Historical Footnotes
6. The Great San Francisco Crime Wave
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6. The Great San Francisco Crime Wave
This is the second in a longer series of Historical Footnotes to California Republic dedicated to the two San Francisco Vigilance Committees. To start with the first Footnote in this series, click here.
There will never be a time when the problem of big city crime will not be troublesome. A recent rise in crime in San Francisco has marred its reputation even as I write this Footnote. But the enormous wave of criminality that swept through Gold Rush San Francisco like a firestorm, when city government and institutions were barely in existence, was the first of such experiences on any terrifying scale in the United States, and the first to cause the population to respond in self-defense. The fact that this response, though ruthless and unlawful, was undeniably successful, has always been a source of fascination and debate. Indeed, it was received so in the East right when it happened.
When gold was first discovered in early 1848, San Francisco was a tiny hamlet with no criminal element at all. There was no crime anywhere in California when it was conquered by America. And getting out to California from the Eastern States was enormously expensive and exhausting. Thus, at least through Summer 1849, the kind of people passing through The City (because few conceived of settling there) were hard-working men about their business, which was mostly washing sands for gold up in the foothills.
But sometime toward the close of '49, and especially through 1850, the word of gold hit New South Wales, the eastern coast of what is now Australia. New South Wales was then a giant British penal colony composed of men transported there to do their time. When one's prison term was up, a prisoner was granted a "ticket of leave" to sail from Sydney Cove, the original of Sydney Harbour. Despite the distance from the Southern Hemisphere across the vast Pacific Ocean, the trip from Sydney Cove to San Francisco was much less difficult and expensive than any trip from the Atlantic States. So, suddenly, a group of men with criminal proclivities and few wholesome opportunities appeared in California in large numbers. They were not Americans, and thus felt no allegiance to the '49ers, and unlike the Americans, they largely knew each other and were prepared to organize and to cooperate.
They clustered around Clark Point at the base of Telegraph Hill, in that stretch of Broadway and Pacific Street that much later became notorious as the Barbary Coast. This was no place to stumble into and became a fortress for the men now known as Sydney Ducks or Sydney Coves. In a city where the primary commodity was gold dust, the "diggings" were far richer for a thief in San Francisco than any placer in the Mother Lode. And so they concentrated all their efforts there.
The situation was ideal for them. The quality of building was execrable, for only temporary occupation. There was no trouble breaking into anything. And everything encouraged fire, from gusty winds to lack of brick to the extensive use of canvas. And thus a daisy chain of fires repeatedly burned much of San Francisco in those very early days, which offered opportunities for theft on a fantastic scale. Whether Sydney Ducks deliberately started any of these fires cannot be known with certainty. But they most definitely exploited them, and San Franciscans thought or feared the conflagrations had been arson, which triggered a far greater hatred toward the Ducks than due to thievery alone.
But San Francisco was in no position to resist them. There was but the merest pretense of societal cohesion and identity. The 49ers were all strangers to each other, and few thought of San Francisco as a living city, but rather as an entrepot into the gold fields. City government and law enforcement were a joke, staffed by men who somehow couldn't find a better way to make a dollar. Yet San Francisco really was a city. Not only were there thirty thousand residents, a quite substantial population for America in those days, but those residents were almost all young men of most ambitious character, who'd risked everything to come and make their pile. Thus (and also due to all the gold in circulation) San Francisco was comparable in substance and pretension to any city twice its size.
By the start of 1851, the Ducks had San Francisco by the balls. They operated with impunity, fearing nothing, surely not the law. When a Duck managed to get arrested, he was easily released upon an alibi supported by the testimony of other Ducks or was acquitted by corrupted jurors. The law courts were incompetent in ways that we can barely contemplate today, as there was nothing in the way of public oversight or even interest. Men complained, but were too busy with their own affairs to act in concert. No one cared about The City as a city.
And yet there was one striking and peculiar case of San Franciscans organizing in the face of some chaotic violence. The matter of "The Hounds" is covered in the fiction portion of this project, as pertaining to Jack Powers, because Powers was himself a Hound, and the reader might refer to it because the background is historically correct. In short, The City back in Spring of '49, lacking any meaningful police or deputies, allowed a group of former U.S. Army soldiers, New York Volunteers, to act as a "Society of Regulators," not as true police, but to serve writs for the Sheriff and do debt collections for the merchants. They grew so arrogant and uncontrollable that San Franciscans were afraid of them and called them "Hounds." They weren't true criminals, but a species of abusive private lawmen, and when they trashed the small Chilean settlement while collecting debts, the merchants chose to shut them down by forming an ad hoc committee to bring the Hounds to trial right in the middle of the Plaza. They ultimately never punished them, but at least they broke them up, so that in '51, when San Francisco faced the Sydney Ducks, there was this memory of public prophylaxis by a volunteer committee.
The breaking point arrived in February 1851, when a merchant was robbed and left for dead on his own premises. Two men were arrested. One called himself Burdue, but was identified as one James Stuart who had escaped from jail near Sacramento while awaiting trial for murder of a sheriff. Both these men were brought before the merchant victim, who claimed to recognize them as the criminals. At least five thousand San Franciscans gathered round the City Hall, where both prisoners were being kept, and a handbill circulated through the crowd, condemning the ineffectiveness of law enforcement as "a nonentity to be scoffed at" and calling for a public assembly on the Plaza with an eye toward lynching the two men at once.
At this iffy juncture, a committee was created by the most important merchants in The City to control the situation, to make sure the prisoners received a trial, but would be punished if convicted. Before a crowd of eight thousand, the mayor agreed to let a panel of twelve men from this committee try the prisoners. But the result was unexpected. A majority were for conviction, but a minority doubted whether the two men had properly identified. Thus the question was whether a mere majority was sufficient, as in a purely democratic process, or whether unanimity was required, as under rules of law. This important disagreement froze the jury and they decided to adjourn and turn the prisoners back over the law without a verdict. Under pressure from the citizens, both men were then convicted in a legal trial and sentenced to long prison terms. The second man escaped from jail ,but Stuart/Burdue was sent back for his murder trial where he was sentenced to be hanged.
As it turned out, and as we'll later see, these two men were unjustly charged and wrongfully convicted in their legal trials. Had the majority in the committee trials governed the decision, both would have been strung at once. Even the murder conviction of Burdue near Sacramento was thrown out when the true perpetrator was discovered. But in the months before this all could be discovered, the group of businessmen who had created the ad hoc committee decided to create a much more stable institution for control of crime in San Francisco, which they styled the "Committee of Vigilance," and waited for their chance to make their play.
extremely readable and interesting. Australians! I didn't know.