The Misadventures of Mike Brannigan (Part Three)

The Worst Cabdriver in San Francisco

Carriages waiting for hire along the Plaza in 1855. In the distance, the harbor is a forest of masts. (Detail of image from the Online Archive of California)

(Read Part One)
(Read Part Two)

By the mid 1850s, San Francisco was starting to settle down and take itself more seriously as a city. The hack and cab business followed suit. For the majority of cabdrivers, this meant seeking respectability. These drivers worked to cultivate a reputation for honesty, reliability, and skill to attract repeat clientele. They could be found waiting for hire at established locations such as livery stables, or along the sides of the Plaza (today’s Portsmouth Square). Some drivers spent extraordinary amounts of money (sometimes more than the price of a house) buying fancy carriages to attract customers—as seen in the advertisement below, run by one such driver in 1855:

Advertisement in Daily Alta California, 1855. (California Digital Newspaper Collection). (More on John Glover)

Not all drivers found themselves able or willing to compete in this fashion. Some turned to cheating, even robbing passengers. Keeping alive the rough frontier ethos which the rest of San Francisco was trying to live down, such drivers prowled the streets at night, or hung around the wharf preying upon “verdant” newcomers to the city, who, unlike city residents, had no idea what cab rides were supposed to cost, or how to tell the difference between trustworthy and untrustworthy drivers. Once these drivers lured unsuspecting passengers into their cabs, they would carry them off to remote locations to shake them down for many times the amount of the legal cab fare. Call it the first “surge pricing.”

Some of the more notorious of these drivers became local celebrities of the love-to-hate variety; many of them went by colorful nicknames such as “Grizzly,” “Calico Pete,” “San Juan Jack,” and “Sinbad.” The most notorious of all was Mike Brannigan. He didn’t use, or need, a nickname. Everyone knew who Mike Brannigan was.

Mike had a reputation for violence. It was alleged that he carried a blackjack for beating uncooperative passengers into submission. He was a known thief, and had once bitten the nose off another cabdriver in a fight, but nothing tended to stick because of his political connections. These came with his second job, as a “shoulder striker,” or political enforcer for the local Democratic party, working during elections to make sure the voting went the right way.

It seems Mike was also a reckless driver. He ran down pedestrians on two separate occasions in the fall of 1854. After his second victim, Mike was sentenced to sixty days in jail; as the Daily Placer Times crowed, Mike was finally

CAUGHT AT LAST—Michael Brannagan, who has been arrested several times, but always contrived to escape the meshes of the law by aid of ingenious counsel, was sentenced on Saturday to sixty days in the county jail, for deliberately running over a quiet peaceable Frenchman, who was at work in the street. Brannagan was drunk at the time and was driving a hack.

Mike was soon to get in even bigger trouble. In April, 1856, a young woman named Frances Willis stepped off a steamer at the wharf, having returned from a trip to Sacramento. Frances was expecting to be picked up by her regular cabdriver, Johnny Crowe. Instead she was met at the wharf by Mike Brannigan, who told her that Johnny was unavailable, and he was to pick her up instead. Frances gave him her bags to load into his carriage. She probably knew Mike, as they had both lived in New Orleans before coming to San Francisco, as had Johnny Crowe as well.

But Johnny had made no arrangement for Mike to pick up his passenger—Mike was just trying to “steal a load.” Johnny turned up a moment later, and Frances got into his vehicle, angrily demanding that Mike return her luggage. Instead, Mike drove off with her bags to her home on St. Mary’s Place (now part of St. Mary’s Square). When she arrived with Johnny, Mike demanded she pay him $5 for transporting her luggage, which she refused to do. Mike resorted to “very insulting language” until the police arrived, and he was forced to give up the luggage, having made no money from the trip.

Mike couldn’t take defeat easily, and waited for his chance to get even. This came one evening a few weeks later, when Frances Willis came innocently walking down Washington street past the Plaza, where Mike was sitting on his hack, waiting for a fare. As she walked by, Mike suddenly yelled an insult and cracked his whip, striking her across the face.

Of all the despicable things Mike had done so far, this was considered the most shameful. Newspapers took to calling him “woman-whipper,” a name which stuck to him for years. Mike was hauled before the Recorder’s Court to be charged with assault and battery. His guilt was obvious. Mike had only one weapon to use against Frances: her race.

Frances, it turns out, had a white father and a black mother. Much like a much more famous early San Franciscan, Mary Ellen Pleasant (who was also from New Orleans), she had been considered black in New Orleans, but could pass for white in San Francisco.

According to California law at this time, “No black or mulatto person, or Indian, shall be allowed to give evidence in favor of, or against a white man” (this was interpreted as including Asians as well). Not only was this law horribly racist, it actually encouraged crime, by making it difficult to convict any white man of a crime unless there were white witnesses. To get off scot free, Mike had only to prove that Frances wasn’t white.

Mike and his defense attorney, Colonel James, succeeded in turning the main issue of the trial away from Mike’s guilt or innocence, into the question of whether Frances was black or white. After a long debate, the exasperated judge declared that because Frances looked white, she must be white, so her testimony against Mike was admissible. The jury took just forty-five seconds to convict.

Mike was sentenced to pay a $100 fine, or spend ten days in jail. His attorney promptly appealed the case on another technicality, and Mike was set free on bail. The newspapers expressed anger and bewilderment that the “woman-whipper” Mike Brannigan had been set free yet again.

The Brannigan case had one positive outcome—it helped influence public opinion against the so-called “Negro Testimony” law, which was repealed in 1863.

Mike’s appeal dragged on in court for several months before ultimately being dismissed. But by the time he was finally and definitively found guilty of his assault on Frances Willis, it no longer mattered.

By then, Mike Brannigan had fled San Francisco, in fear for his life.

(Next: Exiled by the Vigilance Committee!)

Disrupt the Disruptors! An Interview with Kelly Dessaint

Cabdriver, zine publisher, and Examiner columnist Kelly Dessaint’s Behind the Wheel series is a must-read for anyone interested in an on-the ground view of how tech gentrification and the “sharing” economy have transformed the experience of life and work in San Francisco.

