The Sydney Ducks was the name given to a gang of criminal immigrants from Australia in San Francisco, during the mid-19th century. Because many of these criminals came from the well-known British penal colonies in Australia, and were known to commit arson, they were blamed for an 1849 fire that devastated the heart of San Francisco, as well as the rampant crime in the city at the time. [1] [2]
The Sydney Ducks were criminals who operated as a gang, in a community that also included sailors, longshoremen, teamsters, wheelwrights, shipwrights, bartenders, saloon keepers, washerwomen, domestic servants, and dressmakers. The largest proportion (44%) were born in Ireland and migrated during the Great Irish Famine, first to Australia as laborers and then to California as part of the Gold Rush. [3] [4]
The criminality of the Sydney Ducks was the catalyst for the formation of the first Committee of Vigilance of 1851. The vigilantes usurped political power from the corrupt or incompetent officials in the city, conducted secret trials, lynchings, and deportations, which effectively decimated the Sydney Ducks. The area where the Sydney Ducks clustered at the base of Telegraph Hill was originally known as "Sydney-Town," but by the 1860s was called exclusively by its better-known name, the Barbary Coast.
On December 19, 1854, five members of the gang were involved in the Jonathan R. Davis fight. [5]
Vigilantism is the act of preventing, investigating and punishing perceived offenses and crimes without legal authority.
John Neely Johnson was an American lawyer and politician. He was elected as the fourth governor of California from 1856 to 1858, and later appointed justice to the Nevada Supreme Court from 1867 to 1871. As a member of the American Party, Johnson remains one of only three members of a third party to be elected to the California governorship.
A vigilance committee is a group of private citizens who take it upon themselves to administer law and order or exercise power in places where they consider the governmental structures or actions inadequate. Prominent historical examples of vigilance committees engaged in forms of vigilantism include abolitionist committees who, beginning in the 1830s, worked to free enslaved people and aid fugitive slaves, in violation of the laws at the time. However, many other vigilance committees were explicitly grounded in racial prejudice and xenophobia, administering extrajudicial punishment to abolitionists or members of minority groups.
Henry Plummer was a prospector, lawman, and outlaw in the American West in the 1850s and 1860s, who was known to have killed several men. He was elected sheriff of what was then Bannack, Idaho Territory, in 1863 and served until 1864, during which period he was accused of being the leader of a "road agent" gang of outlaws known as the "Innocents," who preyed on shipments from what was then Virginia City, Idaho Territory to other areas. In response some leaders in Virginia City formed the Vigilance Committee of Alder Gulch and began to take action against Plummer's gang, gaining confessions from a couple of men they arrested in early January 1864. On January 10, 1864, Plummer and two associates were arrested in Bannack by a company of the Vigilantes and summarily hanged. Plummer was given a posthumous trial in 1993 which led to a mistrial. The jury was split 6–6.
The San Francisco Committee of Vigilance was a vigilante group formed in 1851. The catalyst for its formation was the criminality of the Sydney Ducks gang. It was revived in 1856 in response to rampant crime and corruption in the municipal government of San Francisco, California. The explosive population growth following the discovery of gold in 1848 was cited as the source of the alleged need for the revival of the committee. The small town of about 900 individuals grew to a booming city of over 20,000 very rapidly. Founders alleged that the growth in population overwhelmed the previously established law enforcement, and led to the organization of vigilante militia groups.
The Barbary Coast was a red-light district during the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries in San Francisco that featured dance halls, concert saloons, bars, jazz clubs, variety shows, and brothels. Its nine block area was centered on a three block stretch of Pacific Street, now Pacific Avenue, between Montgomery and Stockton Streets. Pacific Street was the first street to cut through the hills of San Francisco, starting near Portsmouth Square and continuing east to the first shipping docks at Buena Vista Cove.
McGowan's War was a bloodless war that took place in Yale, British Columbia in the fall of 1858. The conflict posed a threat to the newly established British authority on the British Columbia mainland, at the onset of the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush. It was called Ned McGowan's War after one of the conflict's main antagonists.
William Tell Coleman (1824–1893) was an American pioneer in the settlement of California.
