Such were the methods employed by authorities while Police Officer James R. Rogers bragged: “It is almost impossible to entirely suppress them, for they will naturally open. But they can be kept closed and the business made unprofitable. There is no ordinance that cannot be enforced, and I presume the ordinances we have are sufficient to keep these houses all closed. It don’t require a large force to close these houses. I can do it in one night. Arrest the inmates of one, and it travels like electricity from one to another and in ten minutes every one will be shut up and the doors will be barricaded.”
Thoroughly impatient with such farcical “control” of the red-light district in Chinatown, the decent people of the city—particularly the women—decided to take action themselves; and they took a constructive course. The ladies began a deliberate and well-planned campaign to rescue slave girls from their masters. (As early as 1857 the city was shocked by the desperate attempt of two girls to escape their lives of slavery by throwing themselves into a well in attempted suicides.) One of the first to become interested in the singsong girls’ plight was Mrs. H. C. Cole. She helped set up the Methodist Misson, but the matron had no customers for almost a year. Then, late in 1871, a despairing girl, Jin Ho, escaped from her bagnio, fled to the Embarcadero, and threw herself into the bay. A Negro fished her out with a boat hook and turned her over to police, but she refused to talk to any Chinese, even police interpreters. She told Captain Clark that she would speak only with a “Jesus man.” So the captain sent for Reverend Otis Gibson. As soon as Gibson appeared the distraught girl fell on her knees and begged him, “Don’t take me back to Jackson Street.” He reassured her and took her to the Methodist Mission. A year later she became a Christian and married. By 1874, Jin Ho had seventeen “classmates” in the mission, all under the supervision of Laura S. Templeton.
The Presbyterians were not far behind. They opened their mission in 1874. At first they had a hard time attracting any refugees. The highbinders had begun a program of what would today be called brainwashing. They filled the heads of their girls with horrible nonsense about mission brutality and torture to deter them from escape attempts. They also secured dishonest lawyers and those on the thin line between light and shade—like Three Fingered Leander Quint—to produce writs of habeas corpus in order to recapture legally the girls who did make good their escapes. To the two asylums also came Hip Yee tong emissaries who posed as relatives of the girls hiding inside. They promised to take them away to a new and good life. The brothel owners also got girls to enter the asylum as spies. Once inside the mission they would try to persuade the legitimate refugees to leave. (Sometimes this strategy backfired on the Hip Yee men and they lost another girl.)
All of the tongs’ countermeasures were doomed to failure. More and more public support came for the missions when Reverend Gibson translated and had published the text of cold-blooded bills of sale of several of the unfortunate girls. Typical of them all was the contract of Ah Ho. The document read as follows:
An agreement to assist the woman, Ah Ho, because in coining from China to San Francisco she became indebted to her mistress for passage. Ah Ho herself asks Mr. Yee Kwan to advance to her six hundred and thirty dollars, ,for which Ah Ho distinctly agrees to give her body to Mr. Yee for service as a prostitute for a term of four years. There shall be no interest on the money. Ah Ho shall receive no wages. At the expiration of four years, Ah Ho shall be her own master. Mr. Yee Kwan shall not hinder nor trouble her. If Ah Ho runs away before her term is out, her mistress shall find her and return her. Whatever expense is incurred in finding her and returning her, Ah Ho shall pay. On this day of agreement, Ah Ho, with her own hands, has received from Mr. Yee Kwan six hundred and thirty dollars. If Ah Ho shall be sick at any time for more than ten days, she shall make up by an extra month of service for every ten days of sickness. Now this agreement has proof. This paper, received by Ah Ho, is witnessed by Tung Chee in the twelfth year, ninth month and fourteenth day.
