 21--Salt fish, 60 lbs., at 10c........ $ 12 
5 
250 
6 
---- 
$273 
Received payment,  
LOO CHEE  
Victoria, B. C., May 1, 1898  


All of the Chinese slave girls in San Francisco, particularly those who 
occupied the cribs, were shamefully mistreated by their masters. They 
received no part of their earnings, and most of them never left the dens 
except for brief periods two or three times a week, when they were taken 
out under heavy guard for exercise, like dogs on a leash. For the 
slightest infraction of the strict rules under which they lived, or for 
failure to please every man who visited them, they were lashed with whips 
and branded with hot irons; and other tortures, at which the Chinese have 
always been particularly adept, were also inflicted upon them. Six years 
was a long time for a girl to live after being placed in a crib, and since 
she almost invariably began her life of misery and degradation in her 
early teens, a Chinese prostitute of more than twenty years was a great 
rarity. Moreover, she was, by that time, nothing more than a frightfully 
diseased old hag. In later years girls who had broken mentally and 
physically under the hardships to which they were subjected in the cribs, 
and had so lost their attractiveness and become useless for purposes of 
prostitution, were permitted and encouraged to escape to the missions 
conducted by the Salvation Army and other organizations. But in earlier 
times, during the eighteen-sixties and the eighteen-seventies, they were 
carried into small, dismal rooms in the back alleys of Chinatown, called 
"hospitals," and there left alone to die. One of these places, in Cooper 
Alley, was thus described by the San Francisco Chronicle in its issue of 
December 5, 1869: 

"The place is loathsome in the extreme. On one side is a shelf four feet 
wide and about a yard above the dirty floor, upon which there are two old 
rice mats. There is not the first suggestion of furniture in the room, no 
table, no chairs or stools, nor any window. . . .When any of the 
unfortunate harlots is no longer useful and a Chinese physician passes his 
opinion that her disease is incurable, she is notified that she must die
. . . .Led by night to this hole of a 'hospital,' she is forced within the 
door and made to lie down upon the shelf. A cup of water, another of 
boiled rice, and a little metal oil lamp are placed by her side. . . .
Those who have immediate charge of the establishment know how long the oil 
should last, and when the limit is reached they return to the 'hospital,' 
unbar the door and enter. . . .Generally the woman is dead, either by 
starvation or from her own hand; but sometimes life is not extinct; the 
spark yet remains when the 'doctors' enter; yet this makes little 
difference to them. They come for a corpse, and they never go away without 
it." 

So far as remedying their condition was concerned, the slave girls in San 
Francisco's Chinatown were helpless. Few could speak more than a dozen 
words of English, none had any knowledge whatsoever of American law or 
legal procedure, and there was no one to whom they could have appealed for 
aid even if it had occurred to them to protest against a custom so 
thoroughly grounded in the traditions of their race. The infrequent 
attempts of the federal and city authorities to close the brothels and 
free the slaves were empty gestures which met with little or no success. 
For the most part they were made grudgingly, and only upon the insistence 
of respectable Chinese organizations and the white women who operated the 
Chinatown missions, especially Miss Donaldina Cameron. She devoted 
practically her entire adult life to rescue work among the Chinese 
prostitutes, and to her, more than to any other one person, credit is due 
for the final radical improvement in the moral tone of Chinatown. While 
the earthquake and fire of 1906 destroyed the plague spots of the 
district, girls continued to be held as slaves, though not in such large 
numbers as before, until the enactment of the Red-light Abatement Act by 
the California Legislature in 1914. This, at length, placed in the hands 
of Miss Cameron and her associates an effective legal weapon, which was 
backed by the police. Within a few years slavery in San Francisco had been 
abolished. 

* * * *

The most spectacular and at the same time the most powerful agencies in 
the underworld of Chinatown were the tongs, which were always deeply 
involved in every evil scheme concocted in the quarter. The complete 
history of these extraordinary associations probably never will be 
written. It is extremely doubtful if any white man has ever thoroughly 
understood the innumerable ramifications of tong influence or been privy 
to the intricacies of their organization and methods, despite the fact 
that they are as American as chop suey. Like that celebrated dish, they 
are unknown in China.(*) The first tongs--the Hop Sings and the Suey 
Sings--were organized about 1860 by the Chinese in the gold-fields near 
Marysville, California, as mutual benefit associations. There, too, 
occurred the first tong war, and, in common with many of the other 
conflicts which have since raged in American cities, it started over a 
woman. The mistress of a Hop Sing man was stolen by a Suey Sing Lothario, 
and the Hop Sings declared war to wipe out the stain upon their brother's 
honor. Several men on either side were killed, but the Suey Sings were 
defeated and compelled to restore the girl to her rightful owner. 

(* Chop suey is said to have been invented in 1894. At a banquet in New 
York, at which Li Hung Chang, the great Chinese statesman, was the guest 
of honor, he was asked to have his private chef contribute one dish to the 
feast. Fearing that the white men would not like real Chinese food, Li 
Hung Chang instructed the chef to prepare a stew of meat and vegetables, 
which the chef called "chop suey" and flavored with a pungent sauce made 
from the soya bean, salt, and molasses. The concoction was immediately 
popular, and within a few years chop-suey parlors had sprung up all over 
the United States. Very few Chinese will eat it. According to Webster's 
dictionary the name of the dish is a corruption of the Cantonese "shop
sui," meaning "odds and ends.")

The tongs soon spread to the railroad construction camps in which large 
numbers of coolies were employed, thence to the Pacific Coast cities which 
harbored Chinese settlements, and finally throughout the United States. 
They first appeared in San Francisco during the late eighteen-sixties, and 
within ten years at least twenty tongs were firmly entrenched in 
Chinatown, with large memberships and overflowing treasure-chests. 
Occasionally they engaged in legitimate business, but in particular they 
were the lords of the underworld--they operated gambling resorts, opium 
dens and houses of prostitution, and exercised practical control over the 
slave trade, for although the actual buying and selling of girls was done 
by individuals, the tongs usually collected a head-tax for every slave 
imported for immoral purposes. Sometimes even an honest Chinaman who 
brought his wife to this country was compelled to pay the tongs before she 
was permitted to remain. 

Each of these organizations employed professional murderers and also 
recruited a force of boo how doy, or fighting men, among its own members. 
In later years the tong warrior fought with revolvers, bombs, and even 
machine-guns, but in earlier times his favorite weapons were hatchets, 
daggers, knives, and bludgeons, which he carried in a long silken belt 
wrapped around his body beneath a loose blouse. When abroad on his 
murderous business, his queue was wound around his head, and he wore a 
broad-brimmed, low-crowned black slouch hat, pulled well down over his 
eyes. If he succeeded in dispatching an enemy, he left beside the body the 
weapon with which he had struck the fatal blow. The boo how doy, popularly 
known as hatchetmen or highbinders, received regular salaries, with extra 
pay for exceptional bravery in battle, and bonuses based on the number of 
men they killed. They were subjected to strict discipline and were 
required to obey at all times, without question, the orders of the man who 
had been chosen by their tong to command them in action. What was expected 
of them is indicated in this communication from the supreme council of the 
Gee Kung tong to one of its hatchetmen in 1888. A translation of the 
document was embodied in the report of the United States Industrial 
Commission, which investigated the highbinder tongs in 1901: 

To Lum Hip, Salaried Soldier: 
It has been said that to plan schemes and devise methods and to hold the 
seal is the work of the literary class, while to oppose foes, fight 
battles, and plant firm government is the work of the military. Now this 
tong appoints salaried soldiers to be ready to protect its members and 
assist others. This is our object. All, therefore, who undertake the 
military service of this tong must obey orders, and without orders they 
must not dare to act. If any of our brothers are suddenly molested it will 
be necessary for you to act with resolute will. You will always work in 
the interest of the tong, and never make your office a means of private 
revenge. When orders are given, you shall advance valiantly to your 
assigned task. . . .If, in the discharge of your duty, you are slain, we 
will undertake to pay $500 sympathy money to your friends. If you are 
wounded, a doctor will be engaged to heal your wounds, and if you are laid 
up for any length of time, you will receive $10 a month. If you are maimed 
for life, and incapacitated for work, $250 shall be paid to you, and a 
subscription taken to defray all costs of your journey home to China. 
Furthermore, when you exert your strength to kill or wound enemies of this 
tong, and in so doing are arrested and imprisoned, $100 per year will be 
collected for every year in jail. 
Dated this 13th day of the 5th month of the 14th year of Kwong Su. 

In the spring of 1875 Low Sing, a member of the Suey Sing tong, then the 
most powerful of all these organizations, fell in love with a slave girl 
named Kum Ho, who was also known as the Golden Peach. He began to live 
frugally and save his money, so that in time he might buy her freedom and 
make her his wife. But the beauteous Kum Ho had also attracted the 
attention of the evil Ming Long of the Kwong Dock tong, a noted assassin 
whose hatchet had cleaved a bloody trail through the gold-fields and the 
railroad labor camps. Ming Long informed Low Sing that he had himself 
decided to buy the Golden Peach and add her to the charmers who already 
graced his harem, and warned the Suey Sing man to keep away from the crib 
wherein Kum Ho was confined. But Low Sing was too much in love to obey. He 
continued to visit the Golden Peach, and on an evening in May 1875, while 
Low Sing stood before Kum Ho's crib and held her hand through the bars, 
Ming Long crept up behind him and split his skull with a hatchet. 

