Red-Light Women, Part I

The hidden funders of early Eureka 

In the spring of 1876, a bright and determined 17-year-old girl, standing 5 feet 6 inches, with light hair, fair skin and blue eyes, joined an aunt living in Humboldt County. She’d left San Francisco as Catherine Q., and stepped onto the Eureka Wharf as Kittie Warren, marking the beginning of a double life she would continue for more than 30 years. In that time, she ran one of Eureka’s many brothels, “houses of ill fame” denounced in public even as they helped sustain the city’s vice-driven economy.

Early Humboldt histories often focus on the men who settled and shaped the region, their names preserved on buildings and street signs. But those working in illicit trades also played a significant role. Generations of bootleggers and illegal cannabis growers fueled local commerce, launched businesses and funded civic infrastructure through bribes, fines and unofficial (and eventually legal) taxes. The seldom acknowledged women of the red-light district — sex workers and brothel managers — also left their mark on this community. 

Shunned by polite society even as they supported it, women like Warren and those in her employ attracted customers and their money, paid fines that contributed to city revenues and spent freely at local shops. In an era when sex work was illegal but tolerated, they were permitted and sometimes even encouraged to remain. They lived in the shadows, but their impact on Humboldt County and Eureka, in particular, was profound. 

Kittie Warren 

Born to Irish immigrants in Oakland, Catherine’s early life offered little promise. In a time when parents were expected to groom their daughters for marriage and eligible bachelors were discouraged from marrying “downward,” Catherine’s father spent his days intoxicated and fishing off the local pier while her mother tried and failed to parent the couple’s nine children. The older boys became known for drinking and brawling, while the younger three got caught stealing chickens and loaves of bread. Young Catherine’s sticky fingers made her infamous as a budding criminal “princess.”  

Decent employment hinged on good references and respectable family ties — Catherine had neither and could anticipate a life of drudgery, working long hours as a laundress, chambermaid or sweatshop laborer earning starvation wages. Prostitution, on the other hand, though rife with violence, disease and the risks associated with unwanted pregnancy, provided young women like Catherine enough funds to support themselves and contribute to a struggling family.

Whether her aunt in Humboldt was already in the sex trade is unclear, but Catherine’s new name suggests she’d been coached. Most women adopted aliases when they entered the “life” to hide their identities and protect family members from shame by association, even when their families helped push them there.

By 1880, Catherine had secured a small cottage on Second Street in Eureka. That year’s census listed Kittie Warren as a “housekeeper” — a euphemism for the city’s working women that census worker Louis Tower, who later became a schoolteacher, preferred over “prostitute” (the term used in Sacramento) or “harlot” (as sex workers were labeled in Amador, Mariposa and Siskiyou counties). 

Necessary evil 

Many in the 19th century believed that men required a regular sexual outlet to prevent uncontrolled eruptions of violence, sometimes referred to as the “volcano theory.” Unfortunately for the multitude of single men that flooded early California, self-satisfaction through masturbation was also considered dangerous. Medical authorities warned that “self-abuse” caused impotence and sterility. State hospital physicians sometimes listed masturbation as the sole cause of insanity.

For many, marriage offered little relief. In his book, Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman, published in 1893, renowned Italian psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso promoted a common misconception that “normal” women were “naturally and organically monogamous and frigid,” forcing many wives to suppress their sexuality or risk being judged as deviant. Prostitutes, on the other hand, Lombroso (and others) believed, had naturally strong libidos and provided a critical safety valve for sexually frustrated single and married men alike. “Public women,” prostitute and autobiographer Josie Washburn reflected later, were sacrificed by society “to satisfy men who might otherwise outrage respectable girls and women.”

Sadly, early Humboldt County had no shortage of women deemed less respectable to sacrifice. While some arrived happily married and raising families, many in the frontier community were forced to flee alcohol-fueled domestic violence. Young girls were often ostracized by family and society after breaking the taboo against premarital sex, leaving them few options for financial support. Others were driven into prostitution when death or abandonment shattered their lives, plunging them into despair, alcoholism or addiction. Single and widowed women struggling against poverty and limited opportunities turned to prostitution for survival. 

The law and contradictions 

In December of 1852, San Francisco’s Daily Alta California denounced the “miserable and wretched dens of vice and debauchery” multiplying in the city, casting them as criminal incubators. In response, San Francisco lawmakers imposed fines and jail time on convicted brothel owners and their tenants. Other California towns soon followed, but it wasn’t until 1855 that the fledgling state passed a broader vagrancy law targeting the unemployed, habitual drunkards and prostitutes. The law allowed local officials to arrest and incarcerate women for up to 90 days and/or subject them to hard labor. 

