by Fred Rosen
“I told them that I had seen the elephant, which had a longer tail and a bigger snout than the usual elephants. That I was satisfied with the small bucket full of gold I had accumulated, and would not stay to see it running over the sides like milk from a pail, as I was no advocate for wastefulness.
“Perhaps they had not sense enough in their contracted skulls to understand the homely illustration of the Lancaster shoemaker. If so, they may die with their wisdom, as its loss will be not the least loss to the world.”
10.
CRIME WAVE
As he boarded his steamer in San Francisco Harbor for the trip south, Samuel McNeil noticed all the foreigners emptying off the five-hundred-some ships in the harbor. Being a parochial people, Americans like McNeil were afraid and distrustful of foreigners. Among the latter who came to America’s shores in the wake of the discovery were the dissolute and dishonest from all countries of the civilized world.
“Situated within reach of the penal colonies of Great Britain, as well as being in proximity with the semi-barbarous hordes of Spanish America, whose whole history is that of revolution and disorder, it was soon flooded by great numbers from those countries, who were accomplished in crime, and who, without feeling any sympathy for our institutions, and contributing nothing for the support of our government, their only aim seemed to be to obtain gold, by any means, no matter how fraudulent; and owing to the weakness of the constituted authorities, joined to the vicious among our own people, they succeeded in their frauds and crimes to an amazing extent, and rendered the security of life and property a paradox on legislation, hitherto unprecedented in the annals of modern history,” wrote Alonzo Delano in his popular 1857 book Life on the Plains and among the diggings.
The book is based largely on letters from Delano published in Ottawa, Illinois, and New Orleans newspapers. The Aurora, New York, native had moved to the Midwest as a teenager. By July 1848 he was a consumptive storekeeper in Ottawa looking to extend his life by going someplace where the air was drier. Delano joined a local California company and migrated west, where he won fame after the Gold Rush as an early California humorist.
Delano’s view that Gold Rush crime was perpetrated by “the semi-barbarous hordes” was a popular belief. And yet, like most prejudicial racist tracts, “In the early part of the winter of 1850, however, some of those who left the mines early for fear of starvation, or because they preferred the comforts and pleasures of the town to a winter seclusion in the mines, being unable, perhaps unwilling to obtain employment, gave loose to their vicious propensities; and about that time, too, Sydney convicts began to arrive, when affairs began speedily to assume another aspect and it became necessary to guard property with as much acre as in towns of the older states.”
Gold Rush crime came about because of a variety of factors: sheer force of numbers; the immigration to San Francisco of convicted criminals from Australia and Britain, who came there after their release; and the sheer hunger and deprivations of miners who failed to hit pay dirt. Making things worse was the lack of an effective government and law enforcement program to deal with the burgeoning crime wave.
During the winter of 1849–50, cattle rustling began. The Californios, whose herds the rustlers were stealing, complained, but to no avail, because there really was no one to complain to. Rustling of mules and horses followed with impunity. Naturally, at first the Indians were charged with the thefts. When many of the rustled animals were subsequently recovered and their path from rightful to unlawful owners was traced, it became clear “that the white savages were worse than the red,” Delano wrote.
Then pure greed showed itself at the diggings.
“Even as late as June, 1850, I was one of a jury in the mines, to decide on a case of litigation, where one party sued another before a self-constituted miners’ court, in the absence of higher law, for flooding the water on a river claim, and thus preventing its being worked.
“The court was duly opened, the proofs and allegations adduced, and the costs of the trial advanced. Judgment was rendered against the plaintiff, in favor of the oldest occupant of the adverse claims, when the plaintiff submitted without hesitation, and paid $102, costs, with as much cheerfulness as if it had been done by a legally constituted court of the United States.”
Zachary Taylor had taken office as the twelfth president of the United States on March 5, 1849. For the next sixteen months, Taylor and his vice president, Millard Fillmore, enjoyed unprecedented popularity because of Old Rough and Ready’s forty-four years of loyal and popular military service.
During those sixteen months, the South threatened to secede from the Union over the issue of slavery in the new territory it acquired. Taylor encouraged both New Mexico and California to apply for admission as free states. A Kentucky native, Taylor angered his Southern followers even more by ignoring the claims of Texas, a slave state, to territory that had become New Mexico instead of Texas as a result of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo.
In February 1850 President Taylor held a contentious meeting with Southern leaders threatening secession. “[People] taken in rebellion against the Union, I will hang,” he said, “with less reluctance than I used in hanging deserters and spies in Mexico.”
Eleven years before President Lincoln went to war to preserve the Union, President Taylor threatened to do exactly that. Taylor told the South in no uncertain terms that to enforce the Constitution, he would personally would lead the army against the South.
Taylor then lobbied for the Missouri Compromise of 1850, which prevented the South from seceding, at least for the time being. Then a very strange thing happened. Ground was broken on the Washington Monument on July 4, 1850, at which the president presided. It was a stifling, hot day. For relief, the president consumed a bowl of frozen cherries and milk. He became ill almost immediately and died three days later of what appeared to be an acute inflammation of his intestinal tract caused by ingestion of the confection in combination with the heat.
