17

Meanwhile, Back in California . . .

While many African Americans, like the Custers’ cook Eliza, would lead peripatetic lives following the drum of the US Army, others had already succeeded in making settled lives for themselves in the new territories of the West. California, particularly during the Gold Rush years, was considered “the best place for black folks on the globe” by one enthusiastic emigrant.²⁸⁴ Unlike Oregon, California had not passed Black Exclusion laws, and many white Americans coming to California for the first time were confused by what appeared to them to be a lack of racial distinctions.¹⁴⁵

While the more fluid racial order that existed in California in the early years of its statehood did not last, and the specter of slavery was never quite eradicated until after the Civil War, for all this it was in California that many African Americans would find their first, exhilarating tastes of freedom—and none more so than a remarkable woman named Biddy Mason.

Biddy Mason

A black-and-white photograph of Biddy taken some time in the 1870s shows her well into middle age; a small, homely-looking woman, she stares out at the camera with a strikingly level gaze. She wears a neat black dress, carefully buttoned up the front, with a satin bow at the neck, to which has been pinned a simple brooch. At the time when this photograph was taken, Biddy Mason was a woman of substance.

Bridget (or Biddy) Mason had been among the very first African American women ever to make the journey west. By the time of her death in 1891, at the age of seventy-three, she was one of the most prominent and respected citizens in Los Angeles and a substantial property owner and philanthropist. First arriving in California in 1855, she was one of the first non-Mexican residents of Los Angeles, where she became a successful midwife. After ten years of working and saving she had earned enough money ($250) to purchase land and build a home for herself and her family, becoming one of the first African American women to own property in her own right.¹⁴⁶ She was also instrumental in setting up the Los Angeles branch of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church, which had its inaugural meeting in her house. Those who knew her in her exemplary and prosperous later life would never have been able to guess at the bitter hardships she had endured.

Like many African Americans in the early years of the emigrations, Biddy Mason had first gone west as a slave. Born in Georgia¹⁴⁷ in 1818, as a small child she had been given as a wedding present to Robert and Rebecca Smith, the owners of a Mississippi cotton plantation. Biddy bore three children, all girls—Ellen, Ann, and Harriet—very possibly the offspring of her owner, Robert Smith. Whatever the case, like Biddy herself, these children were Smith’s property and represented a considerable addition to the family’s wealth. Despite not being able to read or write, as a young woman Biddy acquired a number of crucial skills. As well as working in her owner’s cotton fields, she learned how to manage livestock and became a skillful practitioner of herbal medicine. Robert Smith had a further six children with his wife, and Biddy often attended her during her confinements—an experience that would serve her well in later life.

Robert Smith was an early convert to Mormonism, and in 1848 he decided to take his family west, to follow Brigham Young’s call and help build the Kingdom of the Saints.¹⁴⁸ On March 10, the Smiths joined forces with a party of Mississippi Mormons, a group of fifty-six whites and thirty-four slaves. In the Smiths’ party there were nine whites and ten slaves. These included Biddy and her three children, one of whom she was still nursing, and another young enslaved African American woman, Hannah, who may have been Biddy’s half-sister and who was pregnant at the time.²⁸⁵

Despite nursing a tiny baby and having two other young children to care for (Ellen and Ann were ten and four respectively), Biddy was put in charge of herding the family’s livestock. This she did, for seven long months, on that arduous journey across the prairies and mountains to the desert salt flats of Utah.

Unlike the Pacific Territories (Oregon and California), both of which would go on to declare themselves free, Brigham Young’s desert kingdom enjoyed no such prohibitions. When the Smiths arrived in Utah, Biddy and daughters all continued in their household as slaves. Three years later, the Smiths decided to move again, this time to San Bernardino, California, where they hoped to help establish another Mormon colony.¹⁴⁹ Despite warnings from Brigham Young that “there is little doubt but [the slaves] will all be free as soon as they arrive in California,”²⁸⁶ the Smiths made the decision to take their slaves with them. In 1851, these comprised an extended family of thirteen: Biddy and Hannah, who between them now had ten children, and one grandchild of Hannah’s, the child of her daughter, Ann.

