by James Roman
Latinos had an angry response to the Anglo ideas of justice. Teams of bandidos soon terrorized the countryside. They robbed the Wells Fargo wagon nearly 300 times in a decade. Fifty bandidos killed an Anglo rancher in 1857. That started a rumor that 500 Mexicans were about to invade. The LA sheriff took six deputies to investigate, only to be ambushed and slaughtered. Los Angeles Rangers leapt to the rescue. With a posse of 119 bloodthirsty rangers and Indians, they overtook the bandidos, lynching nine of them before handing over the rest to the courts. From the brand-new gallows at Fort Hill (near today’s Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels), the bandido leader was hanged before a crowd of 3,000 spectators. Hispanophobia continued unabated, with Anglos fearing that a revolt might reunite California with Mexico.
There was one topic on which Anglos, Indians and Latinos agreed: Everyone hated the Chinese. Newspapers incited that hatred through libelous editorials, falsely claiming that the “heathen Chinee” were usurping work from local residents. The Chinese were taunted on the streets, pelted with stones; their windows were smashed, their houses were torched. An Anglo hit a Chinaman on the head “because I wanted to.” The Los Angeles News celebrated the opening of the first Anglo laundry, inviting customers who were “not partial to Chinese labor.” Vigilante culture reigned.
The Chinese responded by preparing for battle. Instead of uniting, however, they split into tongs, factions competing for dominance within their community. The internal conflict between these gangs took an epic twist in 1871: It instigated a massacre of the Chinese people.
CHAPTER 4.
THE MASSACRE
CHINESE TONG WAR ENDS AS A HISTORIC TRAGEDY
1871
There were not enough women. In 1870, there were a reported 172 Chinese people living in Los Angeles, and 90 percent of them were males. Most of the Chinese women were brought from Asia to work in the sex trade. In Los Angeles, Chinese men in love with their American spouses were a rarified few.
Instead, Chinese men married young women to set them up as prostitutes; their nuptials put the illicit business beyond the reach of law enforcement. It was no surprise, then, when beautiful Yut Ho married a wealthy man who was greatly her senior. But in March 1871, her dashing young lover arrived by carriage bearing a legal wedding certificate; with help from three friends, he successfully abducted her.
The newspapers had a ball with the romantic caper, but it was no laughing matter. A decade earlier, all Chinese people were united in one huiguan society. Now, their unity was split along clan lines into three separate tongs, all competing for income from prostitution. That dashing young lover was employed by a competing gang, a detail the newspapers glorified. The Los Angeles News called the tongs “rival companies, which hated each other like Christians.”
The enraged old husband went to court, but that backfired when the judge acknowledged the young lover’s wedding certificate and ordered Yut Ho to remain with her abductor. So the old man called for reinforcements from San Francisco. Tong warfare would soon escalate.
Los Angeles, 1868
When the steamship California docked in San Pedro in September 1871, tong fighters from San Francisco disembarked; professional hitmen with a job to do. The Chinese community knew this showdown was coming. Nearly 50 handguns were sold to Chinese men in the four days prior to the steamship’s arrival.
On Tuesday October 24, with Yut Ho apparently hidden out of town, the bullets started flying. No longer a grudge match between two competing grooms, this was a battle for dominance between the Hong Chow (to which Yut Ho’s new groom belonged) and Nin Yung tongs. A local tong fighter drew first blood when he overtook a San Francisco hitman, shot him in the neck, then fled as the dead body dropped to the dust on Nigger Alley.
Officer Jesús Bilderrain, one of LA’s seven policemen, heard the gunshots. He and Police Officer Esteban Sanchez raced to Nigger Alley on horseback. As the gangs faced off with pistols in the street, Bilderrain charged through them to break up the fight. When the horse reared, he pursued the hitmen on foot, heading into the dilapidated Coronel Building at the end of Nigger Alley. Bilderrain blew his whistle with all his might to summon support, then faced a barrage of bullets. He staggered out into the street, clutching his bloody shoulder. The hitmen continued to shoot indiscriminately, still locked in tong warfare, but the rest of Los Angeles saw something very different: For the first time ever, a Chinaman shot a police officer.
