The Rufus Porter Ranch House in Spring Valley, now known as the Hubert H. Bancroft Ranch House

After the discovery of gold in 1848, young Chinese males began a migration to “Gum Saan” — “Gold Mountain” — the name they gave California. A large majority were Cantonese. Wearing layers of clothing, they brought with them a bedroll and only those possessions that could be carried in bamboo baskets. They traveled from the Pearl River Delta to Hong Kong. An organization called the Six Companies paid their fare on a credit-ticket system. As with guilds, the organization provided work, housing, food, medical treatment, even legal representation. The immigrants had three years to repay the debt from their wages.

It’s hard to say how many planned to stay in California — or how many would go back to China, then return to California with a family or a new bride. According to the Burlingame Treaty of 1868, Chinese were banned from testifying against, and not allowed to marry, Caucasians; the ratio of Chinese men to women in “Gum Saan” was 20-to-1. Marriage was often the motive to make the trip home.

Young Ah Chee traveled to California in 1870. Throughout the crossing, he remained below decks in cramped quarters — with little food or water — amid the pervasive smells of bodily functions and seasickness. He disembarked at San Francisco, where customs officials searched for opium.

In the city, he met 19-year-old Tun Yow. An attraction grew, but she did not belong to the organization. A man named Ung Yu bought Tun Yow for $500 — he meant to take her to San Diego and make her his slave.

Instead of following his group to the gold fields or the Central Pacific Railroad, Ah Chee broke away. He asked friends to write him a letter of introduction: it concluded with the statement that Chee had “always been an honest, sober, and truthful fellow.” Ah Chee took the letter south in search of Tun Yow. He hired on as a cook at the Rufus Porter Ranch. Since the Porters worked 16-hour days, a full-time cook was a blessing.

Porter had bought the spread in 1865. He paid $300 for 160 acres and called it “San Jorge.” When his daughter Rufina objected to the pronunciation — “whore-hay” in Spanish — he changed the name to Spring Valley.

The two-room adobe ranch house was 32 feet long and 18 feet wide. Porter added two bedrooms, a dining room, and a kitchen. The timbers and a mahogany staircase came from the Clarissa Andrews, a coal steamer that had run aground at Ballast Point. Stairs led down to the “basement,” a hole in the ground where the Porters stored pans of milk and butter in brine — or sometimes fled to escape mosquitoes and biting flies. Two trap doors covered the basement’s entrance.

Since the ranch was ten rock-riddled miles from town, with no direct route, the ranch had few visitors. A frequent one was Alonzo Horton, founder of New San Diego in 1869. When his block-long, two-story Horton House was completed (where the US Grant Hotel now stands), Horton offered Ah Chee a job in the laundry.

Rufina Porter remembered Ah Chee as a fine cook and a “clean, reliable chap.” Since he had been a luxury, the Porters agreed to let him go. Ah Chee took the job at the hotel.

Less than 100 Chinese lived in San Diego in 1872, most either in a fishing village at La Playa or at the foot of Third Street, a location that Ah Chee may have visited often. On one such occasion, he saw Tun Yow. Love bloomed again.

But she was not free. Ung Yu had a brothel on Fourth Street. He ordered Tun Yow to be a prostitute, and when she refused, he beat her.

At first, Ah Chee was afraid to confront Ung Yu. Yu had many connections in the community and, writes the San Diego Daily Union, “would take powerful vengeance upon him.” But when the beatings continued, Ah Chee obtained a marriage license from the county clerk.

On Thursday evening, April 11, 1872, Ah Chee and Tun Yow went to the courthouse. The previous day, John R. Porter — Rufus Porter’s brother — and his wife Fanny had arrived at San Diego on the steamer Orizaba. John Porter became the local Justice, and in one of his first acts, secretly married Ah Chee and Tun Yow. To avoid suspicion, the couple agreed that she should remain at the brothel until they could take the next steamer to San Francisco.

But the marriage wasn’t a secret. The next day, the Daily Union announced in the “vital statistics” column that the wedding had taken place. Ung Yu read the paper and punished Tun Yow.

That night, desperate to free her, Ah Chee borrowed a carriage from Hinton & Gallagher’s livery stable, at the northeast corner of Second and D (Broadway). He asked a friend to drive to the brothel, pretend to be a customer, and sneak out Tun Yow. When they returned to the stable, they picked up Ah Chee, and the friend raced the carriage into the night.

Since a young Chinese couple was so easy to spot — especially with the young man’s shaved head and queue (a long braid down the back) — Ah Chee and Tun Yow imagined only one possible haven: the Porter Ranch. At the edge of town, the friend turned the rig north toward Mission Valley. They rode to an old creek bed (near today’s Highway 125), turned south, and followed the sycamore- and willow tree–lined ditch to the ranch.

At midnight, Rufus Porter heard footsteps on the porch, then a knock on his bedroom door. Frightened faces told all: the marriage, the escape, and the plea for sanctuary, since a posse would surely track them down.

Porter said he could not keep Tun Yow on the ranch, but the couple could stay the night: Porter would figure out something in the morning. He’d have to, Rufina remembered, because “there would be trouble.”

The next evening, Rufus Porter drove Ah Chee into town. They met with John Porter and discussed strategies.

If the numbers are correct, Ung Yu had paid $200 more for Tun Yow than Porter did for his ranch. On Saturday, eager to catch his prized possession, Ung Yu sent search parties “to every nook and corner of the city” (Daily Union). When they learned that John Hinton had lent the couple a carriage, Ung Yu offered him $50 to say where they’d gone. Hinton refused the money.