There were reversals for Gibson and the missionary ladies during their running fight with the tongs. One such defeat was the Yat Sing case. Yat Sing was a young man who aided three Chinese slave girls to escape. He took them to the Methodist Mission where he proposed marriage to one of them and was promptly accepted. All seemed well. Yet only a few weeks later Yat Sing and his wife came to the mission house, terrified. The former owner of the girls had taken the case before the Hip Yee tong. One of that society’s destroying angels had looked Yat Sing up and demanded the girl or $350. When the young husband answered that he could not pay he was dragged by force before a tribunal of the tong in their secret council chamber. He was given three weeks in which to return the girl, pay the money, or be assassinated. Reverend Gibson consulted with lawyers and aided Yat Sing. He had 8 Hip Yee agents arrested for conspiracy to extort money from his Chinese friend. Before the case came up in police court, more than 50 Chinese merchants called on Gibson to encourage him and to promise their help against the tong. They themselves hired the brilliant Ward McAllister, the best legal counsel in the city, to aid the prosecuting attorney. But the latter suddenly refused to allow McAllister to help him or to take part in the trial in any way. He further refused to bring into court the tong’s seized records which showed that the defendants were officers of the society. Gibson angrily exclaimed, “His whole conduct showed that he did not wish a conviction, and would not have it if he could prevent it.” The hatchet men blandly denied that they were even members of the Hip Yee tong. Each brought forward two Chinese witnesses who swore that the eight were good and true men. As even Gibson anticipated, the jury brought in a verdict of acquittal. It was now commonly reported that the prosecuting attorney had been “consulted” by agents of the secret society and that the affair had cost the Hip Yee tong treasury a neat $10,000. Because of the greed or lack of fortitude of one attorney, Gibson’s big chance to smash the Hip Yee tong was thwarted.
Shortly after the disappointing trial of the eight highbinders, the forces of good scored a few points. Ten Chinese women who had just arrived found their way to the Methodist Mission and asked permission to be sent back to China. Gibson told Chinese merchants of his acquaintance about them. These businessmen furnished money for the women’s passage and assured him that they would do so for all women or girls who called upon them for help. They prepared a huge placard announcing this policy and had it carried through Chinatown. But the merchants feared the tongs enough to hire a white man to carry the sign.
In the meanwhile Gibson translated and published widely the text of another slave-girl’s contract. The plight of Chinatown’s singsong girls became a national issue when this contract was read in the United States Senate. Aaron Sargent, Senator from California, quoted it in a speech of 1876.
The text of the document—”An agreement to assist a young girl named Loi Yau”—was almost identical to that of Ah Ho’s and just as damning.
The tide of battle between the tongs and the missions ebbed and flowed. The Six Companies re-entered the fray as an ally of the missions in 1878, making another try to turn back the flood of slave girls. They sent two representatives to call on Assistant District Attorney Darwin. The men told him that the City of Peking was bringing in 60 prostitutes. Darwin referred them to the police, and 25 of the girls were taken to city hall upon landing. Here they all said that they had come of their own free will and they showed certificates from the United States Consul in Hong. Kong. They had to be set free, of course, although the police knew that the girls had been coached with a catechism of answers and provided with forged immigration certificates. They were set at liberty and quickly rounded up and packed off to the barracoon by the waiting highbinders.
Immigration Commissioner Hart H. North asked Lieutenant William Price of the Chinatown squad what proportion of Chinese women landed on the Embarcadero were destined for the immoral profession. “Ninety percent. I would not take one bit off that,” answered Price
. “They are sold as fast as they are brought over. For every girl who comes here they get about three thousand dollars.”
But the tide really began to turn against the tongs and brothels in 1895, when Donaldina Cameron entered the fight. Within a few years she would become a living legend. Her name—or nickname Lo Mo—is still very important in Chinatown. In her the forces for good had finally found an inspired leader. This beloved, gentlewomanly missionary had the equivalent of carbon steel in her makeup. The hatchet men feared her. Donaldina mounted a counteroffensive which rolled the tong brothelkeepers back on all fronts. Lo Mo—old Mother—to all Chinatown, must be considered a potent factor in the ultimate destruction of the fighting tongs. It was she who knew best how to strike hard and repeatedly at the very foundation stone of their existence—the slave trade. With the courage and toughness of spirit of her Scottish ancestors, she became overnight a sort of Carrie Nation of Chinatown. With the help of the police, law-abiding Chinese, immigration officials, Consul General Ho Yow, an aroused public, and eventually an earthquake and fire, she put the tongs into a retreat which became a rout.
