Mounted patrolman Jesús Bilderrain had been warned by Chinese informants to expect “a big China fight.” He was a couple of blocks away when he heard the sound of gunfire. “Follow me,” he shouted to fellow officer Esteban Sánchez. He sprang into the saddle and spurred his horse toward Negro Alley. As he approached, Bilderrain testified, “I saw six or seven Chinamen about the middle of the street shooting at each other.” He charged into them and the gunmen scattered, running into open doors on either side of the alley. Bilderrain jumped down and nabbed one of them. That was when he saw Ah Choy lying in the doorway of an east side adobe, “dying from a shot he had received.” Sánchez rode up. “I saw Bilderrain afoot, ahold of a Chinaman,” he said. “At the same time I saw another Chinaman shoot at Bilderrain with a pistol in each hand.” Sánchez jumped down and pursued the shooter around the corner of the Coronel, but was driven back by sustained gunfire from a group of Ning Yung fighters massing in the corral at the back of the building.
Bilderrain hailed a bystander and requested his assistance in taking his captive to jail. As they hurried along the south side of the Coronel, a Chinese fighter emerged from the Wing Chung store, fired at them, then darted back inside. Handing his prisoner off to the bystander, Bilderrain charged after the man, revolver in hand. He ran through the open door and someone slammed it behind him. “The house was plum full of Chinamen,” Bilderrain said. One of them pressed a pistol to his chest, and he instinctively grabbed it with his left hand. The gunman pulled the trigger, but the hammer came down on Bilderrain’s finger. “I went to smack him down,” he said, “but some of the Chinamen then shot me.” The bullet penetrated his right shoulder, disabling his gun hand. “I had no show for my life,” as Bilderrain put it, realizing his only chance was to get out. “I thought I was mortally wounded and I was anxious to die outside,” he said. He wrenched the door open with his good hand and stumbled out onto the veranda.
Walter Lyon, who operated a shop in the Arcadia Block, just steps away, saw Bilderrain “come running out with three Chinamen at his heels, pistols in each hand and firing promiscuously.” A Mexican boy standing nearby was hit in the leg. Patrolman Sánchez charged after the gunmen, who retreated back into the Coronel, leaving the door ajar. Bilderrain steadied himself against a post and blew several long blasts on his police whistle. Sánchez stepped up on the veranda, approached the open door, and warily peered in. The interior was thick with gun smoke, but through the haze he could see the figure of a man. “He leveled his pistol at me,” said Sánchez. “I presented my pistol and we both fired at the same time.” Both shots went wide. Sánchez jumped to the right side of the door and pressed himself against the adobe wall. Robert Thompson, a bystander summoned by Bilderrain’s whistle, came running up with another man, and they positioned themselves against the wall on the left side. “What’s the matter?” asked Thompson. “The Chinamen are shooting,” said Sánchez. “They have shot Bilderrain,” the other man added. Thompson pulled his revolver, reached around the door jamb, and blindly fired into the room. “Look out, there are two or three in there and they may shoot you,” Sánchez warned. “I’ll look out for that,” said Thompson. Then, stepping directly in front of the threshold, he fired again. The answering fire from inside was instantaneous. Thompson staggered back, clutching his chest. “I’m killed,” he said.
AN ANGLO AND TWO LATINOS had been shot by Chinese fighters. From that point on, that was all that mattered. Robert Thompson suffered a mortal wound, and although Bilderrain and the Mexican boy would recover, the rumors coursing through town placed all three at death’s door. Nathan King, a security guard at the railroad depot several blocks away, heard that “the Chinese were killing the white men by wholesale in Negro Alley.” He grabbed a rifle and a revolver and hurried there along with dozens of others. Groups of curious and confused men milled about the northern end of Los Angeles Street, where it met Negro Alley. Suddenly a burst of gunfire came from the Coronel building. “The Chinese discharged the contents of their revolvers promiscuously among them,” wrote one observer, and “the crowd scattered like leaves before the whirlwind.” They quickly regrouped with serious purpose. “Almost every man’s hand sought the back pocket of his pants, and a pistol was drawn, cocked and discharged at the Chinamen in less time than it takes to tell.” The firing continued as the sun set behind the western hills and the streets began to darken. Gas street lamps had been installed on downtown streets the previous year, but they would not be lit that evening. The gunfire was intended to keep the attention of the crowd focused on the façade of the Coronel while most of the company fighters escaped out the back, slipping into the vineyards and orange groves, only a few steps away.
