The San Francisco Tong Wars, Founding of the City -Focused Investigation
Where did the City of San Francisco Come from? When was it founded?
Greetings,
First, housekeeping. I was quite proud of last Thursday’s piece, although it did not get as many views as I’d hoped. Please consider giving it a look if you haven’t. I feel like I am beginning to hit my stride here, and last Thursday’s piece, a scattered round up of several topics of interest, was both fun to write and I think offered a lot of good info (and hopefully some entertaining and interesting opinions too). Next Thursday’s should be similar.
FYI, so far I have tried to avoid politics, including things like the Taiwan controversy or human rights issues in China or anything of the sort. I have done so as there may be readers who live in areas where these issues might cause problems, if you live in such an area, and wish to unsubscribe, I understand and wish you the best. I may not be as careful about this in the future. Be forewarned.
Second, today I am writing on the San Francisco Tong Wars and Chinese in the Old American West. This is a subject that has interested me for decades. My dream, and I honestly have no idea if this is realistic, is that this substack will generate enough interest to make writing a book on that subject a viable project.
This piece was started before I launched this project and has been in various states of completion since then. As it is, I obviously got a bit rushed to meet deadline and some of the citations could have been improved. Contact me or leave a question in the comments section if you have a question on where I got any of my information. (By the way, this is an open invitation. Feel free to ask for sources any time.)
The subject of Tong Wars and Chinese in the Old West is a fascinating subject that could used better documentation. This feeling is re-emphasized by the enthusiasm many people had for the TV show Warrior, that dealt with the San Francisco Tong Wars but played fast and loose with the setting and history. I hope to write more about the real history and the TV show once I get some fundamental background and essential facts out of the way, with this piece being part of that.
You may note that last Thursday’s piece included a section on the role the Chinese had in the creation of Yosemite as a resort and later National Park and one of the first pieces here was a map of the Old San Francisco Chinatown.
If you miss articles on ninja, well, interesting facts on ninja were included last Thursday, they will be mentioned next Thursday, and am I the only one who has fond memories of watching actor Adam West running around on an old episode of an extremely obscure television show called “Danger Theater” screaming about “Ninja! Pesky ninja! Everywhere!” on YouTube. 1 Seriously, I have been having a great time exploring the ninja history and the pseudohistory and where did it all come from, but I felt it was important to break it up and remind people this is not Pete’s weekly ninja column, but more Petes Mostly Asian History Column.
In the meantime, if all goes to plan, Ishl Allah, this week I offer this, the first really in-depth piece I have written on the San Francisco Tong Wars and the Chinese of the Old American West. Next week, I hope to offer one specifically on Chinese women of the same time and period and who they were and what they were doing in San Francisco and what their lives were like.
After that, I will be trying to mix things up, and there will be several pieces on Ninja both of today and the origins of where ninja beliefs of the past came from.
Again, please support this project, share these writings, give us positive vibes, and so on and so on.
San Francisco Tong Wars #1
The birth and early years of the city of San Francisco
The history of the San Francisco tong wars cannot be properly understood without knowing a little bit about the city of San Francisco and its history. Therefore, we start at the beginning.
San Francisco is a surprisingly young city. It emerged out of the chaos of the California Gold Rush of 1849. When gold was found in California, a huge influx of fortune seekers from around the globe headed to California hoping to find gold and get rich. Almost all of them intended their stay to be temporary. The dream was to come, find gold, get rich, and return home wealthy as soon as possible.
A surprising number of these fortune seekers were Chinese. And, like most other fortune seekers, most never planned to stay long in San Francisco and California, but failed to get rich and had to adjust and make new plans. In this context, it shouldn’t be surprising that a lot of the social problems that were endemic to the late 19th Century San Francisco Chinatown came from the problem that a large percentage of the residents were frustrated, lonely men who had come to San Francisco and California without their families who having failed to become wealthy, were instead eking out a living any way they could, and then sending a significant portion of their earnings home to their families.
But these are the characters of this story. What about the setting? Where did the city come from? What did the first Chinese, as well as other arriving fortune hunters, find when they arrived in this area during the time of the California Gold Rush?
Although the city of San Francisco did not exist in a recognizable form before the Gold Rush, there was a small settlement in San Francisco bay prior to the Gold Rush.