Kelly Dessaint's Behind the Wheel series chronicles his path from Uber/Lyft driver to licensed San Francisco taxi driver. They are available in print or pdf from his website, as well as from Amazon. He also writes the I Drive SF column for the Examiner.

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I’m inbound on Post street. While I wait for the light to change at Jones, I practice my double bass drumming on the steering wheel along to the Slayer CD blasting from the stereo in my taxicab. (Behind the Wheel 3, page 1)

The third installment of Behind the Wheel begins and ends just like most of the stories it contains—in motion through the streets of San Francisco. Dessaint was the first driver/writer to publish about the experience of driving for Uber and Lyft, and he has since joined the ranks of the city's licensed taxi drivers. Like most writing about cabdriving, the stories in Behind the Wheel take the form of fragmentary, slice-of-life episodes, but Dessaint’s stories are unified by a sense of movement, recurring characters, and a compelling theme of analog resistance to the digital colonization of everyday life.

One of the most striking characters is San Francisco itself. At least since Tex Reed’s 1970 book Hey Taxi, San Francisco cabdrivers have been writing complicated love stories to the city. Cabdriving memoirs from other cities often emphasize a sense of the alienation of disconnected service work, or even the despair of being caught in a dead-end job. San Francisco’s cab writers—including Dessaint—don’t overlook the downsides of the work, but they always balance it with a sense of intoxication with the city, and the myriad stories of the people they drive through it. The result is a mix of light and shadow, of spleen and ideal, a performance far more human and interesting than the sugar-coated kitsch of (for example) Lyft Me Up San Francisco. Dessaint calls it “the incurable madness of taxi driving:”

San Francisco is like a drug. When it gets inside you, each moment is a revelation. Until things get ugly. (Behind the Wheel 3, page 10)

Behind the Wheel paints a psychogeographic portrait of San Francisco, joining a tradition that includes Rebecca Solnit’s Infiinite City and Gary Kamiya’s Cool, Gray City of Love. Like the “spatial stories” described by the philosopher De Certeau, Dessaint’s stories are narratives in motion, lighting up the city through the movements of a cabdriver and his passengers:

And if you’re lucky, one ride follows the next, like jigsaw puzzle pieces falling into place. One minute you’re working the swanky hotels on Snob Hill, the next you’re dropping off in the oft-forgotten Bayview, where urban detritus collects like dust bunnies under a credenza.

And you’ve seen it all, cause you’re a cabdriver, or at least you’ve seen most of it, although in reality, you don’t know fuck all. (Behind the Wheel 3, pages 58-9)

We meet a myriad of other characters of course—passengers from all walks of life, taxi drivers hanging around the garage or the cabstand—but the most interesting is Dessaint himself. Unlike the wry persona affected by many cab writers (such as the Examiner’s old Night Cabbie columnist), Dessaint reveals his own reactions to what he encounters, showing his defeats along with his triumphs, and his exhaustion, uncertainty, and anguish at the hands of abusive passengers, particularly during his “ridesharing” phase:

It’s nights like these that make me want to curl up into a fetal position and rethink this whole ridesharing deal. (Behind the Wheel 2, page 28)

As a whole, the three Behind the Wheel books tell the story of Dessaint’s growth through cabdriving, and his own arc of progress from Lyft driver, to Uber driver, to licensed San Francisco taxi driver—in a direction diametrically opposed to the official narrative of the “sharing economy.” And this is one unifying theme of the Behind the Wheel series: it is a story of defiance, an act of political activism. The series is a war-cry against the gentrification of the city, and the intrusion of tech interfaces and algorithmic manipulation into everyday life. In one of the most important chapters of Behind the Wheel 3, Dessaint teams up with a disgruntled Uber driver to confront David Plouffe himself at a tech conference. In a later chapter he argues with some passengers who don’t realize the contradiction between supporting Bernie Sanders, and patronizing Uber and Lyft:

This new gig economy is regressive. It pushes the most vulnerable members of our society into wage slavery, where they’re paid for piecework rather than given an opportunity to secure a stable income. And what’s more, instead of seeing their profits increase by working more, due to the constant Uber/Lyft price wars, they actually make less in the process. How can you support a system like that? (Behind the Wheel 3, page 55)

The Behind the Wheel series is a must-read for anyone interested in seeing the real, gritty, human reality of how work and urban space have been transformed by the tech-centric “sharing” economy (And as a bonus, each book comes with a “Disrupt the Disruptors” bumper sticker!)

My Other Car Is A Taxicab

I interviewed Kelly by email about Behind the Wheel, along with his long-running zine Piltdownlad, his Examiner column I Drive SF, and his future plans.

How did you start writing a column for the Examiner?

I'd been blogging about my experiences driving for Uber and Lyft for a while and getting a decent amount of attention. I was extremely critical of both companies and how they were treating drivers. I'd already put out the first two zines and started writing for Disinfo.com and Broke-Ass Stuart. To explore other aspects of driving for hire, I was planning to go to taxi school and get my a-card.

On New Year's Eve 2014/2015, Flywheel ran that special where every ride was $10 and it killed business for Uber and Lyft, who'd been getting bad press about surge pricing. I worked that night and it was dismal. Just horrible. I drove around empty most of the night. The next day I wrote a blog post called "Night of the Living Taxi" that made the rounds. Several news outlets contacted me, including Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez of The Examiner. We talked on the phone for a while and the next month he recommended me to the new editor as a modern version of the Night Cabbie, but as an Uber driver. By this time I'd already started driving a taxi, so I pitched my idea of a column about a former Uber/Lyft driver turned cab driver. The editor was interested. When we met to go over the details, he told me that one of the things he wanted to do when he took over The Examiner was revive the Night Cabbie. Of course, in the beginning, and still to this day, comparisons are made between his column and mine. Except I'm not anonymous.