A lawyer told Ung Yu that a $200 reward would bring Tun Yow back. The Daily Union, which earlier referred to the Chinese as “fiends” and “heathen wretches,” quotes Ung Yu as saying “al lightee” to the idea.

Ung Yu accused Ah Chee of stealing his property. When no one could find the couple, Ung Yu swore out a different complaint with Justice Henry C. Skinner: Tun Yow, he claimed, had stolen $150 from him in gold: seven $20 pieces, one $10. The judge issued a warrant.

According to the Daily Union, Ung Yu planned to find and arrest Tun Yow. The charges might be proved false, but he would “seize her again, and after torturing her, compel her to enter upon a life of shame once more. Meanwhile, he and his allies will lie in wait for Ah Chee and murder him if they can.”

But when D.C. Reed drew up the complaint, he accidentally switched the names by mistake. On Sunday afternoon, Deputy sheriff Thomas Sherman led a posse in search of “Ah Chee.” They found him at the Porter Ranch, arrested him, and threw him in jail. When someone discovered the mistake, Judge Wellington Stewart and another man rode back to the Porter Ranch. This time the warrant read “Tun Yow.”

Rufus was away on business. Rufina and her mother, Sophia, heard hard-driven hooves rumbling to the northwest. Men were coming for “the little bride.”

Rufina raced to the outer gate and secured the padlock. They would have to break it, she wrote, “which gave us extra time.”

Sophia dashed inside the house. She and Tun Yow tugged at a long table, finally moving it off to one side. Sophia raised heavy trap doors, pointed to the stairs, and nodded to Tun Yow to climb down.

Tun Yow looked into the darkness, and, writes Rufina, “was scared nearly to death — and no wonder.” But she understood. She carefully descended the slippery steps and crouched among shelves of milk and cheese and the fetid, loamy scents of the earth.

Rufina returned just in time to help lower the trap doors and slide the table back into place. Locking the gate had given them just enough time. “We were none too soon, for as we were just making things look as though they had always been that way, in came the men.”

Stewart banged the door open and bullied his way inside. The two men kicked aside every object blocking a place to hide. “They had no business to look over the house,” wrote Rufina. “Mother and I had to tell some lies to get rid of them.”

The men went outside, searched the barn, wagon shed, and henhouses, but did not find “our little Chinese bride.” Tun Yow, who had experienced unthinkable wrongs since coming to “Gold Mountain,” emerged from the hole quivering with fear. The women assured her that she’d be safe from now on. Rufus drove her to his brother’s house, and she stayed with John and his wife Fanny until the next steamer arrived.

In a rare burst of compassion, on April 16, the Daily Union asked: “Is not the law strong enough to protect these poor people? Can it be twisted to return to slavery and infamy this man’s lawful wife?”

The next day, the paper announced that Ah Chee and Tun Yow had sailed away. At least six men had escorted them in several carriages to the wharf, where the couple boarded a steamer for Los Angeles. “At that city they have friends who will care for them a day or two when they will be sent by stage to San Jose, where they hope to live together in peace and happiness.” The Daily Union praised the Porters and John Hinton. “There will be a big mark set down to their credit in the books of the recording angel.”

Happily ever after?

Accounts vary.

Rufus Porter claimed the couple made it to San Jose and ran a laundry under assumed names. When it burned down, they converted the building to a restaurant.

Interviewed in 1936, Rufina Porter said that Ah Chee and Tun Yow never made it to the steamer. “Their families were of different castes, or tongs, so there was great opposition to the marriage and they probably killed [Ah Chee]. We did all we could to help them, but it was no use.”

Those who side with Rufina claim that in both instances — the marriage and plans for escape — the Daily Union had publicized their intentions, which enabled Ung Yu to track them down.

Jim Van Meter, director of the Bancroft House, suggests a “Door Number Three” option: Maybe the young couple and the Porters had learned something from the published wedding announcement, and had given the Daily Union a false itinerary. They sailed on a different date, to a different port, and fled to new lives. ■

QUOTATIONS

1. Jim Van Meter: “The cellar has been filled in, but the building [called Bancroft House] is now a registered National Historic Landmark.”
2. Murray K. Lee: “California labor union leaders took advantage of the economic depression of the 1870s and the resulting unemployment by waging an anti-Chinese campaign.”
3. Robert Louis Stevenson: “Of all stupid ill feelings…my fellow Caucasians seemed to have looked at them, listened to them, or thought of them, but hated them a priori…as enemies in that cruel and treacherous battlefield of money.”

SOURCES

Adema, Thomas Joseph, Our Hills and Valleys: A History of the Helix–Spring Valley Region, San Diego, 1993.

Daniels, Roger, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life, New York, 1990.

Fong, Walter N., “The Chinese Six Companies,” Overland Monthly, May 1894.

Heizer, Robert F. and Almquist, Alan F., The Other Californians, Berkeley, 1971.

Lee, Murray K., In Search of Gold Mountain: A History of the Chinese in San Diego, California, Virginia Beach, 2011; interview.

Porter, Rufina, Memoirs, ms. San Diego History Center; oral history interview, 1936, ms. Spring Valley Historical Society.

Shin-Shan, Henry Tsai, China and the Overseas Chinese in the United States, 1868–1911, Fayetteville, 1983.

Van Meter, James, director and caretaker, Bancroft Ranch Historical Museum, interview.

Webster, Karna, The Hidden Heart: A History of Spring Valley and the Bancroft House, self-published ms., Bancroft House, 1980.

“Chinese Slavery in California, An Outrageous Case,” San Diego Daily Union, April 16, 1872; “Sequel to the Chinese Case,” San Diego Daily Union, April 17, 1872.