Australian Desperadoes Read online

  About the Book

  In the roaring days of the 1850s California Gold Rush, San Francisco was the most dangerous town in America, made so by a notorious criminal gang: the Sydney Coves.

  The Coves – San Francisco’s first organised-crime gang – were Australians: men and women with criminal careers who had come to the US, not to dig for gold, but to unleash a crime wave the likes of which America had never seen. Robbery, murder, arson and extortion were the Coves’ stock-in-trade, and it was said that the leader of the gang, Jim Stuart, had killed more men than anyone else in California.

  The gang’s base, in the waterfront district, came to be known as Sydney Town – a no-go zone for police, many of whom were in Stuart’s pocket anyway. Just as Capone would one day rule Chicago, the Coves ruled San Francisco. And, more than once, just to make sure there was no doubt that Frisco was their town, they burned it down.

  The Coves were hated and feared by the respectable citizens of San Francisco. Realising that the law forces could not – or would not – take the Coves on, they decided lynch law was the only solution. The streets of San Francisco became a battlefield as the Coves and vigilantes fought for control of the city, with gunfights and lynchings almost daily. When the smoke cleared, the Coves’ reign of terror may have come to a close, but their thumbprint on American history would always remain.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Foreword

  Introduction: Dos Eldorados

  1 A kind of mania

  2 ‘What a great misfortune’

  3 The veneration of Saint Barbara

  4 From the ends of the Earth

  5 Oranges and leg-irons

  6 A red-letter day

  7 Oliver is in town

  8 No luck with pick and shovel

  9 Sainted women and painted ladies

  10 Latter-Day Sam

  11 Kangaroo courts

  12 Who killed Charlie Moore?

  13 Fanning the flames

  14 ‘Fie upon your laws!’

  15 ‘One vast sheet of flame’

  16 ‘Something must be done’

  17 Comings and goings

  18 ‘Speedy and terrible vengeance’

  19 The grocer’s apologia

  20 The wrong man

  21 The Night Watch

  22 Ecce homo

  23 Deeper and deeper

  24 Law and disorder

  25 A ‘quiet and orderly’ occasion

  26 The hangman’s banner

  27 Close but no cigar

  28 Pillars of propriety

  29 Chasing the wily Cove

  30 Never a kind word

  31 Flash and counter-flash

  32 Osiris rising

  33 Better angels

  34 A scattering of Coves

  35 What goes around …

  36 Showgirls and charlatans

  37 Turnabout

  38 The man in the white hat

  39 Unlucky last

  Notes

  References

  Index of Searchable Terms

  Picture Section

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Terry Smyth

  Australian Confederates

  Denny Day

  Copyright Notice

  For the family downstairs, where all good things happen – Kate, Ben, Sophie and Acky

  And for my sister Pauline

  ‘There is in this city an organised band of villains who are determined to destroy the city. We are standing as it were upon a mine that any moment may explode, scattering death and destruction.’

  – Daily Alta California, 9 June 1851

  ‘I have heard hundreds remark here that the day would soon come when this country would be taken by the Sydney people.’

  – Long Jim Stuart, leader of the Sydney Coves, 8 July 1851

  Foreword

  Not so long ago, I stood in Portsmouth Square, the old heart of San Francisco. It was in this former Mexican plaza that the first American flag was raised, where crowds cheered when California became the 31st state of the United States, and where lynch mobs once howled for blood. This was the place where the shout was heard that began the California Gold Rush. And it was here that so many of the events central to this story occurred.

  Of course, Portsmouth Square today would not be recognisable to any of the characters in this story. Like the city that sprung up around it, the old plaza has had many incarnations, some inevitable, simply due to changing times, others of necessity after fire and earthquake.

  Today, the former heart of the city is the heart of Chinatown. The plaza is now a park where children chatter in a playground, Chinese men sit reading or playing cards, homeless people sprawl on park benches and, where the old adobe customs house and town gaol once stood, pedestrians dodge traffic at the entrance to an underground car park.

  Standing there in the old city square, my thoughts turned to the town where I was born and raised – Newcastle, New South Wales – and to the curious connection between the two cities.

  In the days of sail, both were bustling ports, equally notorious for shanghai gangs, and in my youth I once met an old salt who claimed he had been coshed in a dockside pub in Newcastle and woke up aboard a clipper ship, on his way around the Horn to Frisco. It took him ten years, he told me, to drink his way back home.

  After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, in which some 3000 people were killed and most of the city destroyed, rubble from the streets was used as ballast for sailing ships. Ships that docked at Newcastle dumped their ballast at Stockton, on the north side of Newcastle harbour, greatly expanding the foreshore, which is still known as the Ballast Ground.

  To walk on the Ballast Ground at Stockton is to walk upon what is left of old San Francisco, and, occasionally, remarkable finds are made. I recall a notable discovery by a man named Jack Dawson, who found among the ballast a box marked ‘Tiffany & Co’. Inside were six ornate glass goblets, all miraculously intact, having survived the quake, the voyage and the dumping at Stockton. I understand the goblets are still with Dawson’s family.

