We are kind of being asked the impossible question here. To choose between two options, neither of which is well supported by evidence, but one of which must be true. It is possible that Jeffries won some sort of exhibition against Childs, and that this go misreported later. It is also possible that he won a very low level fight against Childs. It might just all have started with an ugly rumor! The bottom line however, is that we can neither prove it, nor rule it out at the moment!
Chicago newspapers regarded Childs as nothing more than second or third-rater in 1898. All this colored championship stuff is just a post-factum hype.
True and his Creedon and Choynski fights lead to this. Plus the record of his March 7th 1897 win over Armstrong is incorrect, it didn't happen. Childs did prove his credentials as a top second-rater later with wins over Dunkhorst, Armstrong, Conroy, Byers, Klondyke, etc but the crucial point is that circa 1893-4 when a Jeffries fight is likely to have happened if at all, Childs was a name fighter in California .
Has anyone ever found a record of his supposed draw with Griffin? That was around a similar time, if a bit earlier. He was expected to give Creedon a better fight than he did, so he did have a bit of a reputation at that point, I'm not sure it was at the stage where a fight with someone just starting like Jeffries, would be reported well enough we'd be sure of having a report of it.
Los Angeles wasn't the biggest place for boxers during those days. Far behind San Francisco and other places. So I'm not sure how "name" a fighter he was then, outside of being a winner over the far-over-the-hill LaBlanche, who had never been anything much in the first place, being pummelled by almost every fighter he met, a-la Al McCoy of the 1910s.
LaBlanche wasn't much, a bit of a hype job but the Dempsey fight made him a big name. The win over Walker and Australian Billy Smith were big enough in San Francisco to give Childs a rep there. A win for Childs might not make the papers as a black fighter but I'm sure a win over him would.
Hard to say what he got it from, but The Inter Ocean says he was expected to give Creedon a good fight (though it's worth noting he had a decent bit of weight on him), and the Chicago Tribune says his reputation vanished when the fight starting, implying he had some sort of rep.
Interestingly, an early Child record lists a four round win over a will Griffin, sometime before the Smith win. He includes the LaBlanche, Rivers and Butler fights but has several others as you would expect of somebody defeating LaBlanche and Smith.
It was a "meeting all comers" kind of bout, that got very little coverage in newspapers. Joe Donovan, the best boxing authority in Chicago at the time, didn't care to mention Childs even once in his regular write-ups during the preceding or the following several weeks. Childs' reputation seemed to be coming only from his having been matched with Creedon in California some time earlier (it had fallen through).
I think the reason is probably the size factor. Martin, Johnson, and McVea were big heavyweights with the size to compete with Jeffries. Childs and Byers were much smaller, so it was hard to work up interest in matching Jeff with a middle, or perhaps super-middle by modern standards, who had lost to Choynski and Creedon. And thanks fellows for the posts and info and input on this obscure topic. Reading them has been informative.
Bottom Line for me .Until someone comes up with a verified quote from either Childs or Jeffries,or a contemporary newspaper mentioning this fight.I say it didn't happen and the onus is on those who may claim it did to produce evidence proving it did!. In over a hundred years with 4 or 5 biographies of Jeffries published and unprecedented access to boxing archives ,with the dawning of the computer age, nobody has done so!
Bottom line for me. A same day report which never appeared in any newspaper won't be found in any archive. I don't think it wise to go so far as to say what we don't know about couldn't have happened. The most I think I would say is that the evidence is too thin to prove such and such happened. In this case, it is quite possible that some sort of fight might have happened and been unreported and so lost to history. Jeff might have had reasons not to dwell on any teenage fights he had. On the other hand, doubt about this fight actually taking place is reasonable also.
I would say there's still a chance to find a primary report in local newspapers. Only two LA newspapers have been looked through pretty thoroughly, the Herald and the Times. The third local daily, Evening Express, hasn't been researched enough, I think, even though Adam did use it in his research. There was another daily - Evening Telegram, but I don't know much about it. There was also a weekly newspaper called The Illustrated California World, published in San Francisco, it covered sports and theater (ala NY Clipper, I suppose), but I haven't seen a single issue of it either. I know it did have boxing write-ups, though, and could contain some additional info about LA boxing scene.
That is precisely the evidence that I would require before coming down on the side of it having happened. I think that it is important to keep an open mind however.