In 1961, Miss Cameron recalled for reporters how she had led the police into the brothels and fought the highbinders in court because no else would do so. Actually she was not the first to engage the tongs in combat over the alley girls. Mrs. P. D. Browne got Donaldina interested in the first place, and Margaret Culbertson—Donaldina’s boss—was no novice. But it was Miss Cameron who became the accepted commander in chief almost from the very day she came to work—the same day on which a cleaning girl found a stick of dynamite in the hall of the Sacramento Street Mission.
Donaldina was more energetic and daring than her predecessors. She willingly and proudly occupied the same cell as slave girl Kum Quai when the latter was jailed on one of the traditional trumped-up charges. She was said to know every roof in Chinatown. She had slipped into the Quarter through the tight quarantine set up by the city government during the bubonic plague scare by using roofs and skylights as knowingly as the highbinders themselves.
From the moment of her first raid on a tightly barred brothel in Spofford Alley, Donaldina Cameron was as single minded in purpose as even Andy Furuseth, who was fighting his great battle for civil rights for sailors at the same time. On her “calls” Miss Cameron usually took along a trio of brawny policemen armed with axes and sledge hammers. Only once did she make a raid without police protection and she had cause to regret it. It was on the City of Peking building on Jackson Street. There she discovered a secret panel which led to the hiding place of the girl she was after. The cornered highbinders showed fight and might have ended her crusade then and there with an ax had not her aide Kum Ching blown a police whistle. Luckily, an officer was just around the corner. He seized the girl from her captors at the same time that he shielded Lo Mo from the hatchet men.
It did not take Donaldina Cameron long to learn conditions in Chinatown. She found that not all prostitutes were of the lowly boat-people class. Some were of high caste, like Jean Ying. This girl, the daughter of a well-to-do Canton manufacturer, had been kidnapped and sent to San Francisco. Donaldina came to realize, too, why most of the girls feigned great reluctance toward being rescued. They were worried that raids might fail. Miss Cameron even learned to lie like her enemy to protect her charges, though it must have hurt her Scots conscience. Whenever a policeman came with a warrant for a girl on some faked charge, Lo Mo would insist, “She’s not here,” while praying that he would not look under the rice sacks in the dark space behind the basement gas meter. She accepted the fact that she often had to break the letter of the law in order to uphold the spirit of it. She was doubtless guilty of trespass and of breaking and entering; contempt-of-court proceedings were instigated against her. But she knew that she was in the right and never wavered in her single-minded purpose.
Donaldina had a nose for trap doors, hidden staircases, secret panels and hiding places. Even when brothel owners hired young children to play with blocks and toys in front of their establishments to give them the appearance of legitimate family residences, Miss Cameron found them out. Once Sin Kee asked her to rescue his beloved from a “boardinghouse” on Mah Fong Alley. She brought a posse to the building, but when they battered down the locked door they found only thirteen Chinese inside, quietly smoking their pipes as though oblivious to the din of axes chopping into stout oak. Donaldina paid no attention to this carefully staged tong meeting but went over the room like a bloodhound. She climbed out of a window onto a rickety fire escape. Across the way she saw a painter on a scaffold. She quizzed him and found out that the girl had been whisked up through the skylight to the roof and over to the next building via its roof. She found the girl there and rescued her.
For all her success, Miss Cameron’s actions sometimes ended in frustration, failure and even tragedy. One rescue attempt which failed was that of Yep Shung in 1898. He came to San Francisco from San Jose to join Lo Mo’s crusade. The ladies of the Presbyterian Mission sent their new volunteer to Sullivan’s Alley with one of their number along as his guide. She waited outside a den as he entered. She waited and waited for a signal. None came. While she was waiting ten highbinders inside were stripping Lo Mo’s green commando and thrashing him. They then tossed him out into the street, naked, to the consternation of the mission lady awaiting him.
