A HIP-HOP STYLE BEEF OVER IMMIGRATION
The feud began with two murders. In January 1886, Jesse and Sarah Wickersham were found dead in their remote farm house outside Cloverdale. A former Petaluma couple, the two were married cousins, the nephew and niece of prominent capitalist Isaac Wickersham.
Although their killer’s identity was never determined, unfounded accusations pinned the murders on the couple’s Chinese cook, Ah Ti, who had gone missing.[1]
Such accusations were not uncommon. Vilified as criminals and cheap labor, Chinese immigrants had been largely banned from the United States for ten years by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.[2] The manhunt for Ah Ti unleashed a new fury of violence, triggering racists to drive them out of Sonoma County.[3]
Ethnic hostilities didn’t end there. A wave of immigrant workers from Italy, Switzerland, Portugal, and Germany—most, like the Chinese, fleeing war and economic upheaval in their home countries—also threatened some American workers with their cheap labor, along with fears their Catholic and Jewish faiths were diluting the country’s Protestant identity.[4]
In local newspapers, a war of words broke out among three factions.
Capitalists like John McNear welcomed the Chinese for their low wages, while evangelists like Petaluma’s Rev. William Pond targeted them as Christian converts. Local Democrats, having sided with the South during the Civil War, opposed Chinese “aliens” but welcomed white Europeans. Nativists sought to limit or cleanse the country of all immigrants.[5]
Nowhere was the ink slinging more ferociously eloquent than in the feud waged between two poets, Jack and Puck.
“Jack” was the pen name of a 35-year-old itinerant reporter named Tom Gregory. He stumbled into journalism as a war correspondent while in the U.S. Navy monitoring a war between Peru and Chile. Upon leaving the Navy, Jack went to work for newspapers in San Francisco and Sacramento. Between jobs, he lived with his mother and stepfather, Sarah and Martin Stone, on their farm in Bloomfield, serving as a correspondent and poet for Petaluma and Santa Rosa newspapers. His poetry earned him a reputation as Sonoma County’s “finest word-painter.”[6]
Alfred James “Puck” Puckett was an 18-year-old literary prodigy known as “Petaluma’s boy poet.” He lived on his parents’ dairy ranch atop Sonoma Mountain. His mother, Mary Meany Puckett, an Irish immigrant and poet in her own right, presided over Petaluma’s Catholic School before marrying. She began Puck’s school days with story and song, cultivating his melodic relationship to language.[7]
Neither man had more than a rudimentary education.
The feud kicked off with one of Puck’s poems in the Petaluma Argus denouncing the Chinese as those “who have a fearful havoc made/to blot our country’s prime/who destroy morals, ruin trade/and fill the land with crime.”[8]
A fellow Democrat, Jack was no fan of the Chinese. Bloomfield had been the first town in Sonoma County to run out the Chinese after the Wickersham murders.[9]
But he had issues with Puck’s knee-jerk jingoism. In a letter to the Argus, Jack schooled Puck not to “mix up iambic, trochaic, and dactylic meter all in one line,” before invoking the wisdom of the Roman poet Virgil, omnia vincit labo, or work conquers all.
“I have seen a young Dutchman,” Jack wrote, “with his wardrobe locked up in a cotton handkerchief, strike a job, pitch in, save his low wages, and soon was a capitalist himself; while strong, healthy American boys sat at the saloon doors through all the long, golden, summer days, until the whole political and physical economy of their pants were worn threadbare.
“But here comes a Chinaman! I’ll go out and kill him. Hence my song, armo virumque cano—I sing of arms and the man! Catch on?”[10]
Puck did. Like a pawn learning to navigate the chess board with the king in public, he accused Jack of “venting his spleen against white labor” while “laboring hard” to make the Chinese seem respectable. He also recounted some juicy gossip about Jack before he became a temperance crusader, being “turned over like a rum-logged wretch in an old barn in Bloomfield.”
As for his poetry, Puck asserted, “I never allow meter to cramp free expression of thought. Do you catch on, Jack?”[11]
“My dear, bright boy,” Jack replied, “do you really contemplate more poetry? You are driving on to destruction! You need praying for! Get right down on your knees, Brother Puckett, and I will pray for both of us, and give my genius a picnic: Gracious father in the sky/hear two awful sinners cry/Two poor poets on their knees/poorer, Heaven seldom seen!”[12]
Puck responded with a poem ending with the lines: “Pray that another foreign race/from shores beyond the sea/may never trample or erase/the birthright of the free.”[13]
Puck’s patriotic invocation reminded Jack of a traveling circus.
“A circus is a caravan of blacklegs and thieves,” he wrote. “Whenever one hits Petaluma with a bag of monkeys and a bare-back riding prostitute, every man who has a $, or can borrow one, goes to see them.”[14]
The two poets continued slinging insults back and forth for months like two modern-day hip-hop artists waging a “beef.” In the fall of 1886, their beef took an ominous turn as they began to run out of words.
