“That’s an unfounded rumor,” said Mary.
The guy grinned at Peter and flashed a gold tooth. “Feds call it affinity fraud, like what Madoff do to his Jews. Now, who the hell are you?”
“You first,” said Peter.
“Your someday-daughter-in-law, she know. She know Willie Ling. Everybody know Willie.”
Mary told Peter, “They call him Wonton Willie, which his grandmother named him because he liked to eat fried wonton so much.”
Wonton Willie nodded, as if he took no offense at the nickname. “I come from Hong Kong. Little boy. Now I the new mayor of Chinatown.”
“Who elected you?” asked Peter.
Willie studied Peter, then asked LJ, “This you father? From Boston? He some kind of wise guy?”
“Not sure he’s wise. But he’s smart,” said LJ. “The original smart-ass.”
“Well, he not smart enough to know Chinatown, if he don’t know the mayor.”
LJ leaned closer to his father and stage-whispered, “He’s self-appointed.”
“Yeah. Self-appointed, hey. You come America, you say what you are, then you be what you say.” Willie pointed his walking stick at Peter. “What you are?”
Evangeline was getting annoyed. She said, “He are with me. And I are holding this.” She showed him the can of Mace.
Wonton shook his head. “No, no, no. You no point that at me. Point at Wraparound. That okay. But Wonton get mad. You no want to make Wonton mad. Just ask Chinatown peoples. They know.”
“We’ll do that,” said Peter.
Wonton stepped out of the way. “But tonight, you get a free pass.”
* * *
THEY HURRIED ACROSS THE footbridge and took the Hilton elevator down to Montgomery Street. Only after they were walking down Washington Street, did LJ start to talk:
“Wonton Willie is a small-timer trying to go big. The Feds took down the Wo Hop To Tong a few years ago, indicted twenty-nine people, including a local legend named Raymond ‘Shrimp-boy’ Chow. Wonton has been building his power ever since.”
“He’s a punk,” said Mary.
“A punk with muscle,” said LJ.
They went past the Transamerica Pyramid, heading for the Embarcadero. Peter slowed at every intersection and scoped out every car. There’d be no hit-and-running on his watch.
LJ kept talking. “Don’t piss Willie off. And stay away from Uncle Charlie, too.”
“Which brings me to this father of yours,” Peter said to Mary.
“Dad,” said LJ with a note of warning in his voice. Don’t upset her any more.
So they went another block in uncomfortable silence until something on the sidewalk caught Evangeline’s eye, near the park at Davis Street. “What’s this?” She pointed to a shiny curve of metal implanted in the sidewalk, like a giant outline.
LJ said, “It represents the bow of a ship. The original shoreline ran along Montgomery Street. Portsmouth Square overlooked a shallow bay called Yerba Buena Cove. Most of the financial district sits on landfill, and a lot of ships are buried in it. Whenever they build another building, they find another ship and put another outline in the sidewalk.”
He pointed to a nearby plaque: “‘Site of the William Winter, arrived from Boston, August 1849. Uncovered during excavations in 1969.’”
“That’s the ship the Sagamores sailed on,” said Peter. What a connection. He loved connections. He gazed up at the Transamerica Pyramid and all the traffic speeding past and said, “Imagine how it looked the day that ship arrived.”
LJ said, “You can read about it in the material I sent you a few hours ago. The second installment, all transcribed and ready.”
The Journal of James Spencer—Notebook #2
August 2, 1849
Hell on a Hill
Hard through the Golden Gate we sailed, chased by the fog that rode like a phantom on the cold Pacific wind, close-hauling past the headlands and the ruins of the old Spanish fort and into a bay the enormity of which was exceeded only by its beauty. All of us, Sagamores and sailors alike, crowded forward to set our eyes upon that expanse of blue water, bejeweled islands, and golden hillsides glimmering in the sun. And for a few moments, we forgot both the travails of the journey just ended and those that surely lay ahead.
Samuel Hodges had described it for us. But a man had to see San Francisco Bay to appreciate or perhaps even to comprehend it. It stretched five miles inland to a wall of hills that in New England we would have called mountains. It extended north and south for many miles more. And any who looked upon it would have to conclude that it was one of the wonders of the natural world.
