The hidden funders of early Eureka
Gold eagle coins worth $10, double eagles worth $20 and various paper bills piled so high on the courtroom table that an officer was assigned to guard them. The fortune was the result of another Tithing Day held on Jan. 6, 1909, Eureka’s Daily Humboldt Standard explained, describing how one by one, 30 women had risen as the judge called their names, pleaded guilty to selling liquor without a license, and laid down $50, worth about $1,750 today. The windfall, the reporter observed, would allow the city to “buy more crushed rock for the streets.”
In the early 20th century, Eureka relied on this system of fines from its red-light women to help pay for city services and infrastructure. Officials celebrated the steady revenue and ignored the grim reality that just blocks away, young women had sold their bodies to collect the funds.
Money and morals
The first time the city arrested Eureka’s madams en masse for selling liquor without a license in an undercover sting in 1888, it went badly. The city paid more than $676 (approximately $22,000 in today’s dollars) for an investigation that netted next to nothing in return.
After the debacle, brothel operators, or “landladies” as they were sometimes called, were largely left alone until the fall of 1900. Pressured by a surprising alliance of the Anti-Saloon League and saloonkeepers angry that restaurants and brothels served alcohol past the closing time mandated by the city’s new “11 o’clock ordinance,” officials raided the city’s houses of ill-fame and arrested 14 madams. In a deal likely arranged in advance, each pleaded guilty to selling liquor without a license, paid $30, skipped their court dates, forfeiting their bail money, and walked away.
In December of 1901, the council considered adding prostitutes to the list of professionals required to pay for a business license. Madams already paid for a “traders’ license” to sell cigars and soft drinks, but prostitution was still illegal in California, so the plan went nowhere. In May of 1902, after reviewing revenues and expenditures, the council ordered the police chief to “strictly enforce” the liquor license ordinance in the red-light district. Once rounded up, the women contributed $450 to the general fund.
In spring of 1903, the council faced mounting debt and looked again to the city’s vice district. Elected officials abandoned plans to prosecute women under the state’s vagrancy law when they learned the county, not the city, would get the fines. Instead, they ordered the police chief to charge the women for violating Eureka’s liquor ordinance. The chief cautioned that convictions were unlikely, so the council asked for voluntary payments. The women refused. Officials next proposed a special liquor tax in the de facto red-light district bounded by Humboldt Bay, Fifth, A and E streets. The landladies consented, but the presence of private residences and a church within the district complicated enforcement, and the plan was abandoned.
Sophia Finegold
In 1901, Aggie Kelly lured 16-year-old Sophia Finegold from her impoverished Russian family in San Francisco with the promise of a theater job in Eureka that would pay $15 a week.
Kelly sent Sophia alone on the steamer and she was met in Eureka by Evelyn Miller, who told her the troupe was still forming. Miller brought the girl to her house on Fourth Street, which Finegold soon realized was a brothel. She remained there for two weeks before her brother, suspecting foul play, came to retrieve her.
Because officials suspected Sophia may have stayed at Miller’s voluntarily (Miller claimed Sophia said she was 19, and the court ultimately sent her to the Magdalen Asylum for “fallen” girls), Miller escaped with only a small fine. Kelly, however, was found guilty of abducting a minor for prostitution, the first such conviction in California, and sentenced to three years in San Quentin prison.
Craig Sisters
In the summer of 1910, Eureka sisters Sadie and Annie Craig fell for George Kavalin and Jim Takos.
The girls’ father was a violent and intemperate gambler who had abandoned his family in 1891, just months before Annie was born. As soon as he was old enough, Annie and Sadie’s brother John helped support his mother and sisters, but at 15 he died in a hunting accident, pushing the small family deeper into poverty. When Kavalin and Takos offered marriage and the promise of a new life in Oregon, the girls readily agreed. When they arrived in Portland that October, however, the men placed them in a brothel run by Carrie Johnson, a married woman who had abandoned her family to work for Kavalin. The sisters refused to solicit customers off the streets, and after Johnson herself was beaten by one of the men, she reported them to the police.
The girls bravely testified at the trial. On Nov. 20, 1910, the Sacramento Daily Union reported that Kavalin and Takos had become the first men convicted under the nation’s new White Slave, or Mann Act. They were sentenced to eight and six years, respectively, at McNeil Island Penitentiary.
Ida C./Cleo Stirling
After being charged with the murder of Sacramento madam Cherry De St. Maurice in 1913, pimp Sam Raber explained that he often targeted “orphan girls,” likely because they were usually impoverished and had no fathers to defend them. Eureka native Ida C., known professionally as Cleo Stirling, was implicated in the slaying of De St. Maurice and one of Raber’s trafficking victims. After Stirling was exonerated, she announced that she was going to “take the advice of the old man on the Jury who told her to lead an honest life” and rejoin her mother in Eureka. It doesn’t appear she ever arrived.