In the same wagon caravan that left Salt Lake City for California there were a number of other enslaved people, including Elizabeth Flake, a young woman who, like Biddy, had herded her owner’s livestock on the journey from the Mormon Winter Quarters (North Omaha) in Nebraska to Salt Lake City. The journey would prove life-changing for both young women. One of the teamsters on that journey was another African American, a former slave called Charles Rowan, and it is likely that it was Rowan, who would go on to be a prominent antislavery advocate, who first urged the two women to contest their enslaved status when they reached California. Elizabeth Flake, who did indeed become a freewoman when she reached California, went on to marry Charles Rowan, and like him became a prominent member of the African American community in San Bernardino and also a vigorous abolitionist.

Biddy Mason, however, was not so fortunate. Like so many other slaveholders, Robert Smith had no intention of relinquishing his property. Although under California’s new constitution slavery was expressly prohibited, it did not follow that on crossing the border, enslaved people such as Biddy and her family would automatically be free. Slaveholders who had arrived before 1850, when California gained its statehood, had been permitted to keep their slaves as indentured servants, but the reality was that many slaveholders simply ignored the law, which was considered by many to be unenforceable. Slaveholders either went unchallenged, or, if they were, the courts were overwhelmingly likely to favor their cause.

The situation was further complicated by the fact that, after several years of infighting, and as a concession to the southern slave states, in the same year that California became a free state, Congress had passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which made it easy to recapture escaped slaves. Bounty hunters who made a lucrative business of tracking down and capturing runaways (in much the same way that they were paid to collect Native American scalps, known as “hairy banknotes”) operated throughout California, often openly advertising in local papers throughout the 1850s. This created a bitterly fraught situation in which many African Americans, freed by their former masters, still faced persecution and harassment, in much the same way as they still did in the Missouri River towns such as Independence and Saint Joseph.

Throughout the 1850s, however, attitudes in California had begun, slowly, to change. Just two years after the Smiths’ arrival, a story appeared in the Alta California newspaper in which “a person by the name of Brown attempted to have a Negro girl arrested in our town a few days since as a fugitive slave, but was taken all a-back by the girl’s lawyer, F. W. Thomas, producing her Freedom Papers. Brown’s father set the girl at liberty in 1851, and it is thought by many that the son knew the fact, and thought to catch the girl without her Freedom Papers, but fortunately for her he did not.”²⁸⁷

Sensing that there was trouble ahead for him if he remained in California, in late 1855 Robert Smith decided to move his entire family to Texas (which, like all the other southern states, would remain a slave state until after the Civil War). Any hopes that Biddy may have had of eventually gaining her freedom in California now seemed utterly dashed. “While slaves in California were free by law, it was impossible to be free and Black in Texas, since Texas law forbade the importation of free Blacks into the state, and Texans would have regarded them as slaves.”²⁸⁸

Against all the odds, Biddy now found herself with two powerful allies. One of these was Elizabeth Flake; the other was another African American called Robert Owens. Owens was, by all accounts, a formidable man, a former slave who had come to California from Texas in 1850, driving an oxteam. At the time he came to champion Biddy Mason, just five years later, he was already an extremely successful businessman, a horse and mule trader who ran a thriving corral in Los Angeles, employing ten vaqueros.

Robert and his wife Minnie Owens had a particular interest in Biddy’s case. Their son Charles was in love with Biddy’s daughter Ellen, now seventeen, and wanted to marry her. A third man, Manuel Pepper, possibly one of Robert Owens’s vaqueros, was in love with Hannah’s daughter, Ann, a young woman of the same age.

Although time was running out, there was now a small but critical delay to Smith’s plans to spirit his slaves away. Hannah was about to give birth to her eighth child, and the Smiths were camped out in a canyon in the Santa Monica Mountains, impatiently waiting for her confinement, after which she would be able to travel again. During this time, Elizabeth Flake and Robert Owens petitioned the local court for a writ of habeas corpus for Biddy and her family. In what must have been a moment of heart-stopping tension, a posse of mounted men—two county sheriffs, together with Robert Owens and his vaqueros—“all swooped down on the camp in the mountains and challenged Smith’s right to take his slaves out of California.”²⁸⁹ Biddy and her family were taken to the county jail, where they were put “under charge of the Sheriff of this county for their protection,” until their case would be heard.²⁹⁰

It is almost impossible to imagine the courage that was now necessary. Although she was a mature woman of thirty-eight, until this point in her life absolutely everything that Biddy Mason had ever known would have militated against taking such a step. Enslaved people were the absolute property of their owners. While laws varied across the southern slaveholding states, all followed a similar pattern. Slaves were forbidden from congregating together, even for religious worship, without white supervision. They were forbidden to bear arms, or to marry or travel without the written permission of their masters. They could own no personal property of their own, sometimes including their working tools or even the clothes they stood up in. Most crucially perhaps, they were forbidden from learning how to read or write.