With Taylor dead, Millard Fillmore took over. Fillmore did not have Taylor’s enormous experience in the world; he never cast a glance toward California. As a result, crime continued unabated in the Union’s newest state.
By the spring of 1851, crime was rampant, particularly on the streets of San Francisco. Robberies and murders were daily occurrences. Organized robber bands terrorized the towns and the mountains.
“I was privately informed by a young man of my acquaintance, that he had been offered seven hundred dollars a month to steal horses and mules. Although he was a wild, daring fellow, he had too much principle to engage in nefarious practices,” wrote Delano.
Every morning, San Franciscans awakened to reports of more robberies and more murders as daily newspapers chronicled the crime wave. By June 1850, there were sixty people awaiting trial for a variety of alleged crimes. Ten of them were on indictments for assault with intent to kill. Things were just as bad in the mining camps.
In Marysville in March 1850, a cloth house was cut open with a knife, and a trunk stolen, containing $1,000. Arrested as they were preparing to go down the river, the thieves were taken before the Alcalde, who sentenced them to a public whipping. It was carried out immediately in the town plaza. Despite that, only a portion of the stolen money was ever recovered.
Down in Placer County, two men went into a tent, and finding a woman alone, her husband off at work, proceeded to bind and gag her, and then robbed the tent of $1,500 dollars. These thieves, too, were arrested. As there were no prisons in the country, they were whipped, and again turned loose. This kind of thing happened regularly.
In December 1850 the crime wave spread south, to Monterrey. While the tax collector was absent from his office for only twenty-five minutes, thieves stole in and robbed it of $14,000 in public monies. Five ex-convicts from Sydney were arrested, and a portion of the money found. Captured in San Juan, two others were charged as accessories.
Of these two, one was also charged with horse stealing; he had sto
len a horse that belonged to Judge Ord, who was counsel for them on the first charge. It was dangerous to buy a mule off a stranger, for fear the property had been stolen, and might be claimed by another party.
January 1851 saw no letup. Buoyed by their unheralded success, the thieves got even more brazen.
“The sleeping room of Captain Howard, of the police in San Francisco, was entered and a trunk, containing $2,100 in scrip, and $3,000 in gold was abstracted. So adroit had the thieves become, they actually went into a store about ten o’clock at night, and while men were at work overhead, they blew open a safe, took $700 which it contained, and escaped,” Delano wrote.
“Cases even more bold and daring than any of these might fill these pages. Such became the insecurity of property, from the hordes of villains prowling about, that men scarcely felt safe under any circumstances, and no man slept in a building without having firearms within reach, well loaded, to protect himself against these ruthless midnight villains.
“In addition to other crimes, was that of arson. San Francisco was four times burned, and every principal city in California suffered severely from fires, when subsequent disclosures proved that some, at least, if not all, were caused by the fiendish incendiary, to gratify a desire for plunder, or from a horrible spirit of revenge.
“Every ship from the penal colonies of Great Britain only swelled the number of English convicts already here; while the vicious from all nations seemed to find a rendezvous in California, and hordes of the most accomplished villains in the world, who had passed through every grade of crime, found a home and congenial spirits in this devoted land.”
These individuals were morally bankrupt. They not only wouldn’t work to acquire wealth, they were willing to kill for it. They got away with it, the kind of situation that cannot long endure in any civilized society without there being violent repercussions.
With any crime wave, there is always a point where the criminal goes too far. Even ordinary people with no taste for blood get that strange, salty taste in their mouth. Then, in February 1851, San Francisco was thrown into turmoil by one of the most audacious robberies that had ever been committed in the town.
Two Englishmen, Frank Dravat and Smythe Carnahan, ex-convicts from Sydney, had entered the San Francisco store of Tom Brewster. Located near the corner of Washington and Montgomery streets, Dravat and Carnahan came in the store at eight o’clock in the evening. Inquiring for some blankets, Brewster was in the act of showing them, when one of the scoundrels struck him a blow on the head with a slug shot, which some also called a blackjack. Brewster fell unconscious to the floor; the thieves jumped on top of him and struck him again.
Satisfied they would not be bothered, the Brits broke the lock off his desk, robbed it of nearly $2,000, and escaped. A short while later, Brewster recovered sufficiently to crawl next door and give the alarm, but the villains were gone. What made the crime different was that it happened on one of the city’s most crowded streets in broad daylight. That not only showed the thieves’ courage but also their desperation to make a score.
A few days later, a Sacramento cop, Chris Dalton, recognized Dravat. He was wanted for crimes committed in the mines. Dalton arrested him, along with his companion, Smythe Carnahan. There were inescapable similarities between their thieveries in the mines—where one of the men knocked out the unsuspecting victim and the other rifled his pockets. Carnahan and Dravat retained counsel, Willie Gingrich, who tried to show they had an alibi.
No one believed them, least of all the district attorney and the public who witnessed the testimony in a makeshift courtroom. A row ensued in which the mob attempted to seize the prisoners to hang them. They were rescued by the police and a company of the Washington Guards, and conveyed to a recently constructed prison.