Finally the firing from the Coronel stopped altogether. But the crowd in the street kept up an indiscriminate fire at the building for another ten or fifteen minutes. No one realized that the company fighters had already fled. Inside the adobe walls of the Coronel were several dozen terrified Chinese men and women, none of whom had anything to do with the gunfight. Outside, at the head of Los Angeles Street, the crowd was intent on wreaking revenge.
It was a situation fraught with peril. Marshal Francis Baker might have organized his patrolmen and attempted to disperse the crowd, which at that point numbered fifty or seventy-five men. But he decided instead to form them into a posse. “I called to citizens to stop shooting,” he testified, “and we would put a guard around the house.” He issued orders to surround the Coronel and allow no one to cross the line. “If any Chinamen come out, let them have it,” he told one man. “Hail any Chinaman attempting to escape,” he instructed another, “and in case he would not stop, shoot him.” Sheriff James Burns, who showed up a few minutes later, endorsed that plan. “Prevent anyone from going in or coming out,” he told the crowd, and if they resist, “bring them down.” This disastrous decision, legitimizing the use of lethal violence, led directly to the horrible events that took place over the next several hours.
BAKER AND BURNS had no sooner established their blockade than a Chinese man bolted from one of the buildings and made a desperate attempt to escape. “Here’s one! Here’s one!” someone cried. The man was swinging a hatchet, attempting to cut his way through the crowd, and several men began pummeling him with canes and clubs. Two patrolmen waded in and grabbed him; assisted by a clerk named Charles Avery, they began marching him toward the jail, four or five blocks away, trailed by a mob of several dozen men shouting, “Hang him! Hang him!” At the corner of Main and Temple, the heart of the city’s business district and only a block from the jail, someone struck Avery on the back of the head, and as he fell to the ground the mob closed in around the officers, pinioning their arms and seizing their prisoner. A big, burly man wielding a Colt’s Dragoon shouted for a rope, and one of the mob ran into a dry goods store and emerged with a new coil. Benjamin McLaughlin, watching from the veranda of the Downey Block, was appalled and he confronted the man. “I said it was not right,” McLaughlin later testified, “and he said I was a damned Chinaman.”
“To the hill!” someone shouted, and the crowd took up the chant. The victim was dragged up Temple Street to the gate of Tomlinson’s old corral, where Michel Lachenais had been lynched ten months before. The rope was thrown over the same crosspiece and a knot hurriedly fashioned at the other end. “Hoist him up!” cried the big man with the Dragoon. “God damn him, if you don’t put that rope around his neck I’ll shoot him anyhow.” The noose was forced over the victim’s head, and he was jerked up by three or four men. The new rope was stiff and the knot wouldn’t slip, so one of the men shimmied up a gate post, and steadying himself against the crosspiece jumped up and down on the victim’s shoulders several times, breaking both his collar bones. Several others pulled out their revolvers and riddled the swinging body with bullets. Then the mob hurried back to Negro Alley, celebrating its accomplishment.
“That fellow didn’t kick over five seconds,” Sheriff Burns heard one of the lynchers exclaim on their return.
“They’ve hanged him,” he heard another man say. Burns watched as the lynchers began infecting others in the crowd with their blood lust. “Damn it,” shouted the man with the Colt’s Dragoon, “we’ll show them how to hang Chinamen.” Several men incited the crowd with incendiary speeches, and there were angry shouts of “¡carajo la Chino!”—fuck the Chinamen! Things were spiraling out of control and Burns figured he had just one more chance. At his urging, District Attorney Cameron Thom stepped up on a box and delivered a law-and-order speech that had little effect. Burns himself then mounted a barrel, shouted for attention, and as a group assembled around him, began pleading for calm. Suddenly the top of the barrel collapsed, Burns crashed to the ground, and the crowd roared with laughter. “No attention was paid to his words,” lamented Charles Avery. “Many were anxious to put a stop to the affair,” testified John M. Baldwin, a prominent local surveyor, “but there was no one to lead.”
At 7 PM the local correspondent for the Daily Alta California of San Francisco filed a dispatch by telegraph, the first report to the outside world of the disaster taking place in downtown Los Angeles. “The excitement in this city is intense,” he wrote.