In Virginia, the cotton-planting region where the majority of African Americans lived, slave literacy was a criminal offence. In Virginia, also, even free Blacks were prohibited from trying to educate themselves, and if a free Black left the state to be educated elsewhere, they were barred from ever returning. Most egregious of all, in Kentucky, it was a criminal offence for African Americans to try to defend themselves, no matter what the circumstances, against white assault. Slaves, and any children they might have, could be bought and sold, either together or separately, at the will of their owners, who often split families apart with impunity; they could be given away in lieu of debts and left in wills as part of their owner’s estate. It goes almost without saying that their testimony was worth nothing in a court of law.

It is hard to imagine what Biddy Mason might have been feeling as she looked out through the bars of the jail, contemplating the prospect of having to face her owner, Robert Smith, in court. One thing she would have known, with absolute numbing certainty, was that if she lost her case, the consequences for her and her children would be catastrophic.

It is, on the other hand, absolutely clear what Robert Smith felt. The entire case that he put forward through his lawyer, Alonzo Thomas, was shot through with lies. First, he tried to argue that the petitioners were members of his family, denying outright that he was holding them as slaves. They had come with him from Mississippi to California, he argued, “with their own consent, rather than remain there, and he [had] supported them ever since, subjecting them to no greater control than his own children.” It was his intention, he stated, “to remove to Texas and take them with him.”

The situation for Hannah was more dangerous still. Unlike Biddy, who had been immediately taken into protective custody, the recently confined Hannah and her newborn baby had remained with the Smiths. They were therefore not only physically under his control, but highly vulnerable to his threats and intimidation. In the case put forward by his lawyer, Smith argued that Hannah and her children were “well disposed to remain with him, and the petition was filed without their knowledge and consent.” His lawyer added: “It is understood, between said Smith and said persons, that they will return to the State of Texas with him voluntarily, as a portion of his family.”²⁹¹

The trial, which was later reported, in all its painful details, in the Los Angeles Star, took place between January 19 and 21, 1856. Presiding over the case was Benjamin Hayes, judge of the District Court of the First Judicial District, Los Angeles. In his summation, the judge set out the situation with great clarity. Robert Smith, he declared, “intended to and is about to remove from the State of California, where slavery does not exist, to the State of Texas, where slavery of Negroes and persons of color does exist, and is established by the municipal laws, and intends to remove the said before-mentioned persons of color, to his own use without the free will and consent of all or any of the said persons of color, whereby their liberty will be greatly jeopardized, and there is good reason to apprehend and believe that they may be sold into slavery or involuntary servitude.”²⁹² Robert Smith, he noted, “is persuading and enticing and seducing said persons of color to go out of the State of California, and it further appearing that none of the said persons of color can read and write, and are almost entirely ignorant of the laws of the State of California as well as those of the State of Texas, and of their rights and that the said Robert Smith, from his past relations to them as members of his family does possess and exercise over them an undue influence in respect to the matter of their removal insofar that they have been in duress and not in possession and exercise of their free will so as to give a binding consent to any engagement or arrangement with him.”²⁹³

The necessarily dry legalese with which Judge Hayes gives his verdict in the case of Mason v. Smith conveys little of the febrile atmosphere in and around the court on that day. The article in the Los Angeles Star, on the other hand, gives an eyewitness account of the extraordinary, nail-biting human drama.

Perhaps sensing that the case was going to go against him, Robert Smith had tried various other tactics. First, he had attempted to threaten Biddy and Hannah outright, and when that did not work he proceeded to bribe their lawyer with one hundred dollars (a huge sum) to drop the case. Their lawyer (unnamed in the Star article) accepted the bribe. Just one day into their trial, the two women found themselves completely abandoned in the courtroom. Under California law, Blacks, “Mulattoes,” and Native people were all prohibited from testifying against whites, in either civil or criminal cases.

Without a lawyer, they did not stand a chance.