A cannon shot from the fort startled us out of our contemplations and proclaimed our arrival. Then a sailor pointed to the top of a bald hill, where men with spyglasses were studying us and, by means of a telegraphic semaphore, were signaling our ship-type and other particulars to the city beyond.
With a few deft sail changes, Captain Trask rounded that hill—soon thereafter named for the telegraph—and warped the William Winter into Yerba Buena Cove, where we were presented with a sight such as no man could have imagined anywhere on earth before that time and place, in the month of August, anno domini 1849.
Hundreds of vessels lay bow to stern, beam to beam, none more than a cable’s length from its neighbor, a forest of masts and spars that surely held more timber than all the hills around us. We counted old whalers and new schooners, sloops and big packets. And amongst the larger vessels swam schools of longboats, lighters, cutters, and rafts, carrying cargo and men across the muddy shallows or up to the wharves that reached out from solid ground like long, rickety, wooden fingers.
San Francisco appeared to be the magnetic pole for half the world’s iron anchors and the ships tethered to them, but in truth it was no more than a plank-and-canvas collection of huts, board houses, and rope-staked tents, the most insubstantial city that ever erupted from the earth or crowded a shoreline or climbed to a little square where the American flag flapped in the wind. Spreading out from that square and onto the hills all around were more tents and shacks, some lined up orderly along wagon ruts that aspired to be streets, others plunked down wherever the plunkers found it convenient.
A pall of smoke and dust hung above it all, but fog was dribbling in over the hills, like a head of ale overflowing a mug, and it would soon drown smoke and city both. It might also deaden the noise that reached us even in the middle of the cove, the din of thousands of shouting men (for I did not see a single woman) and hundreds of clanging hammers (for San Francisco was a-building, even as we dropped anchor) and scores of banging pianos and banjoes and squeeze-boxes (for as many saloons and gambling tents were visible right from the ship).
“Goddamn,” grumbled Matt Dooling, “but it looks like a shantytown.”
“Or a boomtown,” said Jason Willis. “A good place for a blacksmith to set up.”
Dooling gave Willis a look, then moved farther down the rail.
Willis whispered to me, “A chap like that, I can understand. His main chance is in the diggings. But you’re from a mercantile family. You know what we could achieve here.”
I reminded him of the vote. In a contentious meeting the day before, the company had cast 61-39 in favor of holding together and retaining Hodges as president.
Willis looked at the men crowding the rail. “The company may be more fickle than you think, or more willing to listen once they see the opportunities right here.”
I was not so sure. Men were gazing at San Francisco with as much emotion as they had displayed upon leaving Boston. But it was not nostalgia for what they were abandoning. It was anticipation. They were swelling with anticipation. They were fairly bursting with it.
On the voyage, men had let their beards sprout, so facial hair was in full flower, but in the days before landfall, many had begun to spruce. Some had visited the ship’s barber for a shave or trim. (I shaved regularly, as was my custom.) Most had brought out their flannel shirts, a good c
hoice in the surprisingly cold wind. And all had put on their heaviest belts to hold the pistols and Bowie knives that now they might wear in earnest.
Add to their anticipation their vigor. Captain Trask had kept a safe, disciplined ship. Though the first mate had been lost in the pounding misery of Cape Horn, no one else had been seriously injured. Moreover, Doc Beal had insisted that all Sagamores consume a daily measure of lime juice, with or without rum, to fight off the scurvy, while Samuel Hodges had ordered that we engage in at least six hours of exercise a week—fast walks around the deck and gyrations known as squat-thrusts, push-ups, and sit-ups—to preserve our muscle and wind.
But while we had fared well physically, the boredom of almost seven months at sea had allowed small conflicts to magnify and larger issues to fester, making the William Winter a floating cabinet of distrust, disagreement, and outright hostility.
Arguments and fistfights had erupted only occasionally and usually over small matters … a man taking too much space at the mess table or spending too long at the head when others needed to hang their bottoms in the bow ropes. But we had settled most disputes as civilized men will do, in a civil manner, so our competing factions had mingled cordially enough during the voyage, as they mingled now at the rail.