Incidentally, the editor was relieved that I wanted to use my real name. Though I quickly realized the advantage the Night Cabbie had by not revealing who he was. Writing for a newspaper is restrictive because there are limits to what you can write about. Which is why I find doing the zine more liberating because I can write whatever I want. And I'm not bound by a 700 word limit.

How did you first get into writing and zine publishing?

I've always written. It's something my parents encouraged me to do for as long as I can remember. Whether it was filling notebooks with derivative song lyrics or pecking away at my mother's Royal typewriter trying to compose bawdry poems, writing was a way I was able to truly express myself. And shock the adults around me.

As a teenager, I wrote vociferously. Exploring both verse and prose before eventually settling on prose as my preferred method of communication. After getting rejected by any half-way decent magazine I found on the newsstand, I started my own zine and book publishing empire. (And by "empire" I mean that Gateway computer set up in a burned out garage behind my mother's house in East LA.)

I modeled my publications on lit journals from the 60s that I'd found in used bookstores and collected over the years, as well as contemporary handmade, photocopied punk zines coming out of the underground, listed in the back of Maximum Rocknroll and Flipside.

From there, I just kept pushing the boundaries... writing and publishing and designing... collaborating with different artists and writers until we inevitably went our own ways... usually acrimoniously. But not always...

In 2010, I started my latest project: Piltdownlad: A Personal Narrative Zine. 

How did you pick the name for the zine? Some relation to Piltdown Man?

Pitldownlad comes from an album by the D.C. band Fidelity Jones entitled "Piltdown Lad." I combined the two words for aesthetic reasons. Fidelity Jones was the first punk band I saw live, during a visit to D.C. when I was 17. "Piltdown Lad" is their only full length LP. There is very little commentary associated with the album or a title song, but I assume it's an expansion on the idea of the Piltdown Man (a fake early man) to incorporate feeling "fake" as a young (new) person. Perhaps. Or a reference to arrested development. Or, the Peter Pan complex. I don't know really... 

I used Piltdownlad as a vehicle to explore the darkness of my childhood in relation to my current existence as a writer trying to make sense of the past and the future, as well as an outlet to review equally, over-personal zines. 

Where does the Behind the Wheel series fit into this?

After ten issues, around 2014, I discovered Lyft, the ride-hail company. I thought to myself, here is something that is culturally relevant - albeit entirely absurd - that I'd love to document. Something I was convinced surely wouldn't last for long. From Lyft, I delved into Uber, which I also assumed was a fly by night operation at best. 

As I documented the stupidity, the madness, the desperation of using one's personal car as a taxicab, I stumbled onto many fascinating discoveries... Namely, that I loved driving around San Francisco, witnessing the last gasps of a city that I'd always associated with free expression and limitless artistic possibilities as tech start ups took over and molded the cultural reality into something darker and sinister... And the realization that Uber and Lyft weren't going anywhere soon. 

That's where the Behind the Wheel series was born, and from which it has evolved: detailing the nightmare of what was, and what may never be again. And holding a torch for the last bastion of analogue technology: taxi driving. 

It's safe to say I may have bit off more than I can "eschew." And now I'm in a vicious circle. But I still believe that salvation comes from hard work. And driving a taxi in San Francisco is a challenge I have yet to master. And may never master. But I am keeping notes... 

What do you mean when you say you're in a "vicious circle"?

The vicious circle I referred to is driving a taxi to write about driving a taxi... The writing comes easy. The driving, not so much. I suppose I could just work a few days each month, collect some stories, talk to other cab drivers, get their stories and do the column without subjecting myself to the physical stress, the poor financial returns and the constant sense of futility. But that's not the type of writer - or person - I am. Unfortunately, the story I want to tell requires active participation. And that comes with a plethora of consequences, both personal and financial. 

When writing the three Behind the Wheel issues, do you have a particular audience or reader(s) in mind?

I do. And it changes with each issue. When I wrote the first one I thought of readers of my previous zines. The second, people who read my blog. And the third, readers of my column. I've been fortunate to receive a decent amount of messages and comments from people who read my stuff. I don't always reply but I try to incorporate responses in future writings, either through inside jokes or references that only a few will catch.

I know from talking to taxi drivers that geography is a major issue to them when they read about locations. So I always make sure not to fuck up my cross streets or routes. Cause when I do, I immediately hear about it.

A few months back, some guy left a comment on an old column of mine in which he questioned my claim that taxis serve poor people, or the working poor, rather. His argument being that Uber is way more affordable. True, but that's irrelevant. Obviously. The complete lack of insight into how poverty works makes my mind swell each time I think about his comment. I still haven't figured out a single rebuttal because there are so many to make. When I try my mind just goes pfffffftttttttt. And yet, I find myself incorporating the subject of poverty into what I'm writing, not in a direct way, but just adding small scenes along the way. It's a subtle reply, I guess.

What are the most important things you want your readers to learn or understand from your writing?

I think writing should be exciting to read. It should be honest. It should capture the feel of a time and place. It should break rules and constantly push boundaries. I don't see much of that today. I'm often amused by things I read, but rarely am I excited. Like first discovering Henry Miller. Or Thomas Pynchon. Or Hunter Thompson. Not that I actually believe I'll ever reach that caliber, you know, but at least try, right?

Will there be a 4th Behind the Wheel? Do you have other future writing planned?

I've started working on the new BTW. Which will be mostly unpublished stuff about the daily process of driving and going into the city every day from Oakland. "The Thin Checkered Line."

Before I started documenting my experiences driving for hire I was working on other personal narratives under Piltdownlad. I'm actually hoping the new zine will lead to a return to those past stories to wrap up a manuscript I should have returned to the publisher over a year ago. I released a book about my abusive childhood several years ago and that's what led to Microcosm, the publisher, approaching me about another book that dealt specifically with punk rock as a method of recovery from abuse, called No Fun: How Punk Rock Saved My Life.  

The Behind the Wheel series is available from Dessaint's website, or from Amazon.