In 1872, amid ongoing public debates over the regulation of sex work, California enacted a revised anti-vagrancy act: Penal Code 647. It reaffirmed that “lewd or dissolute persons” and “common prostitutes” were vagrants, and it supported authorities in arresting, fining and jailing offenders. Framed as a safeguard for public morality, the statute in practice served less to stop prostitution than to dictate where and when it could occur, using the threat of arrest as leverage. 

Humboldt County was founded in the 1850s by settlers seeking a coastal route to the inland gold mines. By the time Catherine Q. arrived in the 1870s, Eureka had evolved from a rough frontier outpost to a major trading hub and the largest city on the West Coast between San Francisco and Portland. Steamers lined the docks, delivered machinery, factory-sewn clothing, sugar and more. They left carrying lumber, shingles, salmon, potatoes, sheep and other goods to distribute up and down the coast, and as far as Australia. 

Labor was in high demand, and millworkers, craftsmen, loggers, sailors and other transient workers poured in from across the country and around the world. They rented rooms and patronized restaurants. They bought boots and shirts, tools and provisions. But many were also single, far from home and too ill-paid and unprepared to marry. Eureka, like many early California communities, adopted a pragmatic stance toward what many considered a necessary evil and sought to regulate, rather than eradicate, prostitution. After all, sex workers attracted men whose paychecks circulated through saloons, general stores and gambling dens. Brothel keepers paid outrageous rents for ramshackle properties, and the fines imposed when they were arrested helped fund the city’s police, city services and infrastructure. 

While vice was generally tolerated, not all Eurekans and respectable visitors wanted to see it. As the city developed, “rookeries” were pushed southwest and away from the busy F Street wharf and the heart of Old Town. The substantial and attractive commercial buildings that took their places, such as the Vance Hotel, the Palmtag Building (now home to Many Hands Gallery) and the Ricks Building, which houses Old Town Coffee and Chocolates, can still be seen today. Moving southwest, a few of the shorter, squatter, less substantial historic structures, like the one now housing the Shanty, remain.

By 1876, Eureka boasted a population of 6,000, hosted 41 licensed liquor establishments and multiple brothels, but the city employed just two police officers. Ostensibly to protect its citizens from public debauchery, officials enacted Ordinance 28, “for suppression of vice and immorality in the city of Eureka.” The ordinance empowered local courts to fine convicted prostitutes and brothel owners up to $100 or sentence them to up to 10 days in jail. Shortly thereafter, 1878’s Ordinance 54 barred women from entering saloons between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m., curtailing public solicitation and forcing prostitutes into dedicated brothels where they would be hidden from “decent” citizens, but easily accessible to clients seeking their services. The arrangement must have been frustrating for the women, but it could have been worse.

Regulation, not elimination (1880-1900)

By the 1880s, San Francisco’s vice districts were well segregated. A few more fortunate women worked in lavish parlor houses or paid bribes to operate discreetly from boarding houses and hotels. But most were consigned to the city’s notoriously violent red-light district called the Barbary Coast, or confined to miserable “cribs” lining alleys like Morton Street. The San Francisco Call newspaper described these as tiny, airless rooms, sometimes underground, that were “alive with cockroaches and saturated with feculent matter,” unfit for human habitation. As gold deposits dwindled, isolated mining towns offered little opportunity. Eureka, by contrast, with its busy port and constant influx of working men, held relative promise for sex workers.

Prostitution was illegal by state and local statute, but local officials seldom closed entire operations. Eureka brothel keepers like Jack Conar ran their enterprises fearlessly — for good reason. In 1880, Conar paid a $75 fine for operating a “house of ill fame,” as they were sometimes called. It was a pittance compared to his profits, so he stayed open and expanded. In 1883, he built a full saloon, dance house and brothel on the waterfront at the corner of First and C streets (the site, and possibly the same building, that’s now home to the 707 Bar). Though Conar was charged in 1885 for keeping his dance house open after midnight, authorities ignored his brothel upstairs.

Eureka and the state of California’s ambivalence toward prostitution was also reflected in the stark disparities in sentencing. In the summer of 1886, convicted brothel owner Jim Ferris faced a $350 fine or the same number of days in the local jail. After spending a brief time in custody, Ferris paid the balance owed and returned to business. When he was charged for the same offense in February of 1887, his fine was reduced to $100 in exchange for a promise to leave the trade for good, while his wife paid another $25. Ferris argued that even the reduced sentence was unfairly harsh for Eureka, claiming in a letter he wrote that spring to the Arcata Union that six similarly involved property owners had gotten better treatment. 