Citizens are arming and Negro Alley and the Chinese quarters are in a state of siege. Already upward of 100 men armed with Henry rifles and shotguns guard the street. One Chinaman has just been captured, taken through the main street, and hanged by the citizens on a lot formerly Tomlinson’s Corral and Lumber Yard, the same spot where Lachenais was hung by the vigilantes for killing Mr. Bell a few months ago. . . . The sheriff and civil authorities have given up all attempts to restrain the mob, and no one can tell how far they may go.
ROBERT THOMPSON DIED shortly before 7 PM, and the news quickly circulated through the city. Within an hour the crowd at the head of Los Angeles Street had grown to five or six hundred men, a substantial portion of the three or four thousand adult males residing in the city. The Chinese inside the Coronel hunkered down, and the crowd grew restless. About 8 PM a group of men mounted the roof and after chopping holes through the asphaltum began firing down on the people hiding inside. One Chinese man was immediately killed. Another bolted and dashed into the street. The armed crowd did precisely as it had been instructed by the marshal and the sheriff. “It seemed to me five hundred shots were fired at once,” one witness testified. The man, hit numerous times, died in the middle of Negro Alley.
Someone threw a burning torch into the Coronel, and soon smoke began billowing from the holes in the roof. The great Chicago fire had taken place only a few weeks before, and everyone was acutely aware of the danger of general conflagration. One of the patrolmen demanded that the would-be arsonist retrieve the torch, and under the threat of the officer’s revolver he warily ventured inside and dragged it out. Suddenly realizing that the Chinese inside had put up no defense, dozens of men began pouring into the building. “Half the horror of the scene was shrouded by the veil of night,” wrote one observer. “But to the sense of hearing it stood forth more prominently than it could possibly have done during the day, when the busy hum of the wakeful city would have somewhat smothered the noise.”
Young Joseph Mesmer also vividly remembered the furor. “My memories of that night of horrors are vivid and indelibly burned into my brain,” he later wrote.
During my youth my curiosity led me to see practically every lynching that took place in Los Angeles, and I had observed many gruesome sights. But the events that transpired that night were the most irresponsible and bloodthirsty I had ever witnessed. . . . What I saw and heard as a boy of sixteen stands before my eyes to this day as a realization of the extent to which maddened human beings can go. Many of the rioters seemed actually inhuman. They were wild-eyed and sweat-grimed. Knives, pistols, and sword-canes were in many hands; and some armed themselves with short iron-pipes and clubs. Nearly all dashed about trying to vent their brutality on the unfortunate Chinamen the moment they were within reach.
At least one more Chinese was shot and killed inside the Coronel. Another man was seen running from the building. “Like hounds sighting their quarry, a hundred men and boys dashed after him and seized his streaming queue, manhandling him roughly,” said Mesmer. “A score at once dashed off with him at a run for Tomlinson’s corral.”
It was approximately 8:45 PM. Four Chinese men had already been killed. Over the next twenty or thirty minutes fourteen more would be lynched in one of the nation’s most appalling episodes of collective violence. Four more men were hanged at Tomlinson’s, including Dr. Gene Tong, the only one of the victims recognized by the mob. Dr. Tong pled for his life in both English and Spanish, offering the lynchers gold and silver if they would let him go. At the mention of money, someone pulled off the doctor’s trousers and began going through his pockets, looking for cash. Finding none, a frustrated lyncher thrust his revolver in the doctor’s mouth and pulled the trigger, blowing off the side of his face. He was probably dead before he was hanged. “It was a most heinous and gruesome scene,” wrote Joseph Mesmer. “I have seen a good many men hung, both legal and by the vigilance committee, but nothing so revolting as what befell these Chinese.”
Back at the Coronel men and women were being pulled from their hiding places. The lynchers ignored the women, but forced nooses over the heads of the men and dragged them down the street to John Goller’s wagon shop, where the crossbar of his portico became a makeshift gallows. “I saw them bring a lot of Chinamen to my house,” Goller testified, “and I remonstrated with them for bringing them where my little children were.” One of the mob pressed the barrel of his rifle against Goller’s cheek and cocked it. “Dry up, you son of a bitch,” he said. Goller retreated into his house. Seven Chinese were hanged from his porch, pulled up by a group of men and boys on the roof, one of whom danced a quick step and called out to those below, “bring me more Chinamen, boys, patronize home trade.”