I could not understand why any of them would surrender the chance at a glittering gold claim to sit in a San Francisco tent, behind a pile of ledgers, with a cold fog seeping in, and do no more than they had done in Boston.
But our “halfway” adventurers seemed willing. They had come to a new place, where nature—both the divine and the human—would demand new attitudes. Yet they could not think like anything other than what they were: New Englanders who believed that cost defined value and value trumped experience. They reminded me of my father.
Everyone, however, obeyed when Mr. Kearns ordered them to the stern to hear the captain’s “arrival” speech.
Trask did not offer any eloquence. He jerked a thumb and said, “There it is. They call it San Francisco now. Used to call it Yerba Buena, whatever that means. Maybe they’ll call it somethin’ else next week … Hell on a Hill, from the looks of it. We’ll run the longboat till eight bells, midnight, so you can see for yourselves. But any Sagamore not aboard by noon tomorrow, we’ll leave you here. Any sailor not aboard by six bells of the morning watch, we’ll find you and hang you for a deserter.”
I glanced at Michael Flynn, who stood with the rest of the crew.
He was looking around at all the other ships, which should have been sailing back to Boston or New York but instead lay abandoned with crews gone, paint peeling, masts stepped down. Two vessels had been beached, and men were dismantling them for lumber. Another, anchored at the end of a wharf, was covered over with a shed that made of it a huge floating warehouse. Desertion seemed epidemic.
Samuel Hodges planned for the company to stay a day in San Francisco, hear the talk in the town, determine the location of the newest gold strikes, then take the William Winter as far as the inland rivers would allow, either north on the Sacramento to Sutter’s Fort or south on the San Joaquin. Then we would head overland for the diggings.
As for Trask, he planned to turn his ship around and sail back to Boston.
But if crewmen were tempted to jump now, how much worse would it be when we were just fifty miles from the mines?
Hodges stepped forward and opened his Bible. “As we left Boston with a prayer, let us arrive in San Francisco with—”
“Ahoy, the William Winter!”
Hodges glanced over the side at a man standing uneasily in the stern of a rowboat.
“My name is Jonathan Slawsby. I’m here to do business.”
Hodges ignored him and read: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.’”
“I say ahoy the William Winter! I’m agent for Sam Brannan, biggest merchant in San Francisco. I’m here to buy whatever you’ve brought.”
Now half the company was looking at the man in the black suit and beaver hat.
“‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death—’”
“Say, are you deef or somethin’?” shouted this Slawsby, who threw a glance at half a dozen other boats rowing fast in our direction, then said, “I’m here to do business.”
Hodges looked up from his Bible and shouted, “Not interested!”
“I’ll pay triple for whatever you’ve brung, whatever you paid for it in”—Slawsby looked at the transom for the name of the port—“Boston. Triple. A fine profit, sir!”
Now it was Willis’s turn to shout: “If you can pay triple, you can pay tenfold.”
“Not interested!” shouted Hodges.
From another boat, a man shouted, “Ahoy, there!”
“Go back to your whorehouse,” said Slawsby to the new boat. “We’re doin’ honest business here.”
“‘Whorehouse’?” whispered Michael Flynn. “Did he say ‘whorehouse’?”
The man in the second boat shouted, “Do you got any women aboard? Marryin’ women, loose women, young women, old, pretty, ugly, it don’t matter—”
“There’s no women aboard this ship,” said Trask. “Now move away.”
“Hey, Mr. Captain,” answered the man, “you may be king cock on that quarterdeck, but in San Francisco, you’re just another bearded dick. So damn your orders. We need women and we’ll pay plenty for ’em!”
“You’ll need more than women if you don’t get away from my ship,” said Trask. “I’ll turn the four-pounder on you.”
“We need goods!” shouted Slawsby. “Goods and women. Here’s the prices.” He pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket. “Pork, fifty dollars a barrel. Flour, twenty-five—”
“Fifty dollars for pork?” whispered Collins. “We only paid ten in Boston.”