Low Sing lived long enough to tell the head men of his tong who had 
attacked him, and the supreme council of the Suey Sings immediately held a 
solemn conclave. They considered the matter at considerable length. 
Witnesses who were familiar with Low Sing's love-affair with the slave 
girl said that the Golden Peach was also in love with Low Sing, and that 
the Suey Sing man had succumbed to her charms long before Ming Long of the 
Kwong Docks had even seen her. It was clear, therefore, that Low Sing was 
entitled to the girl if he could, within a reasonable time, raise 
sufficient money to buy her. It was likewise clear that the assault upon 
Low Sing had been a direct blow at the honor of the Suey Sings, for the 
enmities of a member of a tong were also the enmities of the entire tong. 
Accordingly, the literary men of the Suey Sings indited a chun hung, or 
challenge to battle, painted in black letters on vermilion paper. It was 
posted upon the bulletin board at Grant Avenue and Clay Street: 

The Kwong Dock tong is hereby sincerely and earnestly requested to send 
its best fighting men to Waverly Place at midnight tomorrow to meet our 
boo how doy. If this challenge is ignored, the Kwong Dock tong must admit 
defeat and make compensation and apologize for the assault upon Low Sing. 
However, we sincerely hope that the Kwong Dock tong will accept this 
challenge, and paste alongside of this poster its own chun hung. 
(Signed)
Seal of the Suey Sing Tong(*)

(* Tong War, by Eng Ying Gong and Bruce Grant; page 17) 

Within an hour there appeared on the bulletin board another strip of 
vermilion paper covered with black characters, signed with the seal of the 
Kwong Docks. The hatchetmen of both tongs immediately began sharpening 
their weapons and otherwise preparing for battle. Knowledge of the coming 
encounter soon spread throughout Chinatown, and by eleven o'clock on the 
appointed night, much to the amazement of the few white policemen who 
patrolled the district, Waverly Place was deserted, and all doors and 
windows on the street level were securely locked and bolted. Even the 
cries of the crib girls were hushed. But the upstairs windows, and the 
balconies which overhung the narrow thoroughfares, were crowded with 
Chinese, who had assembled to watch the fighting and who were excitedly 
laying wagers upon the result or upon the exploits of individual 
hatchetmen. A few minutes before twelve o'clock the warriors began to 
arrive, singly and in twos and threes, queues wrapped around their heads, 
black slouch hats drawn down over their eyes, and blouses bulging with 
hatchets, knives, and clubs. In silence the fighting men of the Suey Sings 
took up positions on one side of the street, while the boo how doy of the 
Kwong Docks confronted them from the opposite curb. There were about 
twenty-five men in each detachment, all noted killers with much experience 
in tong warfare. 

For a little while neither side seemed to be aware of the other. But 
promptly at midnight the leaders began screaming insults. After a moment 
or two of this sort of preparation, they gave the signal, and with a flash 
of knives and hatchets the boo how doy rushed forward and clashed in the 
center of the street. For at least fifteen minutes the hatchetmen fought 
with great ferocity, and the tide of battle surged back and forth while 
the spectators leaned over the balcony railings and the window-sills and 
cheered or groaned, accordingly as they had placed their bets. Then the 
blast of a police whistle shrilled above the roar of combat, and reserves 
from a dozen precincts charged into Waverly Place with drawn revolvers, 
swinging night-sticks. The fighting stopped immediately, and the 
hatchetmen vanished into the dark and dingy passages of Chinatown. None 
had been killed, but nine had been seriously wounded--six Kwong Docks and 
three Suey Sings. Of the latter, one died within a few days, and three of 
the former. The police made no arrests and were never able to learn the 
cause of the fighting nor the identity of anyone engaged in it, although 
for weeks little else was talked of in Chinatown. The Suey Sings 
considered that they had been victorious because the Kwong Docks had 
suffered the greater number of casualties, and next day they dispatched a 
truculent missive to the Kwong Docks, again demanding indemnities and 
apologies. After many lengthy conferences the Kwong Docks paid a small sum 
of money to the relatives of Low Sing and made formal apology for the 
assault upon him by Ming Long. A treaty of peace was signed, and the boo 
how doy of both tongs celebrated the occasion with a great love-feast, at 
which the men who had so recently been at each other's throats became as 
brothers under the mellowing influence of rice wine, bird's-nest soup and 
other delicacies of the Chinese cuisine. Under the code of the tongs the 
life of Ming Long was forfeit to the Suey Sings, and for several days he 
was assiduously hunted by hatchetmen eager for the distinction that would 
come to his slayer. But he escaped and fled to China, where he was safe 
from the vengeance of the Suey Sings. 

This was the first of the great tong wars that shattered the peace and 
quiet of San Francisco's Chinatown, but it was by no means the last. For 
at least half a century--the power of the tongs began to decline only 
about half a dozen years ago--they raged with alarming frequency, although 
none was fought with the ferocious spectacularity that distinguished the 
memorable combat in Waverly Place in the spring of 1875. But from the 
ranks of the boo how doy came many killers of great renown, whose exploits 
entitle them to rank beside the best of the gunmen produced by the white 
man's gangland. There was, for example, Hong Ah Kay, in his peaceful 
moments a scholar and a poet of distinction, who stood against a cellar 
wall and with seven blows split the skulls of seven foes. For this notable 
feat of arms he was greatly honored by his tong, but, unfortunately, he 
was hanged by the white man's law before he had a chance to wear his 
laurels. There were, too, Sing Dock, called the Scientific Killer because 
he carefully planned each murder down to the minutest detail and never 
struck until he was certain that his schemes would not miscarry; Big Queue 
Wai, who induced in himself a murderous state of mind, and incidentally 
perfected his aim and timing, by swatting flies for several hours before 
he went forth to sink his hatchet into the cranium of an enemy; and Yee 
Toy, otherwise Girl-Face, a dandified assassin whose ferocity belied his 
nickname. It was Yee Toy's pleasant custom, when time permitted, to 
straighten the clothing of his victim and comb his hair and otherwise make 
him presentable. Nor did Yee Toy neglect to remove from the dead one's 
pockets any money or other property that might cause unseemly bulges. 

* * * *

The greatest and most successful of Chinatown's tong chieftains was Fung 
Jing Toy, better known as Little Pete, who was head of the Sum Yops and in 
control of other tongs with which the Sum Yops were allied. For nearly ten 
years he was the most powerful Chinaman on the Pacific Coast, and although 
it is doubtful if he ever swung a hatchet or fired a pistol, he was 
responsible for the deaths of no fewer than fifty men. He had a fair 
command of English, which he acquired at American night-schools, but if 
the stories told about him are true, he could neither read nor speak 
Chinese and employed an interpreter to assist him in communicating with 
many of his henchmen. He lived with his wife and two children on the third 
floor of a three-storey building at Washington Street and Waverly Place, 
from the balcony of which, as a boy of ten, he had watched the great fight 
between the Suey Sings and the Kwong Docks in 1875. He slept in a 
windowless room behind a barred and bolted door, on either side of which 
was chained a vicious dog. During his waking hours he wore a coat of chain 
mail, and inside his hat was a thin sheet of steel curved to fit his head. 
He employed a bodyguard of three white men, and when he went abroad, one 
walked beside him, and another in front, while the third brought up the 
rear. And prowling within call were half a dozen of his own boo how doy, 
heavily armed. Also, wherever Little Pete went he was accompanied by a 
trusted servant bearing his jewel-case and toilet articles, for the tong 
leader was a great dandy, and much concerned about his appearance. He 
possessed many diamond rings, a dozen handsomely engraved gold watches, 
and half a score of gold and platinum match-boxes set with diamonds and 
other precious stones. He changed his jewelry several times daily and 
never wore a suit, though he had forty, two days in succession. Two hours 
each morning he spent combing, brushing, and oiling his long and glossy 
queue, of which he was inordinately proud. In his leisure time he played 
upon the zither, listened to the music of his crickets, or wrote comedies, 
which were translated into Chinese and performed at the Jackson Street 
Theatre. He owned the playhouse and never had any trouble getting his 
pieces produced. 

Little Pete was five years old when his father, a merchant, brought him to 
San Francisco from Canton. He began his career as an errand-boy for a 
Chinese shoe-manufacturer, and during his late teens peddled slippers from 
house to house in Chinatown. When he was about twenty-one years old, he 
embarked upon the only honest business venture of his adult life--a shoe-
factory under the firm name of J. C. Peters & Company. Soon afterwards, 
attracted by the profits in vice, he became interested in gambling houses 
and opium dens and also entered the slave trade in partnership with Kwan 
Leung and the latter's wife, Fong Suey, a noted procuress. Backed by the 
Sum Yop tong, of which he gained complete control before his twenty-fifth 
birthday, he soon enlarged his activities. Instead of buying girls, he 
began to steal them, particularly from dealers and crib-owners who were 
members of the Sue Yop tong, one of the most powerful organizations in 
Chinatown. He also interfered in other Sue Yop enterprises, and the two 
tongs were soon engaged in one of the bitterest and bloodiest of all the 
wars of Chinatown. During the early stages of this conflict Little Pete 
overreached himself. He forgot that in the final analysis vice in 
Chinatown existed only upon the sufferance of the white authorities. When 
one of his killers was arrested and placed on trial for the murder of a 
Sue Yop man in 1887, Little Pete boldly tried to bribe the jurors, the 
District Attorney, and everyone else connected with the prosecution. He 
was promptly clapped into jail, later convicted of attempted bribery, and 
sent to San Quentin Prison for five years. 

When Little Pete was released, he again assumed his position as head of 
the Sum Yops and fanned into flame the embers of the war with the Sue 
Yops, which had subsided during his incarceration. He also strengthened 
his position by retaining as counsel for the Sum Yops an influential 
criminal lawyer, Thomas D. Riordan, and by forming an alliance with 
Christopher A. Buckley, the famous blind political boss of San Francisco, 
whom Little Pete called the Blind White Devil.(*) With Buckley's support, 
Little Pete was soon the undisputed king of Chinatown. Every form of vice, 
and almost every form of legitimate business as well, paid him tribute. If 
the owners of gambling houses, opium dens, or brothels refused to pay, 
their establishments were immediately closed by the white police--and 
reopened a few days later with Little Pete's men in charge. The girls in 
all of the cribs operated by Little Pete and his associates were supplied 
with counterfeit half-dollars, which they gave as change to drunken men. 

(* Buckley was in absolute control of San Francisco for some twenty years, 
probably the most corrupt period in the history of the city. He came to 
San Francisco in 1862, at the age of seventeen, and became a bar-tender at 
Duncan Nichols's Snug Café, which he later owned. He lost his eyesight 
through illness in his thirtieth year. He had already gained considerable 
influence in politics, and his career was not halted by his misfortune. 
Within another five years he dominated the Democratic machine and began 
plundering the city for the benefit of himself and his friends. He always 
sat in the rear of his saloon and recognized visitors by the way they 
shook hands. He was finally ousted from control by a group of insurgents 
headed by Gavin McNab and James D. Phelan, and his power declined when 
Phelan was elected Mayor in the middle eighteen-nineties. Buckley died in 
April 1922, in his seventy-seventh year.)

