Port Hazard

by Loren D. Estleman

  It was signed by Fremont Older, Editor-in-Chief; and unlike the earlier dirge for Flinders it carried no black border. The effect was that of a robust gentleman of the old school stripping off his pigskin gloves for a rough-and-tumble behind the club.

  Beecher finished his beer and signaled Billy for a refill. “‘Eradicate this blight.’ That mean what I think?”

  “It happened before,” I said.

  “What’ll that do to the Sons of the Confederacy, you reckon?”

  “Nothing, maybe. Everything if they forget to step out of the way.”

  “What about Wheelock?”

  “Wheelock’s got no place to step. The only thing he has going for him is there’s no one else to keep Barbary from blowing sky-high. If it blows anyway, he’s just an alderman.”

  He smiled. “And a fire captain, too, don’t forget. He sure does like to put on that uniform.”

  “A fire captain is only worth having as long as there’s something to burn.”

  Wheelock had the Flinders investigation buttoned down so far as the legal and political system went in San Francisco, but he hadn’t counted on Fremont Older. The editor-in-chief of the Call had started at the top of the journalistic pay scale as a forty-dollar-a-week compositor with the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City, Nevada, lost that position during the 1873 Panic, and freelanced for grubstake pay writing obituaries and editing agony columns throughout California before taking a steady job as a reporter with a paper in Redwood City for twelve dollars a week. That rose to eighteen when he fell into a part ownership. Upon taking the helm of the Call, he’d set up office in the same building that housed the United States Mint, where he’d spent much of his time coining purple phrases about conditions in shantytown, which for reasons best known to him he had chosen as the target of his personal mission for destruction. There were readers who insisted that Older was the man responsible for naming the region the Barbary Coast, after the den of depravity of that name in Africa, but that was more likely the inspiration of some anonymous sailor who had visited both places.

  No matter. In that quarter, Older marked the sparrow’s fall, whether it was the death of a coolie left to starve in an alley because he couldn’t afford to pay the fees demanded by the Six Companies or the fate of the wandering daughter of a well-placed Philadelphia family kidnapped and sold into slavery on Pacific Street or the robbery and murder of a sailor in a house of pleasure in the neighborhood engagingly known as the Devil’s Acre. He was there to report the facts when three young Chinese were hacked to death in a tong skirmish, and when there was nothing more scarlet to cover than a drunken derelict stumbling and falling under the wheels of a brewer’s dray, he was there, too. On those rare occasions when a week passed quietly, he dressed an adventurous staff member in rags and sent him to live in a lodging house in Dead Man’s Alley for three days, at the end of which he was expected to set down all the lurid details in type, and if he didn’t have any, to make some up. I couldn’t figure out why Older wasn’t as successful as Joseph Pulitzer.

  Whatever his complaint was with Barbary, he seemed to have found his handle with Flinders and had no intention of letting go. In the issue that followed “the carnival of crime,” he surrendered his editorial slot to a long letter by someone who signed himself “Owen Goodhue, D.D., Maj., S.A. (ret’d),” offering to take Older up on his invitation and pledging the support, “spiritual and physical,” of a Citizens’ New Vigilance Committee, “with which I have the honor to consider myself a person of some small influence.” The letter proposed that “one hundred substantial citizens of the City and County of San Francisco” be deputized by the sheriff’s office, “with all due entitlement and authority to enter the area known as the Barbary Coast, not excluding Chinatown, and employ all means necessary to restore law and order.” It added, in terms not too subtle for the more rudimentary subscribers, that if such deputization, entitlement, and authority were not forthcoming, it was the Christian duty of all respectable persons who agreed with the conclusions of the messrs. Older and Goodhue that civilization had broken down in the area referred to previously, “to seize, wrest, and arrogate the instruments of justice and force and visit punishment upon offenders, without regard to rank, gender, nationality, or property, public or private, at such time and on such a date as will be announced presently.”