  In Portsmouth Square, the only reminders of old San Francisco are a plaque commemorating the first raising of the American flag, in 1846, and a monument to the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson, who visited San Francisco for a few months in 1879, and rented a room somewhere near the square.

  Asked what might be Portsmouth Square’s claim to fame, today’s San Franciscans will most likely tell you that a scene from the 1971 Clint Eastwood movie Dirty Harry was shot there. Few, if any, will know of things that happened there in the 1850s, when California was the real Wild West and San Francisco was its dark heart. But that’s understandable. Most people will not know this story because it was buried like the ballast, and because there are no heroes in this story.

  – Terry Smyth, January 2017

  Introduction

  Dos Eldorados

  Once there were two fabled lands of riches beyond the dreams of avarice. One was called California – named after a mythical queen of the Amazons – and was believed to be somewhere in the Americas. The other, which the Bible called Ophir, and from where King Solomon’s fleet ‘brought back 420 talents [about 16 tons] of gold’1 was thought to lie somewhere in the South Pacific.

  These lands of gold had fired the European imagination since antiquity, and, by the sixteenth century, with much of the world yet to be discovered, were widely believed to exist. Europe’s great powers, competing for maritime supremacy, sent their ships to the ends of the earth, following fanciful maps and carrying goods for trade and arms for conquest.

  So convinced were the Spanish that Ophir was to be found, ripe for plunder, on the coast of Terra Australis Incognita – the unknown southern land – that in 1546 a conquistador of Chile, Pedro Sancho de la Hoz, was appointed governor of the undiscovered country: a land rich in gold and silver, said to lie south-west of the Strait of Magellan – the narrow channel separating mainland South America from Tierra del Fuego.

  As with the destruction of the Aztec empire in Mexico and the Incas in Peru, the planned conquest of Ophir to satisfy Spain’s lust for gold was justified by an assumed duty to convert the heathens of undiscovered lands to Catholicism. To that end, Juan de Silva, King Phillip III’s confessor, wrote to Pope Urban VIII in 1623, requesting ‘that the mission to the natives of the Austral Lands be confided to the spiritual care of the Franciscan friars, who would undertake their “conquest” by spiritual and peaceful means’.2

  However, expeditions sent to find and conquer the southern land of gold foundered in the wild storms of the Roaring Forties or were driven offcourse by the powerful Peru Current and forced to turn back. Nature made sure the natives of fabled Ophir would never see the glint of conquistador armour or the grey robes of missionary priests.

  Amazons had always been out there, just beyond the edge of the known world. The ancient Greeks told of a race of warrior women – Herodotus wrote of them in his Histories, Homer in his Iliad. In the Middle Ages, Crusaders returned with tales of fierce female warriors who fought with Muslim armies. Christopher Columbus returned to Spain with a second-hand tale of an island in the New World inhabited only by women. The conqueror of Mexico, Hernan Cortes, and other conquistadores relayed similar tales, and in all such stories the land of the Amazons was always rich in gold, silver and precious stones.

  So, in the early sixteenth cent
ury, when Spanish explorers heard rumours of an island of Amazons off the north-west coast of Mexico, they named it after the island in a popular romance novel of the day. The book, Las Sergas de Esplandian (The Adventures of Esplandian), by Garci Rodriguez Ordonez de Montalvo, was a particular favourite of Cortes, and in an era of exploration, when fact and fiction were often indistinguishable, could well have fostered his belief in the existence of a golden isle of women.

  Montalvo wrote:

  ‘Know ye that at the right hand of the Indies there is an island called California, very close to that part of the Terrestrial Paradise, which was inhabited by black women without a single man among them, and they lived in the manner of Amazons. They were robust of body with strong passionate hearts and great virtue. The island itself is one of the wildest in the world on account of the bold and craggy rocks. Their arms are all of gold, as is the harnesses of the wild beasts which, after taming, they ride [flying beasts called griffins – part lion, part eagle]. In all the island there is no other metal.

  ‘They live in well-excavated caves. They have ships in which they go to raid other places, and the men they capture they carry off with them, later to be killed as will be told. At other times, being at peace with their opponents, they consort with them freely and have carnal relations with them, from which it results that many of them become pregnant. If they give birth to a female they keep her, but if to a male they kill him. The reason for this, as is known, is that they are firmly resolved to keep the males at so small a number that without trouble they can control them with all their lands, saving those thought necessary to perpetuate the race.

  ‘Over this island of California rules a queen, Calafia, statuesque in proportions, more beautiful than all the rest, in the flower of her womanhood, eager to perform great deeds, valiant and spirited, and ambitious to excel all those who have ruled before her.’3

  Calafia – black, brave and beautiful – is convinced by a captured Muslim warrior named Radiaro to come to the aid of a Muslim army defending Constantinople, under siege by Christian crusaders. She sets sail with her army of Amazon warriors, with their golden weapons and griffins, and joins the defenders of Constantinople.

