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from penal colonies. From 1851 to 1856, San Francisco’s self-appointed ‘Vigilance Committee’ tried, convicted and hung suspect ‘Sydney Ducks’ in hour-long proceedings that came to be known as ‘kangaroo trials.’ The San Francisco Herald caricatured the Australian waterfront neighborhood called Sydney-Town with undisguised venom: ‘The upper part of Pacific Street, after dark, is crowded by thieves, gamblers, low women, drunken sailors, and similar characters, who resort to the groggeries that line the street, and there spend the night in the most hideous orgies. Every grog shop is provided with a fiddle, from which some half-drunken creature tortures execrable sounds, called by way of compliment, music.’ Australian boarding houses were torched six times by arsonists from 1849 to 1851, so when gold was found in Australia in 1851, many were ready to head home; Australians who stayed were promptly blamed for the ensuing California gold panic.

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RAILROADS & RIOTS

Along with Australians, Chinese – the most populous group in California by 1860 – were at the receiving end of misplaced resentment. Frozen out of mining claims, many Chinese instead opened service-based businesses that survived when all-or-nothing mining ventures went bust – incurring further antipathy among miners. In 1870, San Francisco became the first US city to pass ordinances restricting housing and employment options for anyone born in China.

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SPEAK OF THE DEVIL

Go ahead and call Ambrose Bierce a cynic: you might be too if you’d reported on Barbary Coast shenanigans for more than a decade, ditched your newspaper job to seek and not quite find your fortune as a prospector in Deadwood, and worked as a lobbyist for Machiavellian San Francisco mining magnate George Hearst. Bierce’s satirical 1868–1911 columns yielded his 1911 book The Devil’s Dictionary, where he provided disambiguation for key terms as used in San Francisco. To wit:

acquaintance, n: a person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.

brandy, n: a cordial composed of one part thunder-and-lightning, one part remorse, two parts bloody murder, one part death-hell-and-the-grave and four parts clarified Satan.

bride, n: a woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.

impunity, n: wealth.

telephone, n: an invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.

tenacity, n: a certain quality of the human hand in its relation to the coin of the realm.

vote, n: the instrument and symbol of a freeman’s power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.

zeal, n: a certain nervous disorder afflicting the young and inexperienced.

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Not coincidentally, this law served the needs of local magnates looking for cheap labor to build the first cross-country railroad. There were few other takers for treacherous railroad work, given a job description that, if truthful, might have read thusly: must dangle off cliffs in rickety baskets, light sticks of dynamite in rock crevices and yell like hell to be yanked to safety prior to detonation; salary negligible, benefits include sporadic meals and prisonlike bunkhouse accommodation under armed guard in cold, remote mountain camps. With little other choice in legitimate employment, an estimated 12,000 Chinese laborers were blasting through the Sierra Nevada at the height of railroad construction.

Upon completion of the railroad, most Chinese laborers settled in San Francisco, increasingly confined to Chinatown. But there would be no respite for the weary workers. After being accused of taking low-paid, dangerous dockworker jobs no one else wanted, Chinese San Franciscans were attacked in the 1877 anti-Chinese riots. This violence troubled Emperor Norton, who in one instance reportedly stood between the attackers and their intended targets, and recited the Lord’s Prayer until the rioters dispersed.

Any hope that the general populace – composed almost entirely of recent immigrants at the time – would follow