  This compost heap of redundancy, tub-thumping rhetoric, and overripe declension took up a quarter of a page that might otherwise have been dedicated to enlightenment. It was answered the next day in the lead column on the front page by statements attributed to C. T. Warburton, Sheriff of San Francisco County, to the effect that the situation in Barbary was in hand and that he had no intention of cloaking “a collection of cranks and malcontents” in the authority of his office. Older made no comment, apart from a sly reference to the fact that Warburton was not facing re-election this year.

  There was no hope from the military, either: A laconic item at the bottom of the second column reported that a wire sent to President Arthur asking for a declaration of martial law and dispatch of troops to San Francisco had received no response thus far.

  I didn’t see Wheelock’s hand in any of this. Neither Warburton nor Arthur held jurisdiction inside the city limits, and both were old enough to remember the draft riots in New York City and the damages to life and property that resulted when civilians took up arms to no specific purpose. The sheriff may have witnessed the last time vigilantes set out to restore order in Barbary and made only chaos. In any case they could both claim that the affairs of their offices lay elsewhere.

  On the following day appeared a full-page advertisement, with flags unfurling in the corners and a flaring eagle with arrows in its talons at the top, opposite the usual endorsements for Tutt’s Pills, men’s woolen drawers, improved harrows, St. Jacob’s Oil, and the New Line of Fancy Goods obtainable at Clemson’s Emporium on Market Street:

  SUMMONED!

  100 SUBSTANTIAL CITIZENS 100

  To the Southeast Corner of Portsmouth Square at 8:00 P.M.

  on Friday, September 28th

  Whence the Party will Proceed

  Through the Area Known as the

  Barbary Coastand Chinatown

  to Arrest, Detain, and Discipline

  Brothel-Keepers, Opium Peddlers, Pickpockets,

  Assassins, Harlots, Procurers,

  White Slavers, Pan-Handlers, Vagrants,

  Burglars, Sneak Thieves, Confidence Men,

  Burkes, Bludgeoners, Blacklegs,

  Swindlers, Gamblers, Smugglers, and Uncertified Celestials

  100 SUBSTANTIAL CITIZENS 100

  GATHER YE SONS OF FREEDOM

  “I didn’t see no niggers on the list.” Beecher folded and returned the newspaper to me. “Reckon I’m safe. What’s an ‘uncertified celestial’?”

  “Any Chinese without identification.”

  “Hell you say. When it’s done there won’t be a yellow face left ’twixt here and Seattle.”

  “I wonder who’s this fellow Owen Goodhue.”

  We both looked toward Pinholster’s table. The gambler had left for supper.

  Billy the bartender spat on a glass and polished it with his bar rag. “Nan’s the one to ask about Doctor Major Goodhue. She’s had personal experience.”

  I asked what kind.

  “Close as you can get with your duds on. She shot him once.”

  20

  “That Billy would hang whiskers on a goat,” Nan Feeny said. “I never shot Goodhue. The pepperbox misfired.”

  We were gathered in her quarters behind the saloon. Beecher and I were seated, he enjoying one of the late Commodore’s well-preserved cigars. Our hostess wore a ditch in the floor between her bed and the decanter filled with peach brandy. She had on one of her long, high-collared dresses, topped off by the ribbon she tied around her neck to remind her how close she’d come to hanging for shooting a square citizen to death in that room. She’d have saved shoe leather if she didn’t
insist upon drinking from a tiny cordial glass like a woman of gentle breeding, but the trips back and forth didn’t slow down her consumption. A miner would have been pressed hard to keep up with her with a tankard. All this vigilante talk had her more on edge than even the previous transaction with Wheelock’s man Tom Tulip. Her speech had reverted to the broad accents of Boston and she kept abandoning the local vernacular for the variety practiced on the Eastern seaboard; which was a little easier to comprehend, if it didn’t come at you like Confederate grapeshot.