Little Pete's income from his various enterprises must have been enormous, 
but he was not satisfied. He looked around for new sources of revenue and 
became greatly interested in the possibilities of horse racing. Early in 
the spring of 1896 he became a familiar figure in the betting rings of the 
Bay District and Ingleside tracks and soon attracted attention by the size 
of his bets. He regularly wagered eight thousand dollars a day, and he 
never lost. Within two months he had won a hundred thousand dollars, and 
the stewards of the Pacific Coast Jockey Club began to believe that there 
might be some connection between Little Pete's streak of luck and the 
sudden epidemic of sick horses and bungling rides by hitherto skillful 
jockeys. Private detectives followed several riders to the offices of J. 
C. Peters & Company, and further investigation disclosed the fact that 
Little Pete was not only paying the jockeys to lose races, but was bribing 
trainers and stablemen to poison horses against which he wished to wager. 
As a result of the inquiry Jockeys Jerry Chorn and Young Chevalier were 
ruled off the turf for life, while Jockey Arthur Hinrichs and Dow 
Williams, who had been Lucky Baldwin's trainer, were barred from the two 
tracks which Little Pete had honored with his operations. Nothing could be 
done to Little Pete, who retired to Chinatown with a substantial addition 
to his fortune. 

Little Pete's star, however, was setting. He had become so rapacious that 
the Sue Yops determined, once and for all, to end his reign. They invited 
twelve other tongs, all of which had felt the weight of Little Pete's 
heavy hand, to join them in a war of extermination against the Sum Yops, 
and a formidable force of boo how doy took the field. A price of three 
thousand dollars was placed upon Little Pete's head, probably the largest 
sum that the tongs have ever offered for the death of an enemy. For weeks 
the hatchetmen of the allies kept close upon the trail of the chieftain of 
the Sum Yops, as did many free-lance professional killers, all eager to 
win the amount, which to them meant an old age of luxury in China. But 
none could pierce the wall of white bodyguards and boo how doy with which 
Little Pete had surrounded himself. 

In January 1897 there arrived in San Francisco two young Chinamen, Lem 
Jung and Chew Tin Gop, who had been prospecting in the mountains near 
Baker City, Oregon. They had accumulated a small fortune and had come to 
San Francisco to see the sights of Chinatown, after which they intended to 
return to China. They were members of the Suey Sing tong, now allied with 
the enemies of the Sum Yops, but they were men of peace. Neither had ever 
handled a hatchet or fired a pistol or participated in a tong fight. They 
knew nothing of Little Pete, and first learned of his villainies, and of 
the money that would be paid to his slayer, from their cousin Lem Jok Lep, 
who represented the Suey Sings on the board of strategy that had been 
created by the allied tongs to devise means of eradicating the Sum Yops. 
With rising indignation Lem Jung and Chew Tin Gop listened to Lem Jok 
Lep's recital of the many indignities which Little Pete had heaped upon 
the heads of their tong brothers. 

"There is no reason," said Lem Jung, "why we should not earn this money. I 
myself shall kill this man." 

With no experience in fighting, and with scarcely any plan of campaign, 
these young men rushed in where the bravest hatchetmen had trodden with 
the utmost caution. On the evening of January 23, 1897, which was the 
Chinese New Year's Eve, Lem Jung and Chew Tin Gop walked calmly into a 
barber-shop on the ground floor of Little Pete's building at Waverly Place 
and Washington Street. There they found Little Pete bending over with his 
head under a faucet, while the barber wetted his hair preparatory to 
plaiting it into a queue. Every circumstance favored the assassins. Little 
Pete had left his apartment in a hurry, accompanied by only one of his 
bodyguard. And this man he had sent out to buy a paper only a few minutes 
before Lem Jung and Chew Tin Gop entered the shop. For the moment Little 
Pete was defenseless. Chew Tin Gop remained near the door on guard while 
Lem Jung quickly stepped forward, caught Little Pete by the hair, brushed 
the barber aside, and shoved the muzzle of a heavy revolver down the back 
of the tong leader's neck, inside the coat of mail. He pulled the trigger, 
and Little Pete fell to the floor dead, with five bullets in his spine. 
The murderers escaped, received their money, and fled to Portland, where 
they were received as heroes. Eventually they took ship to China. The 
police arrested four Chinese, Chin Poy, Wing Sing, Won Lung, and Won 
Chung, who had been found loitering near the barbershop. On each were 
found revolvers, knives, and hatchets. Wing Sing and Chin Poy were brought 
to trial for the murder, but were acquitted. 

The death of Little Pete demoralized the Sum Yops, and the boo how doy of 
the Sue Yops and their allies promptly began a slaughter, which ended only 
upon the intervention of the Emperor Kwang Hsu of China, to whom Thomas 
Riordan, attorney for Little Pete and the Sum Yops, cabled for help. 'The 
Emperor called into consultation the great Chinese statesman Li Hung 
Chang. 

"The matter has been attended to," said Li Hung Chang. "I have cast into 
prison all relatives of the Sue Yops in China, and have cabled to 
California that their heads will be chopped off if another Sum Yop is 
killed in San Francisco." 

And in far-away America the war ended with startling suddenness, and the 
Sue Yops and the Sum Yops signed a treaty of peace which has never been 
violated. 

The spirit of Little Pete ascended to his ancestors in a blaze of 
magnificence, though perhaps without proper sustenance, for his funeral 
was probably the most spectacular ever held in San Francisco. A cortège 
more than a mile long followed the body to the grave, and the air rang 
with the report of fire-crackers, the "windy chaos" created by three 
Chinese bands, and the crackling of rattles swung by black-gowned priests. 
Scores of hacks had been rented for the occasion, and a dozen express 
wagons hauled the baked meats and the rice and the cases of gin and tea 
which had been provided that the spirit of the tong chieftain might 
refresh itself before beginning the long flight to heaven. But at the 
cemetery a company of hoodlums fell upon the cortège, routed the mourners, 
and feasted upon the funeral viands. 



Chapter 9. "God Help The Poor Sailor!" 

For half a century after the beginning of the gold rush one of the most 
dangerous areas in San Francisco was the waterfront, along the eastern and 
northeastern fringes of the Barbary Coast. Murderers, footpads, burglars, 
hoodlums, and Rangers prowled the streets in such numbers and carried on 
their depredations with such boldness that the police walked their beats 
in pairs and went in even greater force whenever they found it necessary 
to enter any of the dives with which the district abounded. Every 
policeman assigned to waterfront duty was specially chosen for strength, 
bravery, and huskiness. He was equipped with the regulation night-stick 
and pistol and also carried, in a large outside breast-pocket within easy 
reach of his hand, a huge knife a foot or more in length. This fearsome 
weapon was infinitely more effective at close quarters than a club or the 
cumbersome, unreliable fire-arm of the early days. Nor did the police 
hesitate to use it. Several battles occurred in which beleaguered 
policemen chopped off the hands of their assailants or inflicted other 
wounds equally frightful, and at least one in which an attacking hoodlum 
was decapitated. This latter feat was performed by Sergeant Thomas 
Langford, for many years one of the best-known men of the harbor precinct. 
Attacked in a second-hand-clothing store in Pacific Street by several men 
whom he had found ransacking the place, Sergeant Langford drew his knife 
and rushed them in the face of a heavy pistol-fire. He struck wildly in 
the darkness, and with his first blow neatly sheared the head of one of 
the thieves from his shoulders. The remainder of the gang, several of them 
badly wounded by the Sergeant's slashing knife, fled in terror, and 
thereafter Sergeant Langford was held in greater fear by the denizens of 
the Barbary Coast than any other policeman in San Francisco. 

Innumerable alleys and many comparatively important thoroughfares on or 
near the waterfront, including Davis, Drum, East (now the Embarcadero), 
Front, and Battery streets, and the eastern ends of Pacific, Jackson, and 
Washington streets, were crowded with brothels, saloons, and boarding-
houses catering especially to sailors, wherein the luckless seaman was 
invariably robbed and frequently murdered, and from which he was 
shanghaied aboard an outgoing ship. It was in these resorts that the word 
"shanghai" was probably first used as a verb. In early times there were no 
ships sailing directly from Shanghai to San Francisco, and a man who 
wanted to travel from the Chinese port to the Pacific coast of North 
America had to sail round the world to reach his destination. Almost as 
extensive a journey was required to go from San Francisco to Shanghai, 
which was then little more than a fishing village. Consequently, when a 
ship started on a long and hazardous cruise, she was said to be making a 
"Shanghai voyage"; and, likewise, a sailor who had been forcibly impressed 
into a vessel's crew was "sent to Shanghai." Later, as the expression was 
naturally shortened, he was said to have been shanghaied. As early as 1852 
twenty-three gangs were more or less openly engaged in this nefarious 
trade in San Francisco, and for many years shanghaiing was one of the most 
lucrative activities of the boarding-house masters, or crimps, and their 
natural allies, the dive-keepers of the Barbary Coast. 