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Taxi Inferno, Anthropologist Wallace Zane's harrowing cab ride through Los Angeles
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The Misadventures of Mike Brannigan (Part Two)

Mike Brannigan, Gold Rush Cabdriver

The intersection of Clay and Kearny in 1854, from the Annals of San Francisco. Image courtesy of the McCune Collection.

(Click here to read Part One.)

Mike Brannigan claimed (a bit dubiously) to have been the first cabdriver in San Francisco. What is true is that he was one of the city's earliest drivers for hire. He was there in the early 1850s, driving passengers around San Francisco, while the frontier settlement transformed from a collection of tents lined up in the mud, into a real-ish city of wood and brick.

Illustration from the Annals of San Francisco, courtesy of the McCune Collection.

San Francisco's early street conditions were not always favorable to pedestrians--to put it mildly. Riding in a carriage was much nicer, and since almost nobody owned their own carriages, cab and hack business was booming.

At the time, San Francisco lived up to its reputation as a rough place. Brannigan’s favorite fares were duelists, riding out of town into the sand dunes to shoot at each other. As he later recalled:

There was always $75 in a duel. It was at San Mateo they generally fought; for though it was all right to get into a shooting scrap on Montgomery street, the Sheriff used to chase the boys if they went potting at each other after thinking the matter over all night.

The Broderick-Terry Duel. Mural study by Wendell Jones. Image courtesy of www.famsf.org                                                                                                                           

The first one I had on hand was between Ned Tobey and another young fellow—I forget his name. Hall McAllister was Tobey’s second, I remember, and four shots were fired, though nobody was hurt. Then I took out Miles D. Truitt when he fought Colonel Washington the newspaper man. The Sheriff chased us all over the sand hills, but the affair came off all right, and Washington wounded Truitt in the shoulder. Another time General Walker had a row with Joe McKibben, and I drove out the General and Colonel Kewen, who was seconding him. All such matters was a sure $75.

As San Francisco history buffs will recall, the most famous casualty of the city’s early dueling craze was Senator David Broderick (now remembered chiefly for the street carrying his name). Though Mike was not Broderick’s cabdriver on that occasion (another cabbie, Owen McFarland, did the honors), Senator Broderick played an extremely important role in Mike’s career, as we shall see shortly.

Mike’s first appearance in the news was in 1852, when a certain Ira Cole attempted to “annihilate Michael Brannigan with a broomstick;” the case was dismissed when Brannigan refused to press charges.

As the tale goes (and since it was Brannigan who told the tale, it may well be a very tall one), Mike had co-owned San Francisco’s first hired carriage, along with fellow Irish immigrants Johnny Crowe and Jim Travers. Mike’s relationship with Crowe and Travers went through some ups and downs. In July of 1852, while still driving for Crowe and Travers, he drunkenly carried a lamp into the stable and almost set it on fire; in September Crowe and Travers tried to get him jailed on trumped-up charges (as related in Part One). By October of 1852 he was driving for a different livery stable, but managed to get in a fist-fight with Johnny Crowe when they both tried to load the same passenger at the wharf.

The Great Fire of 1851. Image courtesy of www.famsf.org.

In November, while most of San Francisco was trying to stop one of the many early fires which threatened to burn the city down, Mike snuck into a burning building and stole a coat. He was later arrested and thrown in jail, but was somehow acquitted. This was the first indication that Mike had some kind of ... protection ...

After this Brannigan managed to stay off the police blotter for an entire year. This personal record was perhaps helped by the fact that the city’s population was overwhelmingly male, averaging about twenty years old, armed to the teeth, drinking heavily, and desperately in search of riches by any means necessary. This was the time and place where the word “hoodlum” was coined.

Somehow, despite their history, Brannigan started driving for Jim Travers once again (Crowe had branched off into his own business). Apparently, Travers had not learned his lesson from earlier experiences with Mike Brannigan. The expression, “once bitten, twice shy” was about to acquire a new meaning.

Travers now ran one of the largest livery stables in the city, located at Kearny and Broadway. It was here that, in early December of 1853, Mike got into a fight with another driver named John Dougherty. The Alta California described the result:

During a fight which ensued, Brannigan bit the end of Dougherty’s nose entirely off, and also a piece out of his cheek. [Dougherty] was also wounded in the head, and the physician testified that about one-fourth of the nose was gone.

Court cases in those days tended to resolve very quickly, by our standards, but this one dragged on into February of 1854, when Mike Brannigan was found guilty of assault and battery... and then immediately pardoned, by no one less than the Governor of California, “Honest John” Bigler.

Yep: Mike had that kind of protection.

Remember Ira Cole, who Mike forgave for attacking him with a broomstick back in 1852? Mike wisely chose to make amends with Cole, because Cole (man about town, part-time boxer) was the right-hand man of “Dutch Charley” Duane (San Francisco Fire Chief, retired boxer). For these guys, being both politicians and boxers was not an accident. Together they oversaw a gang of street toughs who helped make sure elections went favorably for the Tammany-esque political machine run by San Francisco’s first party boss—Senator David Broderick. Governor Bigley was one of Broderick’s many allies, and he wasn’t above protecting "one of the boys" if called upon to do so.

Mike had picked up a second job to supplement his income as hackdriver: political operative. His responsibilities included:

• being a "shoulder-striker," in other words, a political thug, intimidating voters during elections;
• "colonizing," which meant using his hack to ferry trustworthy/intimidated repeat voters from polling place to polling place;
• and, when all else failed, stuffing ballot boxes.

Mike's second job came with some great benefits--best of all, a "Get Out of Jail Free" card. Throughout his career, Mike knew how to schmooze up to powerful people, and he was always willing to do whatever dirty work was needed to gain their trust.

(Read Part Three: The Worst Cabdriver in San Francisco)

The Misadventures of Mike Brannigan (Part One)

The First Cabdriver in San Francisco?

Mike Brannigan was—according to one of his closest associates—“a loafer, vagabond, drunkard, and thief.” I came across his story because he claimed to have been the driver of the very first carriage for hire in San Francisco. Mike, however, had a knack for storytelling, and no great reputation for telling the truth.

