Timecapsule podcast: San Francisco, December 8-14

San Francisco History Podcast – Sparkletack

A weekly handful of weird, wonderful and wacky happenings dredged up from the kaleidoscopic depths of San Francisco history. THIS WEEK: a hanging from 1852, and a Miss Goldie Griffin wants to become a cop in 1912.

December 10, 1852:
San Francisco's first official execution

It certainly wasn't for any lack of local mayhem that it took so long for San Francisco to order its first "official" execution.

The sleepy hamlet of Yerba Buena had ballooned from fewer than 500 to over 36,000 people in 1852 -- and the famous camaraderie of the '49ers notwithstanding, not all of them had the best interests of their fellow men at heart. During the first few years of the Gold Rush, San Francisco managed to average almost one murder per day.

The murders that made it to court in these semi-lawless days were seen by sympathetic juries mostly as cases of "the guy had it coming". And concerning executions of the un-official variety, Sam Brannan's Committee of Vigilance -- that would be the first one -- had taken matters into their own hands and lynched four miscreants just a year earlier.

As the San Francisco Examiner would describe the event 35 years later,

"The crime which inaugurated public executions was of a very commonplace character. A Spaniard named José (Forner) struck down an unknown Mexican in (Happy) Valley, stabbing him with a dagger, for as he claimed, attempting to rob him. ... after a very prompt trial, (Forner) was sentenced to be hanged two months later."

Was it because he wasn't white? Lack of bribery money? Some secret grudge? José had claimed self defense just like everybody else, and turns out to have been a man of relatively high birth in Spain, oddly enough a confectioner by trade -- and we can only speculate as to the reason he ended up the first victim of San Francisco's official rope.

The execution was to take place up on Russian Hill, at the oldest cemetery in the young city -- a cemetery which, due to the fact that a group of Russian sailors had first been buried there back in '42, had actually given the hill its name. If you've heard the Sparkletack "Moving the Dead" episode, you know that this burial ground is long gone now -- and in fact, its remote location up on the hill had already caused it to fall out of use by 1850.

I guess that made it seem perfect for an early winter hanging.

Let's go back to the Examiner's account:

"(The location) did not deter some three thousand people from attending, parents taking children to see the unusual sight, and women on foot and in carriages forcing their way to the front.

Between 12 and 1 o’clock the condemned man was taken to the scaffold in a wagon drawn by four black horses, escorted by the California Guard. The Marion Rifles under Captain Schaeffer kept the crowd back from the scaffold. The man died game, after a pathetic little farewell speech, in which he said:

“The Americans are good people; they have ever treated me well and kindly; I thank them for it. I have nothing but love and kindly feelings for all. Farewell, people of San Francisco. World, farewell!�

A dramatically chilling engraving of the scene can be seen by clicking the thumbnail above. If you'd like to pay your respects in person, the Russian Hill Cemetery was located in the block between Taylor, Jones, Vallejo and Green Streets.

December 9, 1912:
Miss Goldie Griffin wants to become a cop!

Another item culled directly from the pages of our historical newspapers, this one from the period in which California women had just won the right to vote -- something for which the country as a whole would need to wait seven more years.

This hardly made San Francisco a bastion of progressive feminist thought. I scarcely need to point it out, but note the amusement and disdain in this articles' treatment of the first female applicant to the San Francisco Police Department, December 9, 1912:

read on ...