He may have been right. As a heavy drinker who had spent time in San Quentin for attempted murder, Ferris may have lacked the finesse and connections needed to appease officials. Joseph Mattson was convicted of operating a brothel on First Street two months after Ferris and fined only $50. On the other hand, Chris Welden, a Humboldt County man addicted to opium, received two years in San Quentin for stealing and pawning a gold watch that same year. 

During this time, the city’s prostitutes were generally left alone unless they disturbed the peace or their soliciting became too blatant. “Worthless scamps,” however, were often targeted. In 1881, officials grew tired of Alfred Olney living off a local prostitute and fined him $25 for vagrancy (likely paid by the poor woman he pimped). Undeterred, Olney faced the same charge again in 1883 and, despite prolonged unemployment, came to court well-dressed, sporting flashy jewelry and a “bowery mustache.” Officials hoped his conviction would drive off others in the same non-occupation. It didn’t, likely because Eureka’s casual approach remained: Vice was tolerated as long as you were Caucasian and remained off the city’s main thoroughfares. 

Eureka’s Chinatown and Lower District 

Despite widespread awareness that they were trafficked and held against their will, white Eurekans also directed hostility toward Chinese prostitutes. By 1885, local editorials called on city officials to “wipe out the plague spots,” referring exclusively to Chinese brothels and opium dens (“Opium Dens and ‘Morphine Fiends,’” June 16, 2022). Maybe not so coincidentally, Eureka citizens used the accidental shooting of city councilman David Kendall that same year, attributed to a stray bullet shot during a conflict between Chinese tongs or gangs, as an excuse to expel the vast majority of Eureka’s Chinese residents overnight under threat of hanging — shuttering their brothels and opium dens (“Heading for Charlie Moon Way,” Nov. 7, 2021). 

Eureka’s de facto red-light district located just blocks away along Third Street, between C and D streets, kept operating. The street was a magnet for sailors, loggers, addicts, petty criminals and working men looking for a drink and paid sex. Anchored by saloons on the eastern corners and H.L. Lockhart’s “restaurant,” a dance house and brothel on the south center of the block (across the street and east of where the Shanty is now), there were at least six dedicated brothels on the block. The area was known for drunken melees, random shootings and violent assaults on the district’s working women by customers and pimps. And it thrived. 

Kittie Warren’s quiet corner 

Warren didn’t want violence, or a pimp, or a landlord to appease. She wanted independence and the ability to choose her clientele. She saved her money and in 1887 purchased a house (one of the few old brothel properties still standing) at 127 Third St., a significant and rare accomplishment. She had built enough trust that owner Phillip Needs (also builder of the Needs Building at the corner of Third and E streets) provided her with a $2,000 mortgage, which was double the county assessor’s value, but may have included funds for furniture. Women like Warren were often overcharged, but she was also buying stability, or so she thought. 

The 11 o’clock ordinance 

In an attempt to temper the city’s rowdier element, in January of 1888, Eureka enacted Ordinance 114, known as “the 11 o’clock ordinance.” It required all saloons to stop serving alcohol at 11 p.m. and threatened violators with fines of $25 to $500 and up to 10 days in jail. Saloon operators complained that when they complied and closed shop, customers headed to nearby brothels and continued drinking, while bars lost money.

In response, Eureka officials secretly hired the Harry Morse Detective Agency of San Francisco, and two of its undercover agents spent approximately two weeks drinking alcohol in the city’s brothels. Officials then used evidence outlined in their report to arrest 10 female brothel keepers for selling liquor without a license. (No records have been found to indicate any woman was granted a liquor license in Eureka in the 19th century.) 

Most pleaded not guilty, forfeited their bail and fled on the next steamer to San Francisco. One pleaded guilty and paid a $75 fine. Warren demanded a trial. Though detectives testified they enjoyed whiskey and observed ongoing liquor sales to a consistently full house six timesin Warren’s establishment, the first jury deadlocked on a verdict. A second trial found her guilty, but the fine was minimal in the scope of her operation, and she stayed put. 

The city, on the other hand, did not get off so easily. Eureka paid $676.05 for the sting operation, roughly $22,000 in today’s dollars, and would not systematically target brothel keepers for another 12 years. 

Property and profits

In the 1850s, William Duff briefly joined his brothers in Humboldt County and amassed significant property in Eureka. After his death, his wife Julia and her second husband (another William Duff, improbable as it sounds) held onto these properties, even as the dwellings became brothels. 

