Roaring Camp

by Susan Lee Johnson

  According to this section of the pamphlet, the crime itself unfolds thus: Both M. V. B. Griswold and Fou Sin work for Horace Kilham, “an extensive ditch proprietor”—that is, a water company manager—and a banker of sorts who exchanges gold dust for specie. Griswold is Kilham’s clerk and Fou Sin his cook. While Kilham is away in Sacramento, five Chinese men apparently commit the “ingeniously conceived and dexterously executed” killing. Their primary aim is to rob Kilham’s safe, which holds eight or nine thousand dollars. In order to steal the money, they must do away with Kilham’s clerk. So Griswold is felled by a blow to the head, and the safe is emptied. Griswold’s body is stashed underneath a bed in Fou Sin’s room, and a board that almost reaches the floor is nailed to the bed rail so as to conceal the corpse. This section, however, is not written in narrative fashion but rather as a kind of catalogue of evidence that emerged from the inquest into Griswold’s death and the trials of Fou Sin and his compatriots: the empty safe, Fou Sin’s absence on Kilham’s return, the body under the bed, a bloody shirt, sightings by white men of Chinese men in flight, gold and jewelry in Fou Sin and Chou Yee’s possession. As the writer puts it, all of this “made up one of the strongest cases of circumstantial evidence of which there is any record.”18

  Cover of the crime pamphlet Murder of M. V. B. Griswold by Five Chinese Assassins, with image of Fou Sin.

  Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

  Just as the reader starts to piece this evidence together into a story, yet another section of the pamphlet begins, one with which the writer wrestles mightily so that it does not contradict what has come before. Here, statements appear that Fou Sin, Chou Yee, and Coon You made to newspapermen after conviction and before execution. A portrait of each man, drawn from an ambrotype, precedes his statement. The portrait and statement of Fou Sin go farthest in undermining the pamphlet’s overarching narrative, though the consistency of all three men’s accounts is also key. Fou Sin’s portrait depicts a strong man with sturdy features who gazes directly at the camera, with no hint of guilt or remorse. He does not wear a customary queue; rather, his full head of hair hangs neatly to the nape of the neck. The writer of the pamphlet prefaces Fou Sin’s statement by noting that Fou Sin was the “master spirit” of the crime, “vastly the superior of all the others.” And indeed, Fou Sin’s “capacity, experience, [and] knowledge of the world” exceed those of M. V. B. Griswold himself. He is fluent in English, and so he speaks to the newspapermen without an interpreter. He chronicles his life from his origins as the son of a farmer and stonecutter in South China, to his many years working aboard British, French, American, and Russian ships, to his arrival in San Francisco in 1857 and his subsequent journey to Jackson, in the Southern Mines. According to Fou Sin, it was an old friend from his home district near Canton, a man named Chou Yee, who told him to look for work in Jackson and who lent him the thirty dollars it cost to travel there from San Francisco.19

  Now begins Fou Sin’s account of the crime at Horace Kilham’s house. Once in Jackson, Fou Sin finds work cooking for the ditch proprietor Kilham. Chou Yee visits Fou Sin often, in part to see if Fou Sin can repay the thirty dollars advanced for the fare from San Francisco. During one such visit, three other Chinese—strangers to Fou Sin and Chou Yee—come to the house. They confirm with Fou Sin that his “master” is “very rich,” and threaten to “rob the money out of the house.” Fou Sin tells them not to do this while he is cooking there. But the next thing he knows, they are beating and choking Griswold, taking the key to the safe from the dying man’s pocket, and emptying the safe of its contents. Now all five Chinese men—Fou Sin and Chou Yee as well as the strangers—must flee to avoid arrest. Fou Sin’s statement continues with an account of their escape, the three strangers departing in one party and Fou Sin and Chou Yee in another. Both Fou Sin and Chou Yee disguise themselves by shaving their heads, and Fou Sin buys Chinese apparel to replace his Euro-American clothes. Their flight takes them from Jackson to Sacramento to the Northern Mines. In Marysville, however, an acquaintance of Fou Sin’s betrays them, and they are arrested.20