When Robert Thompson, a beloved former saloonkeeper, joined Officer Sanchez in coming to Bilderrain’s aid, he was shot and killed next. At that instant, race relations in Los Angeles took a furious twist. As Robert Thompson’s body was carried into Wollweber’s Drug Store on Main Street, every white man within view put his hand on his gun. It was time to eradicate the Chinamen.
Saloons emptied immediately. Shops closed their iron shutters. When one Chinese attempted to escape from the Coronel Building, his body was riddled with bullets. Mexicans and Anglos surrounded the building, taunting the Chinese who had barricaded themselves inside. Both City Marshal Frank Baker and County Sheriff James Burns begged for calm, but the frenzied crowd was determined to avenge Thompson’s death. No one knew that almost all the professional tong fighters from San Francisco, who smelled trouble and knew when to leave, had already escaped from the neighborhood.
Before sundown, the mob had grown to nearly 500 people. They shot at the adobe walls of the Coronel Building; they climbed onto the roof and fired down inside. Eventually, they broke in by battering down the doors to adjoining buildings. Innocent Chinese people anywhere in the vicinity were wounded and killed by the wild mob in a bloody rampage that raged for more than four hours. Chinatown’s highly respected physician, Chee Long Tong, begged for his life in fluent English and in Spanish. He volunteered his gold ring to buy his life, but he and five other victims were dragged to Temple Street, where they were hanged from the gates of a corral.
Lafayette Hotel stagecoach near the adobes in Calle de los Negros (now it’s Alameda Street near Union Station and Terminal Annex Building). Old Coronel Building in the background, c. 1871
An anti-Chinese riot, 1880
Nooses were placed around the necks of four Chinese men as they escaped from the Coronel Building. Others were dragged by their queues, poked, jeered and stabbed on their way to Commercial Street, where they were shot and hanged from the bows of freight wagons. Six more were hanged from the awning of a wagon shop and a saloon. Chinese-owned shops were looted and ransacked. Approximately $30,000 in cash, jewelry and merchandise was stolen within hours (that’s more than half a million dollars today).
When the mob finally wore itself out, countless people were wounded; 19 bodies, more than 10 percent of the Chinese population, lay dead. By 11 p.m. that night, the streets were empty and the saloons were filled. Blood-spattered men celebrated their massacre. Some held up the queues they sliced from Chinese napes for souvenirs. It’s the moment when LA’s vigilante culture reached its climax.
Pride turned to revulsion the next morning when Angelenos got a good look at the devastation in Chinatown, with rope fragments and bloodstains still fresh on the streets. It was the biggest lynching in American history; the first time that a story from Los Angeles made international news, knocking the Chicago Fire off the front page of the New York Times. The reputation for all of California suffered as a result. The San Francisco Examiner chided that the “ruthless slaughter” was a “disgrace to the State.” Publications across the country condemned lawless Los Angeles; one East Coast editorial recommended that “certain portions of California” should be “placed under martial law.”
The bodies were laid out in double rows on the northern side of the jail (near today’s City Hall), some with the ropes still taut around their necks. Dr. Tong’s finger was severed to steal his gold ring; his pockets were torn to steal his money. In the intimate Chinese community, everyone had a direct connection to at least one of the dead. The eyewitnesses who placed the bodies into coffins told the newspaper reporter that
just one of the dead men was a tong warrior. Everyone else was innocent. The Chinese men were buried in the non-denominational City Cemetery, with Dr. Tong’s coffin leading the procession.
Newspapers eulogized Robert Thompson as “a generous hearted, liberal man” with a wife and young daughter. He was “killed while aiding an officer in the discharge of his duties.” Three weeks later, Mrs. Thompson gave birth to twins, and went on to raise three fatherless children.
Chinese corpses at the LA jail, awaiting coffins and burial, 1871
Forty-nine rioters were indicted, but just seven were found guilty. Judge Robert M. Widney, the founder of the University of Southern California, had been hastily appointed to fill a vacancy on the bench, but he was ill prepared. On appeal, his indictment failed on a legal technicality: From the language of his indictment, the appellate court could not reach the conclusion that anyone was actually murdered. The seven defendants served less than one year in jail before their convictions were overturned and all men were set free. No one was held accountable for the massacre in Chinatown.