Henry Frederick Teschemacher served as the 9th mayor of San Francisco from October 3, 1859, to June 30, 1863.
Australian Americans are Americans who have Australian ancestry. The first Australian Americans were settlers in Australia who then moved on to America. This group included English, Irish, Welsh and Scottish settlers in Australia who then moved to California during the Gold Rush. Immigration from Australia to the United States increased at times of economic boom, such as the Reconstruction era, and in the years following the Second World War. Many Australian citizens live in the U.S during the 21st century, including an estimated 44,000 Australians living in the city of Los Angeles alone as of 2016.
The Superior Court of California of the County of San Francisco is the state superior court with jurisdiction over the City and County of San Francisco.
Jack Powers, whose real name was John A. Power, was an Irish-born American outlaw who emigrated to New York as a child and later served as a volunteer soldier in the Mexican–American War in the garrison of Santa Barbara, California. During the California Gold Rush, he was a well-known professional gambler and a famed horseman in the gold camps as well as in San Francisco, Santa Barbara and Los Angeles.
Edward McGowan was an American lawyer, Pennsylvania assemblyman, Judge of the California Court of Quarter Sessions, poet, Fraser Canyon gold seeker, adventurer, assistant sergeant-at-arms in the United States Congress, newspaper publisher and bon vivant instigator of the eponymous McGowan's War in colonial British Columbia.
The history of vigilante justice and the Montana Vigilantes began in 1863 in what was at the time a remote part of eastern Idaho Territory. Vigilante activities continued, although somewhat sporadically, through the Montana Territorial period until the territory became the state of Montana on November 8, 1889. Vigilantism arose because territorial law enforcement and the courts had very little power in the remote mining camps during the territorial period.
Jonathan R. Davis was an American gold rush prospector. On December 19, 1854, he single-handedly killed eleven armed outlaws at Rocky Canyon near Sacramento, California, using two Colt revolvers and a Bowie knife. This episode became one of the deadliest small arms engagements in American history involving one man against multiple foes. American sculptor Michael Trcic depicted the historical event in the sculpture "One Man With Courage is a Majority".
James King of William was a crusading San Francisco, California, newspaper editor whose assassination by James P. Casey, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1856 resulted in the establishment of the second San Francisco Vigilance Committee and changed the politics of the city. King was among the first newspapermen to be honored by the California Journalism Hall of Fame.
Belle Cora, also known as Arabella Ryan, was a madam of the Barbary Coast of San Francisco during the mid-nineteenth century. She rose to public attention in 1855 when her lover, Charles Cora, killed U.S. Marshal William H. Richardson after they had a conflict at the theater. She died in 1862.
A Sailortown is a district in seaports that catered to transient seafarers. These districts frequently contained boarding houses, public houses, brothels, tattoo parlours, print shops, shops selling nautical equipment, and religious institutions offering aid to seamen; usually there was also a police station, a magistrate's court and a shipping office. Because it took several days, in the past, to unload ships, crews would spend this time in sailortown. These were "generic locations—international everyplaces existing in nearly every port." Cecily Fox Smith wrote that 'dockland, strictly speaking, is of no country—or rather it is of all countries'". Sailortowns were places where local people, immigrants, social and religious reformers, and transitory sailors met.
Jose Antonio Garcia was a Californio bandit, born in Santa Barbara, Alta California, Mexico. He was suspected by the San Luis Obispo Vigilance Committee of being part of the gang of Pio Linares, and he was hung after making a confession exposing other members and the leadership of the gang as the participants in an 1857 robbery and murder of two French Basque cattlemen.
The San Francisco Herald, or San Francisco Daily Herald, was a newspaper that was published from 1850 to 1862 in San Francisco, California. The paper stood out aggressively against crime and corruption associated with the California Gold Rush. The editors fought several duels with men whom they had offended. In 1856 the paper attacked the Vigilance Committee, which was taking the law into its own hands. Supporters of the committee withdrew their subscriptions and advertising, almost forcing the newspaper to close. However, the newspaper continued to be published with smaller circulation until 1862.