  Outside, Barbary continued unbowed. Eight or nine tin-tack pianos were clattering like steam pistons with not ten fingers of recognizable talent anywhere in evidence, the one-armed concertina player at the Pacific Club was homing in on “Jack o’ Diamonds,” a sailor’s leather lungs let fly with a deep bass whoop, expressing either boundless joy or black anguish, a harlot or one of the sweet young danseuses at the Belle Union countered with a thin soprano shriek like crystal shattering. A shotgun barrel emptied with a deep round roar; a bartender punching a hole in the ceiling to break up a brawl, or in a customer to defend the cash-box, or maybe it was just a part-time rat-catcher paying for his drinks the easy way. The resident rodents were running as big as bobcats that season and paid more bounty than renegade Mexicans. If Owen Goodhue and his one hundred substantial citizens expected the advertisement in the Call to have a sobering effect on vice, they were in for disappointment. Somehow I thought the reverse would be true. They had hemp fever and would enjoy nothing better than to catch the pack in full howl.

  “Why’d you try to shoot him in the first place?” I asked Nan. “And who is he?”

  “The first answers the second. To look at the Sailor’s Rest now, you’d not guess what it was at high tide, before Wheelock’s slubbers put the spunk to it; glass all round, with curtained boxes for the fish to have their fancy and pretty waiter girls in short smickets and silk vampers hoof to hip. One night there’s this row out front. I hooked my little barking-iron and legged it there and laid my lamps on that scrub parson Goodhue ducking one of my girls in the trough where they sluice the prads. Holding her under by the neck, he was, and her flapping her mawleys and trotters like a snaggled hen. I says, ‘Here, what you think you’re about, drownding that little molly?’ He says, ‘Tain’t drownding her a-tall, harlot. I’m baptizing this child in the name of the Lord and the Salvation Army.”

  “White of him to put the Lord at the top of the bill,” said Beecher.

  She stabbed him with her eyes, gulped peach brandy, and lifted the decanter. Telling a story uninterrupted was one of the privileges of the mistress of the establishment.

  “‘Baptizing be damned,’ I says. ‘Stand away or I’ll let California climate through your bread-bag.’

  “Well, he just showed me his tombstones and went on a-baptizing. The girl ain’t fighting so hard by this time.

  “‘Cock your toes up, then, you jack cove,’ says I, ‘and take your lump of lead.’

  “Well, I shot the blighter; or would of, if the fog hadn’t got to the powder. As it was, the cap snapped, and he heard it and left off his lay there and then. I pulled back the hammer again and he tucked tail and trotted, spitting Scripture over his shoulder and calling me whore and I don’t know what else, except that there’s none of it I ain’t been called before, and by better scrubs than him.”

  “What about the girl?” I asked.

  “She swallowed half the trough, but I got her on her back and pumped her out the way the Commodore showed me. Venus’ Curse croaked her at the finish, up on Broadway after she left the Rest. Maybe it wasn’t such a good turn I done her after all, though she was grateful enough at the time, and still more so not a month later, when Goodhue baptized another girl clear to Glory in a rain barrel in the alley back of the Fandango.”

  I asked if he’d stood trial. She laughed and shot brandy down her throat.

  “Cove behind the bench was a Christian man; fined him twelve dollars for breaching the public peace and made him pay fifty to the girl’s family for compensation. The Salvation Army took a rustier view of the whole transaction and told him to pad the hoof.”

  That explained the “Maj., S.A. (ret’d).” I’d wondered if he’d been any kind of real major. “Who does he work for now?”

  “Owen Goodhue. He’d say God like as not, but with him they’re one and the same.” She set down her glass and bent over the packing crate she kept next to the barrel stove, filled with old numbers of the Call and other paper scraps suitable for lighting fires. After rummaging for a minute, she came up with a crumple of heavy stock, which she brought over to me.

  It looked like a wanted circular, complete with a full-face photograph of an old road agent with broom whiskers chopped off square across his collar and a coarse wool coat buttoned to the neck like a military tunic. The base of his beard and the broad, flat brim of a campaign hat with dimples in the crown like the Canadian Mounties wore drew two parallel lines, with the fierce face framed between like a hermit’s peering through a window. The eyes beneath their drawn brows were set close above an S-shaped nose, broken several times and never reset.

  I didn’t like the fact that I couldn’t see his mouth through the coarse growth that covered the bottom half of his face. It reminded me of something I’d read in a book in Judge Blackthorne’s personal library, now destroyed by fire, about creatures on the floor of the ocean that disguised themselves as heaps of moss in order to lure curious small fish into the hungry maws hidden beneath the tendrils.