But Robert Smith had not reckoned with Judge Hayes. “I was pained by an occurrence not to be passed unnoticed,” the judge wrote. “There was a motion to dismiss the proceedings, based on a note from the petitioners’ attorney on the opposite side, in these words: ‘I, as attorney for the petitioners, being no longer authorized to prosecute the writ, and being discharged by the same and the partner who are responsible to me, decline further to prosecute the matter.’ ”

Judge Hayes subpoenaed the lawyer, questioned him, and then denounced his lack of legal propriety. He then proceeded to question the women, not in court but in his private chambers. In addition to Judge Hayes himself, two disinterested “gentlemen witnesses” were present to hear their story. The conversation was reported as follows:

Biddy: “I have always done what I have been told to do; I always feared this trip to Texas, since I first heard of it. Mr. Smith told me I would be just as free in Texas as here.”

Hannah’s daughter, Ann, when questioned separately from Biddy, asked the judge, “Will I be as free in Texas as here?”—a question the legal experts found a poignant response to Smith’s bluster that all would travel willingly.²⁹⁴

It would transpire later that Robert Smith had tried not only verbal threats but other, even worse forms of intimidation to try to force the women to give up their case. One of the Smith party, a man named Hartwell Cottrell, made a bungled attempt to snatch two of Hannah’s children away from her but was prevented, and he had to flee California himself, with a charge of kidnapping against him. The turnkey at the county jail, Frank Carpenter, later gave evidence in court as to the women’s terror of Smith, but, even without his testimony, it was perfectly clear to everyone in court. The judge decided that the “speaking silence of the petitioners” must be listened to, and that Hannah, in particular, had almost certainly been threatened. “Nothing else—except force—can account rationally for a favorable disposition in Hannah, if she had any.” Her very hesitation in speaking out, he noted, “spoke a volume,” and furthermore, “she is entitled to be listened to when, breathing freer, she declares she never wished to leave, and prays for protection.”²⁹⁵

In his conclusion, Judge Hayes wrote: “No man of any experience in life will believe that it was ever true, or ever intended to be realized—this pleasant prospect of freedom in Texas.” Robert Smith, he observed, had only “$500 and an outfit” and had “his own white family to take care of, and seemed to have no reason to transport fourteen slaves so far—unless he intended to sell them.”²⁹⁶

“And it further appearing . . . to the judge here, that all of the said persons of color are entitled to their freedom and cannot be held in slavery or involuntary servitude, it is therefore argued that they are entitled to their freedom and are free forever.”^150 297

There was another form of slavery in California, however, that for many decades yet would remain impervious to legislation. The life of the Chinese sex slave, wrote one commentator as late as the 1890s, was one “of total debasement and ill-treatment.” Girls had been found “who have been burnt with red-hot irons, dragged about with the hair, and had their eyes propped open with sticks. Slaves that are resold by a contract, a document which, while unfit for publication, is a most remarkable paper, showing that the sale of a woman is looked upon in the same light as that of the lowest animals.”²⁹⁸

An enslaved Chinese woman, photographed in holiday attire

In 1852 there were only nineteen Chinese women residing in San Francisco, compared to around three thousand Chinese men. In later years, between 1860 and 1880, many more would arrive, the vast majority of them smuggled in as slaves or indentured sex workers. They joined the thirty thousand Chinese men who journeyed to San Francisco in this same period, huge numbers of whom were employed in the late 1860s to do the dangerous and backbreaking work of laying the western portion of the transcontinental railway through the Sierra Nevada.¹⁵¹ While some Chinese women traveled to California as genuine wives or concubines, most did not. These women were known as baak haak chai, or “one hundred men’s wife.”

The women arrived from China by sea, a journey that in the days before steam travel could take as many as a hundred days.¹⁵² Conditions on board the boats were so primitive that many arrived half-starved or sick from long weeks in cramped, unsanitary, and poorly ventilated holds. Occasionally, women and young girls were concealed behind false partitions, but even if they had the “luxury” of traveling steerage, they were crammed together on a framework made of shelves, no more than eighteen inches apart. One journalist from a San Francisco weekly remarked that “if a few barrels of oil were poured into the steerage hold, its occupants would enjoy the distinction, so often objected to, of being literally ‘packed like sardines.’ ”²⁹⁹