  Appended to this statement are answers Fou Sin gave to questions posed by examiners as well as a translation of a letter written to his father and brother. Fou Sin explains, for example, why one of his shirts was bloodied: it was hanging over the edge of the bed when Griswold’s body was pushed underneath. He also explains why a deadly slungshot was found in his room: he made it in case he got into a fight at a Chinese brothel (a slungshot is a striking weapon that resembles a blackjack). In addition, he passes on what he has learned in jail about the two strangers, Coon See and Coon You, who were also arrested. According to Fou Sin, Coon See has said that he was “in jail for a long time in China for killing a man.” Likewise, Coon You has said that he was “a robber and pirate” and a “great scoundrel” there. These denunciations notwithstanding, both Coon See and Coon You, as well as Chou Yee, add brief notes to the letter Fou Sin writes to his family explaining his fate. The pamphlet writer cannot help admiring the literary merit of this composite epistle. As translated by Charles Carvalho, Chinese interpreter for the city of San Francisco, Chou Yee writes, “My body hath gone before me, borne on clouds. My youth was coupled with twenty springs; I was unconscious of it, but thus it was.” And Coon You, “The spirit will mount, borne by red incense, full of fragrance; the fulfillment, like a gem, is soon wrought.” More and more, the “five Chinese assassins” threaten to break out of their characterization as cunning and treacherous devils and to appear instead as men with complicated affections and animosities, men alive to (what readers would consider) refined sensibilities.21

  Image of Chou Yee from Murder of M. V. B. Griswold by Five Chinese Assassins.

  Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

  Image of Coon You from Murder of M. V. B. Griswold by Five Chinese Assassins.

  Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

  To forestall this eventuality, the pamphlet employs several tactics. First, Fou Sin’s portrait and statement are followed by those of Chou Yee and Coon You, which are less flattering. Chou Yee’s portrait, for example, depicts a disheveled man: he looks away from the camera; his face is careworn; his hair hangs in uneven tangles. Coon You’s likeness, meanwhile, must have looked feminized to eyes schooled in Anglo American conventions of gender. He is pictured with his hair drawn loosely into a queue, which is brought forward over one shoulder for emphasis. He gazes just above the camera’s lens, lending an innocent air to his appearance. Both Chou Yee’s and Coon You’s statements are translated from the Chinese, underlining their foreignness, and the pamphlet writer does not preface either with admiring observations. Chou Yee says little about his background—only that he came to California from the Sandwich Islands and went to the Southern Mines, where he worked as a cook. Coon You’s statement is similarly brief—though he mentions he is married—and is damningly contradicted in several particulars by an account he gave just after his conviction. In addition to setting these largely negative representations off against the more ambiguous representation of Fou Sin, the pamphlet writer also frequently interrupts the statements of all three men to point out apparent lies and inconsistencies. For example, where Fou Sin claims that Griswold was killed with a stick or club, and that his own slungshot was not used, the writer interjects, “The wounds on . . . Griswold’s head . . . could scarcely have been made with a club. He must have been struck with the slung-shot . . . or something of the kind.” Finally, the pamphlet closes by reproducing the verdict of a coroner’s jury in the jailhouse death of Coon See, who is found to have hanged himself by a rope made out of strips torn from his own shirt. Earlier, the writer has speculated that Coon See “appealed his case to the court of his own conscience, which convicted him . . . and receiving his sentence, [he] became his own executioner.” This closing, then, tries to bring the reader back around to the posit
ive guilt of the “five Chinese assassins.”22