The Founding of the Earliest non-Indigenous Settlement in the Area
This settlement was founded in the 18th Century,
According to Wikipedia, the first non-indigenous visitors to the area were Spanish explorers who passed through in 1769 and claimed it for Spain. In 1776, this was followed by Spanish settlers and officials coming to the area. They built a Catholic mission and a fort called the Presidio. ( Yerba Buena, California.)
Although the settlement never grew big, it did survive.
In 1821, Mexico became independent from Spain, and about a year later word of this reached California, an unimportant place on the periphery of Spain’s North American colonies. The political change led to changes in the local lifestyle and allowed non-Mexicans to settle and purchase land in Mexico, if they became naturalized and converted to Roman Catholicism (Just like in Texas. It seems both Texas and San Francisco, undoubtedly two of the most bipolarly divergent yet iconic examples of American cultural excess and extremism, emerged from the 19th Century Mexican government’s naïve presumption that it would be a simple thing to take desperate, American fortune seekers and simply assimilate them into their society by asking them to swear an oath promising to behave themselves and also convert to Roman Catholicism? Apparently so. No comment.) (Mexican California.)
Regardless, with this new government and new policy, the tiny settlement became home to a small number of Americans and other immigrants who saw the bay area as a good place to settle and establish a business or ranch.
In 1833, a traveler named William Heath Davis left a detailed description of Yerba Buena. He described it as an isolated military outpost. This outpost, the Presidio, had a population of about 250 men, women, and children, mostly Spanish speaking Mexicans. The others included several Americans and an Irishman and a Scotsman. The residents were ranchers who often traded furs, including otter furs, with visiting ships. The nearby mission, while not part of the town, had a population that often included two thousand indigenous people, many of them skilled tradesmen. (Museum of San Francisco)
In 1835, the bulk of the population lived in the nearby mission, properly named the Mission Dolores.
A 1925 document now reprinted on the website of the Museum of San Francisco describes the city as such:
“In 1835 the Mission Dolores, now on Sixteenth Street, San Francisco, was then located about a mile from the site of the town of Yerba Buena. In August the population was estimated at two thousand Indians, many of them having been taught trades as blacksmiths, shipwrights, carpenters, tailors, etc. The Mission then owned tens of thousands of cattle, sheep, horses. Its possessions included most of San Mateo County."”
But it was also in 1835 that the first real structure outside of the Presidio and the mission was built in Yerba Buena. It was a large canvas structure built on a frame that served the harbor master, William Richardson. Richardson was a local rancher who had married a Spanish woman from a prominent family. (From the 1820s to the Gold Rush)
On July 4, 1836, the first house ever constructed in Yerba Buena was finished, having been constructed by Jacob Leese, who settled there, hoping to establish a mercantile business. When the house was finished a large celebration held (Museum of San Francisco)
1840 -Leese, the man who built the house sold it to the Hudson Bay Company and moved to Oregon. Although seemingly unimportant, it does establish a pattern of people, even prominent people, coming and going from the city. ( Museum of San Francisco)
In 1844, Yerba Buena had grown and had a dozen houses and was home to approximately 50 people (Museum of San Francisco)
In 1846, the Hudson Bay Company left, continuing the pattern of people, even rich people, coming and going. Yerba Buena now had a population of 150 to 200 people depending on the source on uses. (Museum of San Francisco. . . .) (Berglund, p. 6) [i][ii]
Becoming U.S. Territory and “Yerba Buena” gets renamed “San Francisco” just in time for the Gold Rush.
In 1846, during the Mexican-American War, the forces of the United States seized the area, established a local government of their own, and in 1847, Washington Allon Bartlett, the political administrator appointed by the US military for the area, issued a proclamation that changed the name of the settlement to San Francisco ( Yerba Buena, California. Washington Allen Bartlett )
In 1847, the population was 259 people. ( Museum )
Things didn’t change too much until the discovery of gold in the California region in the next year, 1848, and when the California Gold Rush of 1949 brought change, it brought change in a big way. Huge numbers of people came to San Francisco from all directions, from all over the globe, and several nations and continents, seeking to get rich quickly.
“In 1848, the school census showed a population of 575 males, 177 females and 60 children, a population of 812.” (museum . . .)