He had a very bad reputation, in fact, pretty much everywhere he went, and much of this reputation was deserved. But he also had an uncanny ability to get people to write about and talk about him. For half a century, it was a rare month in which some newspaper somewhere wasn’t chronicling another of Mike’s misadvantures—mostly petty crimes, though occasionally darker deeds were involved. He was to some degree a classic picaresque rogue, but not the likeable kind: as the Virginia City Union said of Brannigan:

For a brave scoundrel we have a fearful admiration, or, as Channing expresses it, a “shuddering sympathy,” but for this despicable specimen we can hardly condescend to afford disgust.

Nevertheless, for decades journalists and readers kept coming back to the subject of Mike Brannigan. Here is his story:

Michael Brannigan was born in Ireland about 1829, and emigrated to the US in 1846, at the height of the Great Famine, when he was around 17. He lived in New Orleans for a few years, probably working as a tailor’s apprentice, before catching “gold fever” in 1849 and shipping out to California. He is said to have tried his luck as a prospector in ‘49 and ‘50 with no success, though he forged some advantageous friendships with other miners who did hit pay dirt.

View of San Francisco harbor in 1849, from Rincon Hill. Public Domain image from Wikisource.

The first 49ers saw San Francisco as nothing more than a stopping-off point on the way to the gold fields. Many of the buildings were tents, the streets were mud, and the harbor was full of rotting ships whose crews and passengers, one and all, had jumped ship to head for the Sierras. But as Mark Twain supposedly said, the best way to get rich during a gold rush is by selling picks and shovels; and Brannigan was one of the first savvy few to realize that there was an easier path to wealth than digging for it. As he later recalled:

When the mail steamers would arrive I have seen a gambler give a man an ounce of dust—that is, $16—for his place in the long line of anxious people waiting their turn outside the old post-office, which was then at the corner of Brenham place and Clay street. Then you would have to pay $12 a dozen for articles to be laundried, and men used to throw soiled underclothing away and buy new articles rather than pay for washing.

Waiting in line at the post office on steamer day. From the Annals of San Francisco.

There was no need to run off into the hills to get rich—gold was flowing into the city, and heavy-pocketed miners were spending freely. The wiser 49ers settled down in San Francisco, and sold, not just picks and shovels, but merchandise and real estate; they peddled liquor and sex, and built restaurants, gambling halls, and theaters. (And eventually, even laundries.)

And Mike Brannigan?

I owned and drove the first hack that ever rumbled over the streets of San Francisco.

Well, “owned” and “first” turn out to be questionable here. And actually, Mike didn’t claim to own the first hack all to himself. As he told the story, in 1850 an Australian had shipped the carriage from Sydney, and Mike chipped in to buy it, along with two other Irish-born 49ers, Jim Travers and Johnny Crowe, for $1000. With two horses thrown in for $150 (though according to Brannigan they weren’t worth $10), the trio were in business.

Let’s hear what else Mike has to say about the early days:

In 1851 I got $50 a night to drive Catherine Hayes, the famous singer, and her mother, between the Razette House and Tom Maguire’s Theater, which was then situated on Washington street, between Montgomery and Kearny. I also got the same sum from several others at the same time for the same trip.

Mind you, that was a distance of about seven blocks, from the Rassette [=correct spelling] House at Bush and Sansome to Washington and Kearny. By most estimates, $50 in 1851 dollars would be worth over $1500 today. Today’s taxi fare for the same trip is a bit below $7.

The Rassette House. (Image: San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library).

Of course, this was at a time when all prices were inflated, when getting your laundry done cost more ($12 then, about $300 in today’s money) than buying new clothes. Nevertheless, in Mike’s reminiscences, times were good and business was plentiful:

And that was nothing in a day’s work. Why, I’ve often—especially of a day when the steamer came in from Panama and with the mails aboard—why; then I’d get $25 a trip from the dock to the Razette House or the Tehama, as it chanced, and ten trips was nothing for an easy day.

The rosy glow of memory may have fogged up Mike’s recollection of these early days. We have a more reliable record of San Francisco’s very early cab industry on a specific day in 1851, during the time when the city had been taken over by a gang of vigilantes (calling themselves the “Committee of Vigilance”). After hanging a number of Australians and exiling several other suspicious persons from the city, the somewhat paranoid Committee felt the need to track down just who had ridden down to the waterfront in a carriage and thrown a hat and boots into the bay on July 29^th 1851; so, they gathered a report on the activities of all the city’s hired carriages on that day. This wasn’t too hard; there were a total of six, and only one of them had had any trips on that day, a single ride out to the cemetery.

This does seem to contradict Mike’s story of easy money in the early hack business, though the city being under marshall law may have had a dampening effect on people’s desire to ride around in carriages.

But here’s another fact: one of the six carriages in the report is listed as belonging to “Traverse & Crow;” but Brannigan’s name appears nowhere.

If Brannigan did have a partnership with Crowe and Travers it did not last long. Just what their relationship was like, is revealed through the particulars of a court case titled, “The People vs. Michael Branagan,” tried in September, 1852, in which Brannigan was charged by James Travers with having “burglariously” entered his home on the 21^st of August of that year, to steal a shirt (valued at $2) and a puppy (valued at $25). As reported in the Daily Placer Times,

The prosecution proved that defendant told Travers that he had opened the window of his (Travers’) house, on the 21^st August, at 3 o’clock in the morning, and carried away the pup; Travers at this time charged defendant with having on his (Travers’) shirt. It was testified by John Crow, Travers’ partner, that defendant was a loafer, vagabond, drunkard and thief.

(To be fair, Crowe himself was described by a contemporary as “ a noisy, blatant, meddlesome fellow.”)

The judge’s suspicions were raised, however, when Crowe and Travers contradicted each other in their testimony against Brannigan:

[Crowe] also testified that he, witness, was at Sacramento on the night the burglary was committed—Mr. Travers having previously sworn that Crow, on that same night, cautioned him to look out for the defendant, that he would burn the building, which induced Travers to be particularly careful to make all fast before going to bed.

