Terry Smyth - 31 July

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 Franciscos 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 gangs base, in the waterfront district, came to be known as Sydney Town a no-go zone for police, many of whom were in Stuarts 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.

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

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 Dawsons 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 Squares claim to fame, todays 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 thats 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

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 Solomons fleet brought back 420 talents [about 16 tons] of gold 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. Europes 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 Spains 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 IIIs 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.

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.