“As Spring advanced, the story of gold findings at Sutter's mill began to spread widely. Very quickly the excitement leaped to fever heat. Gold became the irresistible magnet and nothing could check the insistent rush. Laborers, clerks, waiters, servants, all disappeared as if by magic, and melted into the stream of feverish beings headed for the slopes of the Sierra.
In the month of May 1848 more than 150 people left San Francisco, and the days added to the departures. On May 29, "The Californian" announced it could not issue the newspaper "until further notice" because all of its employees had quit. Other papers were quickly closed for the same reason. On July 15, the "Californian" managed to get out slip of a paper announcing "The Whole World at War" alluding to the Revolution in France. The military governor of California issued a proclamation calling on the people to assist authorities in apprehending Army and Navy deserters who had joined the gold rush. Public schools were ordered closed because of the rush to the gold fields.”
(Museum . . .)
POPULATION DEMOGRAPHICS AND ETHNIC COMPOSITION
In 1850, in the midst of the Gold Rush, the San Francisco bay region had a population of approximately 35,000 people. That’s a growth from a little over 800 people to approximately 35,000 in two years. In other words, if we run the numbers, the population increased to over 43 times its original size in that short period.
Of these 35,000, a little over 4,000, or slightly over 10%, were Chinese and the overwhelming number of them were male, young and adventurous males. According to one source, in 1850, there were 4,018 Chinese men living in the city and 7 Chinese women. Just to reaffirm, that was seven, yes, single digit seven Chinese women known to be living in the new city in 1850. ( 7, “七”in Chinese. Yes, typos have been spotted here from time to time, and I do apologize for that, but the number 7 here is not a typo.) Again, running the numbers, that’s one Chinese woman for every 574 Chinese men. (Yung, page 18)
And most of these men were young and adventurous, risk-takers, and it may be presumed quite virile.
Obviously, social problems and social tension was going to occur among the Chinese population.
Attitudes and Impressions of the Chinese
Reports of the attitudes that other fortune seekers and residents held towards these Chinese fortune seekers need to be examined in depth. (As with so many things relating to this project, I hope to do it in the future, and if that sounds like a tired refrain, please put that in the context that this project is causing me to do more Asian studies related writing and research than I have in a long time, and that is a very good feeling. Keep supporting this project and it should, ultimately, get done.)
Of course, the Foreign Miners’ Tax Act of 1850 needs to be mentioned. It was an obvious, and blatantly represented as such, to reduce the presence of foreign, particularly non-White, particular Chinese from competing with White Americans in the mining for gold. Like so much, it merits an in-depth examination, something I don’t really have time or here. For the moment, let me suggest, horrors, apologies, and I feel ashamed, that you visit Wikipedia and begin your own research: Foreign Miners' Tax Act of 1850
But as for the subject of racial attitudes towards Chinese during this time, for the moment, I will say that reports vary.
Although most modern reports emphasize prejudice, discrimination, and economic exclusion of the Chinese, Richard Dillon paints a very different picture.
In his book, “The Hatchet Men, the Story of the Tong Wars in San Francisco’s Chinatown,” he writes that the local people and government enjoyed and appreciated the local Chinese during the early years of the city and they often added color to local events and festivals.
Although Dillon’s book was written in 1962 and is very much the work of a White San Franciscan without much background in China or Asian studies, and I think it’s likely that Dillon put too much faith in the statements of the local Chinese Consolidated Benevolence Association, the traditional, unofficial government of most of the USA’s Chinatowns, who pushed their own cooperative image of the city’s Chinese American history. Regardless, Dillon’s book is obviously also a labor of love and clearly his attempt to create the best book he could on the Tong Wars of his city. It is also one of the few book length works on that subject, perhaps the only one. (I hesitate to say “only” but I am still looking for others.) Therefore, despite a lack of proper footnoting or citation of his sources ( Aaargh! I hate that.), Dillons book remains in print today, and is still read.
For several reasons, it’s well worth quoting at length from Dillon’s book, particularly as it makes a striking contrast to the general image of small bands of scattered, abused and mistreated Chinese miners being tormented, robbed, and bullied by their larger and more numerous White counterparts. Instead, we get a picture of a loose knit community of new arrivals and a fluid, confused, and chaotic, economic and political situation with many groups struggling to both find a niche and contribute to the great good, and trying to work together, and appreciate their diversity.