Added to this was the extreme distress that all the women suffered when the reality of their situation finally sank in, since many of them had been either kidnapped or otherwise duped into boarding the ship. Some, like Lin Yu-shih, who boarded a ship in Hong Kong, wept for days on discovering that she had been kidnapped; many others committed suicide by jumping into the sea. Others were only small children when they were trafficked and had no real idea of what was happening to them. Lilac Chen was six years old when her father sold her to a procurer. Many years later she would recall that she had thought she was going on a visit to her grandmother, becoming confused when her mother started to cry. When the ship finally sailed, leaving her alone on a deck full of strangers, she “kicked and screamed and screamed,” refusing to eat, and begging to be taken home, but to no avail.³⁰⁰

In the early 1850s, when San Francisco was in its lawless infancy, and the numbers of Chinese women being trafficked were still very small, they were openly sold on the docks, the bidding being carried out in full view of the spectators, who frequently included police officers among their number. Later on, the auction sites moved to Chinatown itself, the newly burgeoning area that within a decade would be home to the largest population of Chinese outside of their own homeland.

It was here, in a place known as the “Queen’s Room” on Dupont Street, that most of the auctions took place. For all its grandiose name, in reality the “Queen’s Room” was no better than “a public slave mart” where women were put on display, to be bought and sold on again at the will of the slave dealers. By the time they arrived in California, the likelihood was that they had already been passed down a long line of traffickers, beginning in China itself. Traffickers were well established in almost all large Chinese cities, and these in turn had subagents “in the suburban districts, whose duty it is to kidnap the victims and forward them to the agent at the shipping ports.”³⁰¹

Often women were told that they were traveling to America to be married. Despite repeated legislative efforts to try to stem the flow of Chinese emigration—particularly what was termed “involuntary immigration” on the part of Chinese women—political will was insufficient to prevent it. “Unfortunately, the Chinese law and custom of marriage aids the kidnapper,” wrote one commentator. “A wife rarely sees her husband before marriage; the affair being a business arrangement, pure and simple.” Girls and young women were valued from $15 to $3,500 at auction, and consequently “every effort is made by the consignee to bring them through the ordeal successfully.”

“This accomplished, the girl, who perhaps still expects to meet her promised husband, is taken to a boardinghouse, provided with a rich wardrobe and rendered as attractive as possible. She is now . . . conducted to the ‘Queen’s Room,’ which she is told belongs to her husband and where she is to receive his friends. The girl is now really on exhibition for sale and is critically examined by high-binders, slave-dealers, speculators, brothel keepers, and others interested in the sale. Finally, a price is agreed upon and she becomes the property of some man whom she supposes to be her husband. The plot is not discovered by the credulous victim until her master hands her over to the keeper of a brothel. In four-fifths of the cases of slavery this is the method of procedure, which, it is needless to say, is invariably effective, the victim rarely if ever escaping.”³⁰²

One particularly poignant article in the Daily Morning Chronicle in 1868 printed the following bill of sale:

Loo Woo to Loo Chee

Rice mats at $2	$12
Shrimps, 50 lbs, at 10c	$5
Girl	$250
Salt Fish, 60 lbs, at 10c	$6
	____ $273303

Although the majority of Chinese women were brought to California to work in the sex industry, many found other forms of employment. They worked as domestic servants, laundresses, and seamstresses and in industries such as the tobacco, cigar, boot, and shoe trades. Of those who did work as prostitutes, by no means all considered themselves as victims. Many were resigned to what they saw as their fate; others looked on it as a business arrangement, sometimes even signing contracts to this effect.¹⁵³

An “Agreement Paper” signed in 1875 between two Chinese women, Yut Kum and Mee Yung, was preserved in the congressional records of the day and reads as follows: “At this time there is a prostitute woman, Yut Kum, who has borrowed money from Mee Yung $470. It is distinctly understood that there shall be no interest charged on the money and no wages paid for services. Yut Kum consents to prostitute her body . . . for the full time of four years.” The Agreement Paper records not only the length of time that Yut Kum should work but, with brisk practicality, the terms and conditions that were attached to her service. “If Yut Kum should be sick fifteen days she shall make up one month. If she conceives, she shall serve one year more. If during the time any man wishes to redeem her body, she shall make satisfactory arrangements with the mistress, Mee Yung.” The paper also includes clauses about what should happen in the event of Yut Kum falling sick with one or other of the “four great sicknesses” that might affect her trade: leprosy, epilepsy, conception, and “stone woman,” a condition in which a woman was unable to have intercourse with a man. If she were to run away and be recovered, “then her time shall never expire.” But, in the happy event that “the mistress [should] become very wealthy and return to China with glory, then Yut Kum shall fulfil her time, serving another person.”³⁰⁴