The defense called only one witness, who clarified things immensely. Brannigan, this witness pointed out, “had worked for Travers & Crow, for several weeks,” and “that they kept him in clean shirts, to make a genteel appearance as agent for their popular carriages.” In other words, he was a hired driver working for the two carriage owners; the shirt in question was part of his uniform, to make him look presentable to passengers. Furthermore, while working for Travers and Crowe, Brannigan had brought to the stable three pups, one of which (a black pup) was to be the property of Travers. The pup which Brannigan had taken was tan.

While this corroborates Brannigan’s later claim that he was in business with Travers and Crowe in the early days of San Francisco’s hack industry, it places him as merely a hired driver, not a co-owner, and as working only “several weeks” prior to September of 1852, by which time the partnership of Travers and Crowe had been in business for over a year.

Nevertheless, Crowe and Travers certainly had it in for Brannigan—enough to mount a court case against him on what were evidently trumped-up charges. Maybe there was more to the story.

In any event, the judge now knew enough to dispose of the charges of theft for the shirt and the dog. However, there was still the charge of breaking and entering, based on Brannigan’s own admission to Travers. Upon reflection, the judge came to a truly Solomonic verdict:

The Justice, in reviewing the testimony, came to the conclusion that the shirt alleged to have been stolen was borrowed, and ought to be returned; that the pup claimed, belonged to the defendant, and that as there was no proof of the burglary beyond the admission of the prisoner, and he being proved to be a loafer, vagabond, drunkard and thief, it was but fair to infer that he was also a liar and unworthy of belief—under which consideration the Justice ordered his discharge.

This judgment set the tone for much of Brannigan’s future brushes with the law. He almost always evaded punishment. And throughout all of his many, many court appearances, Brannigan was to repeatedly protest his innocence. And every now and then, he may have been telling the truth.

(Continued in Part Two.)

A Romantic Adventure of Old San Francisco

San Francisco in 1857, from Nob Hill.

According to the Daily Evening Bulletin, a Frenchman named Muns, proprietor of the Marseillaise Saloon, “on the south side of Pacific street, between Kearny street and Bartlett alley,” had a beautiful daughter named Therese. Therese had many suitors, including a wealthy American (favored by the family, even though he spoke no French, and Therese spoke no English) and an Italian barber, nicknamed “Count de Shears.” As the Bulletin noted, “like other famous barbers, some of whom are celebrated in Arabian and Spanish stories, the barber was richer in wit than in pocket”...

From the Daily Evening Bulletin, December 7, 1857:

Yesterday afternoon, our bold barber planned an elopement to take place in the evening; and the lady, nothing loth to reward his enterprise, entered into the plot, keeping the whole affair a sacred secret from her family, and particularly her watchful brothers. The Count accordingly, with her connivance, made his arrangements; a cab was engaged and posted on Bartlett alley, a short distance from the Marseillaise Saloon; and the driver was well paid to await the progress of affairs. At the same time, away up on Broadway, near Dupont street, the proper arrangements had also been made, and Justice Bailey, of the Second District, was in waiting to tie the silken strings of matrimony, any moment the lovers might chance to appear.

Everything being thus ready, about 8 o’clock last evening, Count de Shears and several of his friends approached the Marseillaise Saloon. The friends went to the bar and engaged the attention of the bar-keeper, while the beautiful Therese stole out to the Count, who, by appointment, was standing outside the door. While the friends amused the bar-keeper and the brothers, the lovers slipped around into that romantic thoroughfare, called Bartlett alley, entered the cab and drove off in a circuitous direction for the Court of Judge Bailey.

Hardly, however, had they commenced rattling over the street, before the alarm was given and the inmates of the Marseillaise Saloon started forth in pursuit. A cab happened to pass the corner of Kearny and Dupont streets in the very nick of time in which they sallied forth, and supposing that it contained the fugitives, they pursued with all their speed. By the time they overtook the vehicle, however, the happy couple, who had taken an altogether different direction, had appeared before the Justice, sworn eternally to love each other, and been bound in those ties which none but Heaven ought to dissolve. They retired immediately to lodgings, prepared by the foresight of the happy husband, and no tongue can tell how happy they were.

The brothers of the bride during the night scoured the whole city in search of their lost sister. They went through every street, went to the Mission, searched and inquired in every quarter, but without success, until this morning, by means of a largess paid the cabman, they found out the retreat of the lovers on Sacramento street. They forthwith proceeded to the spot, and the smiling sky of love was for a brief period o’erspread with a storm of passionate remonstrances, poured forth upon the head of the beautiful lady and her brave lover by the unfortunate brothers; but Hymen [the Greek god of marriage], who had joined, protected the devoted ones, and the brothers at last departed, satisfied that there was no use of weeping over what was irretrievably lost.

A New York City Cab Ride in 1840

In 1880, the popular 19th Century writer Prentice Mulford published this recollection of a New York City cab-ride when he was six years old, in about 1840:

"Swallowed up in a moving mass;" New York City traffic at Broadway and Canal Street in 1836, by Thomas Hornor. (www.metmuseum.org) For a detailed analysis of this image, see here.

We get into a cab, a one-horse cab entered from the rear, and of a fashion now quite departed. It teters forward and back; it rocks and rolls from side to side; it stops; it crawls; now it darts furiously ahead; now it crawls again, swallowed up in a moving mass all about of boxes, barrels and crates. I hear cries, shouts and profane language. Drivers on one side shout; on the other side yell; behind they curse; our cabman swears back. Once more we move; we rush, teter, rock and bang over the cobble-stones round a corner; we stop; my parents get out.

I am told to remain behind, and placed in temporary charge of the cabman. I wonder this cabman shows no signs of the recent disturbance through which he has passed. He yelled, shouted and swore as loudly as the rest. He seems to have forgotten all about it. I should think he would talk about it for the next two months. We would at Pennyville. He is a tall, wrinkled, sharp-nosed old man, clad in a long snuffy-looking coat which runs largely to collar. Above, he seems all coat-collar and hat.