Of course, all what Dillon depicts can be true and it can be mixed in with blatant racist bullying. They are not necessarily contradictory.
Obvious apologies for periodic racism or language.
In the years immediately following 1849, the Chinese were welcomed to San Francisco as a quaint segment of society. They were considered colorful and docile and quite law abiding. When roughly handled in the mines or persecuted by the Foreign Miners’ License Law, they often drifted down to San Francisco from the Mother Lode, to swell the population of Little China, as Chinatown was first called.
Little China was adjacent to Little Chile, which became Sidney Town and later the Barbary Coast. A second Little China existed for a time at the foot of Fremont Street where Chinese wreckers squatted on the beach and broke up old hulks like the “Loo Choo,” which had brought Colonel Jonathan D. Stevenson’s regiment of brawlers to Yerba Buena. A village of 150 Chinese fishermen huddled in the lee of Rincon Point not far from the mouth of Mission Creek. With their twenty-five boats they took 3,000 pounds of sturgeon, shark and herring each day, most of which they dried. Other colonies were located on Hunter’s Point in the South Bay, on the “contra costa,” and at China Camp in Marin County. But these were fish or shrimp camps where the men anchored in their homemade junks, and merely satellites of Chinatown.
Dupont Gair became and remained the nucleus of Chinatown. Strangely enough, for a ghetto, old Chinatown grew up not across the tracks or as an outskirts shanty town. It blossomed in the heart of the city on high ground adjacent to Portsmouth Square – San Francisco’s first civic center. The heavily crowded but substantial buildings occupied the very site of the founding of Yerba Buena, the parent village of San Francisco, if we except Captain William Richardson’s temporary structure on the beach itself. The second building erected, that of Jacob P. Leese, was located on the corner of Dupont and Clay in 1836. Dupont was then called calle de la Fundacion, Street of the Founding. When Port Captain Richardson constructed his second building, in 1838, the adobe La Casa Grande, it was on a lot on the west side of Dupont between Washington and Clay Streets. The great fires of May and September 1850 swept over the area of Chinatown, and when people returned to live in the ashes more and more of them were Chinese.
With little crime or disorder in Chinatown, John and Brother Jonathan got along well in these early years. Evidence of the great affection -however short lived—of San Franciscans for their new Oriental neighbors was the celebration of August 18, 1850, in Portsmouth Plaza. Mayor John Geary, Reverend Albert Williams and Frederick A Woodsworth –like his brother Selim a sort of quasi consul for the Chinese community gathered on a platform erected in the square. There they orated and the presented a number of religious tracts, papers and books printed in Chinese characters. The crowd listened in rapt attention to their speeches, translated into Cantonese by the interpreter Ah Sing. The mayor wound up the program by inviting the Chinese to take part in the funeral procession for President Zachary Taylor scheduled for the following day. They accepted with much alacrity and gratitude. They were much honored by the gesture.
The next day, the China Boys, as they were fondly called, formed up and marched in a procession to Portsmouth Square to hear Mayor Geary orate once again. The 1850 City Directory noted the appearance in the parade of the large body of the Chinese in their curious national costume as the most remarkable feature of the ceremony. The directory ventured the opinion that this was the first procession in the limits of Christendom in which Chinese had formed such a prominent part. The next morning the China Boys presented Mayor Geary with an elaborate document in ornate Chinese calligraphy ( . . . ) (Dillon, p. 30-32)
By contrast, books such as Victor G and Breet de Barry Nee’s “Longtime Californ’ -a Documentary Study of an American Chinatown," emphasizes the legal and economic obstacles places in the way of Chinese trying to find success and settle in the USA, and the vision of the new American authorities to create a new American state in which only White males would be eligible for full citizenship and full economic and legal privileges. ( Nee, p. 31)
As stated, none of this is actually a complete contradiction to the colorful picture of the new city portrayed by Dillon. For better or worse, as I have learned in my life, people tend to enjoy cultural diversity right up until the point where they find themselves competing for needed resources with members of other cultures.
