The Forgotten History of the Western Klan

Sometimes the mere threat of violence sufficed. Like southern Klansmen, western vigilantes operated in a cryptic and clandestine fashion. In April 1869, “another open Ku Klux proclamation, without address or envelop[e] … was thrown into the Post Office receiving box last night,” reported the Patriot of San Jose. “It threatens a destruction of all the crops of persons employing even a single Chinaman.” Another message, signed “Ku Klux Klan,” threatened to disembowel a citizen near Marysville, California, for his comparatively progressive views on race.

California Klansmen played the victim and reveled in theatricality. “Action! Action! Action!” demanded a manifesto addressed to “fellow members of the KKK” that was distributed near San Francisco in 1868. The letter vowed “retribution and vengeance” and promised to “sheath daggers” in the breasts of those who sought the “enslavement of a free people”—that is, white workers. The irony of white supremacists complaining about slavery was apparently lost on certain Klansmen.

Vigilantes suited their actions to their words. Numerous Chinese immigrants were targets of extralegal violence. In the spring of 1868, white vandals raided a series of ranches in Northern California. They captured and savagely beat the Chinese workers there, according to an article in Sacramento’s Daily Union titled “Kuklux Klan – California Branch.” Blood oozed from the ears and nostrils of one of their nearly lifeless victims. The next year, a mob stormed a ranch near Santa Cruz, where they “drove some Chinamen off after horribly maltreating them, abused and terrified the children … and raised Cain generally,” according to the Santa Cruz Times.

Nothing was sacred to anti-Chinese mobs. In 1869, arsonists burned down a Methodist church in San Jose that housed a Sunday school for Chinese children. Vigilantes torched another church, in Sacramento, as well as a brandy distillery near San Jose that employed Chinese workers. A newly opened school for Chinese children in Nevada City, California, was scheduled to operate strictly in the daytime and on Sundays, “so as to avoid the Ku Klux Klan, who are burning churches, and will next attempt to destroy all school books,” according to a local newspaper.

Western vigilantes in the Reconstruction era could claim an advantage that some southern Klansmen lacked: the support of their local government. Klan activity peaked in the late 1860s, when most former Confederate states were under military occupation and governed by Republican politicians. California, however, had remained loyal to the United States in the Civil War and thus avoided federal oversight during Reconstruction. That left Democrats free to participate in politics. They carried the state election of 1867 in a landslide, catapulting unabashed white supremacists into California’s highest offices. In his inaugural address, Governor Henry Haight told his white audience precisely what they wanted to hear: Chinese immigration must cease. The “influx” of Chinese workers would, he warned, “inflict a curse upon posterity for all time.” A Klansman couldn’t have put it more pointedly.