But Curly had a powerful ally. Policeman Gard — who did little to stop the lynching — testified that he gave his rifle to Curly to hold while he put out a fire on the roof. When he got it back, he said, the gun contained the same number of bullets.
Suddenly, Gard's and Harris' jailhouse visit made sense.
Corpses of the Chinese victims
Los Angeles at the time of the Chinese massacre
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The trials of the next nine defendants were combined. This is usually a dangerous tactic, since jurors tend to blame all for the worst acts of the few. But Kewen had an ace up his sleeve.
Seven of the nine were convicted but, again, of manslaughter. Widney imposed sentences ranging from two to six years, light terms given the crime.
Kewen pulled out his ace not long after the guilty boarded ship for San Quentin. He filed papers with the Supreme Court of California, alleging that the convictions were improper because the district attorney committed a fatal legal error.
Prosecutor Thom had correctly charged the defendants with murdering the beloved Dr. Tong. But Thom had failed to introduce evidence that Tong had been killed.
The court agreed and the convictions were set aside.
Thom's mistake was the error of a rookie, not of a veteran prosecutor. What's more, Thom never attempted to retry the defendants.
He also never brought to trial the majority of those accused by the grand jury. After a time, the indictments themselves were mislaid, so that no future trials could be held.
Just like that, L.A. had disposed of its messy public relations problem.
Local newspapers did not even mention the lynching in their year-end analysis of the major events of the previous 12 months.
Within five years, the arrival of the transcontinental railroad made the trip West fast and safe, and the great immigration of church builders, book clubbers and ladies who lunch followed. Los Angeles became a modern city, and many of the men who lived through the evil times grew rich.
The massacre did have one salutary effect, however: It brought an end to the rule of the rope in Los Angeles. The Chinese were the last to be lynched in L.A.
Historian Nunis was convinced that the whole truth about the massacre never was told. "It's very hard to prove that the best citizens were involved, although I believe it's true," he told the Weekly.
"You've got to look at what motivated the killers," he added. "The economy was on the decline with the end of the Civil War. There was social dislocation. Blacks were moving in. The Chinese were very successful. All these things caused resentment."
Far from being the result of passions inflamed by alcohol, "I really felt the lynchings were a put-up job," Nunis said.
And still today, every so often, the rainbow mix of populations in Los Angeles forsake their surfboards, convertibles, Cinco de Mayo celebrations and Martin Luther King Jr. Day marches and rise in revolt against each other's accursed presence in this paradise.
The story might end there, were it not for strange events that occurred in the following years.
In 1877, a brief appeared in one of the newspapers noting that one Yo Hing had been hacked to death by an assassin bearing, along with a hatchet, "an old grudge." Somehow, the author failed to note Hing's connection to the massacre only six years earlier.
Celis, one of only two defendants acquitted in the massacre case, died in a bizarre accident while chasing horse thieves in the San Fernando Valley. According to the account given by Gard, who was riding in a buggy with Celis at the time, a rifle fell out of the wagon and hit a spoke on one of the wheels. Absurd as it sounds, the rifle discharged a bullet that struck Celis square in the chest, Gard said, apparently with a straight face.
As no one else saw the incident, Gard's word was taken as gospel.
Around the same time, H.M. Mitchell, by then known as Major Mitchell, having left behind his ragged roots as a journalist, went hunting with City Attorney William E. Dunn in the foothills beyond Pasadena. Dunn mistook his friend for a deer, accidentally shooting Mitchell — twice. A single mistaken shot by a skilled hunter seems barely credible. But two shots?
Did the wily Sam Yuen, still burning with rage over never having recovered his gold, have a hand in these events?
Nunis doubted Yuen was that smart. And Yuen could hardly be blamed for another premature death, that of Gard, who after the massacre became a railroad detective and died in a fiery explosion.
If not Yuen, then, who was settling the score?
Maybe it was just bad luck, the kind that for a few decades in the 19th century seemed to find a home in the rough-and-ready town of Los Angeles.