Some cases did not end ludicrously, but tragically. When Foon Hing managed to bring his cousin to Donaldina for safekeeping, the girl was made secure enough, but Foon Hing was shot down by hatchet men as he left the mission. Lew Yick was another young man who rescued a girl and delivered her to 920 China Street (as Sacramento Street used to be called). He was captured by tong toughs who had owned the slave. They held him prisoner in a room on Clay Street and kept him awake for a full thirty hours by torturing him with hot irons. They demanded he raise $700 ransom—an impossible requirement. Lew Yick had lost all hope, but rescue came in the eleventh hour as an immigration officer and a police posse finally ferreted out where he was kept prisoner. In a third case, which ended badly for Miss Cameron, Lem You, a Christian Chinese who had given the mission people information on slave girls, had a price of $1,000 placed on his head by one of the tongs. He was shot in the back on Clay Street by Quon Ah You and another hatchet man.
During these years of battle Donaldina Cameron learned whom to trust. She found that she could not put all her faith in all policemen. Some officers were anti-Chinese, others Were bribe takers. Lawyers were subject to purchase, too, she found. Her friend Attorney Henry E. Monroe angrily rejected an offer of $250 per month just for tipping off the tong men in advance on Donaldina’s raids. But not all of his colleagues were quite so upright.
The years rolled on and Lo Mo kept up her raids, hitting brothels in Chinatowns as far away as Monterey and Marysville. She kept the slaving tongs always on the defensive. Willard Farwell’s map of 1885 must have been graven on her mind. She could find her way blindfolded to every hidden den. Chinatown squad officer Duncan Matheson always claimed that the great change for the better in Chinatown which transformed it from a bloody ghetto into the most orderly district in the city was due to two things: the gradual education of the Chinese people, and character-building institutions like Lo Mo’s.
CHAPTER TEN
The Terror Of Chinatown
“If a Chinaman is to be got rid of, the highbinders, for a consideration, will undertake the task of removing him. An officer of the secret police, from whom I obtained much information concerning the Chee Kongs, was himself black-listed, a reward of $800 set upon his head. Being a cool man and a good shot, and always well armed, he has thus far escaped although two or three night attacks and broken bones have resulted in the attempts of the highbinders to remove their enemy…”
—Lee Meriwether, Special Agent, United States Department of Labor, 1889
DURING the 1880s, though the slave girls were still thriving, the sand-lotte
rs were going into a decline. The Workingmen’s party lost badly in the elections and Dennis Kearney was soon out of politics and back in the drayage business. Before long he was forgotten. Although the Burlingame treaty was abrogated, the pressure on the Chinese community from the outside began to subside during this period. The anti-Chinese measures of the 1879 California Constitution were declared unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court, and the horizon appeared to be brightening.
But it was a false dawn. The highbinders were not yet out in the open. But they were confident; their control over Chinatown already amounted to a strangle hold. In the four years from 1877-1880, when they were just warming to the task, 27 of a total of 81 homicides were of Chinese victims. Of these, 22 were actually killed in Chinatown, and all—save one—were murdered by other Chinese. And where 13 were shot, 12 were either chopped or stabbed to death. (One was clubbed, and one was suffocated.)
At the same time that the threat of the hatchet men increased, crime in general was growing in the city Chief Crowley again and again asked for enlargement of his force. He had 400 policemen and 5 captains under him in 1886, but he pleaded for a mounted striking force, for a policewagon system, and for prohibition of “fortified rooms”—the iron-doored Chinese gambling dens. His requests were turned down by economy-minded supervisors.
The reports of Coroner D. L. Dorr tended to bolster Chief Crowley’s good but losing arguments. San Francisco during the decade was enjoying almost double the murder rate of other cities equal in size or larger. Dorr pointed out to the city fathers that San Francisco had one murder for every 11,190 inhabitants, as compared to New York’s one to 25,000. In San Francisco’s Chinatown there was a murder for every 2,222 people. Dorr placed the blame for this squarely on the hatchet men: “The system of professional murderers among this peculiar people is frequently recognized, and during the year several of the assassins have evaded detection. These murders are of the most cowardly and dastardly kind, not one having the semblance of manslaughter or justifiable homicide and generally being undertaken for purposes of revenge in money matters.”
Hatchet Men: The Story of the Tong Wars in San Francisco’s Chinatown Page 21