Jack lifted some lyrics from “I’ve Got a Little List,” a song in Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operetta “The Mikado.” A satire of society set in an imaginary Japan, the musical was breaking box office records that year all across America.[15]
“Now someday,” Jack wrote, tweaking the lyrics, “I am thinking, the Fool-Killer/must come round/I have got a little list—I have got a little list/Of rabid, red rhyme-writers who might well be underground/And who never would be missed/who never would be missed!”[16]
“Alas, poor Jack,” Puck replied in verse, “you are doomed/I feel it in my soul/That, when you have counted up your list/Yourself must head the roll/Better come down from the hill tops/And hide yourself away/The Fool-Killer is on the march/The oldest fool to slay.”[17]
Neither Jack nor Puck was a stranger to violence. The year before, Jack had wounded his 17-year-old stepsister’s suitor with a shotgun after catching him sneaking into her bedroom window one night.[18]
Puck’s views aligned with those of his father, Edward Puckett, who, prior to settling on Sonoma Mountain in 1854, had been a member of San Francisco’s Vigilante Committee. Seeking to wrestle control of the city from the Sydney Ducks, an Irish gang from the Australian penal colonies, the vigilantes resorted to secret trials, lynchings, and deportations.[19]
“You are almost gone, you poetic comedian,” Jack warned Puck. “You have the worst dose of cacoethes scribendi (an insatiable urge to write) that ever fell to the lot of juvenile flesh. In poetry you have no more chance than a stump-tail calf in fly-time. Good bye!”[20]
Before their feud could escalate any further, Jack fell victim to a lingering illness, forcing him to lay down his pen. By that time, Sonoma County’s racist fever had begun to subside, as labor shortages—largely in jobs whites refused to fill—made the Chinese appear less threatening, leading to their gradual return.[21]
However, immigration from China continued to be highly restricted, thanks to an extension of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act introduced in 1892 by Sonoma County congressman Thomas Geary, a former Petaluma lawyer. The restrictions would not be lifted until 1943.[22]
Shortly after his feud with Jack, Puck and his father became involved in a violent dispute with a neighbor over a calf that had strayed onto their ranch. Puck was shot twice, in the abdomen and shoulder.[23] After recovering from his wounds, he went on to establish a reputation as “the poet of Sonoma Mountain,” publishing several books of his work, and as a local historian.[24]
As for Jack, a year after the feud he became editor of Santa Rosa’s Sonoma Democrat, replacing longstanding editor Thomas L. Thompson, who had been elected to Congress on his anti-Chinese platform.[25]
Finding his poetic temperament unsuitable for daily newspaper editing, Jack quit after a year, and went to work for the U.S. Post Office, and then the U.S. Navy’s recruiting office, before returning to covering the waterfront for San Francisco newspapers. [26]
In the early 1900s, Jack and his wife moved back to Santa Rosa, where he freelanced for local newspapers.[27] A few years before his death in 1914, he began writing books of regional history. His first was The History of Sonoma County, which, despite its rambling verbosity and questionable factchecking, still serves as a seminal work for local historians.[28]
In the book, he made no mention of the Chinese.
Versions of this story appeared in the Petlauma Argus-Courier, November 28, 2025, and the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, November 30, 2025
FOOTNOTES:
[1] “A Terrible Crime,” Petaluma Courier, January 27, 1886; “Ah Ti, the Murderer,” Petaluma Argus, January 30, 1886; Jeff Elliot examines holes in the accusations against the Wickersham’s cook: “The Wickersham Murders,” “Who Killed the Wickershams,” Santarosahistory.com, http://santarosahistory.com/wordpress/2017/05/the-wickersham-murders/.
[2] Michael Luo, “The Forgotten History of the Purging of Chinese from America,” The New Yorker, April 22, 2021. https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-forgotten-history-of-the-purging-of-chinese-from-america?_sp=0b6879cb-dd67-4dcd-a2c6-f519bac1ace0.1757793793358.
[3] “Anti-Coolie Meeting,” Sonoma Democrat, February 6, 1886; “Going Below,” Petaluma Argus, February 13, 1886; “Sebastopol Anti-Chinese League,” Sonoma Democrat, February 27, 1886; “Blew Them Up,” Petaluma Argus, March 10, 1886; Jean Pfaelzer, Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans (University of California Press, 2008); Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Harvard University Press, 2018), p. 5-8; Hannah Clayborn, “History of Healdsburg: The Chinese in Sonoma County, https://www.hannahclaybornshistoryofhealdsburg.com/the-chinese-in-sonoma-county.html
[4] “Speech of John F. Swift,” Petaluma Argus, October 30, 1886.
[5] Lew-Williams, pp. 5-8; Thomas Chinn, A History of the Chinese in California (San Francisco, CA: Chinese Historical Society of America, 1969), p. 21; William C. Pond, Gospel Pioneering: Reminiscences of Early Congregationalism in California 1833-1920 (Oberlin, OH: The News Printing Company, 1921), pgs. 10, 17, 91-95, 130-135; Robert Segar II, “Some Denominational Reactions to Chinese Immigration to California, 1856-1892,” Pacific Historical Review , February, 1959, Vol. 28, No. 1, pgs. 51, 58; Wesley S. Woo, “Presbyterian Mission: Christianizing and Civilizing The Chinese in Nineteenth Century California,” American Presbyterians, Fall 1990, Vol. 68, No. 3, pgs. 68, 71, 167-172.