Young attorney Henry T. Hazard, watched the proceedings with a mounting sense of self-loathing. With Goller’s portico crowded with suspended bodies, the mob dragged several more victims to a large freight wagon standing nearby. “Rope, more rope!” someone cried, and a woman who operated a boardinghouse across the street rushed over and offered her clothesline. “Hang them!” she shouted. “Hang them!” As the line was being cut and nooses fashioned, Hazard took a stand. Climbing onto the tongue of the wagon, he shouted to the mob. “Do you know if the man you’re hanging is guilty?” There were catcalls. “You better dry up and get down or we’ll hang you,” one man shouted. “But it isn’t right,” said Hazard. His friends pulled him down as just someone fired a pistol and a bullet whistled past his face. Three more men were hanged from the high sides of the wagon.
LAWYER AND REAL ESTATE AGENT Robert M. Widney, leader of the Los Angeles vigilantes, was walking from his residence in the southern portion of the city to his office in the Downey Block, at the corner of Temple and Main, when he was hailed by Samuel C. Foy, a longtime resident who operated a harness and saddle shop on Los Angeles Street, only a few steps from Negro Alley. Foy was a vigilante from way back, and served with Widney as one of the leaders of the Law and Order Party. “They are killing all of the Chinese off,” Foy exclaimed. Widney supposed he was joking. “It’s a fact,” said Foy, and he explained what was happening. Widney’s first concern was that members of their organization might be involved in the violence. Foy assured him that was not the case. Widney told Foy to round up all the “old vigilantes” he could find and bring them to the corner of Temple and Main. He would be back as soon as he retrieved the revolver he kept in his office.
But Widney could not locate his Colt’s Navy six-shooter, so when he came out onto the street and came face-to-face with a mob forcing two Chinese men up Temple toward Tomlinson’s gate, he was unarmed. “Years of experience as a trapper and hunter and in the early days of Nevada mining camps,” Widney later wrote, “had demonstrated that words were useless with such rioters.” Not knowing what else to do, he followed them up the hill. At Toml
inson’s he ran into John Baldwin, a vocal opponent of Widney’s brand of vigilantism, one of the few men who had turned out to help Sheriff Burns protect Michel Lachenais. That night, however, the two found common cause, both circulating through the crowd, remonstrating with the lynchers. One man—Widney described him as a broad-faced Irishman with square-cut whiskers—pushed a revolver in Widney’s face and demanded that he shut up. They had important work to do, he said. Widney asked whether he was a vigilante. “Damn it,” the man replied, “we are all vigilantes.” He paused, then looked directly at Widney. “And there are a lot of white men here who ought to be hanged also.” Widney was stunned. “I believe he referred to me.” Widney and Baldwin moved off to the side and watched in silence as the Chinese victims were hoisted up.
Afterward Widney returned to the corner of Temple and Main, where he found Sam Foy and a few others, including grocer John Lazzarovich and Widney’s brother William. The younger Widney had taken the revolver from the office and also had a single-shot pistol. He handed the Colt to his brother. Now they all were armed. Widney was determined to rescue the Chinese from the hands of the lynchers. He was equally determined to rescue the reputation of the vigilantes from any association with the mob.
“We saw two or three groups coming with Chinamen,” he testified. It was do or die. The first group came up, led by the burly man with the Colt’s Dragoon. “The cheap labor is done away with now,” he shouted. “Every damned Chinaman will be hung by morning!” William Widney confronted him. “What are you going to do with that man?” he asked. “Hang him, by God,” the man with the Dragoon replied. Widney thrust his little single-shot pistol in the big man’s face as others grappled with him and seized his revolver. “I can get another in two minutes,” the man sputtered. But in the face of this simple demonstration of force by a group of determined men, the mob released its victim, and Foy and young Widney quickly escorted the Chinese man down Spring Street to the jail. Within seconds another group of lynchers arrived, dragging a victim. Lazzarovich and the elder Widney waded into the crowd and seized him. The lynchers resisted, and one of them leveled a revolver at Lazzarovich. Widney pressed his Colt against the man’s chest. “Get out or I will kill you,” he said in a low, threatening voice. The man went pale and moved aside, and as he did so the mob melted away. Lazzarovich and several others took the Chinese victim to the jail. Widney and the others repeated this several times, saving the lives of four or five men.
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