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The small Mexican village of Yerba Buena was a sleepy place to live, farm and ranch. This all changed when gold was discovered in relatively nearby Sutter's Mill in 1849, shortly after the territory of California was taken over by American settlers and soldiers following Presdient James K. Polk's War of 1848.
A map of that shows the approximate coastlines of early San Francisco super-imposed on modern day San Francisco. The black line is the coastline of Yerba Buena in the 1840s; the blue line is the filled in coastline from 1852. The green square is the early central plaza of Portsmouth Square, where so many of the Vigilance Committees actions were held. The red is the approximate location of the Barbary Coast.
NOTE: due to some server error, the image above is not displaying. Click this text to see a large version.
When the news of gold was spread around the world, the first to respond were immigrants from the western portion of the world - first Chile, then Australian and China. Immigrants from the east coast cities of the US soon followed, and San Francisco sprung from nothingness (and Yerba Buena) into a highly multicultural city, like Athena springing fully formed and armed from Zeus's head.
Any sudden growth like that seen in San Francisco, where the population grew from 400 to 25,000 in just a few months, is sure to bear with it some problems. Especially if it is compounded by the fact that less than 3% of the population were women. Men in the sole company of other men tend towards the rambunctious, and San Francisco fast became the proto-typical wild west town where ranchers, farmers, prospectors, gamblers, prostitutes, thieves, robbers and vigilantes all mixed together
It was on to this scene that a group of Australian immigrants arrived. When the British monarchy lost Georgia as a penal colony in the American Revolution, they turned to newly found Australia as a place to deport their undesireables. Thus many of the Australians that immigrated to San Francisco were actually British felons and convicts once removed. They quickly established their own place in this forming metropolis - the neighborhood where they gathered was called Sydney Town; and the cackling laughter as they went about their business earned them the name of the "Sydney Ducks."
Moving into the area north of Market Street after a gang of former US soldier Know-Nothings (known as the Hounds) were expelled, the Ducks quickly set about making themselves at home. They founded many pubs with distinctly British names such as "The Boar's Head", "The Noggin of Ale" and "The Bird-in-Hand." These bugs soon became the wellspring from which drunkenness, gambling, prostitution, violence and all manner of other vice issued. Such was the rough atmosphere of this coastal neighborhood that it was likened to the Barbary Coast of northern Africa, from where Berber Pirates terrorized the Mediterranaen and at where the fledgling U.S. Marines saw their first action on foreign soil. The name stuck, and from the 1850s until a decade after the great earthquake and fire of 1906, this neighborhood was known as the Barbary Coast. It is now located in the San Francisco neighborhood of North Beach.
Particular to San Francisco, of all the wild-west towns, was the practice of "shanghai'ing" - so called because the victim of shanghai'ing was a sailor that would find himself bound to an undesireable long journey to ports such as Shanghai, with no recourse but to see the sailing through. While this practice continued for many decades in San Francisco, it was of particular usefulness in the early 1850s during the peak of the gold rush years. Captains that set port in San Francisco during this time found themselves on an abandoned ship as crew after crew fled north east to make it rich in area around Sacramento. The harbor of San Francisco was cluttered with hundreds of abandoned ships rotting away with no crew to sail them. Many of these abandoned ships gave up all hope of sailing away, and were beached to become hotels, stores, even jailhouses.
It was rough for all of the ship captains, but thoses captains with a particularly bad reputation found themselves unable to hire crews to sail their ships. Having their reputations for a reason, tehese ship captains would then unscrupulously contract with "crimpers" who would raid the Barbary Coast saloons for sailors to shanghai. The saloon operators were often complicit with such acts, if not active crimpers themselves. A sailor would find themselves in the charming companionship of a barmaid who would pass them a shot of whiskey spiked with laudanum or other drugs. If that failed to work, then a billy club was often sufficient to render them unconscious. The Bar's job done, the crimper would then load them on to a ship to nurse a nasty hangover while they discovered where they were headed when they woke up the next day.
Another phenomenon of early San Francisco were routine fires that would raze the city of timber houses to the ground. Originally thought to be the handy work of the Sydney Ducks, recent writers are of the opinion that these firse were set by merchants wishing to cash out on insurance policies held on warehoused good that the volatile market forces had rendered impossible to sell for a profit.
Regardless of who set these fires that burned the town to the ground six times in as little as two years, they tended to be set when prevailing winds would be blowing out of the east or north, away from Sydney Town. The Sydney Ducks were not above reproach, either, as the would use the incendiary chaos to loot the burning houses and cart the goods back to Sydney Town, earning the emnity of the rest of the town.