[6] “Death Calls for Tom Gregory,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, September 9, 1914; Jeff Elliott, “Tom Gregory,” Santa Rosa History, December 29, 2011. http://santarosahistory.com/wordpress/2011/12/tom-gregory/
[7] “Decoration Day,” Petaluma Argus, May 24, 1884; “Early Days in Petaluma,” Petaluma Courier, October 12 1899; “Mary Catherine Puckett,” Petaluma Courier, July 6, 1901; “Sudden Death of A.J. Puckett,” Petaluma Argus, March 9, 1926.
[8] “Free Labor,” Petaluma Argus, March 6, 1886; “Mary Catherine Puckett,” Petaluma Courier, July 6, 1901; “Early Days in Petaluma,” Petaluma Courier, October 12 1899.
[9] “The Ball Still Rolling,” San Jose Herald, January 30, 1886; “Letter from Bloomfield,” Sonoma Democrat, February 27, 1886.
[10] “Omnia Vincit Labor,” Petaluma Argus, April 24, 1886.
[11] “Jack and Puckett,” Petaluma Argus, May 1, 1886; On Jack’s sobriety, “I haven’t drank a drop for six months”: “Letter from Jack,” Petaluma Courier, April 18, 1883.
[12] “Puck and Jack,” Petaluma Argus, May 8, 1886.
[13] “Reply to Jack,” Petaluma Argus, May 29, 1886.
[14] “An Alcoholic Ramble, addressed to “Bro. Puckett,” Petaluma Argus, June 5, 1886.
[15] “Some Recent Outbreaks of the Mikado Madness,” San Francisco Examiner, January 28, 1886; “Footlight Flashes,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 12, 1886.
[16] “Song from the Mikado,” Petaluma Argus, September 4, 1886.
[17] “To Tom Gregory,” Petaluma Argus, September 18, 1886.
[18] “The Impetuous Step-Brother,“ Sacramento Bee, March 18, 1885; “Bloomfield Shooting Fracas,” Petaluma Argus, March 28, 1885; Simple Assault,” Petaluma Argus, May 23, 1885; “Love vs. Shotguns,” Sonoma Democrat, May 23, 1885.
[19] Mick Sinclair, San Francisco: A Cultural and Literary History (UK, Signal Books, 2024), pps. 53-60; “Another Pioneer Passes,” Petaluma Courier, September 11, 1907.
[20] “Cacoethes Scribendi” Petaluma Argus, October 2, 1886.
[21] “Fruit Growers,” Petaluma Courier, March 13, 1886; “Potato Diggers,” Petaluma Argus, November 19, 1887; U.S. Census, 1890: Sonoma County’s Chinese population rebounded to 1,145, of which 104 lived in Petaluma.; Gordon C. Phillips, “The Chinese in Sonoma County, California, 1900-1930: The Aftermath of Exclusion,”Masters Thesis, Sonoma State University, 2015, pgs.38-39, http://sonoma-dspace.calstate.edu/bitstream/handle/10211.3/153831/PhillipsG_Thesis.pdf;sequence=1
[22]Iris Chang, The Chinese in America (NY: Viking Books, 2003), pp. 125-141.
[23] “Another Shooting,” Petaluma Courier, December 10, 1890; “Card from Mr. Puckett,” Petaluma Courier, December 17, 1890.
[24] “Pioneer Was a Visitor,” Petaluma Argus, January 26, 1925; “Sudden Death of A.J. Puckett,” Petaluma Argus, March 9, 1926; “A.J. Puckett Drops Dead at His Home,” Petaluma Courier, March 9, 1926; “Rich Petaluman Poet Dies of Heart Attack,” Santa Rosa Democrat, March 8, 1926.
[25] Petaluma Argus, November 19, 1887; Hannah Clayborn, “History of Healdsburg: The Chinese in Sonoma County.”
[26] Personal and Social,” Petaluma Argus, November 19, 1887; “Personal and Social,” Petaluma Argus, April 14, 1888; Petaluma Argus, October 20, 1888; “Peggy’s Pencilings,” Petaluma Courier, November 19, 1890; From 1893 to 1896 Gregory’s byline appears regularly in the San Francisco Call Bulletin: “The Call’s Staff Sups,” San Francisco Call Bulletin, June 7, 1896; “To Secure Men for Naval Vessels,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 26, 1898; Waterfront coverage: Petaluma Argus, July 9, 1904; Petaluma Courier, September 21, 1907; “Tom Gregory is Dead,” Sacramento Bee, September 9, 1914.
[27] “Born,” San Francisco Call, May 13, 1900; “New Up-to-date Home,” Santa Rosa Republican, October 12, 1905; “Bennett Valley,” Santa Rosa Republican, October 25, 1910.
[28] “History of Sonoma County Comes from the Press,” Petaluma Courier, December 26, 1911; Santa Rosa Republican, June 27, 1911; “Tom Gregory is Dead,” Sacramento Bee, September 9, 1914.