If Yut Kum had remained in San Francisco to ply her trade, she would have done so within the relatively orderly confines of Chinatown. By the 1870s not only was the Chinese presence in San Francisco extremely well established, but the city as a whole was a very different place from the lawless shantytown it had been during the Gold Rush years. Throughout the 1850s two notorious gangs, the Hounds and the Sydney Ducks, had all but brought the city to its knees, and it had taken the combined efforts of two vigilance committees, one in 1851 and one in 1856, to bring the city under control. Now, places such as the Barbary Coast, and Chinatown in particular, were, if not yet exactly tourist destinations, then places it was de rigueur for the more intrepid to visit. A description of the city without a description of Chinatown and the Chinese would have been like “Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark’s character.”³⁰⁵

It was made all the more fascinating by the fact that there was still a delicious frisson of danger to be had. When Mrs. Frank Leslie, the wife of a wealthy newspaper proprietor, traveling in high style, visited San Francisco in 1877 with her entourage, she employed the services of a bodyguard to accompany her there. Mr. Mackenzie was a veteran detective and police officer who had served in the San Francisco police service for twenty-two years. Although he was disappointingly discreet when she tried to elicit his reminiscences from the past, when they came to Portsmouth Square he pointed to one of the buildings and remarked: “Out of that window the Vigilance Committee of ’51 hung their first man.”

Mrs. Leslie had not been particularly impressed by her first visit to Chinatown. Nonetheless she was fascinated by it, returning there at least four times during her visit to San Francisco. “Each little shop hangs out its sign of red and gilded paper inscribed with Chinese characters,” she wrote, while the joss houses were “redolent of a pungent, delicious odor of sandalwood and Oriental perfumes.” From fashionable Kearney Street, the burly Mr. Mackenzie had led them into “steep and dingy” Munro Street, and all at once they had found themselves in a different world. “Here all the houses are dingy, no two alike; all the people are poor, and although universally clean in person cultivate a squalid and odorous mode of existence . . . that makes visiting among them rather distasteful to fastidious people,” she wrote. “In Dupont Street the narrow walks were scarcely lighted except by the smoky glare from the shop windows, and the silent-footed, sad-eyed passengers crept along the wall, or stepped off from the walk at our approach, more like the shades of Dante at the entrance of the Inferno than living and busy mortals.”

As they made their way still farther in, they found themselves at the entrance to “a black and narrow alley, its depths hidden in tenebrous shadow, and here our guide produced and lighted two candles, whose gleam faintly illuminated the first few steps of a black and rickety staircase. Up this the guide led and we followed, walking purely by faith; since nothing was to be seen but the little patch of light, the dim roofs of houses beneath us, and, far above, the cold pure gleam of the stars. As the candlelight fell upon the wall at the left, we perceived that it was closely covered with scraps of red and gold paper inscribed with Chinese characters.” It proved to be a tiny temple, its ceiling hung with lanterns, its walls with banners made from scarlet and gilded paper, and scarves and ribbons festooned across with peacock feathers.

Mr. Mackenzie’s tour of Chinatown proved to be nothing if not comprehensive. They visited barber shops, the Royal Chinese Theatre on Jackson Street, and even an opium den. They ate in a Chinese restaurant. But he had saved the pièce de résistance for last. At the end of their tour, stopping at the entrance to “a dark and dismal court, whose odors seemed more sickening and deadly than those we had breathed before,” he said to them: “ ‘I reckon I can show you as strange and tough a sight as you want to see, if you like to risk it, for the ladies.’ ‘This is pretty rough’ said the guide; ‘but say the word and I will take you in.’ ”

They climbed the wooden stairs and found themselves at last on a narrow balcony overhanging a courtyard. “Some Chinese women clustered at the end of this balcony staring at us, behind them was a shrine containing the Goddess of Love, with gilt paper and Joss-sticks burning in the tray before us.” From the gallery they passed into “a perfect honeycomb of little rooms, dimly lighted, or not lighted at all; no doors were visible, the doorways being shaded by long, pink calico curtain, and as they blew or were drawn aside we saw every room crowded with men and a few women, smoking, drinking tea, or playing at dominoes or cards. Every room we entered was exceedingly tidy and clean, and the inmates looked remarkably neat and tidy. Some effort of decoration was visible in the way of gilt and red paper, bright-colored scarves and peacocks’ feathers upon the walls, and pretty little Chinese tea-pots and other pottery upon the table and shelves. Everyone was smiling and bland as possible, and seemed overjoyed to receive a call.”