The Dragon Parade and the Chinese New Year’s Day celebration in old Chinatown, c. 1900
A steady stream of immigrants continued to arrive from China, unperturbed by this violent incident. Chinese men married Chinese brides and started families. Buildings were rebuilt and Chinatown expanded for a decade. Then a harsh new federal law intervened: The Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited Chinese immigration for decades (until the U.S. needed soldiers for World War II). Nigger Alley and Old Chinatown were demolished to make way for Union Station in the 1930s. A new Chinatown was erected to the west of the historic Plaza where it continues to flourish today.
Beautiful Yut Ho was never heard from again. Los Angeles reporters apparently lost interest in her story, and the city fathers were happy to keep it that way. Los Angeles was about to get connected to the Transcontinental Railroad, a chance to inject new blood into the hotheaded community. From this tragic ebb, Los Angeles would reinvent itself again in a new chapter of prosperity and growth, though race relations continued to simmer.
IN THE MOVIES:
The sites in this chronicle were used (many years later) in the following films; Gangster Squad (2013), The Green Hornet (2011), Fast and Furious 4 (2009), Made of Honor (2008), Rush Hour (1998), Lethal Weapon 4 (1998), Chinatown (1974), The Dragon Seed (1944) and many more.
The Anti-Chinese Wall; the American wall goes up as the Chinese original goes down, F. Grätz, 1882
CHAPTER 5.
HUNTINGTON’S BOOM
THE IRON HORSE POKES ITS HEAD THROUGH SAN FERNANDO TUNNEL
1876
When a golden spike was driven into a railroad track in Promontory Summit, Utah Territory in 1869, the Transcontinental Railroad united America from New York to San Francisco. By then, the whole nation had gone a little train-crazy. Boosters even hailed railroads as the “triumph of civilization.” Speculators constructed railroads seemingly everywhere … except Los Angeles.
Collis P. Huntington is credited with the first transcontinental link. The intense New York City businessman was one of the Big Four moguls who controlled the “octopus,” the Union Pacific and the Southern Pacific Railroads. It was their Union Pacific that provided the final tracks on the Transcontinental Railroad, terminating at San Francisco. Now, a federal charter empowered Huntington to link it with the Southern Pacific, too. A railroad tentacle finally reached Los Angeles, reversing the city’s fortune and reputation with a most welcome boom. Huntington brought civilization to the Wild West Coast, not to seek heroics, but to seize extraordinary wealth.
Across the Continent: Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, 1868
In the 1870s, the railroad industry was big business, the era’s major economic force. Then a bank that backed the railroads went broke. The Panic of 1873 was a financial catastrophe that drove railroad speculators and just about everybody else to ruin. Prices fell so fast on the New York Stock Exchange that it closed early and didn’t reopen for 10 days! Credit dried up. Huntington’s brokers went bankrupt.
Not Huntington. The world’s loss was his gain. The Big Four were robber barons, owners of a massive asset financed largely by other people’s money, a railroad that could now acquire others at bargain rates to link them or cut them off altogether. The Big Four monopolized rail construction and travel for a huge section of the continent, then lined their pockets. The cash outlay to build a railroad was so astounding that it even broke a bank, but the payoff to former California Governor Leland Stanford, hot-tempered railroader Charles Crocker, numbers cruncher Mark Hopkins and hard bargainer Huntington was even more astounding because it grew exponentially. Still, when pondering potential routes for expansion, the Big Four were ruthless. They approached city officials to enquire how much their communities were willing to pay for a railroad, and then, if a town failed to meet the Big Four’s suggestion, the tracks were laid many miles away. Some Western towns turned to dust while others sprang up practically overnight near railway stations.
