Revised Nov. 2, 2002
Table of Contents:
- A convict family
- Gold!
- A bad time and place to be Irish
- Children on the stage
- 'Festive little Maggie Moore'
- 'They were an era'
- End of a marriage
- Phantom cable cars?
- J.C. Williamson
- Harry Roberts
- Voices of the period
- Playbills
- Music
III. A bad place and time to be Irish
In 1856, a group of prominent men, fed up with the fraud and ballot-box stuffing that had set into San Francisco politics, formed a Vigilance Committee, or V.C. for short. They hung two men, James Casey and Charles Cora, both for murder. A third, James Sullivan, was found dead in his cell May 31, 1856 -- at first assumed to have committed suicide, but later found to have been murdered. This James Sullivan was better known as "Yankee" Sullivan, was also a native of Ireland who had ended up in Sydney, but he was five years younger than the James Sullivan of Sullivan and Secor, and only had one child, not six (James and Bridget's seventh was born afterwards). Nevertheless, I mention him because it illustrates that it wasn't a good time to be an Irishman in San Francisco as most of the people who were being picked up by the Vigilance Committee were Irish. It was especially bad to be a former convict from Australia, regardless of what you were doing with your life now. Alf Doten wrote in his journal:
May 31 ... The friends of Sullivan and the Irish generally are down on the Vigilance Committee, and in fact charge them with murder -- there will be trouble with the Irish yet.
June 2 ... There was a sort of mass meeting in the Plaza today of those opposed to the action of the Vigilance Committee - Those afraid of being turned out of the offices which they have gotten into by fraud and ballot-box stuffing, were there and some of them harangued the crowd, which was composed mostly of Irish &c, but the meeting amounted to nothing at all...
Emigrants from Australia, nearly all of whom were habitual criminals, congregated well north of where the Sullivans ended up, in an area that was known as Sydney Town, and later became known as the Barbary Coast. And if people didn't like Australians, it was no wonder; there were some pretty evil things going on in Sydney Town, as documented in Asbury's book "The Barbaray Coast," Chapters 3 and 4. Asbury says you could find just about any form of X-rated entertainment you care to think up (and several you probably don't care to think of). Then there was the man who would eat or drink any sort of refuse offered him for a few pennies. He got arrested for "making a beast of himself" in 1852, and said he'd been drunk for at least seven years and hadn't bathed for 15.
This sort of thing went on unchecked in part because the Gold Rush coincided with the transition of existing local government from a Mexican model to an American one. So on the one hand, you have military personnel saying they had the right to run civilian affairs; and on the other, the men who would normally have demanded stability were too busy mining to care what went on with the government. Out in the mines, if there was trouble, the miners settled it themselves. (The Sullivans probably shouldn't have been in California; there was an old Mexican statute, technically still in effect at the time they arrived, that forbade immigration by anyone convicted of a crime in another country. However, this law was never enforced.)
San Francisco was almost burned to the ground six times between Dec. 24, 1849, and June 22, 1851; four of those fires were blamed on arsonists affiliated with the Sydney Ducks. Yet they had influence with the town's crooked politicans and bribed their way out of the charges. This is why the first Vigilance Committee was formed in 1851. This first VC hanged three leading members of the Sydney Ducks and threatened to hang every other felon they found in San Francisco. This caused such a panic in Sydney Town that it was soon virtually deserted. The dance halls, saloons and whorehouses that were left operated well within the law for a couple of years. By 1854, the Ducks had come back to Sydney Town and it was as bad as ever, at least until 1856, when Casey and Cora were hung. Because of the threat the VC made against felons -- and I'm not sure if they meant to include people like Bridget and James, who had mended their ways and come to California more or less honestly -- James and Bridget may have concealed their convict backgrounds from their children. Or perhaps they had been doing this all along. Immigration law aside, convict status would doubtless be socially damaging, and they probably wanted to forget the whole sordid mess as soon as possible. Although it would not be until the early 1900s that the number of women finally became more or less equal to the number of men in the city, the more women that came over, the more social distinctions would be drawn between "respecitable" women and others.
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Created 20 Feb 1999 by Reunion, from Leister Productions, Inc. Revised January 10, 2003