And why not? As one Chicago property owner confessed to Pall Mall Gazette editor William Stead in 1894, brothel keepers often paid double the market rate for substandard accommodations. And, as a 1913 Portland, Oregon, vice report pointed out, women of the demi-monde made ideal tenants, posing few demands while consistently paying high rents up front.

William Duff (Julia’s second husband) managed the Eureka properties from the family home in Alameda County and collected rental income that supported daughter Agnes Duff’s position in Berkeley’s “exclusive society set,” as well as Julia’s passion for collecting “rare and artistic” art, furnishings and more. (This continued even in later years, when Agnes and Julia were prosecuted under the city’s red-light abatement act for owning brothel properties and the family refused to let go of its holdings.)   

Callaghan followed a similar path. Acquiring Eureka property early on, he, his wife and eventually his children held on to the quarter block at the northwestern corner of Fourth and B streets as marshland gave way to rough framed dwellings. For years, the area went without a proper sewer system. Residents threw slop in the streets and cesspools festered. When the city installed gaslights throughout much of downtown, the B Street neighborhood stayed dark. 

These abysmal conditions attracted only the most desperate tenants and, by 1884, brothels were firmly entrenched in the “Lower B,” which carried a well-earned reputation for violence and despair. That year, 22-year-old prostitute Della Downing swallowed carbolic acid to end her life. In 1888, a customer shot pimp Peter Peartree after he threatened to kill brothel keeper Gussie Meyers, a woman Peartree had brutally beaten for years. Other women, like “drunken” May Winters and Emma Way, endured chronic abuse at the hands of brutal customers and pimps. While Lockhart’s brothel on Third Street housed two African American women in 1888, B Street was generally where the district’s women of color lived. For the most part, officials left its inhabitants and customers to their own devices. 

In the early 1890s, while nearby communities like Ferndale actively expelled sex workers, Eureka maintained a laissez faire attitude, likely influenced by the national depression of 1893, when lumber demand plummeted, mills scaled back, and fewer steamers and sailors came through the port. Anything that brought men and their money into town must have been welcome. That continued even after the economy recovered. As the 20th century approached, more dwellings became “houses of ill repute.” By 1900, at least 11 dedicated brothels were established on Fourth Street between A and C streets, with more scattered throughout the area. 

The city’s approach remained pragmatic. Fifth Street was the city’s primary thoroughfare. “Lewd women” were one block over but a world away, where only men seeking prostitutes would see them. While there were occasional arrests, usually for vagrancy when public disturbances became too blatant, brothel keepers and their occupants were usually left alone. At times, they even received grudging sympathy. In the fall of 1899, after a local girl known professionally as Pearl Moreland shot notoriously violent pimp Alex Watson in the leg to stop his assault, the Humboldt Standard complained only about her bad aim. A local sign painter passing by inadvertently caught one of Moreland’s stray bullets in his leg but declined to prosecute.

Catherine Q. and Kittie Warren

Throughout the 1890s, Catherine maintained a double life as Kittie Warren, traveling between her family in Oakland and her brothel in Eureka. She seems to have managed both worlds with composure, except for a brief period in the mid-1890s, when the lines between the two blurred and almost broke. In January of 1895, Bay Area newspapers reported that Catherine Q. was found nude and incoherent on the roof of an Oakland brothel. Journalists suggested the seemingly innocent young woman had been drugged and taken there against her will, suspecting no connection to her work in Eureka’s red-light district. Catherine spent a short time at St. Agnew’s asylum before returning to Eureka as Kittie Warren, where she remained for another 13 years. 

During that time, Warren witnessed a new level of contradiction in Eureka. In the early 1900s, prostitution remained illegal by state law and local ordinance, but the city was broke. Ignoring any moral implications, Eureka allowed the women to pay for regular trader’s licenses that permitted them to sell cigars and snacks in their brothels and, in 1903, the city launched a system of regular “prosecution” that effectively taxed local madams, giving them tacit permission to operate as long as they continued to pay.   

But moral crusaders, politicians and others would soon struggle to control the red-light district, its sex workers and the money they brought in.

To be continued next week. 

Lynette Mullen (she/her) is a Eureka-based historian focused on the lives of red-light women in early Northern California. She leads public presentations and walking tours and is creating a self-guided historical tour of Eureka’s Wicked Waterfront. She is also writing a book examining how Progressive Era reform impacted rural California’s vice districts and sex workers in the early 20th century. For more information, please visit thelowerlevels.com or email lynette.mullen@gmail.com.

This article appears in Red-Light Women, Part I.