* * * *

Until small craft driven by steam or gasoline came into general use, 
communication between shore and the ships anchored in the Bay of San 
Francisco was maintained by professional boatmen who plied back and forth 
in large skiffs, called Whitehall boats. They transferred pilots to and 
from the vessels and carried as passengers the sailors and officers who 
had been given shore liberty. Many of them, in later years, became 
important figures in San Francisco's commercial and shipping circles, but 
others were scoundrels and remained so throughout their lives. In this 
latter category were such celebrated boatmen and waterfront characters as 
Old Activity, so called because he was always deeply involved in some 
gigantic undertaking, seldom honest; a Mexican known as Red Shirt, who was 
at length shot by a policeman while robbing a sailor whom he had knocked 
unconscious with a bludgeon; Old Buzz, shrewd but illiterate, who talked 
almost continuously in a low, buzzing monotone; and Solly, a gigantic 
ruffian who carried a revolver, a slung shot, and a pair of brass 
knuckles, while round his neck a knife was slung on a lanyard. Solly was 
one of the most accomplished and successful crooks on the waterfront, and 
for a small fee he would do anything from scuttling a ship to cutting a 
throat. One of his favorite methods of acquiring wealth was to row into 
the middle of the Bay and threaten to throw his passenger overboard unless 
he were paid double or triple the fare which had been agreed upon. There 
was seldom any argument, for Solly's appearance was, to say the least, 
terrifying. Moreover, he had a well-earned reputation for carrying out his 
threats. He was never jailed, as he should have been, although the police 
always believed that he was responsible for the deaths of several men 
whose bodies were washed ashore soon after they had embarked in his boat. 
Eventually, however, Solly met his destined fate. He was engaged to take 
the mate of a British schooner out to the ship, which was anchored just 
inside the Golden Gate, and in mid Bay made his usual demand for more 
money. The mate promptly shot him and rowed the boat to the schooner, 
where the smaller craft was cast adrift with Solly's body draped over the 
gunwale. 

The best customers of the boatmen were the runners who worked for the 
sailors' boarding-houses, from one to half a dozen being attached to each 
place, according to the size and popularity of the resort. The principal 
duty of the runner was to bring seamen into the establishment of his 
employer, and for each man so delivered he was paid from three to five 
dollars, depending upon supply and demand. Whenever a ship was reported 
outside the Golden Gate, the Whitehall boatmen took the runners down the 
Bay, where they clambered over the vessel's side, sometimes while she was 
still under headway, and in any event soon after she had dropped her 
anchor. Once aboard, the runners stopped at nothing short of murder, and 
not always at that, to induce or compel the sailors to desert the vessel 
and accompany them to the boarding-houses. "They swarm over the rail like 
pirates," said the San Francisco Times of October 21, 1861, "and virtually 
take possession of the deck. The crew are shoved into the runners' boats, 
and the vessel is often left in a perilous situation, with none to manage 
her, the sails unfurled, and she liable to drift afoul of the shipping at 
anchor. In some cases not a man has been left aboard in half an hour after 
the anchor has been dropped." 

The wages paid to sailors shipping out of San Francisco varied with the 
years, but from gold-rush days to the turn of the present century they 
probably averaged around twenty-five dollars a month and found. 
Occasionally a seaman of unusual sobriety and intelligence found his own 
berth, but the great majority of sailors, even those who were not 
shanghaied, were shipped through the boarding-house masters. When a man 
signed his name or put his mark to a ship's articles, he received, in 
theory at least, two months' pay in advance, so that he might outfit 
himself and not have to depend upon what he could purchase from the 
captain's slop-chest. It was seldom, however, that any of this money 
actually passed into the possession of the seaman; almost invariably it 
went into the pockets of the crimps, ostensibly in payment for lodging and 
other shore expenses. The balance of the sailor's wages was not paid until 
the ship had completed her voyage and dropped anchor in her home port, 
which in sailing-ship days might mean anywhere from four months to four 
years. If the seaman deserted, he forfeited the entire amount. During all 
the time he was at sea or in port he was dependent for pocket-money upon 
the good nature of the captain; the latter could advance funds or withhold 
them, as he pleased. In San Francisco some ship captains arranged with the 
owners of second-hand-clothing stores, where the sailors purchased most of 
their supplies, to pay the bills contracted by members of their crews. The 
storekeeper charged exorbitant prices for everything and occasionally 
advanced the sailor a few dollars spending money, putting double or triple 
the amount on the bill. Just before the ship sailed, the captain paid the 
amount, deducting the sum from the seaman's wages and usually receiving a 
share of the graft from the storekeeper. 

If the captain of a ship intended to sail within a few days or a week 
after arrival, it was to his interest and that of his owners to keep his 
crew intact, since to obtain other men he would usually have to pay out, 
in advance wages and bonuses to the crimps and runners, more than he would 
save through forfeiture of wages. But if a ship was to lay up in harbor 
for several weeks or months, as frequently happened, the desertion of the 
sailors would result in a considerable saving. A skipper who thus faced 
the prospect of maintaining a crew in idleness usually welcomed the 
runners and did whatever he could to help them get the men off the ship. A 
week or ten days before the vessel made port, he and the mates began to 
pave the way for the activities of the runners by inaugurating a process 
called "running the men out"--they were deliberately cruel, compelled the 
ship's cook to serve rotten and scanty rations, and put the sailors at 
unnecessary and back-breaking tasks, and otherwise sought to make their 
lives as miserable as possible, hoping so to enrage and disgust them that 
they would leave the ship at the first opportunity. If they failed to do 
so, or if they resisted the importunities of the runners, as they 
sometimes did when large sums were owing to them, the captain announced 
that no shore liberty would be granted so long as the ship remained in 
port. The prospect of spending several weeks or months aboard the vessel 
while the bright lights of the Barbary Coast beckoned was usually more 
than a sailor could stand. Almost invariably, no matter how their resolve, 
they deserted within a few days and made their way to shore in small boats 
which a falsely sympathetic ship's officer had made available to them. 
They landed with no money and no place to go and were easy prey for the 
crimps and runners, who gave them drugged liquor and then lugged them off 
to the boarding-houses. Quite often even a captain who intended to remain 
in port only a short time would run his men out, and after they had 
deserted, and so forfeited their pay, he reshipped them through 
arrangements previously made with the boarding-house masters. The sailors 
would thus, and sometimes within a few hours, find themselves aboard the 
vessel they had just left, unable to collect the money they had earned 
during the previous voyage and with their pay for two months of the new 
cruise in the hands of the crimps. 

* * * *

When the runners went down the Bay to board an incoming ship, their 
equipment was so nearly identical as to be practically standardized. It 
consisted, usually, of a revolver, a knife, a blackjack or a slung shot, a 
pair of brass knuckles, a flask of liquid soap, obscene pictures, and as 
many bottles of rum and whisky, all liberally dosed with Spanish fly, as 
could be crowded into their pockets. And, of course, a complete assortment 
of lying promises. If the runner clambered over the side of a vessel about 
meal-time, his first care was to empty his flask of liquid soap into the 
kettle of soup or stew which was usually to be found simmering on the 
galley stove. When the resultant offensive mess was served, it naturally 
increased the traditional enmity between the sailor and the ship's cook 
and put the former in a proper frame of mind to listen to the runner's 
arguments, which were as often physical as vocal. He began by giving the 
sailors as much whisky and rum as they could drink, and when the drugged 
liquor began to take effect, he produced his obscene pictures and embarked 
upon a glowing account of the amorous pleasures which awaited them in the 
dives and brothels of the Barbary Coast. He offered to provide whatever 
money might be required, and told the sailors that the proprietor of the 
boarding-house of whose staff he was such an ornament had engaged the 
prettiest and most skillful harlots in all San Francisco for their 
amusement. These ladies, the runner said, were waiting impatiently. 
Moreover, he promised that when the seamen had caroused to their hearts' 
content, the generous boarding-house master would sign them for a voyage 
with a kind-hearted ship's captain who was going on a pleasure cruise in 
the South Seas. To men who had been at sea for months, or even years, this 
sort of ta!k sounded like news from heaven and was usually very effective. 
As soon as a sailor showed signs of wavering, the runner rushed him across 
the deck and shoved him into the waiting Whitehall boat. If he came 
willingly, the boatman gave him a drink; if he showed fight, the boatman 
hit him with a slung shot or club to keep him quiet. Sailors who 
stubbornly maintained their right to stay with their ship were threatened 
with revolvers or knocked down and beaten and not infrequently were 
carried off the vessel by main force. The runners operated under a sort of 
code by which a sailor was anybody's game until he was actually in a boat 
or until he had uttered the name of a boarding-house master, whereupon he 
became the property of the runner representing that particular crimp and 
was no longer molested by the others. It was not uncommon for two opposing 
runners to seize a sailor's ears between their teeth and hang on, biting 
hard, until the bewildered and frightened seaman cried out the name of the 
boarding-house master which had been most forcibly impressed upon his 
mind. 

Honest shipmasters, especially those in command of foreign vessels, were 
frequently warned by "certain interested parties," as the San Francisco 
Times put it in 1861, meaning politicians and lesser city officials, that 
if they interfered with the runners they would not be permitted to ship 
crews when they were ready to sail. Nevertheless, many tried to keep the 
rascals off their vessels, although they were seldom successful, because 
they were helpless against the rush of a dozen or more heavily armed 
thugs. Usually the officers of a ship were sufficiently cowed by a display 
of force and the brandishing of fire-arms, but if they persisted in their 
opposition, the runners sometimes drove them to their quarters and 
compelled them to remain there until the sailors had been rushed overside 
and were on their way to San Francisco and the boarding-houses. The 
boarding of the British ship Loch Err in September 1870 by runners who 
ignored the captain's protests was thus described by one of her 
passengers: 

"I had noticed several small boats containing two or three men in each, 
who with boat hooks and ropes attached had made fast and were being 
dragged along-side of our ship, which was now proceeding slowly into the 
harbour of San Francisco, and who had been told once or twice to let go 
and leave the ship. But they flatly refused to do so. . . .Whilst the crew 
was busy furling the sails, the men not only climbed on deck but mounted 
the rigging, and were soon seen very assiduously to importune, and at the 
same time hand bottles from which the sailors took long draughts. At first 
the sailors evaded them, but as the liquor began to work its effect, they 
gradually gave way, and allowed themselves to be cajoled. The captain 
several times called them down and threatened to have them arrested if 
they did not leave the ship. Two of them not only refused, but actually 
pointed a revolver at him, and told him that he was not in a 'B-- Lime 
Juice' country, but in God's own free land, where one man was as good as 
another. The captain appeared to be cowed, and did not interfere with them 
again. . . .At short intervals I noticed that the sailors climbed over the 
side and lowered themselves into the boats, accompanied by the villains, 
and were being rowed ashore. . . .I arose earlier than usual the next 
morning to pack my baggage preparatory to going ashore. Whilst partaking 
of coffee I heard the second officer calling all hands on deck, but 
receiving no response except from Dick [the oldest member of the crew, 
fifty of whose seventy years had been spent at sea] and the apprentices, 
he looked into the forecastle and found all the berths empty. I told him 
that the crew had been taken ashore by those who had boarded us. . . .
After partaking of breakfast I was about to leave, when I saw two men drag 
old Dick towards the companion ladder. I attempted to stop them, but 
received curses and several blows on my face. I returned the insult, and 
letting go of old Dick we engaged in a close contest, during which I 
knocked him down. Meanwhile, Dick was not idle, but fought with his man in 
order to free himself. I was about to spring to his assistance, but on 
account of the hatch which was close behind him, the impetus in trying to 
free himself caused him to reel backwards, and before I could grasp him 
poor old Dick fell headlong down, striking his head against the keel of 
the ship. I called for assistance, and after securing the two men, we 
descended and found poor Dick quite dead, his head and body being 
frightfully mangled. The captain at once hoisted a police flag, which was 
quickly responded to by two water-policemen, who took the two villains in 
custody. I was requested to appear as a witness at the trial, which took 
place three days afterward. . . .The two culprits being well represented 
by counsel, got off with a light sentence of six months hard labour."(*)