  Bold black capitals printed across the top of the sheet read:

  LECTURE

  AT THE EAST STREET MISSION

  WEDNESDAY, APRIL 4th

  7:30 P.M.

  There followed the picture, captioned: “Owen Goodhue, D.D., Maj., S.A. (ret’d); Founder of the First Eden Infantry, Army of the River Jordan.” Beneath that, again in large capitals:

  “WHEN GABRIEL BLOWS ‘ASSEMBLY,’ WILL YOU ANSWER?”

  “Clever,” Beecher said, when I’d read it aloud. “I always thought the army would be a lot more like hell.”

  A dense paragraph appeared under that heading, full of biblical quotations with chapters and verses. I noticed they were all from the Old Testament, always the most popular with the kind of devout party who liked to use words such as “seize,”

  “wrest,”“arrogate,” and “punish.”

  I reread the caption. “D.D.,” I said. “Is he a dentist?”

  “Doctor of Divinity.” Nan pursed her lips above her cordial. “If he got it from anyplace but the College of Queen Dick, I’m a sister of charity. His joskins hand out that scrip every couple of months all over Barbary. I wouldn’t of took it this time except we had a cold snap and I was low on kindling.”

  “I’m glad it warmed up before you burned it. I always like to know what the devil looks like this visit.”

  “He ain’t Old Nick, though he’d welcome the kick upstairs. Or downstairs, seeing as how it’s the Pit we’re talking about. He’s just another black imp. The town’s flush with ’em, and I ain’t just referring to the picaroons round here. You’ll find ’em in case lots on Nob Hill as like as down Murder Point.”

  She started to drink, then lowered the glass. “Don’t think from that he ain’t a cove to be ware hawk of. He was with the vigilantes what strung up Jim Casey and Charlie Cora at Fort Gunnybags in fifty-six.”

  “I don’t suppose he stood trial for that either,” I said.

  “Nary a one of ’em did. The governor called in the U.S. Army, and dance at my death if the vigilantes didn’t give them a proper caning and sent them slanching back to Sacramento. Goodhue was just a squeaker then. He’s near thirty years meaner, and has got the Rapture to boot. He and his hundred substantial citizens’ll go through Barbary like salt through a hired girl. This time I’m keeping my powder dry for when that Friday face of his shows up here three days from now.”

  “That pepperbox only fires six. Vigilantes travel in bigger packs than th
at. Why not just close up and leave town till it blows past?”

  “I never thought of that. I’ll take a parlor car to Chicago and crib up in a suite at the Palmer House.” She drained her glass.

  It was the tot that broke the camel’s back. Her speech slurred and gradually became incoherent—even more so than when she was speaking the Barbary dialect—and when she tried to get up from the bed for another trip to the decanter she fell over on her face and began snoring into the mattress. Beecher helped me rearrange her into a position less likely to suffocate her. As we were leaving, she started talking in her sleep, blubbering endearments to the Commodore.

  Wednesday morning’s Call carried another full-page advertisement, bordered once again by flags and the ferocious eagle:

  WARNING!

  This was followed by the same list of miscreants that had appeared in the previous call to arms, beginning with brothel keepers and ending with uncertified celestials. This time a roster of specific names had been added:

  “Little Dick” Dugan, Murderer;

  Tom Tulip, Procurer;

  Ole Anderson, Shylock;

  “Hugger-Mugger” Charlie, Counterfeiter;

  Fat John, Chinaman:

  Axel Hodge, Procurer;

  Nan Feeny, Harlot.

  If Seen within the Limits of the City of San Francisco after

  8:00 P.M. on Friday, September 28th, you will be Arrested

  and Detained for Trial by the Citizens’ New Vigilance

  Committee, and if found Guilty of Presenting an Endangerment to the Civil and Moral Welfare of this Community, will be

  Dealt With in the same Manner as Those who in the Past have ignored this Warning; and if Acquitted, will be Escorted beyond the City Limits by such Means as will be explained directly the Verdict is Rendered; and should you attempt to