Social and Economic Instability of the City and Foreign Born Population
As stated, the city was marked by a great deal of economic and social instability. Berglund, however, offers some numbers,
“Among the working classes arriving between 1850 and 1870, only one in ten stayed in the city for three decades; three out of four left within eight years of arriving. Tellingly, when the names of the 120 wealthiest residents fo the city were published in 1871 only three of the 509 richest men listed in 1851, reappeared.” (Berglund, p 5 and 6. She cites her sources.)
Police in Early San Francisco
Although the tong wars really begin in the 1880s, not the 1850s, it can’t hurt to include some discussion of early law enforcement in the new city. If nothing else, it gives a better picture of the lawlessness of the place.
As for law enforcement and the rule of law, a city police department was established in 1849. It had 33 officers, no uniforms, no training, and its chief of police was an Irish born immigrant who’d grown up in New York City, and, like so many others, had come to California seeking to get rich quick. ( https://web.archive.org/web/20070807095555/http://www.sfgov.org/site/police_index.asp?id=20204 )
This police department had a bad reputation. Having no uniforms, they were known to have hidden their badges and then themselves when things got risky. Some claim they even robbed, rioted, and fought themselves when it suited them. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_San_Francisco_Police_Department )
On top of that, it had no jail. In need of the jail, the city had purchased an old ship named the Euphemia, kept it docked in the harbor, and used it as a place to lock up prisoners, including visiting sailors who had tried to jump ship to visit the city. Nevertheless, escapes were common. ( https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/the-san-francisco-police-department-150-years-3071969.php )
Conclusion
In conclusion, we get a picture of a fluid, chaotic place full of adventurers, risk takers, and sojourners, combined with an initially low quality, law enforcement organization. If we combine this with racial tension, sexual frustration and shortage of women (for all the men present but particularly for the Chinese), and mix in economic fluidity (or should we say perhaps instability?) then it seems inevitable that bad things are going to happen.
And bad things, make for interesting history. Oh my!
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PRINT SOURCES
Asbury, Herbert. The Barbary Coast, an Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld. New York, NY: Old Town Books. 1933.
Berglund, Barbara. Making San Francisco American, Cultural Frontiers in the Urban West, 1846-1906. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2007.
Dillon, Richard H. The Hatchet Men. New York: Coward-McCann Inc, 1962.
Nee, Victor, and Brett De Bary. Longtime Californ': A documentary study of an American Chinatown. Pantheon, 2014.
Yung, Judy. Unbound Feet, A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1995.
Web Sites and Electronic Sources
“Yerba Buena, California.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerba_Buena,_California. Accessed April 28, 2024.
“Mexican California -Collection: California as I Saw It: First-Person Narratives of California's Early Years, 1849 to 1900.” Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/collections/california-first-person-narratives/articles-and-essays/early-california-history/mexican-california/
“Washington Allon Bartlett,” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Allon_Bartlett, accessed on April 28, 2024.
“From the 1820s to the Gold Rush.” The Museum of the City of San Francisco. Accessed April 27, 2024. https://sfmuseum.org/hist1/early.html
“150 Years of History.” City and County of San Francisco Police. Accessed on April 27, 2024 from an archived website dated August 7, 2007. https://web.archive.org/web/20070807095555/http://www.sfgov.org/site/police_index.asp?id=20204 )
“History of the San Francisco Police Department.” Wikipedia.org. Accessed on April 27, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_San_Francisco_Police_Department )
Herron Zamora, Jim, “The San Francisco Police Department 150 Years.” SFGate. August 13, 1999. https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/the-san-francisco-police-department-150-years-3071969.php )
Okay, here is is. It might not be as funny as I remember,. Just remember, at the ends of some of these links are really, really good things, but I don’t promise this is one of them. It’s in the second half: Danger Theatre 1: Fatal Distraction / Lethal Luau
FYI, I discovered this show in the early 1990s in Taiwan when one of the Taiwanese TV stations had this weird but engrossing habit of buying American TV shows that had been quickly cancelled and then airing them at about 11:30pm on weeknights when few were watching television. I came to live not just Danger Theater but also Broken Badges, She-Wolf of London, a TV show called DEA (not the second DEA TV show but the first one on FOX), and a Canadian syndicated TV show called Fly By Night. I miss Danger Theater.