(* Through the Golden Gate, by Charles Ridgway, pages 7-10) 

Most of the seamen who succumbed to the blows or blandishments of the 
runners were taken immediately to the boarding-houses by which the runners 
were employed, although, as the San Francisco Times pointed out in 1861, 
"in more than one instance the crew of a newly arrived foreign vessel have 
actually been driven like slaves over the ship's side, stupefied with 
drugged liquor, and taken on board some other vessel and sent to sea, fit 
subjects for scurvy, without putting their feet upon land." Ordinarily the 
work of the runner was completed when the sailors stepped across the 
threshold of the boarding-house. Thereafter they were handled by the 
crimp, and if they proved intractable, by strong-arm bruisers who beat 
them into submission with slung shots and bludgeons. Once a sailor was 
actually in the clutches of a boarding-house master, he hadn't even the 
proverbial Chinaman's chance of regaining his liberty. As soon as he 
arrived, the bag containing his few possessions was taken from him and 
locked up. He was then given a bunk and as much cheap, vile whisky as he 
could drink. The liquor was usually dosed with laudanum or opium, Spanish 
fly having already served its purpose. On rare occasions women were 
brought in from the houses of prostitution to entertain the sailors, but 
more often the captives, if they had any money, were escorted by the 
crimp's strongarm men to the dives and brothels of the Barbary Coast, 
where they were promptly robbed by the harlots and other attachés of the 
resorts. The crimp always received a share of the spoil and was thus 
relieved of the trouble, and sometimes the danger, of himself robbing the 
sailor. 

While a seaman remained in the boarding-house, which was seldom longer 
than twenty-four hours, he was kept as drunk as possible. In due course a 
shipmaster appeared to engage a crew. As many men as he desired were 
produced by the crimp and were told that a ship had at last been found for 
them. If they were sober enough, they were permitted to sign their names 
to the articles and also, though they seldom knew it at the time, to a 
document which assigned their two months' advance pay to the crimp. If 
they were drunk or semi-conscious from drink, the boarding-house master 
signed for them. Occasionally a sailor objected to being shipped aboard a 
vessel of which he knew nothing for a voyage he didn't want to make, 
whereupon the crimp's thugs dragged him into another room and beat him 
until he was willing to do anything to escape further punishment. The 
formality of signing the articles having been completed, the captain 
returned to his ship, while the sailors were given more liquor, so heavily 
drugged that they were soon in a sodden daze. They were then carefully 
searched, and all valuables found were appropriated by the crimp and his 
hirelings. If any of the seamen wore good clothing, it was stripped from 
their bodies, and they were dressed in shoddy, worthless cast-oils or 
wrapped in old blankets. Their dunnage-bags were kept by the crimp, and 
the contents sold for whatever they would bring. As a final step in this 
phase of shanghaiing, the sailors were driven or carried to the 
waterfront, loaded into boats, and rowed out to the ship. There they were 
hoisted aboard as if they had been so many sacks of meal. One of the 
ship's officers checked them as they came over the rail, and when the 
proper number lay about the deck, the captain appeared and paid to the 
crimp the advance wages which had been assigned by each man of the crew. 
The captain also paid the crimp a bonus, ranging from twenty-five dollars 
to a hundred dollars, for each man delivered on board. Sometimes he had to 
pay more. During the eighteen-fifties, when the rush for the gold-fields 
made it extremely difficult for outgoing ships to obtain crews, an able-
bodied man was worth as much as three hundred dollars. Whatever sum was 
paid in bonuses was always, on one pretext or another, deducted from the 
sailor's pay. 

There were plenty of state and city laws under which the activities of the 
runners and crimps could have been controlled or even prevented, one 
municipal ordinance in particular imposing a fine of a hundred dollars 
upon any person who boarded a vessel without the consent of the captain. 
But little or no attention was paid to these statutes. Few runners or 
boarding-house masters were ever arrested, and even fewer convicted, for 
the politicians and city officials protected them just as they did the 
purveyors of vice in other parts of the Barbary Coast. Consequently both 
runners and crimps waxed fat and sassy. In busy seasons, when the port of 
San Francisco was crowded with shipping, and sailors were both plentiful 
and much in demand, some of the runners earned as much as five hundred to 
eight hundred dollars a week, while many of the boarding-house masters 
banked fifty thousand dollars a year clear profit over a long period. 
There is no record, of course, of the number of sailors who passed through 
the hands of these villains, but the annual turnover must have been 
several thousand. Of British seamen alone it was estimated(*) that during 
the eighteen-nineties between eight hundred and eleven hundred deserted 
their ships each year and were immediately shanghaied out again by the 
crimps. The Britishers were easiest of all sailors to influence, for the 
standard wage out of English ports was two pounds and ten shillings a 
month, while out of San Francisco it was between four and five pounds. 
Most of the difference went into the pockets of the crimps, and in the 
long run the sailor actually earned little more out of one port than out 
of another.

(* By the Reverend James Fell, an English clergyman who conducted a 
mission in San Francisco from 1892 to 1898 and wrote a book called British 
Merchant Seamen in San Francisco (London, 1899))

In this more or less enlightened age it is difficult to understand why the 
sailors submitted with such docility to the fearful abuse meted out to 
them by both runners and crimps. The answer probably lies in the fact that 
in those early days the vast majority of seamen were great stupid, hulking 
brutes of scant sensitivity and little or no intelligence. Aboard ship 
they were held under iron discipline and were accustomed to brutality from 
their officers. They naturally expected the same sort of treatment from 
everyone else and were seldom disappointed. Moreover, they had no legal 
rights that anyone, including the authorities, recognized, and no 
knowledge of how to obtain justice, even if it had occurred to them that 
they were entitled to it. The practice of enslaving sailors began to 
decline only with the gradual disappearance of the tramp sailing-ship; the 
formation of the Seaman's Union, the Seamen's Institute, and other labor 
and welfare organizations; the enactment of additional legislation for the 
protection of sailors and the regulation of shipping; and the effective 
enforcement of laws which already existed, particularly "An Act to 
Prohibit Shanghaiing in the United States," passed by Congress in 1906, 
which imposed, upon conviction of the offense, a fine of a thousand 
dollars or one year in prison or both. During the past twenty-five or 
thirty years shanghaiing has seldom been heard of, although it probably 
still occurs occasionally in San Francisco and other American seaports. 

* * * *

In the main the crimp who operated along the waterfront of San Francisco 
was so thoroughly a crook that he refused to play fair even with his 
confederate the shipmaster. Quite often the men who signed the articles in 
the presence of the ship's captain were strong, husky specimens, obviously 
sailors, while the ones actually shipped were just as obviously physical 
weaklings, puny little dock rats whom the crimp's runners had picked up 
along the waterfront. It was comparatively easy thus to impose upon a 
ship's captain, for all of the men delivered to his ship were invariably 
so sodden with drink or drugs that they appeared to be lifeless. 
Sometimes, also, the crimp included a dead man or two among the crew. The 
presence of a corpse was seldom discovered until the ship was at sea, and 
then the captain usually thought it that of a sailor who had died of acute 
alcoholism. The body was heaved overboard and nothing more thought of it. 
Nor did the captain report the matter to the police when, if ever, he 
again dropped anchor in the Bay of San Francisco, for the death of a 
sailor was a matter of little importance. Many murder mysteries in early 
San Francisco were never solved because of this practice of shipping the 
corpus delicti to sea as a live sailor; many crimps did a flourishing 
business in so disposing of the victims of criminals who had found that 
the easiest way to rob a man was to kill him first. Another way in which 
the crimp fleeced the shipmasters was to include a dummy among the sailors 
whom he delivered. A suit of clothes was stuffed with straw and properly 
weighted, while that part of the dummy which represented the head was 
swathed in mufflers or other heavy cloths. This fraud was not much easier 
to detect than the inclusion of a corpse, although when it was found out, 
the ship's captain didn't merely fling the dummy overboard and forget 
about it. The fact that he had paid a hundred dollars or more for a bundle 
of straw was usually enough to embitter him for years. But he had no 
recourse. 

The first man to sell a dummy to an unsuspecting shipmaster is said to 
have been a wizened little Laplander known as Nikko, for many years runner 
and right-hand man for Miss Piggott, a ferocious old woman who operated a 
saloon and boarding-house in Davis Street during the eighteen-sixties and 
the eighteen-seventies. No one ever knew her first name; she insisted upon 
being addressed, with proper respect, as Miss Piggott. Her only rival of 
importance as a female crimp was Mother Bronson, whose establishment was 
in Steuart Street. Both these ladies were worthy compeers of Pigeon-Toed 
Sal and the Galloping Cow, who were then rising to fame elsewhere on the 
Barbary Coast. Like these celebrated personages, Miss Piggott and Mother 
Bronson were their own bouncers and chief bar-tenders, but neither 
enforced her edicts with a bludgeon or a slung shot, as did Sal and the 
Cow. Miss Piggott remained faithful to the bung-starter, and in the use of 
this implement as a weapon she developed amazing skill. On the other hand, 
Mother Bronson, who was nearly six feet tall and broad in proportion, 
scorned to use any other than Mother Nature's weapons. She possessed a 
fine and strong set of sharp teeth, which she was delighted to sink into 
the anatomy of an obstreperous customer; her enormous feet were encased in 
No. 12 brogans, and her fist was as hard as a rock and in size resembled a 
small ham. With the toe of her boot she once hoisted a Chinaman from the 
floor of her saloon to the top of the bar, and she often boasted that she 
could fell an ox with one blow of her fist, although no one ever saw her 
do it. Nor did anyone dispute the statement. 

