Although few, if any, of the participants and witnesses at the time were aware, the gory battle in the Chinese tong headquarters on Bakersfield's, L street brought to a close an epic period in the American West. Bakersfield looked on the incident as perhaps the most revolting in a series of "man for breakfast" episodes which had given the city a reputation for being the roughest and most hellish of its day, worthy successor to Virginia City, Abilene, Dodge, Deadwood, Tombstone, Bodie and other western boomtowns noted at times for the vigor of their vice and violence.
Bakersfield as the last survivor of the tough towns of the old west was in the opinion of those who had seen its predecessors, by all odds the toughest.
But it was neither gold nor cattle that were to set off Bakersfield as a boomtown. It was oil. A smoldering fuse of drilling had existed in the county for forty years before the turn of the century, financed by bold chance-taking money from the gold country.
During the wild west era between the 1860s and the new century, the valley boasted as degenerate a collection of desperados, road agents, outlaws, and badmen as any area of the west.
In the grab for oil lands, lease wars broke out and major oil companies hired gun hands, "shotgun men," to guard their properties. This work came easy for men who had participated in the water wars of Tulare County.
The activity in the new oilfield was matched in scope by Bakersfield's nightlife, especially in the tenderloin.
One of the early civic boasts of the city was a streetcar system and it did a thriving business. On Saturday nights when men came in from the fields for fun and relaxation, the streetcars were so crowded that as late as midnight and even into the small hours of Sunday men hung outside and even on top. In the tenderloin, a dozen different dance halls furnished pretty girls and entertainment.
Even the former Chief justice of the Supreme court of the United States was not immune to Bakersfield's violent undercurrent.
Chief Justice Earl Warren was a graduate of Kern Union High School later known as Bakersfield high school, and in 1938, during the great depression, his father Matt was murdered in his own home for unknown reasons and the killer was never identified. To this day, the murder of Matt Warren is unsolved, like the Kennedy assassination.
During the all-out push to win the war, several army air corps training bases began operations in the surrounding communities such as Shafter and Taft. According to the war department if any military personal were to go to Bakersfield, then the secret whorehouses and clandestine gambling joints had to close down for good. It wasn't as out in the open as the days of the old west, but there was still a section of downtown where the good folks avoided because they knew what was going on over there and that section of town was the tenderloin.
So actually during WWII was when the Tenderloin of Bakersfield officially died. Until the US government cracked down its unknown how long it would have gone on. This was according to a source who lived in the area and had a well-versed knowledge of written and unwritten history.
In 1952 a massive earthquake destroyed most of downtown Bakersfield and anything left standing with a link to a shady past was swept under the rug.
Even after all the evolution with technology and human advancement, at our worst, there is still a band of wild heathens shooting each other for some inexcusable reason, it's sick.
Of course, this is total nonsense, and it's not something I want, but the place has a violent past, a violent present and nobody knows how to change the future.
Essentially I have solved the homeless crisis, revitalized downtown, solved the murder problem, the crime problem, invented a reason for high-speed rail, gave the middle finger to the effete snobs in the North, funded public pensions in perpetuity, and solved your revenue problems in one blog post. Plus it would be cool to have trolley cars again. I only ask for one thing in return, that you let me ring the bell on a cable car.