As they went farther in, the rooms became smaller and more crowded. Here, “the women were mostly without beauty or grace and usually dressed in dingy blue sacks with huge sleeves, their hair drawn back and curiously puffed, coiled or plaited behind. They all wore the mechanical smile which seems part of the national character; but their faces were thin and haggard, and the paint did not disguise the wan weariness which was eating away at their lives.” Many of them had signed a contract, and received “a certain sum in advance for services during a term of years or for life; the larger part of which sum goes to the broker or intermediary. These slaves—for they are so considered, and, as a general thing, are very harshly and penuriously treated—receive only a maintenance and coarse clothing during their brief period of health, and when overtaken by sickness are turned out to die in any hole they can creep into.

“Coming out of this house, we passed a row of tiny windows, breast-high to a man, looking out upon the narrow sidewalk of the court, at each of which appeared the face of a woman, the little room behind her as bright and attractive as she knew how to make it; one in especial was quite illuminated and decked with flowers and draperies, and the inmate, a rather pretty young girl, was singing in a sort of cooing little voice.”

Mrs. Leslie was observant enough to notice that not all the Chinese women she saw that day were either haggard or downtrodden. One who caught her attention was a prosperous-looking “fat, good-looking woman of thirty or so, with her hair elaborately coiled, puffed and ornamented with bright gold pins”; another she spied in a gambling room seemed positively affluent: “By no means unattractive [she] wore beautiful earrings and had a large diamond ring, and on her fat and pretty arms bracelets which our guide said were twenty-carat-fine gold.”³⁰⁶

As Mee Yung would do in her “agreement” with Yut Kum, there were many Chinese women who took full advantage of the opportunities offered by the vice trade: strong women with sound business minds. Perhaps the most famous of these was a woman named Ah Toy, who in her day was one of San Francisco’s most prominent madams.

One of only a tiny handful of Chinese women to take up residence in San Francisco in the first year of the Gold Rush, Ah Toy began her career working alone from a small shanty just off Clay Street. By 1850 she was employing two more recently arrived Chinese women, Aloy and Asea, to work for her. A few years later, in a city directory for 1852, she is listed as the proprietor of not one but two boardinghouses (often a euphemism for a brothel), No. 34 and No. 56 Pike Street. The San Francisco Examiner reported (possibly with a pinch of poetic license) that white miners queued for a whole block and paid an ounce of gold just “to gaze on the countenance of the charming Ah Toy.”³⁰⁷

Ah Toy soon proved herself to be a woman of considerable business acumen. Catering for white as well as Chinese clients, she is said to have been involved in running brothels not only in San Francisco, but as far away as Sacramento and Stockton too. Soon she became rich, once owning a diamond breastpin worth three hundred dollars (later stolen by one of her clients). She also knew how to use the legal system to protect herself, appearing in the courts a number of times to sue clients who had paid her with brass filings instead of gold dust,¹⁵⁴ until California law was changed to include Chinese in the same ruling that forbade African Americans and Native Americans from testifying against whites.

As the years went by, San Francisco became an increasingly difficult place for a single businesswoman, particularly a Chinese one, to operate in. Anti-Chinese legislation, together with stricter measures for social control put in place by the police, steadily encroached on her business. More detrimental still was the rise, in the mid-1850s, of criminal Chinese gangs, known as the fighting Tongs, determined to dominate all aspects of the vice trade. Very soon her business was on the point of collapse.