Sometimes Miss Piggott lacked enough sailors to round out an order, 
whereupon Nikko prowled through the Barbary Coast until he found a likely-
looking prospect, and enticed him into the Davis Street saloon. There he 
was nudged along the bar until he stood upon a trapdoor built into the 
floor. Then Nikko called loudly for drinks, which were served by Miss 
Piggott in person. The Laplander received beer, while for the stranger 
Miss Piggott prepared a concoction much used in shanghaiing circles and 
called a Miss Piggott Special. It was composed of equal parts of whisky, 
brandy, and gin, with a goodly lacing of laudanum or opium. While the 
victim was shivering under the terrific impact of this beverage, Miss 
Piggott leaned across the bar and tapped him on the head with a bung-
starter, while Nikko made matters certain with a blow from a slung shot. 
As the prospect began to crumple to the floor, Miss Piggott operated a 
lever behind the bar and dumped him into the basement, where he fell upon 
a mattress which Miss Piggott had thoughtfully provided, realizing that 
the man might receive an injury which would lessen his value. When the 
object of all these attentions awoke, he was usually in a ship bound for 
foreign climes, with no very clear idea as to how he got there. All of 
Miss Piggott's regular customers knew the exact location of the trapdoor 
and kept away from it, for it was an unwritten law of the establishment 
that any man who stood upon the fatal spot was fair game. The spectacle of 
Miss Piggott drugging and then slugging a stranger and dropping him into 
the basement excited no particular attention. The bystanders might comment 
judiciously upon the force and accuracy with which the old lady delivered 
the knock-out blow, but that was about all. It never occurred to anyone to 
go to the victim's assistance or to call the police. What happened to him 
was his own affair. 

Nikko is said to have sold mare than a score of dummies to shipmasters 
during his long and busy career as a runner for Miss Piggott. He devoted a 
great deal of time to building them and made them more lifelike by 
imprisoning a rat in each of the coat sleeves, so that when the dummy lay 
upon the deck of the ship the efforts of the rodents to escape produced 
very satisfactory twitchings, while their muffled squeaks passed muster as 
the groans of a very sick man. When, in the early eighteen-seventies, Miss 
Piggott passed to whatever reward awaited her, Nikko became a bartender 
for Olaf Frisson, who operated a saloon in Harrison Street which was much 
frequented by Norwegian sailors and ships' officers. Olaf's resort was an 
honest drinking place, with no shanghaiing done on the premises, and Nikko 
virtually had to begin life anew. He became, instead of a runner and a 
slugger, an oracle, and was soon known far and wide for the uncanny 
accuracy of his prophecies. For drinks to the assembled company, Nikko 
would predict in detail the happenings of any given year in any man's 
life. Olaf himself was seven feet tall in his socks and was a man of 
tremendous bulk besides, weighing more than three hundred pounds. He was 
healthy and popular and owner of a prosperous business; nevertheless he 
nursed a secret sorrow. He often complained that no woman had ever loved 
him for himself alone, and this distressing situation he attributed to the 
fact that he had practically no neck--his head jutted abruptly from 
between his shoulders, and he was never able to find a collar narrow 
enough for him. However, he had one great gift of which he was extremely 
proud and which made him famous all along the waterfront. He could, and 
frequently did, drink a gallon of whisky at one sitting--and a very short 
sitting, at that--and feel no ill effects. 

While the unquestioned abilities of Miss Piggott and Mother Bronson were 
recognized and generously applauded by the critical population of the 
Barbary Coast, the ladies were more or less regarded as freaks because 
they were women. As a general rule, despite an occasional bold stroke and 
the unflagging industry of Nikko and their other runners, they were forced 
to content themselves with the leavings of the masculine shanghaiers. The 
dominant figure of the waterfront during the years in which Miss Piggott 
and Mother Bronson flourished, and perhaps the most successful and 
dangerous crimp who ever operated in San Francisco, was a short, thick-set 
Irishman, with flaming red hair, a bristling red beard, and an irascible 
disposition. Throughout the underworld, and wherever sailors gathered, he 
was known and feared as Shanghai Kelly. Of scarcely less renown were such 
crimps as Jimmy Laflin, who with Bob Pinner operated a place at No. 35 
Pacific Street and specialized in crews for whaling vessels; George 
Reuben, who kept a boarding-house for German sailors; Horseshoe Brown, who 
at length killed his wife and himself in front of their resort in Kearny 
Street; Shanghai Brown, whose place was in Davis Street; Calico Jim, a 
Chileno who conducted a particularly low saloon and crimping joint at 
Battery Point; Johnny Fearem, Patsy Corrigan, and Michael Connor, who had 
saloons and boarding-houses in East Street, now the Embarcadero; and Billy 
Maitland, of Front Street. Some time during the eighteen-nineties Calico 
Jim is said to have shanghaied six policemen who were sent, one after 
another, to arrest him. Soon afterwards he left San Francisco. When his 
victims returned from their enforced cruise, they pooled their resources, 
chose one of their number by lot, and sent him to South America to search 
for the crimp. After several months the policeman came upon Calico Jim in 
the streets of Callao, Chile, and shot him six times, once for each 
shanghaied officer.(*)

(* The story of Calico Jim has been current in San Francisco for many 
years, but I was unable to find any verification of it. The Police 
Department has no record of the shanghaiing of six policemen.) 

In his latter years, about 1880, Michael Connor abandoned East Street and 
opened the Chain Locker Saloon and Boarding House at Main and Bryant 
streets. While Connor was a crimp and a shanghaier, he was also a deeply 
religious man, and his proudest boast was that he never told a lie, though 
when in his cups he would admit that he sometimes stretched or garnished 
the truth. In those days a man was not considered a real sailor until he 
had made the perilous Cape Horn passage, and a shipmaster who could be 
convinced that a seaman had been round the Horn was usually willing to pay 
a few dollars more for him than for an ordinary man who had not undergone 
this tremendous experience. Whenever Connor assembled a crew, he always 
swore upon the Bible that each man had been round the Horn. In one sense 
this was true enough, for the first thing Connor did when a sailor was 
brought into his house was to lay a cow's horn upon the floor and make the 
seaman walk round it. In his back yard Connor also installed a ship's 
steering-wheel and a mast with flying jib, main halyards, truck, and 
rigging, upon which he gave his landlubber victims a few lessons in 
seamanship before loading them aboard a vessel. 

Shanghai Kelly's saloon and boarding-house was a three-storey frame 
structure at No. 33 Pacific Street, between Drum and Davis streets, under 
part of which tidewater flowed. Kelly preferred to handle bona fide 
sailors, partly because they were more docile and partly because there was 
seldom any danger of reprisal, no matter how they were treated. But, in 
common with his co-workers in the crimping field, he would, if necessary 
to fill out a crew, shanghai whoever fell into his hands. And for a price 
he would shanghai any man whose enemies wanted him out of the way. Kelly's 
runners and strong-arm men went into the streets or the dives of the 
Barbary Coast and blackjacked the men they wanted, or induced them to 
visit Kelly's saloon. There they were drugged, blackjacked, and dropped 
through trapdoors, of which there were three in the floor in front of the 
bar, into a boat which was always tied up to a pillar of the house. In his 
drugging operations this prince of shanghaiers used the Miss Piggott 
Special and also gave his victims a concoction of his own invention, 
compounded of schnapps and beer and seasoned with opium or laudanum. 
Besides these quieting doses he used a cigar heavily doped with opium, 
which was known as "the Shanghai smoke" and was manufactured especially 
for him by a Chinese cigar-maker. 

Kelly's boarding-house was usually filled with sailors, many of whom put 
themselves in his power of their own accord and with full knowledge of 
what would undoubtedly happen to them, because he provided free women as 
well as free liquor and permitted any sort of debauchery a man might 
fancy--and sometimes men who had been several years at sea came ashore 
with very exotic ideas. Once during the middle eighteen-seventies, 
however, Shanghai Kelly found his place practically bare of seamen at a 
time when three ships anchored off the Heads, outside the Golden Gate, 
wanted crews immediately. One of these vessels was the Reefer, a notorious 
hell-ship out of New York, which was commanded by a captain with whom no 
sailor in his right mind would ship if he could avoid it. Confronted by 
the necessity of shanghaiing strangers in wholesale lots, Kelly performed 
the exploit which set the cap-stone to his fame and which is still talked 
about along the San Francisco waterfront as the most daring job of 
crimping in the history of the city. He chartered the Goliah, an old 
paddle-wheel steamer which had wheezed about the Bay for many years, and 
announced that he would celebrate his forthcoming birthday with a picnic, 
at which there would be free liquor and other attractions. He issued a 
blanket invitation to the Barbary Coast, and the riff-raff of that quarter 
answered in droves. As his guests came aboard, however, Shanghai Kelly 
counted them, and when ninety men stood on deck, he cast off, and the 
Goliah chugged down the Bay and outside the Golden Gate into the broad 
Pacific. Barrels of beer and whisky were broached, and the picnickers 
began to drink Kelly's health with great enthusiasm. But the liquor was 
heavily drugged, and within two hours every man on board, excepting Kelly 
and his henchmen, was asleep. Thereupon the Goliah steamed alongside the 
Reefer and the two other ships, and a crew for each vessel was hoisted 
aboard, although there was scarcely a man among the ninety who knew one 
end of a ship from the other. On her way back to San Francisco the Goliah 
took off the survivors of the ship Yankee Blade, which had been wrecked on 
a rock off Point Conception, west of Santa Barbara. The landing of the 
rescued men at the Market Street wharf caused great excitement, and no one 
seemed to notice that Shanghai Kelly had returned without his picnic 
guests. 