That was it. The mob hissed the Washington Guards and rushed the prison. Stones were thrown through the barred windows, shattering the glass. Some in the mob brandished rifles and revolvers; others, knives and pickaxes. Suddenly, the door to the prison was thrown open and a man in uniform appeared, Captain Bartol of the Washington Guards.
Bartol wore the standard issue scabbered sword on one side, with a holstered Colt Navy revolver in a waist-high leather holster, secured to his thigh by a drawstring of tough rawhide. Bartol addressed the crowd.
“I have acted only in obedience of the law. If the prisoners are guilty, and if required by the authorities, we will march out and assist you in hanging them.”
The crowd liked what they heard and backed off, deciding to act with brains instead of brawn. They organized a meeting, and appointed a committee of twelve to consult with the city authorities and to guard the prisoners. A meeting was called for the next day. As the time for said meeting approached, crowds began to gather around City Hall.
The streets and the roofs, windows, and balconies of adjoining homes all filled up with people. About ten thousand in all anticipated the meeting, which finally began with the mayor, as well as several other gentlemen, coming forward to address the mob. The committee of twelve advised the mob to leave the matter with the proper authorities, while pledging themselves that justice should be administered.
During their speeches, the committee members were frequently interrupted by cries of “no more quibbles of law—no straw bail—the criminals all escape—give us justice.” But justice won out for the moment, and the mob once again backed off. A few days later, there was a major jail break. Among the escapees were Dravat and Carnahan.
The newspapers were not ignoring the crime wave, covering it in all its sensationalism. It provided a circulation boost and an opportunity for editors to pontificate on the conditions and, occasionally, solutions. From the San Francisco Daily Courier of June 10, 1851:
“It is clear to every man, that San Francisco is partially in the hands of criminals, and that crime has reached a crisis when life and property are in imminent danger. There is no alternative now left us, but to lay aside our business, and direct our whole energies, as a people, to seek out the abodes of these villains, and execute summary vengeance upon them.”
On September 23, the Alta California, one of the state’s best papers, published this editorial:
“We do not wonder that the whole city is excited, that every honest man feels indignant against the vile miscreants who have fired our houses, robbed our citizens, and murdered them. This feeling is natural. And the present apparent and expressed determination to take the administration of the law into their own hands is the inevitable result of a shameful laxity in the administration of our lower courts. To them alone is chargeable the present state of public feeling.
“Examinations and trials of criminals have been a miserable tissue of trifling, quibbling, and nonsensical distinctions, and deductions unworthy to be used by a respectable bar, unworthy of any consideration by judges. Any persons have been allowed to testify. Every one of the thieves and robbers who infest our city has witnesses enough to swear an alibi and such evidence has been allowed! Every means, too, has been taken by unscrupulous advocates [usually lawyers] to postpone, and stave off trials, knowing that delay would absolutely destroy all incriminating evidence.”
It was an argument that would be used in the subsequent century when a crime wave hit the midwestern United States in the 1930s, and again the 1980s through the 1990s, when cases against members of organized crime fell apart with bought alibi witnesses. California has the dubious distinction to say that it happened there first on a regular basis.
On June 11, a notice appeared in both the Daily Courier and Alta California, requesting that San Francisco’s citizens assemble in Portsmouth Square at three o’clock in the afternoon. At the appointed hour, the citizens assembled there to the astonishing spectacle of a man hanging by the neck from the porch of an adobe home.
Someplace under cover of darkness and civilized law, a shadowy, vigilante organization had formed. Composed of some of the city’s wealthiest citizens, who had much to lose if crime continued to run
rampant, the newly organized Vigilance Committee was determined to execute justice, and criminals, with their own hands. This hanging was the first by their organization. The Daily Courier of June 10 covered the lynching this way:
“It is clear to every man, that San Francisco is partially in the hands of criminals, and that crime has reached a crisis when life and property are in imminent danger. There is no alternative now left us, but to lay aside our business, and direct our whole energies, as a people, to seek out the abodes of these villains, and execute summary vengeance upon them.”
A week later, Sam Jenkins, a Sydney convict, was arrested while robbing a safe. A jury was selected, “indubitable proof of his guilt was adduced, and he was hung immediately, about two o’clock in the morning. Shortly afterwards, the people of San Francisco were summoned by the most respected men of the city, to a meeting in the Plaza.
“The meeting was duly organized, and several among the most highly esteemed citizens addressed the people, briefly stating the condition of affairs and advocating the necessity of taking steps to arrest the career of crime. The existence of a Vigilance Committee was [publicly] announced.”
A resolution was then offered, approving their acts in hanging Jenkins. By loud acclamation the crowd accepted it, with one lone dissenting voice, from a lawyer, “whose interest it undoubtedly was to perpetuate this unwarrantable condition of things in our community. The meeting adjourned over to the next day, at the same hour and place, when, it was understood, a series of resolutions would be presented.
“At the appointed time, the Plaza was again filled with anxious but not excited citizens, and there was a determined calmness in their demeanor, which plainly told that it proceeded from long suffering, and that they would coolly, deliberately, and surely protect themselves from further insult and outrage.”