The city government during this era was under-staffed, under-equipped, and under-motivated. With most of the eligible populuous out in the fields trying to strike it rich, the police and city government appeared to be more concerned with using their public powers to make themselves rich. This, combined with the fact that police work in an era of solo beat patrols before the advent of radio communication and immediate back-up made police work particularly dangerous. Especially since many policeman were denied the use of guns unless they supplied them themselves. And if the suspects were apprehended, they were housed on the scuttled brig Euphemia, which was bought and turned into a jailhouse, and from which escapes were routine as inmates dug out of their cells while the wardens failed to watch. It was little surprised that the inhabitants of early San Francisco felt that the local wheels of justice incapable to do the work necessary.
Then, in June of 1851, during the reconstruction after a particularly nasty fire blamed on the Ducks, self-styled civic leader Samuel Brannan, himself an interesting character, and a couple hundred of other San Franciscan citizens formed the first Committee of Vigiliance, dedicated to cleaning out the city of the criminals that infested it. Just days after the committee was formed, they were given cause to act by the theft of one John Jenkins, known even to his fellow theives as "the Miscreant." Following his theft of a safe from a local merchant, which the Miscreant threw into bay while rowing away from a throng of citizens chasing him, Vigilance Commitee took steps to immediately apprehend the thief before the police could be roused. They took him to immediate trial, found him guilty as charged, and then sentenced him to be hung from the central plaza at Portsmouth Square. Lacking a gallows, they threw a rope over a beam that projected out from an adobe building there, and ran with the other end of the rope until John Jenkins was lifted off of the ground. All two hundred members of the committee took turns holding him aloft so that they would all be "equally to blame" for his death if legal action followed. They then published their entire roster of members to openly declare what they had done.
The next step of the Vigilance Committee was to let all the of the criminal elements of the Barbary Coast know that they had five days to leave the city, or they would be lynched or thrown out of the city, whichever was felt to be expedient at the time. There was a mass exodus of many of the lesser criminal elements, but the serious elements of the Ducks stayed put, somewhat ironically putting faith in the machinery of city government to protect them from these vigilantes. Another fire, said to set in Revenge when the winds were blowing away from Sydney Town, burned the city down again soon after.
Then next action of the Vigilance Committee took place when English Jim, a particularly nasty Duck, a sort of leader among the rabble of Sydney Town, returned to San Francisco and tried to rob the Captain of an English ship while he slept in its cabin. English Jim had as earlier notable exploits, killed a Sheriff in nearby Marysville in a burglary, and escaped from jail a few days after, gone to San Francisco, where he robbed Jansen Bonds and hightailed out of there with $2000. In an interesting twist, one Thomas Berdue, who was so physically similar to English Jim as to share the same scar and missing finger, was literally sent up the river to the interior to hang for English Jim's crimes, narrowly escaping a mob lynching himself in the process.
As English Jim tried to rob the Captain's cabin, he was held fast by the Captain's wife while she called for help from the other sailors on the ship. Thus caught in the act, English Jim was taken to summary trial by the Vigilance Committe and almost immediately confessed to the crimes for which Berdue was sent to hang. English Jim was sentenced to hang for the multiple robberies and the murder of the Sheriff, and they paraded out into the street with him in tow. English Jim seemed to believe that he'd be rescued by his fellow Australian cronies before he'd make it to the gallows, but the sheer mass of the entire city gathered to watch rendered any escape impossible. English Jim had to be carried the last few steps to the hastily erected gallows at the head of Market Street, where he was hung. Riders were dispatched to the interior to exonerate Thomas Berdue now that the real English Jim had been hung, and Thomas was given some thousands of dollars to compensate him for their mistake. He quickly left town, and it is unknown where he went to.
Two more Sydney Ducks were soon apprehended by the vigilantes and sentenced to be hung. This time, though, the police stepped in to prevent mob justice from being executed. The sheriff arrived with a large contigent of police force and an order from the governor of California to demand that the two Ducks be turned over to him for a legal trial. Most of the Vigilance Committee being elsewhere at the time, the scant few guarding their makeshift prison assented. Two days later the Vigilance Committee in full force raided the police jailhouse and took the two Sydney Ducks out for an immediate hanging. Samuel Brannan then announced to the gathered crowd that the citizens Vigilance Committee would not be swayed from exacting justice regardless of what the police, city government or state goverment said contrariwise, and that every felon that valued his life should immediately depart from San Francisco. Sydney Town was quickly depopulated, with only a few bars, pubs and brothels remaining in operation, and this rambunctious town was quiet for a spell. Some of the Ducks would later return, but by and large their power was broken, though in time they would be followed by a next in a long series of thugs - including the now eponymous hoodlums - that would continue to ravage wild-west era San Francisco.
----Information comes from:
History of the Barbary Coast - An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld - Herbert Asbury. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, 1933.
{Out of print, text found online at http://www.sfgenealogy.com/sf/history/hbtbcidx.htm}
The Strongest Gang in Town - Kevin J. Mullen. Noir Publications, Novato, CA, 2005.
Walking the Barbary Coast Trail - Daniel Bacon. Quicksilver Press, 1997.
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