“We pay in gold!” shouted Slawsby. “But them prices won’t last. There’s more ships comin’ in every day, carryin’ smarter men than you, and if they sell, prices’ll go down faster than your Boston breeches in a Frisco whorehouse.”
Collins whispered to Hodges, “Half the pork is spoiled. We could sell ’em that.”
“Such a fine Yankee gentleman,” muttered Michael Flynn.
A man in a third boat shouted, “If you’ve brung shovels, we’ll top any price! Especially Massachusetts shovels! Ames shovels! Best damn shovels made!”
Willis looked at me and said, “Are you not related to the Ames family of Easton?”
I was. But I did not say so. It would only encourage him.
A man on a fourth boat asked if we had egg-laying hens and offered seventy-five cents for every egg. A man on another boat topped that with a dollar.
“A dollar for an egg?” muttered Thomas J. Lyons, attorney-at-law. “Impressive.”
Another topped that with fifty dollars for every hen.
I could see men making eye contact and whispering. These were powerful inducements. Perhaps we really had brought the gold.
Hodges shouted to the Sagamores, “Remember your charter, men!”
While this was happening on the starboard side, another boat was bumping up to the larboard. No one noticed until a grappling hook snagged in the mainmast shroud.
An instant later, a broad belly of a man sprang onto the rail with all the skill of an acrobat. He balanced himself, then shouted, “I’m Big John Beam, and I’m lookin’ for men who can work!”
“Get off my ship!” cried Trask.
Big Beam ignored the captain. “I ain’t talkin’ about prospectin’. I’m talkin’ about honest work. Real work. I need blacksmiths, carpenters, coopers. I pay an ounce a day, sixteen dollars, more than you make in a week back home.”
Matt Dooling whispered something to Jacob Foote, a carpenter from Dorchester. Was Dooling tempted? Or Foote?
Trask came down from the quarterdeck, pushed through the company, and growled up at Beam, “Get off my ship.”
“Give me another minute, Cap, and I’ll save your boys from the perdition of the mines altogether. So�
�—Beam shouted to the company—“come find me at my sign-up table in Portsmouth Square, and I’ll take any women aboard, too—”
Trask pulled a belaying pin from the rail, drove it up into Big Beam’s belly, and sent him pinwheeling into the water. The splash reached as high as the mainsail spar, but Trask never even looked down. He slammed the belaying pin so hard on the deck that it bounced. “No one boards my ship without permission.”
Meanwhile, the shouting continued on the starboard side as more boats arrived, more promises of fast money filled the air, more Sagamores moved to the rails to listen.
Trask ordered Kearns, “Fetch the four-pounder! Now!”
“Aye, sir!” Kearns scurried to a deck box and, with the help of another crew member, lifted the little cannon onto a mount at the stern.
“You don’t frighten me,” shouted Slawsby. “That thing ain’t even loaded.”
“It will be.” said Trask. “Loaded with grape enough to clear all you gulls in one shot.”
“I’m agent for the biggest merchant in California!” answered Slawsby. “Do business or be damned!”
Hodges nodded to Sloate, who pulled his Colt, and—BAM!—Slawsby’s hat flew.
The report of a pistol stunned everyone—on the boats and the ship—into silence.
Except for Hodges. He shouted, “If it’s a choice, we’ll be damned.”
“Damned for sure!” cried Slawsby. “That hat cost ten damn dollars.”
“It cost a dollar and a half,” answered Willis.
“Not here.” Slawsby fished the hat from the water. “Ten dollars, gold.”
“See that?” said Willis to the company. “Even the hats are overpriced here.”
However shocking the gunfire, it was not nearly as shocking as those prices. I actually noticed one man take off his hat and inspect it, as if he might offer it for sale.
* * *
NO ROWER RELEASED FROM the slavery of a Roman galley was ever as happy debarking from a ship as I was leaving the William Winter. To feel solid ground beneath my feet, to escape that vessel, that cauldron of competing interests, that increasingly odiferous refuge for Horn-rounding Boston rats? That was like a cool draft of water after a summer hike up the side of Mount Monadnock.
Bound for Gold--A Peter Fallon Novel of the California Gold Rush Page 12