Los Angeles—a violent pueblo of just 6,000 people that were policed by vigilantes—was no contender for a railroad terminal. The city fathers approached Huntington twice, and failed twice to agree. Besides, the Big Four observed, the Cajon Pass was a natural route through the rugged terrain. A route to Los Angeles would require a tunnel. They planned to make San Bernardino into a western metropolis on the Southern Pacific line and end the route at San Diego with its large, natural seaport.
Collis P. Huntington
The U.S. Congress disagreed. An 1871 bill stipulated Southern Pacific must build its track from San Francisco “by way of Los Angeles” without the Cajon Pass. When Huntington met with LA’s former governor John G. Downey on the third approach in San Francisco in April 1872, Huntington agreed to take the money: a subsidy of more than $600,000 from Los Angeles (that’s almost $13 million today), plus 60 acres for a depot, and something dirtier. An upstart was already running a new railroad from LA’s Bay of Smokes itself, the port at San Pedro; it linked the city to its port. Huntington demanded that, too. In exchange, the Southern Pacific would build a minimum of 50 miles of track through Los Angeles County in 15 months, including a spur to the groves in Anaheim—but they would only collect the subsidy if the railroad was delivered on time.
The race was on! A task force of 350 Chinese tunnel diggers went to work on a staggering piece of construction. The tunnel through the San Fernando Mountain, at more than 7,000 feet, would be the fourth longest in the world. Predictably, it was dangerous work; before electricity, equipment was powered by steam stoked from flaming coal. It necessitated the use of high-pressure drainage pumps and artificial ventilation 400 feet below the earth’s surface. Cave-ins were frequent, and the air was so humid that the torchlights could barely stay lit. The project’s pace ratcheted up. Another 1,500 workers, mostly Chinese, were added to the project. Even veteran workers found the project frightening, yet the tunneling progressed about 24 feet per day. Final cost: two million dollars; far more than the amount they were racing for.
Finally, on July 14, 1876, barely 90 days before deadline, the headings met under San Fernando Mountain. When a telegraph operator wired, “The Iron Horse poked his head through the San Fernando tunnel at six o’clock this evening and neighed a long, loud and hearty greeting,” the people of LA fired the cannon in front of the opera house repeatedly. A spontaneous, torchlit parade rejoiced through the pueblo streets. The Transcontinental Railroad would link Los Angeles, land of bountiful orange groves and eternal sunshine, with the rest of America.
Another golden spike, driven by Huntington’s partner Charles Crocker on September 5, 1876, marked the ceremonial delivery of one new railroad: the day that LA was reborn.
The city’s boosters wasted no time. Tons of publicity flooded the East and Midwest. Settlement agents, land bureaus, lectures, exhibits and news stories all touted the City of the Angels, part of a grand plan to get paying customers onto trains bound for Calif
ornia. It worked. Some came for “the Cure” in LA’s glorious climate; others came to raise families and grow oranges. All of them relied on Huntington’s trains.
He attempted to monopolize the freight routes in and out of the port on the little San Pedro & Los Angeles Railroad, but the courts put an end to that. Years later, the Supreme Court forced the divestiture of the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific Railroads to break up its monopoly.
Southern Pacific map (detail), 1876
Meanwhile, the economy of the dusty little pueblo went boom! With the railroad’s arrival, Los Angeles County planned 100 new townships, including Hollywood, Burbank, Santa Monica and Glendale. (An even bigger boom would come when the movie camera was invented.)
The Los Angeles and San Pedro Station, the first railroad into Los Angeles, c. 1880
Epilogue:
The golden spike was replaced with a plaque, and the site at Promontory Summit was designated as a Registered National Landmark in 1957. Today, the spike is kept in a vault at the California Historical Society in San Francisco (though a commemorative reproduction is on display at Stanford University). It is engraved: Last Spike Connecting Los Angeles And San Francisco By Rail. The date is engraved on its head, Sept. 5, 1876.
The little railroad from San Pedro to Los Angeles expanded to Las Vegas in 1904, becoming the San Pedro-Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad.
The city of San Bernardino was eventually connected by rail to the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad.
Leland Stanford, the first Republican Governor of California, became U.S. Senator Leland Stanford in 1885. He donated more than $40 million (that’s more than $1 billion today) to establish the vibrant university that bears his name.