Mark > Recent Status Updates

How is his hope for independence to be viewed in the light of his "empty shell" view of national consciousness (p. 97) and the "charnel houses of ethnic cleansing": Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Sudan etc.

Red haired Jewish prostitutes on Morton St (Union Square)

The Little Frog Catcher (so sad). She went from catching frogs in the marshes of San Mateo County to organizing a gang, purloining hos from the other brothels. Shot in the heart at 25.

Tip Thornton the nose-slicer was finally arrested in the Whale by patrolman Jack Cleary who dragged him out at the end of a pair of nippers after fighting off the bartender and half a dozen other men. He was sent to San Quentin.

Shanghai Kelly shanghai'd an entire boatload of men who didn't knew one end of a ship from the other by throwing a birthday party with free drugged booze on board the Goliath. On the way back he picked up the survivors of a ship that had wrecked near Santa Barbara. The landing of the rescued men at the Market St wharf caused such excitement that no one seemed to notice that he had returned without his picnic guests.

Sailors were forced to go ashore by runners who also sold dummies to ships instead of sailors, sometimes with rats in sleeves (Nikko)
Mother Bronson (female crimp) used her teeth to subdue obstreperous customers
Nikko could drink a gallon of whiskey
Chilean Calico Jim shanghaied six cops. He was eventually shot by one of them in Callao, Chile where he had fled.

Cops along the waterfront carried large knives and several battles occurred in which they chopped off the hands of their assailant and one incident where Sergeant Langford decapitated a man ransacking a secondhand clothing store on Pacific.

The life of a Chinese prostitute slave was brutal in the extreme. They were left to die "hospitals."

90% of Chinese prostitutes had STDs. A physician testified that he had seen white 8 and 20 year old boys of with diseases they had gotten from the hos.

He thinks that Chinatown was more or less purged of evil by the '06 quake.

"The best cure for hoodlumism is the frequent application of locust or hickory to the hoodlum's skull."

Felonious dandies

The description of the 1870s and '80s

Anti-Chinese pogroms

Devil's Acre

There was a murder a week on "Battle Row," the eastern side of Kearny Street. None of the windows in the brothels were equipped with shades or curtains so whatever went on inside was visible to passers by.

Happy Jack stabbed Billy Dwyer in the stomach at O'Brien'a saloon and was sent to San Quentin. Nothing more was ever heard from him on the Barbary Coast.

Jackson and Kearny was known as Murderer's Corner.

The women of Bull Run were not allowed to leave the dance floor or the stage often enough to oee so they wore diapers.
If one of them passed out from booze, they were carried upstairs and as many as 30 or 40 men would fuck them.

The BC was what it was because Pacific was the most important street, cut through the sandhills behind YC cove.
The first boat landing on the waterfront was at Pacific and Davis and it ran straight to Portsmouth Square and beyond.

Barbary (Berber) Coast was Pacific between Kearney and Montgomery.

The second Vigilance Committee hung Cora and Casey and then Brace and Heatherington and basked in "the glow of municipal righteousness" of no murders having been committed for the two months after C&C, then gave up the munitions at Fort Gunnybags and handed them over to the Governor.

The Vigilantes acted in defiance of the governor and the sheriff but were successful in ridding the city of the Sydney Ducks.

Thomas Berdue was mistaken for English Jim
and almost killed by a lynch mob in Portsmouth Square. The Sydney Ducks got revenge for the "popular demonstration against their hero" by setting yet another fire (there had already been four since 1849) that consumed 2000 buildings, 3/4 of San Francisco. They supposedly chose a night when the wind was blowing from the east and the north so Sydney Town was unaffected.

The plunge and rip of the knife

The Hounds were violent thug assholes, many of whom came from the Bowery and Five Points.

Miners lynched a young pregnant Mexican woman.

Everything was outrageously expensive.

The wealthy would send their linen underwear and shirts to Honolulu or Canton to be laundered (3 to 6 months).

Mexico ceded California in 1848

Sam Brannan hated the US or the US government which is why he went to California but when he sailed through the gate he saw the American flag and said "There's that damn rag again!"