* * * *

The most celebrated of the runners who made the port of San Francisco a 
byword in all the Seven seas was Johnny Devine, better known as the 
Shanghai Chicken, who was described by the San Francisco Call in 1871 as 
"one of the most dangerous of the habitués of the Barbary Coast." Devine 
was a New Yorker, and no one in San Francisco, at least so far as the 
police ever learned, knew anything about his early life except that he had 
been shanghaied out of the metropolis in 1859, when he was twenty years 
old. About two years later, in 1861, he appeared in San Francisco and soon 
became one of the principal ornaments of the waterfront and the Barbary 
Coast. He was a bold and industrious burglar, footpad, sneak-thief, 
pickpocket, and pimp. 

At one time he had seven women walking the streets for him or entertaining 
men whom he brought to their quarters. He was a real artist with the 
blackjack, the slung shot, and brass knuckles and for a small sum would 
commit, upon whoever was pointed out as the proper recipient of his 
attention, any sort of physical outrage from mauling to mayhem. In nine 
months he was arrested twenty-seven times for as many different crimes, 
but the only punishment meted out to him by the courts during this period 
was fifty days in jail. He had been hired for fifty dollars to attack a 
man against whom another and more cautious man held a grievance, and had 
done his work so well that his victim was in a hospital for several 
months. 

When he first came to San Francisco, the Shanghai Chicken fancied himself 
as a prize-fighter. He defeated Patsy Marley in a bout at Point Isabel, 
and a little later he fought Soapy McAlpine at San Mateo. Soapy was a much 
better pugilist than Devine, and a bit more imaginative. He introduced 
kicking, biting, and butting into the fray and soon stretched the Shanghai 
Chicken unconscious on the floor. When he was able to walk, Devine said 
with great firmness that he was through with the prize-ring. He became a 
runner for a crimp named Johnny Walker and later was a sort of chief of 
staff for Shanghai Kelly, on whose behalf he performed great deeds. He was 
particularly adept at hi-jacking sailors whom other runners had captured 
and were escorting to the boarding-houses of their employers. He once 
tried to take a drunken sailor away from Tommy Chandler, one of Shanghai 
Brown's runners, and Chandler promptly knocked him down with a hearty 
punch to the jaw. The Shanghai Chicken got to his feet, carefully felled 
the sailor with a slung shot so that he couldn't escape, and then drew an 
old pepper-box pistol and shot Chandler in the left breast and right hand. 
He then lugged his booty to Shanghai Kelly's boarding-house. The shooting 
ruined a promising career in the prize-ring, for Chandler had shown 
considerable ability as a fighter and had already defeated Dooney Harris, 
a well-known English pugilist, and Billy Dwyer, who was murdered by Happy 
Jack Harrington. Chandler never fully recovered the use of his right hand, 
and never again entered the ring. Nevertheless, he refused to appear as a 
witness against the Shanghai Chicken, and the latter escaped punishment. 

On June 13, 1868 Devine went on a spree with Johnny Nyland, another of 
Shanghai Kelly's runners. Both had guns, and Nyland also carried a huge 
knife which he boasted had been stolen from the dead body of a waterfront 
policeman. They shot and knifed several men--none seriously, however--in 
Billy Lewis's saloon, on Battery Street, and then swaggered into the bar-
room attached to Billy Maitland's boarding-house, in Front Street, near 
Vallejo Street. There Nyland cut two men with his knife, while the 
Shanghai Chicken fired half a dozen shots at the bottles behind the bar, 
and several at the bar-tender. Devine was thus engaged when Billy 
Maitland, a huge man of tremendous strength and with a wide reputation as 
a rough-and-tumble fighter, came into the saloon. Maitland took Nyland's 
knife away from him and kicked him into the street. With the knife in his 
hand he returned to the bar-room to find the Shanghai Chicken unsteadily 
aiming a pistol at him. Maitland lunged forward, Devine dropped the gun 
and raised his left arm to protect his throat, and the heavy knife sheared 
cleanly through the flesh and bone of his wrist. While the Shanghai 
Chicken screamed in pain, Maitland tossed him into the street beside 
Nyland and slammed the door. Devine struggled to his feet, shrieked curses 
at Maitland for a moment, and then cried: 

"Hey, Billy, you dirty bastard! Chuck out me fin!" 

Maitland opened the door of his saloon and threw Devine's severed hand 
onto the sidewalk. Supported by Nyland, the Shanghai Chicken carried it to 
Dr. Simpson's drug-store, at Pacific and Davis streets, where he flung the 
gory member on the counter. 

"Say, Doc," he said, "stick that on again for me, will you?" 

Before Simpson could tell him that such surgery was impossible, Devine 
collapsed. He was sent to a hospital, where his left arm was amputated a 
few inches above his wrist. When he recovered, he had a large iron hook 
attached to the stump and thereafter was more dangerous than ever. He 
sharpened the point of the hook to needle fineness, and in his fights used 
it as an offensive weapon, inflicting terrible wounds. He began to drink 
more and more after his injury, however, and soon became so unreliable 
that Shanghai Kelly not only discharged him, but tried to shanghai him. 
Several attempts failed, although once Kelly's strong-arm men captured him 
and got him as far as the boat-landing. There the Shanghai Chicken broke 
his bonds and went into action with his iron hook. He soon had Kelly's 
sluggers fleeing for their lives. Then Devine rowed Kelly's boat down the 
Bay and sold it to another crimp. 

As a criminal, the Shanghai Chicken sank pretty low after his hand had 
been cut off by Billy Maitland. His women left him, and he managed to eke 
out an existence only by robbing drunken men and committing small thefts. 
About 1869 he served a year in the county jail for larceny and soon 
afterwards was imprisoned for thirty days for stealing three pigs' feet 
from a lunch-room. A few weeks after he had served this sentence, in May 
1871, he committed the final crime of his career. He shot a German sailor 
at Bay View, in South San Francisco, and then threatened to kill a woman 
because she refused to hide him from the police. He was not caught until 
the next morning, however, when Patrolman John Coulter found him aboard 
the steamer Wilson G. Hunt, which was about to sail from Meiggs Wharf. He 
was wearing his victim's cap, having left his own black sombrero at the 
scene of the crime. While Coulter was taking him to police headquarters, 
the Shanghai Chicken said: 

"John, you're a damned good fellow, but I'm afraid you'll have me hung." 
"Why so?" asked Coulter. 
"Well," said Devine, "I shot a son of a bitch at Bay View yesterday, and I 
think they'll make me swing for it." 

He was right. They did. 

* * * *

Not every seaman who sailed into the Bay of San Francisco fell into the 
hands of the runners and crimps. There were many who were given shore 
leave by their captains and returned to their ships when it expired; many 
who deserted of their own accord and came in contact with the boarding-
house masters only when their money was gone and they were ready to ship 
out again; and many who ended their voyage at San Francisco and were paid 
off there. These men, especially those in the last-named class, always 
came ashore with a little money, which they were anxious to spend. For 
many years they provided a large share of the revenue which flowed into 
the bar-rooms, dance-halls, concert saloons, and brothels of the Barbary 
Coast. They were always welcome in any of the resorts, while scores of 
places made special efforts to attract their custom. Some of the dives 
catered particularly to the Souwegians, as the Scandinavian sailors were 
called, and provided the sort of women and entertainment which these sons 
of the north were likely to prefer; others sought to entice the German or 
the Englishman or the Frenchman; while perhaps a score bent their energies 
to the amusement of the Negro. Curiously enough, a Negro sailor in San 
Francisco was always called Mister Peters, a queer bit of nomenclature 
which persisted for years, but of which no one appears to know the origin. 

Large numbers of sailors could invariably be found in the audiences of the 
Bella Union on the Barbary Coast, and the Midway Plaisance in Market 
Street, particularly the latter after it had begun to feature hoochy-
coochy dancers. Bottle Koenig's concert saloon, where the immortal Oofty 
Goofty made his theatrical debut and which was noted for the beauty and 
amiability of its pretty waiter girls, was also a place of resort for 
sailors, although it probably would have been more popular if the bouncers 
had been a little less enthusiastic in their use of hickory bludgeons. 
There was no dancing at Bottle Koenig's or at any of the other resorts of 
that type; they strove to hold the sailors' interest with liquor and bawdy 
shows. Seamen who desired to dance went to the scores of dance-halls which 
flourished throughout the Barbary Coast. On the floor of any of these 
places, with a fair damsel clasped in his arms, the frolicsome sailor was 
encouraged to express himself in any manner which might seem to him best 
suited to the occasion; he was not molested, indeed, if he chose to 
execute dance movements which might with more propriety have been 
performed behind the closed doors of a sleeping-chamber. 

When a sailor with money in his pockets had tired of women and 
entertainment and wanted to do some serious drinking, he was welcome in 
many famous saloons, among them the Balboa, the Foam, the Bowhead, the 
Grizzly Bear, and Sverdrup's, all on East Street; the Cowboy's Rest, in 
Pacific Street near Kearney; and the Whale, also in Pacific Street. 
Excepting the Cowboy's Rest and the Whale, these were decent enough 
drinking places. The Whale, which was run by Johnny McNear during its 
period of greatest renown, was as tough a bar-room as San Francisco ever 
harbored. Sailors were encouraged to come there and drink because they 
were notoriously free spenders and not overcaptious about the quality of 
the liquor served them, but no one not a recognized criminal was permitted 
to make the place a regular haunt and rendezvous. Any murderer, burglar, 
or footpad whom the police might be seeking was almost sure to be found in 
the Whale, but it usually required several policemen to get him out. A 
list of the criminals who sought refuge there would be a roster of San 
Francisco's worst citizens during a period of some ten or fifteen years. 
One of the most notable of the Whale's habitués was Cod Wilcox, who in the 
late eighteen-seventies stole a sloop and enjoyed a brief but prosperous 
career as a pirate in the Bay of San Francisco before he was caught and 
sent to San Quentin Prison for twenty years. Another was Tip Thornton, a 
pickpocket, burglar, sneak-thief, and footpad, who usually worked with his 
brother, Mush Thornton. Although he was a slim, soft-spoken little man, 
Tip Thornton was acclaimed as one of the most ferocious fighters on the 
Barbary Coast and as a very dangerous man to annoy. He always carried a 
long knife with a narrow blade, but sharp as a razor, and when he became 
involved in an altercation, his sole idea was to slice off his opponent's 
nose. If he couldn't get a nose, he'd take an ear. He is said to have cut 
off at least a score of noses in the Whale and elsewhere on the Barbary 
Coast, and almost as many ears. But he finally sliced off one nose too 
many, and Patrolman Jack Cleary, one of the few policemen who dared enter 
the Whale alone, went to the saloon, fought off the bar-tender and half a 
dozen other men, and came out dragging Tip Thornton at the end of a pair 
of nippers. The nose-slicer was sent to San Quentin. 