"He seems all coat-collar and hat." An 1829 image of a London hackdriver,  by George Cruickshank (archive.org)

My parents have entered a carpet-store. Rolls of carpet stand without, from some of which the bright-colored threads have raveled and lie loose on the pavement. I am quickly employed in winding balls of this thread to carry back to Pennyville. Absorbed for some time in such occupation, I am surprised and pleased as the cabman tosses toward me a large ball which he has wound also. He does but stand there, tall, lank, snuffy, and buried in coat-collar and hat. He never knew the incredible remembrance this one act brought him. He is the first and only human being in all this hard, cold, unsympathizing great city who has shown a trace of friendship for me. 

-- from Prentice Mulford, "Through Infant Eyes: Prentice Mulford's First Impressions of a Great City" San Francisco Chronicle, January 11, 1880)

(For more on the image of 19th Century cabdrivers, see Daumier's Hack Drivers.)

Posner's Taxi Ruling Is Based on Falsehoods and Bad Logic

Conservative jurist Richard Posner, writing for the US 7^th Circuit of Appeals, has issued what is likely to be an influential ruling on the regulation of soft cabs (such as Uber, Lyft, etc.; in his ruling Posner refers to these as “TNPs”) and other taxicabs in the city of Chicago. This is unfortunate, because Posner’s ruling is riddled with errors, inaccuracies, and false logic—in fact he all but admits cribbing part of his argument off the internet! Here I’m going to go through Posner’s most ridiculous statements point by point; you can read his full text here.

The first is that allowing the TNPs into the taxi and livery markets has taken away the plaintiffs’ property for a public use without compensating them. A variant of such a claim would have merit had the City confiscated taxi medallions, which are the licenses that authorize the use of an automobile as a taxi. Confiscation of the medallions would amount to confiscation of the taxis: ... Anyway the City is not confiscating any taxi medallions; it is merely exposing the taxicab companies to new competition—competition from Uber and the other TNPs.

Does Posner understand anything about how the taxi industry works? Of course medallion owners can’t complain about competition, because they are already in competition with each other. Even drivers for the same company are in competition with each other. It’s like Posner is borrowing an image of a monopoly from a completely different industry and trying to impose it on the cab industry. Do your homework, sir.

The real complaint from the taxi industry was not “we are being competed against” but “we are being charged licensing fees, etc., but other people operating the same business are not being charged the same fees.” In other words, the argument is not against competition but against unequal competition as an effect of unequal regulation.

An apt comparison would be if someone paid a license fee to run a liquor store, then complained because the city allowed someone to sell liquor next door without a license. Or, if the electric company was only allowed to charge certain rates, but then another electric company was allowed to operate in the same city, charging whatever they wanted. Would Posner really argue that such companies had no legal recourse against the regulator for allowing such unequal competition?

Posner then rambles off into another argument borrowed from the internet—that the difference between Uber and taxis is the simple fact of historical technological change:

Indeed when new technologies, or new business methods, appear, a common result is the decline or even disappearance of the old. Were the old deemed to have a constitutional right to preclude the entry of the new into the markets of the old, economic progress might grind to a halt. Instead of taxis we might have horse and buggies; instead of the telephone, the telegraph; instead of computers, slide rules.

What makes these examples particularly funny, to me, is that I actually research the history of two of these transitions—from the telegraph to telephone, and from horse-drawn cabs to taxis. I’m sorry Mr. Posner, but those transitions had almost nothing in common with this current case. For one thing, those were actual, significant technological shifts, but there is no actual difference in technology between an Uber and a taxi. Both are just automobiles, and both can be hailed from a smartphone. I realize that Posner, like many people, may not be aware that smartphone apps for taxis have been around longer than Uber (in Chicago, Curb (formerly Taxi Magic) has been available since 2009). But you would think that a legal scholar making an important ruling on a case like this would bother to do some actual research on the history of this technology, instead of taking Uber’s crypto-history at face value.

The plaintiffs argue that the City has discriminated against them by failing to subject Uber and the other TNPs to the same rules about licensing and fares (remember that taxi fares are set by the City) that the taxi ordinance subjects the plaintiffs to. That is an anticompetitive argument. Its premise is that every new entrant into a market should be forced to comply with every regulation applicable to incumbents in the market with whom the new entrant will be competing.

Here Posner briefly comes back to reality before taking another swerve off into his own imaginary land. At least he states the taxi industry’s complaints correctly: yes, they are upset that someone competing against them, offering the same service they do, is not subjected to the same rules and regulations. In other words, they are asking for a level playing field. How is this remotely an “anticompetitive argument?”

Then Posner launches into his already infamous “taxi drivers are like dogs” argument. Let’s just quote this, slightly amended for clarity to show what he is strongly implying:

[Taxi drivers] on average are bigger, stronger, and more aggressive than [Uber drivers], are feared by more people, can give people serious bites, and make a lot of noise outdoors, barking and howling. Feral [Uber drivers] generally are innocuous, and many pet [Uber drivers] are confined indoors.

Thank you, Mr. Posner, for so clearly and cluelessly articulating part of the deeply racist and classist imagery at the heart of Uber’s popularity. This ugly little quote is too packed with significance to be fully dealt with here. Suffice it to say for now that the contrast Posner is articulating is known, in US history, as “the house slave and the field slave.”

Let’s move on to Posner’s next insanity, where he takes issue with the lower court judge who had granted some merit to one of the cabdrivers’ claims:

She ruled that the City, by failing to place as many regulatory burdens on the TNPs as on the taxicab companies, might have denied the latter the equal protection of the law. But this was taking equal protection literally, and it should not be taken so. Otherwise prospective entrants to a market who had lower costs than incumbent firms would not be allowed to enter the market unless some regulatory entity burdened the new entrants with regulations, whether or not necessary or even appropriate, that eliminated any cost advantage the new entrants would otherwise have in competing with the incumbent firms.

“Equal protection of the law” should not be taken literally? Wow, Mr. Posner. Just, wow. I suppose we ought to leave that one wide open to interpretation, huh? Otherwise we all might have to be treated... equally... well, we can’t have that!

