The "tong" secret societies are as American as Chop Suey -- which is to say, invented in San Francisco and completely unknown in China.

The first tong was organized by Gold-Rush era immigrants as a means of mutual support and defense against a mostly-hostile white dominated world, and before long, tongs had popped up in most every city with a Chinese population.

It didn't take long, though, for the money to be made from drugs, gambling and prostitution to attract a criminal element, especially in chaotic Barbary Coast-era San Francisco. The world of tongs devolved into a near-constant state of bloody gang warfare over control of Chinatown's underworld.

"Little Pete"

In the 1880s, a young man by the name of Fung Jing Toy rose to the top of this wild-west gangster scene, and created his very own tong -- a personal army of hand-picked hatchetmen. He was nicknamed "Little Pete", and with this army of boo how doy began violently pushing the other tongs off of their hard-won turf, moving inexorably towards complete control of Chinatown.

As was undoubtedly marked on your calendar, San Francisco's patron saint Emperor Norton died last week, January 7, 1880.

But his was not the only January passing worthy of note. Ten days later (and nineteen years earlier), we lost perhaps the most notorious personage ever to grace the streets of our fair city.

We speak, of course, of Countess Lola Montez . Yep, that's the one -- "whatever Lola wants, Lola gets".

You already know Lola's story, of course. You don't? The breathtakingly gorgeous Irish peasant girl with the soul of a grifter and the heart of a despot? How she -- with a few sexy dance steps, a fraudulent back story involving Spanish noble blood and the claim of Lord Byron as her father -- turned Europe upside down and provoked a revolution in Bavaria?

Still doesn't ring a bell, hmm? Well, Lola's whole story is a little too large for this space. She'd already lived about three lifetimes' worth of adventure -- and burned through romances with personalities from King Ludwig the First to Sam Brannan -- before conquering Gold Rush-era San Francisco with her scandalous "Spider Dance".

In this San Francisco Chronicle story from 1899, a North Beach street urchin defends himself in court. No, we don't know why he was allowed to act as his own lawyer -- or for that matter, why a six-year old was arrested in the first place! It's just another peep-hole into life during the Gilded Age:

John Manuel Parodi, aged six years, successfully defended himself yesterday in Judge Treadwell's court, where he was on trial for the alleged theft of a box of cigars from the store of Carlos Sobrano on Prescott place, near Vallejo street. Sobrano testified that he missed the cigars a moment after young Parodi left his store about 7 o'clock last Sunday evening.

"I'd like to ask him something" piped the boy defendant in a small treble voice, after Sobrano had told his story.

"Haven't you a lawyer, my boy?" asked the Court, leaning over the bench to get a better view of the tiny prisoner.

"No sir," said John Manuel Parodi. "I think I can acquit the case myself."

"All right; take the witness," said Judge Treadwell, with a poorly concealed smile.

"Did you see me take your cigars, mister?" queried Parodi.

"No, I did not." answered Sobrano.

"Then you don't know I took 'em. Don't you know, mister, that you sold a package of cigarettes to me which is against the law, and then you come and say I stole your cigars. You're all right, you are."

Sobrano was excused, and Giovanni Cerino, a larger boy than the defendant, took the stand. Cerino said he saw Parodi leaving the store with a box of cigars under his arm.

"Where were you then?" inquired the amateur attorney.

"On the opposite side of the street," replied the witness.

On Christmas Day, 1894, the first San Francisco Cliff House burned to the ground.

As the Chronicle poetically reported the next morning,

San Francisco's most historic landmark has gone up in flames. The Cliff House is a smouldering ruin, where the silent ghosts of memory hover pale and wan over the blackened embers.

Ah, yes. We discussed this first incarnation of the Cliff House a few weeks ago -- its novel location at the edge of the world, its singular popularity with San Francisco's beautiful people, and its subsequent decline into a house of ill-repute.

Well, before it could rise from that undignified state to the status of a beloved landmark, San Francisco's original "destination resort" needed a white knight to ride to the rescue. That knight would be Mr. Adolph Sutro, who -- in 1881 -- purchased not only the faded Cliff House, but acres of land surrounding it.

Mining engineer millionaire and future San Francisco mayor, the larger-than-life Sutro had already established a fabulous estate on the heights above the Cliff House, and by the mid-1880s could count 10% of San Francisco as his personal property.

Unlike the robber barons atop Nob Hill, though, Adolph believed in sharing his good fortune. His first order of business upon making acquiring the property was to instruct his architect to turn the Cliff House into a "respectable resort with no bolts on the doors (ahem) or beds in the house."

This was just a small part of Sutro's grand entertain-the-heck-out-of-San-Francisco scheme. The elaborate gardens of his estate were already open to the public, and the soon-to-be-famous Sutro Baths were on the drawing board. His goal was to create a lavish and family safe environment out at Land's End, and that's just how things worked out.