The Cowboy's Rest, the site of which is now a dairy lunch-room, was 
operated by Maggie Kelly, a large and voluptuous blonde who was variously 
known as Cowboy Mag and the Queen of the Barbary Coast. No women were 
regularly attached to her place, but she operated a rooming-house in 
connection with her saloon, and whoever rented one of her rooms was never 
asked any embarrassing questions. She flourished after Pigeon-Toed Sal, 
the Galloping Cow, Mother Bronson, and Miss Piggott had been gathered to 
their fathers, but she was in every way their equal. Like these ferocious 
females of an early day, she was her own bouncer, and whenever a customer 
became obstreperous, she relieved him of his weapons and ran him into the 
street. Her place was destroyed by the holocaust of 1906, and when the 
police searched the ruins, they found, behind the bar, a neat pile of some 
fifty revolvers and a score of knives, besides many slung shots, 
blackjacks, and brass knuckles. Cowboy Mag was arrested frequently and 
became the subject of critical comment in the newspapers because of the 
extreme excitement and irregularity of her love life--in the course of her 
somewhat hectic career she found it necessary to shoot one husband and one 
lover, to discipline with a club several other men who had enjoyed her 
favors, and to administer sound thrashings to various ladies who attempted 
to trespass upon her amorous preserves. Fortunately for her, the husband 
and the lovers were too gentlemanly to appear in court against her, and 
the other women dared not. Her greatest public renown came in 1898, when 
several Negro regiments were waiting in San Francisco for transports to 
take them to Manila. Other Barbary Coast dive-keepers welcomed the black 
soldiers, for they had money to spend, but Cowboy Mag remained true to her 
principles. Each morning until the regiments had embarked, she mounted 
guard at the door of her saloon with a revolver and remained there 
throughout the day, threatening to shoot every Negro who tried to enter. 
When a newspaper reporter suggested that she wasn't being very patriotic, 
she said, simply: 

"I hate niggers! I'll blow the head off any nigger that comes into my 
place!" 

* * * *

The commanders of the ships which anchored in the Bay of San Francisco 
seldom frequented the Whale, the Cowboy's Rest, and the other dives of 
that character at which the common sailors were such welcome guests. 
During their hours ashore the shipmasters were usually to be found 
spinning their yarns in the innumerable respectable bar-rooms, along the 
waterfront and elsewhere, which did much toward increasing and spreading 
the fame of San Francisco as a cosmopolitan and hospitable city. One of 
the most famous of these places was the Bank Exchange, in Montgomery 
Street near California Street, a magnificently appointed saloon paved with 
marble and decorated with oil paintings valued at a hundred thousand 
dollars. M. S. Latham, a San Francisco capitalist, eventually bought one 
of these pictures for $10,500. The Bank Exchange was especially noted for 
Pisco Punch, invented by Duncan Nichol, who was second only to Professor 
Jerry Thomas as bar-tender. During the eighteen-seventies it was by far 
the most popular drink in San Francisco, although it was sold for twenty-
five cents a glass, a high price for those days. The secret of its 
preparation died with Nichol, for he would never divulge it. But 
descriptions of the San Francisco of the period abound with lyrical 
accounts of its flavor and potency, and it must have been the crème de la 
crème of beverages. Its base was Pisco brandy, which was distilled from 
the grape known as Italia, or La Rosa del Peru, and was named for the 
Peruvian port from which it was shipped. And the brandy itself, even 
without the other ingredients which made it into punch, must have been 
something to write home about. It was thus described by a writer who first 
tasted it in 1872: 

"It is perfectly colourless, quite fragrant, very seductive, terribly 
strong, and has a flavour somewhat resembling that of Scotch whiskey, but 
much more delicate, with a marked fruity taste. It comes in earthen jars, 
broad at the top and tapering down to a point, holding about five gallons 
each. We had some hot, with a bit of lemon and a dash of nutmeg in it
. . . .The first glass satisfied me that San Francisco was, and is, a nice 
place to visit. . . .The second glass was sufficient, and I felt that I 
could face small-pox, all the fevers known to the faculty, and the Asiatic 
cholera, combined, if need be."(*)

(* Underground, or Life Below the Surface, by Thomas W. Knox, page 253. 
During my stay in San Francisco I tried industriously, even desperately, 
to find some of this rare liquor, but, so far as I could learn, no 
recognizable Pisco brandy has been seen there since Prohibition. The 
speakcasy bar-tenders had never heard of it. Pisco brandy was also used in 
a drink called Button Punch, which Rudyard Kipling, in his From Sea to Sea 
(1899), described as the "highest and noblest product of the age. . . .I 
have a theory it is compounded of cherubs' wings, the glory of a tropical 
dawn, the red clouds of sunset, and fragments of lost epics by dead 
masters.")

Among other famous saloons wherein sea captains were wont to forgather and 
flavor the atmosphere with the tang of their salty reminiscences were the 
Cobweb Palace, on the northern end of Meiggs Wharf; the Cottage Bar, in 
Stevenson Street, then a dingy alley; the Martin and Horton saloon, in 
Clay Street near Montgomery; and John Denny's grocery and bar, at Salmon 
and Pacific streets, which was also a noted political rendezvous. In the 
alley behind Denny's place hung a large bell, which was rung by a push-
button under the bar. Whenever a politician entered, particularly one who 
was running for office, Denny pressed the button, the bell rang, and 
everyone within hearing rushed into the saloon to drink the politician's 
health--at the politician's expense. The Cottage was run by Barney Schow, 
who was celebrated both for the length and luxuriance of his mustache and 
for his great strength--he could juggle a thirty-gallon barrel of beer 
with one hand. His most prodigious feat was performed in 1898, when he 
lifted the anchor of the bark Elsie Thurston, after the vessel's donkey-
engine had broken down. He saved the lives of six men who had been caught 
in the anchor chain, but injured his own back so seriously that thereafter 
he walked with a cane. Schow's saloon was popular at a time when one of 
the ambitions of every young man was to own a meerschaum pipe, although 
few were willing to do the almost continuous smoking required to color it 
properly. Barney Schow contracted to do this work and loaned the pipes to 
shipmasters bound for the Orient, who kept them burning to China and back. 

The Cobweb Palace, a favorite resort of those who liked hot toddies 
concocted of boiling whisky, gin, and cloves, was opened in 1856 by Abe 
Warner and operated continuously by him until he retired, in 1897, at the 
age of eighty years. It was really an extraordinary place. Warner had a 
great liking for spiders and never interfered with one when it started to 
spin. As a result, the interior of his place was a mass of cobwebs; they 
hung in festoons from the walls and ceiling, covering the lighting 
fixtures and decorations and even extending to the row of bottles behind 
the bar. Set against the wall under the cobwebs were rows of cages 
containing monkeys, parrots, and other small animals and birds which 
Warner had purchased from sea captains and sailors. One parrot, which had 
the freedom of the saloon and frequently imbibed too much liquor, called 
Warner Grandfather and cursed in four languages. During the course of his 
career Warner also acquired one thousand garish paintings of nude women, a 
few of which were faintly visible beneath the masses of cobwebs on the 
walls; and a unique collection of walrus tusks and the teeth of the sperm 
whale, all handsomely carved with patriotic scenes, which is now in the 
Museum of Golden Gate Park. A frequent visitor to the Cobweb Palace was 
William Walker, the famous Central American filibuster who, with his long, 
black cloak and big, floppy hat, was a familiar figure in San Francisco 
for several years. Once when Walker poked with his cane at a cobweb, 
Warner remarked: "That cobweb will be growing long after you've been cut 
down from the gibbet." It was only about three years later that Walker was 
shot by a firing squad in Honduras. 

The Martin and Horton saloon was an unpretentious place with long, bare 
tables and sawdust-covered floors, but the liquor and free lunch were 
unexcelled anywhere in San Francisco, and prices were extremely low. Beer 
never cost more than a dime for a large glass, and whisky and other 
spirituous liquor sold for a bit, or twelve and one-half cents, a drink. 
This bar-room was the favorite loafing place of most of the queer 
characters who were seen about the streets of San Francisco during the two 
decades that followed the Civil War, but it was even more than that to 
Willie Coombs, who thought he was George Washington and always wore a 
Continental uniform of tanned buckskin. To Willie Coombs the saloon was 
both General Headquarters and the White House. He appeared there each 
night with his maps and his state papers and over a glass of beer planned 
his battles and composed messages to Congress and foreign nations. Once he 
almost starved himself to death before his friends could convince him that 
he was no longer at Valley Forge. 

Old Orthodox and Hallelujah Cox, street preachers who sometimes descended 
from their soap-box pulpits long enough to absorb a sustaining ration of 
beer, were among the regulars at Martin and Horton's; and so was their 
nemesis, Crisis Hopkins. Although he wore a high clerical collar and a 
ministerial frock coat, Crisis Hopkins was a scornful free-thinker. He 
followed Old Orthodox and Hallelujah about the streets and heckled them, 
and when they had finished their stints, he mounted a soap-box and 
delivered a reply. He always began with: "The hell-fire and damnation 
preachers are gone, friends; now listen to reason." For a few months 
Crisis Hopkins strove unsuccessfully to convert to free-thinking a shy 
little man, calling himself Charles E. Bolton, who often came into Martin 
and Horton's and drank beer, retiring to the remotest corner of the room. 
This same shy little man was at length, in 1883, unmasked as Black Bart, a 
famous road-agent who prowled the Western highways for some seven years 
and held