Sometime in 1857, Ah Toy sold her property and sailed for China. Two years later, however, she was back in San Francisco. While there is some evidence to suggest that she once again opened her own brothel, the era for independent entrepreneurship such as hers was well and truly over. Ah Toy was not heard of again until her death was announced in 1928. According to newspaper accounts, for many years she had been living quietly with her husband in San Jose, Santa Clara County, and, after his death, with her brother-in-law. She had last been sighted selling clams to visitors in Alviso (a suburb of San Jose) and had died just a few months short of her hundredth birthday.³⁰⁸

Like Ah Toy, a large number of former sex workers went on to marry, or become conjugal partners of some kind, sometimes as a second wife. The moral disgrace of having lived “a life of vice,” almost without exception an insuperable barrier to white prostitutes, did not seem to apply. “For the most part the Chinese did not attach the same stigma to prostitution . . . far from being considered ‘fallen women,’ prostitutes were seen as daughters who obeyed the wishes of the family.”³⁰⁹

One such dutiful Chinese daughter was a young woman called Lalu Nathoy. Unlike most Chinese women to emigrate to America, the vast majority of whom came from the southern Chinese province of Kwangtung (Guangdong), Lalu Nathoy was born in northern China in 1853. The area where she lived was subject to bandit attacks, and when the crops failed, the bandits had forced her family to give up what little produce they had. Faced with the prospect of seeing his entire family starve, Lalu’s father sold his daughter to one of the bandit leaders in exchange for seeds to plant a new crop (a not-unusual practice at the time). She was trafficked to San Francisco, and sometime in 1872 she was sold on to a man named Hong King, the owner of a saloon in the tiny mining community of Warrens in the mountains of central Idaho.

Lalu was nineteen when she arrived in Idaho. A pretty but physically tiny young woman well under five feet and “no taller than a broom,” she probably looked much younger. Years later, in 1922, she gave an interview about her life. “They sell me as a slave girl,” she told her interviewer. “Old woman she smuggled me into Portland [probably from San Francisco]. I cost $2,500. . . . Old Chinese man he took me along to Warrens in a pack train.”³¹⁰

There has been much speculation about Lalu’s status when she arrived. Some have claimed that Hong King bought her as his concubine, but the sum of money involved, even if exaggerated, would have been a stupendous outlay for a saloon owner in an obscure mining village, and the likelihood is that Hong King expected some kind of a return on his money.¹⁵⁵ Whatever the truth of the matter, once in Idaho, not even her name was her own: from now on Lalu would be known simply as “Polly.”

There would soon be another twist in Polly’s story. At some point during her time in Hong King’s saloon, she met a man named Charles Bemis. As the daughter of Polly’s greatest friend would later explain, “Polly was brought from China for the world’s oldest profession. When taken to [Hong King’s] saloon she was terrified. Charlie Bemis was present and protected her from unwanted advances.”³¹¹ According to local lore, when Bemis sustained a serious gunshot wound, Polly nursed him back to health, gaining not only his gratitude, but his love. Bemis proposed, and Polly accepted. After her marriage (history does not relate what happened to Hong King), she went on to run a thriving homestead in the mountains of Idaho with her new husband, growing her own vegetables and keeping chickens and horses.

There is another mystery connected to the story of Polly Bemis, and that is her birth name. Lalu Nathoy is so un-Chinese-sounding that there has been speculation that it was never her real name. Some recent historical detective work has shown that Lalu/Polly was in fact not Chinese at all, but Mongolian, probably a Daur, a minority people related to the Mongols and the Tungus-Manchu-speaking people, large numbers of whom settled in Han (majority Chinese) areas in the mid-nineteenth century and adopted their customs. Nathoy is an anglicized version of Nasoi. Lalu means Islam, or “long life.”³¹² She died, appropriately enough for her name, aged eighty, on the same ranch she had lived on for decades, a peaceful end to a tumultuous life.

Later in the century, various rescue homes were set up specifically to give sanctuary to Chinese women who had been forced into prostitution. For the most part these were run by Presbyterian and Methodist women missionaries, and while it is impossible to be anything but admiring of their work, the general attitude in the homes—colored by the moral values of their day, and with a heavy emphasis on Christianity—did not always sit well with their clientele. In some of these refuges, the women were kept as virtual prisoners. And, so far as proselytizing was concerned, a religion that represented “a foreign, heterodox faith that attempted to subvert traditional Chinese society” mostly fell upon deaf ears. As Narcissa Whitman had found, all those years ago among the Cayuse, while some of these “fallen women” were “saved,” the reality was that most Chinese women rejected the missionaries’ attempts to convert them. Mature women, especially, were “rebellious.” In the words of one Presbyterian missionary, it was “a most difficult work—to tame barbarians.”³¹³