With streetcar lines beginning to move into the brand new Golden Gate Park, and the City's acquisition of the Point Lobos Toll Road (now Geary Boulevard), the western edge of the City was becoming more attractive and accessible, and over the next decade, families did indeed flock to Adolph's resuscitated resort.

And then in 1894, it happened.

Braving armed guards, bone-chilling water, and a mythical one-finned shark named Bruce, Theodore Cole and Ralph Roe take advantage of the heaviest fog on record to escape from the escape-proof prison island of Alcatraz.

The two were incorrigible criminals -- and escape artists. Roe had once broken out of an Oklahoma pen by stuffing himself into a shipping crate, and Cole had successfully used the old "laundry bag" routine in Texas. Garbage cans, hacksaws, guns carved from wood -- they'd tried them all.

That's why they ended up on the Rock .

Here's a condensed version of their legendary escape: Under cover of fog, the two used heavy tools to cut through the bars of a blacksmith shop and break a padlock on the prison fence. They clambered down to the water's edge ... and were never seen again.

Alarms were sounded, a massive manhunt was launched, but that fog made chances of spotting the two unlikely -- and frankly, not a soul thought they'd survive that cold, cold water. The warden summed up the official attitude this way:

"Serving terms tantamount to life imprisonment, it is my belief they decided to take a desperate chance and that they had no outside aid. I believe they drowned and that their bodies were swept toward the Golden Gate by the strong ebb tide."

Though the FBI stated that the hunt for Roe and Cole would "go on until they are found—dead or alive”, the invulnerability of the Rock remained officially unbroken.

That's more or less how things stood until 1941, when an article in the Chronicle busted the case open again:

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. We 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:

Miss Goldie Griffin Wants to Become Cop and Asks for the Job
City Attorney Debating Eligibility of Women for Such Posts

Miss Goldie Griffin, horsewoman, athlete, sometime actress, and young and attractive to boot, wants to be a policewoman in San Francisco. Also she perfectly don't care a good piece of fudge who knows it.

She has made application to be a police woman, believing that she can walk a beat just as well as any member of the city's finest, and she intends to walk that beat if there is any way that she possibly can do so. She is thoroughly and absolutely convinced that she can jail drunk and disorderly persons, break up fights, arrest robbers and other horrid men who would try to disturb the peace and quiet of San Francisco, and do everything in the line of policing that any mere man cop can do.

And it might be remarked in passing that Miss Goldie may become a policewoman at that. So far as has yet been discovered there seems to be no legal reason why she should not.

This item flowed from the pen of some long-forgotten San Francisco Chronicle beat writer, a little piece in which a neighborhood dispute is lovingly detailed.

Butchertown was a tough old San Francisco neighborhood on the edge of today's Bay View district, around the mouth of Islais Creek. It was comprised mostly of German and Irish immigrants -- ballplayer Lefty O'Doul was probably its most famous son -- and it was absolutely packed with slaughterhouses, meat packers and (here's a shocker) butchers.

Without further ado, a dash of local color circa 1899:

Haberdashery Issue Stirs Butchertown

Whether William Beckman and Thomas O'Leary quarreled over a love affair or over collars and neckties is a mooted question.

Beckman is a butcher employed in one of the many abattoirs of South San Francisco. A few months ago he married the former Mrs. O'Leary, and when O'Leary, after a three years absence, returned to town two weeks ago and found that his divorced wife had become Mrs. Beckman, there was trouble in Butchertown. It all resulted in the arrest of O'Leary on a charge of making threats against life, and the case came up yesterday in Police Judge Conlan's Court.

Beckman told of a long knife with which O'Leary threatened to perform an autopsy on (him). There was also a dispute, Beckman said, as to whether the wearing of collars and neckties was proper form in Butchertown.

We noticed a short notice in the local papers from, oh, 98 years back, announcing that the entire theatrical wardrobe of Kolb and Dill -- the most popular comedy team in San Francisco -- was to be sold at auction.

Clarence Kolb and Max Dill were just a couple of boyhood pals from Cleveland who'd decided to go into show biz. They honed their skills working every vaudeville and burlesque house in the midwest, until -- in the gay 1890s -- they headed out west, discovering San Francisco and an adoring public.

Ethnic stereotypes were the stock in trade of the vaudeville stage. So-called "dialect comedians" played Irish, Jews, Chinese and African-Americans in what are (to most of us) absolutely shudder-inducing ways.

Kolb and Dill were of the vaudeville flavour known as a "Double Dutch" act, performing a caricature of Germans as coarse, blustering knockabout oafs in loud checkered suits.