The next sentence is where his argument gets really ridiculous. According to Posner, if we had to offer all competitors equal protection (or, an equal playing field, basically), we would have to handicap any new entrants who had a special advantage. Like saying: runner A is faster than runner B, so if they compete, runner A has to carry weights to make them run the same speed.

Well, this is a fascinating diversion into philosophical speculation, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with the real-life case that Posner is supposedly writing about. The taxi operators are not asking for additional burdens, above and beyond what taxis bear, to be placed on Uber and Lyft to make them competitive; they are just asking for equal regulations. Equal treatment. Literally.

Mind you, there is a very important truth buried here, which Posner has completely failed to recognize. Uber and Lyft really aren’t in a truly competitive market situation against taxis, because while taxis have to compete in a real market, Uber and Lyft (for the time being) are being subsidized by a constant influx of new investment capital. How “competitive” is it to have to keep a small business legitimately afloat while competing against someone who can lose money hand over fist, while constantly attracting more funding? There is no real “market” here as long as Uber (and its backers) have a heavy hand on the scales.

Posner finally turns to his most important argument, that taxis and soft cabs like Uber are too different to be regulated in the same way. First of all, he repeats the very tired argument that taxis can be hailed off the streets, but that Ubers can only (legally) be hailed with a phone app. What Posner completely fails to understand is that this difference is the wholly arbitrary effect of regulation, not a pre-existing difference that regulation is “responding” to.

Not that regulation never responds to the nature of the industry regulated: in fact, much existing taxi regulation is just such a response. In many cities, for instance, it was long illegal for cabs to take street hails—regulators wanted cabs only to pick up at set locations like cabstands, or to respond to orders via phone. Over time, those restrictions were worn away by demand. In some cities, such as Mexico City, there are still different categories of taxi, some of which respond to street hails, while some can only be picked up at stands, and others can only be ordered by phone. This is, incidentally, a very inefficient system, brought about by regulation that arbitrarily creates a distinction between dispatch modes. There is an inherent pull, I would argue, for taxis to ultimately be made available by all dispatch modes. Uber (and other soft cabs) is in fact already starting to experience this.

Right now soft cabs are only (legally) hailable by phone; but this is just the arbitrary effect of the exemption that regulators have created. But anyone coming out of a busy concert and trying to hail an Uber knows that dozens or hundreds of vehicles converging at once, each looking for a specific person, is a complete mess. Now, imagine that the Ubers were instead allowed to line up at the concert exit, and everyone coming out could just take the first one in line. Wouldn’t that be more convenient? Rest assured that, at some point in the near future, regulators will be asked to make this change.

Or say that, as Posner believes, licensed taxis are completely driven out of business. Who then will serve the demand for street hails? Uber, of course, will be given the right to accept flags off the street. And it is perfectly rational, in fact almost inevitable, that this will happen. The only irrational aspect to it would be the inconvenient fact that Ubers had first been created as a separate category on the temporary, and arbitrary basis that they were excluded from these forms of dispatch. But there is no inherent reason for this exclusion, or for the legal distinction between taxis and soft cabs.

Posner then makes a series of false or illogical statements in rapid succession:

A major difference is that customers, rather than being able to hail an Uber car, must sign up with Uber before being able to summon it...

Remember, you can e-hail taxis just like soft cabs, requiring all the same pre-arrangement. This is an absolute red herring.

Unlike taxicab service Uber assumes primary responsibility for screening potential drivers and hiring only those found to be qualified, and the passengers receive more information in advance about their prospective rides—information that includes not only the driver’s name but also pictures of him (or her) and of the car.

This is an odd way to put it, because for taxicabs the “primary responsibility” for these falls to regulators. Uber is only exempt from this (and thus allowed to take “primary responsibility”) because they were granted an exemption by lawmakers. Furthermore, if you’ve followed Uber in the news and the courts at all you are likely to have a dim view of their sense of “responsibility.” Posner is really arguing here that you should simply trust this corporation when it comes to safety. But if Uber was really committed to safety, and background checks, etc., why are they so against being required to follow the same level of safety regulations as taxis already face?

Furthermore, the TNPs use part‐time drivers extensively, and it is believed that these part‐timers drive their cars fewer miles on average than taxicab drivers, who are constantly patrolling the streets in hope of being hailed; and the fewer miles driven the less likely a vehicle is to experience wear and tear that may impair the comfort of a ride in it and even increase the risk of an accident or a breakdown.

If Posner was posting this on Wikipedia, an editor would flag “it is believed” as weasel words. Not only is Posner’s statement weaselly, it is precisely the opposite of “what is believed.” Having studied and written about this very aspect of the industry, I find these falsehoods particularly insulting. The truth is that the core of Uber and other soft cab services are provided by drivers who rely on it as a job; incidental or “part-time” drivers as Posner imagines them only provide a fraction of overall rides. Second, part-time and incidental drivers are not more efficient in their mileage than full-time drivers; in fact, the opposite is likely to be the case, as I pointed out in my 2014 publication on this very question. Mayber Posner should have read some of the literature before jumping to these assumptions?

Posner ends by showing his true colors, with a paean to the disastrous experiments in taxi deregulation back in the 1970s. He lauds the fact that “the deregulation movement has surged with the advent of the TNPs.” Which leads to the most important lesson to be learned from this entire saga:

There is really no such thing as “deregulation;” there is only different regulation.

Posner completely fails to understand (or to admit) that all the differences between soft cabs and taxicabs which he feels justify separate regulatory regimes for the two forms of on-demand car service, were in fact created by those very regulations. Thus, even though he celebrates this as “deregulation” it is really just an arbitrary shift—from one game, involving a certain set of rules and certain players, to another game, with different players and different rules. Even the neoliberal economist Friedrich Hayek recognized that markets are artifacts in this way. The surprising thing is that Posner does not apparently realize this—that regulators are not “recognizing” a real distinction between two markets, but creating that distinction; and Posner in issuing his decision, is actively assisting in that creation.