  Captured in battle when the Crusaders sack the city, Calafia converts to Christianity, marries a Spanish knight named Talangue, and sails back to California with her army and her husband to establish a Christian monarchy where men rule, women know their place, and they all live happily ever after. Apparently.

  By the mid-eighteenth century, the name California was generally applied – although unofficially at first – to the northernmost outpost of the Spanish Empire’s American possessions. It was not an island, as had been supposed, but a peninsula, and yielded neither gold nor jewels nor black warrior women.

  In November 1769, on arriving overland from Mexico at a shallow bay north-east of the Californian peninsula, a Spanish expedition led by Don Gaspar de Portola claimed the territory for King Charles III. On the bay shore, the explorers built a fort and a Franciscan mission, which they named Mission San Francisco de Assis, and, in a cove on the inland side of the peninsula, south of the bay entrance, a settlement named after a plant common to the area – Yerba Buena (‘Good Herb’, clinopodium douglasii, an aromatic herb of the mint family). In time, the pueblo of Yerba Buena would adopt a contracted version of the name of the mission – San Francisco.

  Six months after the Spanish claimed San Francisco Bay, a British expedition led by Lieutenant James Cook sailed into a shallow bay on the east coast of New Holland – a lost continent no longer – and claimed the entire east coast in the name of King George III. In recognition of the bay’s unique flora, Cook called it Botany Bay, a name that would become synonymous with the exile of Britain’s convicts to penal colonies in the land Cook called New South Wales.

  The California of fable became a reality almost 80 years later when, on Monday 24 January 1848, a carpenter named James Marshall, while building a sawmill near Coloma, on the American River, noticed some shiny specks in a water channel below the mill.

  ‘I picked up one or two pieces and examined them attentively,’ Marshall wrote, ‘and having some general knowledge of minerals, I could not call to mind more than two which in any way resembled this: sulphuret of iron, very bright and brittle; and gold, bright yet malleable.’4

  He collected a few more specimens and showed them to a Mr Scott, a fellow carpenter.

  ‘What is it?’ Scott asked.

  ‘Gold,’ Marshall replied.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Scott. ‘That can’t be!’5

  But it was. And when word got out, and a merchant named Sam Brannan ran through Portsmouth Square, in San Francisco, waving his hat in one hand and a bottle of gold dust in the other, yelling, ‘Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!’, the rush was on.6

  Three years later, in Australia, a prospector named Edward Hargraves, lately returned from the California goldfields with little to show for his efforts, was riding with a companion, John Lister, through the Macquarie River country, in central-western New South Wales. When the pair stopped to water their horses, Hargraves, who had noted the similarity of the land to the gold-bearing regions of California, took his pick and pan into a creek bed and washed out five specks of gold.

  It was Wednesday 12 February 1851. ‘This is a memorable day in the history of New South Wales,’ he told Lister. ‘I shall be a baronet, you shall be knighted, and my old horse will be stuffed, put in a glass case and sent to the British Museum.’7

  Appropriately for the place where the ancient fantasy became fact, Hargraves named the goldfield Ophir, and for the second fabled land of riches, the rush was on.

  In those few fevered years between 1848 and 1851, thousands of Australians left home and hearth for California, hoping to strike it rich on the goldfields. The exodus was not entirely made up of gold-seekers, however. There were some who joined the exodus across the Pacific with criminal intent. In San Francisco, through mayhem and murder, a gang of Australian desperadoes terrorised the town. They called themselves the Sydney Coves, and this is the story of their rise and fall.

  Chapter 1

  A kind of mania

  The tiny, tattered fishing village of Brighton was fated to change forever when a certain Dr Richard Russell turned his mind to the curious fact that the oceans were so full of salt that salt makers, ‘before they deposit their brine, boil it till it will suspend an egg’.1

  From that prosaic observation, Dr Russell deduced:

  ‘That great body of water, therefore, which we call the sea, and which is rolled with such violence by tempests round the world, passing over all the submarine plants, fish, salts, minerals, and in short, whatsoever else is found betwixt shore and shore, must probably wash over some parts of the whole, and be impregnated, or saturated with the transpiration, if I may so term it, of all the bodies it passes over: the finest parts of which are perpetually flying off in steams and attempting to escape to the outward air, till they are entangled by the sea and make part of its composition; whilst the salts also are every moment imparting some of their substances to enrich it, and keep it from putrefaction.

  ‘By these means, this fluid contracts a greater soapiness, or unctuosity, than common water, and by the whole collection of it being pervaded by the sulphureous steams of bodies which pass through it, seems to constitute that fluid we call sea water, which was intended by the great author of all things to be the common guardian against putrefaction and the corruption of bodies.’2