1903 — The system
In the summer of 1903, new Mayor William Clark moved to change Eureka’s reputation from that of an “open town” that tolerated vice and prohibited gambling, even though it sacrificed lucrative slot-machine tax revenue in the face of mounting debt and demands for new roads and services. That September, the council passed an ordinance imposing fines of up to $500 or six months in jail for those found guilty of operating disorderly houses that disturbed “the peace and quiet of the city.” Convictions were unlikely, but the ordinance gave officials leverage. On Oct. 26, 26 madams pleaded guilty to selling liquor without a license, paid and then forfeited their $30 bail. Though it wasn’t the city’s first use of the tactic, it launched Eureka’s first formalized process for collecting money from the red-light women. As the Press Democrat noted in 1908, Santa Rosa had long used a similar system.
Police continued to round up the landladies at least once and sometimes twice a year, with the understanding that they either paid and forfeited their “bail” (effectively a fine) or closed and left town. The $30 was less than the $100 charged quarterly for a liquor license (women couldn’t get one anyway), bought tacit permission to operate and allowed women to confidently call on officers when facing violence or other emergencies. In 1904, landladies contributed at least $900 to the city’s unappropriated (general) fund, and in 1905 they added more than $1,500 — worth more than $55,000 today.
In 1905, livery stable owner Abner Torrey challenged Clark in the mayoral election. Torrey’s backers ignored the thriving red-light district and painted Clark as an overreaching moral reformer whose crackdowns on gambling and saloons strangled the economy. Clark’s supporters countered that electing Torrey would brand Eureka an “open town,” drawing “black legs [meaning card cheats], thugs, sneak thieves” and more. Ultimately, Eurekans chose prosperity over reform. Torrey took the gavel and that August, the ladies gave the city at least $600.
A blip of moral outrage
Eureka’s first significant outcry of moral outrage came from an outsider in January of 1906. Thirty madams in the red-light district had just paid their $30 fines when Rev. Elwood Bulgin, a nationally known Presbyterian evangelist, arrived at the invitation of local clergy to conduct a three-week revival campaign throughout Humboldt County.
Bulgin immediately criticized Eureka for hosting at least 30 brothels and even more “poor creatures” in rooming and lodging houses. The women deserved pity, he declared, saying he was stunned when “society women” explained that brothels protected them from the “exorbitant attention of their husbands.” He also expressed shock when Mayor Torrey claimed his office had no authority to address the issue. Unwilling to retreat, Bulgin claimed that Eureka’s red-light district and 60-plus saloons brought the city closer to the devil than any place he’d ever been.
While admitting Eureka was “wide open,” Humboldt Daily Times editor Charles Milner accused Bulgin of calling Eureka the wickedest city he’d ever seen (a statement Bulgin denied) and responded by calling Bulgin a liar. Bulgin then offered statistics showing the “relative wickedness” of California cities. Based on the number of saloons per capita, Bulgin admitted Redding was the “worst city in the state,” followed by San Francisco, then Eureka in third place. Bulgin went on to suggest Eureka High School was graduating libertines who flouted conventional morality. Milner then moved the public discussion away from the city’s slide into perdition and into a righteous defense against Bulgin’s slander. Sarcastic and insulting letters flew between the two, and the good reverend forgot the plight of Eureka’s fallen women entirely. Back in Los Angeles, Bulgin sued the paper for calling him a liar but dropped the case after failing to secure a change of venue. Bulgin’s moral outrage had made no difference in the lives of Eureka’s red-light women, who continued their often dangerous sex work and again lined up and paid their fines that summer.
Alternatives
For many in Eureka’s red-light district, the system of periodic fines in exchange for relative immunity was better than harsher conditions in other California cities. In August of 1906, Oroville officials were caught forcing madams to support a secret “corruption fund” that benefitted dishonest police officers. The following year, San Francisco’s police chief and others were indicted for charging brothel keepers protection money. Sacramento officials confined prostitutes to one of three “concentration camps” that became centers of graft and human trafficking.
Eureka tolerated the trade for obvious financial reasons. As Torrey handed the mayoral gavel to Hiram Ricks in the summer of 1907, he boasted of conquering Eureka’s $1,500 deficit, establishing a pest house, purchasing land, improving streets, laying new sewers, and leaving the city with a $1,783 surplus. Torrey failed to acknowledge, however, the thousands of dollars from the red-light women that had helped to finance the city’s turnaround.
Mayor Ricks
In 1907, Eureka’s new mayor pledged to clean up the town and vowed to pull saloon licenses where gambling was uncovered. He also helped pass a “backroom ordinance” banning liquor sales to women and girls, and forbidding their presence in saloons.
In November, Ricks ordered police to drive out “undesirables.” Arguing that men living off red-light women had to be kept where they could be watched, arrested or expelled, the police chief then ordered all prostitutes to sleep within the district, ignoring harsh realities. Many prostitutes had broken family ties and frequent moves left them isolated. After her arrest in a Chico brothel, a young woman reportedly pointed to the bulldog in the parlor and told the officer it was her only friend. Some women were controlled by pimps who used violence or emotional manipulation to take the prostitutes’ earnings, but others formed quasi-romantic bonds with men known as macquereux, or “macs.” Women often supported macs in exchange for some semblance of love and affection. Unsurprisingly, many suicide attempts and suicides in red-light districts were traced back to rejection or abandonment by these men.