  When the Southern Mines region began to write its own stories, the California Gold Rush became very complicated. Just as it was difficult to spell out Chinese names by means of the English alphabet, so too was it difficult to contain Chinese testimonials in an Anglo American narrative. Indeed, read in historical context, the statements of Fou Sin, Chou Yee, and Coon You point to a different unfolding of events surrounding M. V. B. Griswold’s murder from what the pamphlet writer would have readers imagine. None of the convicted men suggest that Fou Sin and Chou Yee knew Coon You, Coon See, and Ah Hung. As for the four who were charged, Fou Sin and Chou Yee, on the one hand, and Coon You and Coon See, on the other, likely came from different native places in South China and felt little affinity for each other. California-bound Chinese came overwhelmingly from just eight districts in the Pearl River Delta area of south-central Guangdong Province: the “Three Districts,” or Sam-yap; the “Four Districts,” or Sze-yap; and the single district of Xiangshan. From what they told their interrogators, Fou Sin and Chou Yee probably came from Sam-yap, the area closest to the city of Canton. Coon You and Coon See probably came from Xiangshan.23 Among Chinese immigrants, district origins drew important social boundaries. Hence it is not surprising that where Anglo American observers saw five Chinese men acting in concert, the Chinese men themselves saw something else altogether. For their part, Fou Sin and Chou Yee consistently blame the robbery and murder on the three strangers who came to Horace Kilham’s headquarters that fateful morning—Coon You, Coon See, and Ah Hung. Coon See apparently gave no account of the crime before he was found hanged in his jail cell. Coon You, however, in one statement claims that Fou Sin and Chou Yee murdered Griswold—before he and Coon See arrived at Kilham’s—and in another includes Coon See among the perpetrators. What this suggests is that two or three of these men might have joined forces to rob the safe where Kilham kept the proceeds of his ditchdigging and gold-dust-changing business. All five of them, however, are unlikely to have done so together.

  As logical as all this seems when considered in historical context, such a reading of Murder of M. V. B. Griswold by Five Chinese Assassins was improbable in 1858. Those most apt to read in this manner—Chinese immigrants—for the most part were not literate in English. As audience, the publisher had in mind English-speaking Americans, as he put it, “the entire people, not only in California, but also in the Atlantic States.” That the publisher intended to create among this people both local and national markets for the pamphlet is underlined by two strategies. First, he rushed the pamphlet to press after Fou Sin, Chou Yee, and Coon You were convicted, and put it on sale the day they were executed, when local attention to the crime and its punishment was at an all-time high. Second, when the pamphlet went on sale, postage was included in the purchase price; for fifty cents, anyone could both buy the pamphlet and send it to friends or relatives in the East.24

  How might local and national audiences have read this pamphlet? White people in Amador County would have been shocked, outraged, and frightened by the crime. They might well have known Griswold. They might have recognized Chou Yee, who had worked as a cook in area restaurants and residences for several months. And they certainly knew of Griswold’s and Fou Sin’s employer, Horace Kilham. Kilham had lived near Jackson since the early 1850s, and his house, which also served as an office, was a local gathering place. Kilham was well known as a prosperous “ditch proprietor,” and he also ran an exchange business for miners laden with gold dust. In addition, he cultivated an oft-visited orchard and garden that included over 800 peach trees, 75 apple trees, and 200 grapevines—the only spot of its kind in the county. However shocking the crime, then, local readers must have felt compelled to grapple with its meaning. Indeed, on the day that Fou Sin, Chou Yee, and Coon You were hanged, officials estimated that four to five thousand people jammed the streets of Jackson.25 Those unnerved by the crime would have applauded the pamphlet’s efforts to impose order and logic on events, just as they seemed to appreciate the finality of retribution that the hangings represented.

  Such responses, however, did not always extend beyond the immediate area. Much of the content of the pamphlet appeared first in the columns of Jackson’s Amador Weekly Ledger (it was the Ledger’s publisher who printed the pamphlet). Other California newspapers reprinted or commented on some of the items the Ledger published. When the Jackson paper ran the portraits and statements of Fou Sin, Chou Yee, and Coon You, for example, the Sacramento State Journal noted, “The Amador Ledger comes to us this week with the portraits of the three Chinamen who were strangled for the murder of Martin Van Buren Griswold,” but then declined to reprint the Ledger article. The Ledger editors were furious at the implication of this brief note, and shot back in their next issue, “If the lawful execution of three yellow-skinned Chinamen, who committed the most diabolical murder and robbery ever recorded in the annals of California crime, is to be termed ‘strangling’ . . . then the Journal is welcome to use the expression.” But the Sacramento writer should admit, the editors insisted, that his note “conveys the idea that the Chinamen were hung by a mob.”26

  This was precisely the idea that the newspaper-and-pamphlet publisher wanted not to convey. After all, it was 1858, not 1848, and California criminals were punished within a state judicial system, not at the hands of local vigilantes. Were they not?

  If the content of Murder of M. V. B. Griswold by Five Chinese Assassins, as it first appeared in the Ledger,could stir up this kind of rancor within a forty-mile radius of Jackson, one wonders how the pamphlet was received when local people sent copies to eastern friends and relatives. Indeed, all one can do is wonder, since no evidence of eastern reaction appears to have survived. If distribution of the pamphlet depended on individuals sending single copies through the mail, it seems unlikely that an extensive national audience ever developed. And the pamphlet does not seem to have been reprinted by an eastern publisher. In addition to these logistical problems, there would have been discursive problems as well in attracting a national readership. Put simply, the pamphlet told a complicated story that eastern readers were ill prepared to hear. Martin Van Buren Griswold himself would have been a familiar character—a cherished son of eastern parents who chases western opportunities, lighting out for the territories while holding in his heart “the influence of HOME.” He is industrious and forward-looking (indeed, he predicts the Gold Rush) and does not hesitate to demonstrate “American prowess” to “Greasers.” He becomes a clerk, a respectable entrée to an emerging middle class.

  But M. V. B. Griswold is brutally murdered. And he is murdered not by customary western adversaries—say, Indians or Mexicans. He is murdered, it seems, by a world-traveled Chinese cook whose final act is to send a letter home to his family. What is more, this cook has a name—Fou Sin—and a story to tell, as do his countrymen, who are supposed to be co-conspirators. These co-conspirators, however, tell conflicting and confusing stories. And the one who is acquitted of murder charges, and who thus will not face execution, hangs himself—or at least that is what the coroner concludes. For eastern readers, then, the pamphlet would have ended with unsettling images: on the one hand, there is the only man not convicted of murder hanging by his neck in a jail cell; on the other, there are the three convicted men awaiting death. If readers had any doubt whatsoever about the guilt of the remaining three, then this last image could have been disturbing indeed. Most such readers would have been raised in a culture steeped in Christian iconography. And, short of the cross itself, there was no more powerful Christian image than that of three men facing public execution together—reminiscent as that was of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ alongside two common criminals. It was not an image that reflected well on public officials.

  To Anglo American readers outside the region where the white clerk and Chinese cook lived, worked, and died, Murder of M. V. B. Griswold by Five Chinese Assassins would have told the wrong stories. Two Eras in the Life of
the Felon Grovenor I. Layton had helped domesticate the Gold Rush for eastern readers by assuring them that true moral danger was located within the hearts of individual white men, where it could be mastered, not in the external trappings of western mines or eastern cities. At the same time, by portraying Grovenor Layton as both murderous villain and lynched victim—both subject and object—of his own story, and by eliding the murdered Chileans as nameless ciphers, the pamphlet participated in the taming of the Gold Rush as an essentially Anglo American event. Murder of M. V. B. Griswold by Five Chinese Assassins, by contrast, said that the danger white men faced in California was not within themselves, where self-restraint could keep it in check, but without, in the very social order the Gold Rush had fostered. No amount of hard work and home influence could defend against it. And that danger had a foreign face. It was not a familiar foreign face, either—not that of continental neighbors such as Mexicans or Indians. Worst of all, that foreign face was neither monolithic nor predictable—nor even consistently dangerous. It might be Fou Sin, son of a farmer and stonecutter, who was intelligent, worldly, and worried about his white employer only insofar as it concerned his own employment. It might be Coon You, a young husband whose innocent appearance contrasted with his incriminating statements. It might be Chou Yee, who looked diabolical enough, but who penned haunting phrases such as “My body hath gone before me, borne on clouds.” When the Southern Mines region told its own tales, then, they were tales like these—global, complex, fragmented, multivocal. This was true even when the individuals telling the tales, such as the publisher of the Amador Weekly Ledger, came from social positions of dominance and privilege. No wonder national audiences turned a deaf ear to such stories so very long ago.