Despite the order to sleep in their brothels, women sometimes yielded to the pressure of a mac or a forceful customer to ignore the edict. Maisie Elmore paid and forfeited a $50 bail after officers caught her entering a regular lodging house at 4 a.m. Officers also conducted early morning brothel raids, busting into bedrooms looking for men who had fallen asleep and stayed overnight. Women who had not successfully pushed out macs or stubborn customers were arrested with them. City officials ignored the hypocrisy of jailing the women along with “vile and degraded” men, while knowing the fines for both would be paid with money earned from prostitution. After all, the same policy had long applied to madams. Regular fines levied on landladies were, in reality, drawn directly from the prostitutes, paid as rent, bed fees or both.
In July of 1908, the city raised fines to $50 and the Daily Humboldt Times newspaper noted 25 women paid more that month than the court collected in all of 1906. That year, weary of raids and restrictions, a group of Eureka’s madams pooled their money to build a boat. By June, the so-called “pleasure ark” was afloat and anchored off Tuluwat (then Gunther) Island. Sounds of drunken revelry soon drifted across the bay. Eureka authorities ordered the vessel moved, but after it anchored in the north bay, Arcata officials demanded the madams move it again. The women then tried grounding it on property secured in Fields Landing, but railroad workers stopped them from pulling it across the tracks. A nightwatchman then kept the ship out of town until residents could get an injunction. The floating brothel never landed. Eureka’s January of 1909 collection yielded $1,300, worth about $50,000 today, but the city’s relationship with vice was changing.
Pressure to reform
In early 1909, the national moral reform movement finally found its way to Humboldt County. A new Civic League led by local professionals, members of the Good Government League and clergy pressed Mayor Ricks to expel Eureka’s prostitutes. Facing reelection that summer, the mayor announced a crusade against “social evil.” He vowed to close the city’s brothels by March 1, but reformers grew frustrated when he failed to execute the plan, likely at the behest of those who profited from prostitution. He then reiterated his commitment to limit illegal liquor sales and proposed mirroring policies in Los Angeles and Sacramento by “concentrating the evil” in a very limited area. He suggested requiring women to live and work in a “pen,” a designated block or half-block area enclosed by a 15-foot double fence with a single guarded entrance to keep out liquor and minors. Existing brothel property owners resisted the idea. Ricks then urged the women to congregate outside city limits, where he had no jurisdiction. No one moved. The mayor then half-heartedly suggested prosecuting the brothel property owners but admitted past failures made this strategy unpromising.
By March, Ricks had abandoned sweeping reform in favor of gradual regulation. On April 1, he ended the long-standing system of arresting and fining women for selling liquor without a license. He ordered the police chief to strictly enforce a district-wide ban on liquor sales, arguing that the loss of secondary income would force many brothels to close.
Push for reform continues
In July of 1909, Ricks lost his mayoral seat to William Lambert, who had positioned himself as a steady reformer independent of saloon and red-light district interests. Despite Lambert’s vow to end gambling, the Good Government League launched a campaign in support of a “clean moral government,” issuing a pamphlet decrying the city’s 65 saloons and 32 brothels, and threatening to publish the names of brothel property owners who refused to evict their tenants. John Neighbor, manager of the Bayside Mill, was one of the few who urged the league to focus on the welfare of the women. The leadership, however, was focused on boosting economic opportunity and Eureka’s reputation — they just wanted the women driven out.
The league chose not to publish the brothel property owners’ names, though reformers lost all faith in Lambert on Jan. 1, 1910, when they discovered the Oberon Saloon open after midnight in violation of the city’s saloon ordinance and Lambert enjoying drinks inside. The mayor tried to shield himself by personally swearing out the complaint against the saloon’s proprietor but the damage was done. The league demanded his resignation. Lambert refused. Throughout 1910, as the league pushed to limit vice, Lambert increasingly criticized their tactics and ignored their directives.
Scant protection
Though paying fines offered madams and prostitutes some protections, not all benefitted from the system. After Edna G. was arrested for soliciting in Sequoia Park in 1910, the “feeble-minded” 22 year old was told to leave Eureka or spend 30 days in jail. Only after Edna was arrested again in Shively and returned to Eureka did the judge acknowledge her “loathsome” sexually transmitted disease (likely syphilis), send her to the hospital for treatment and call on rescue workers to help the girl.
Rescue organizations had mixed success. While some provided moral and financial support to help women out of prostitution, many imposed strict rules and unrealistic expectations. Edna successfully transitioned from a rescue home into legal domestic labor, but others balked at the prospect of long days in laundries, sweatshops or working as hotel chambermaids earning poverty wages, and returned to prostitution. Though violence, disease and unwanted pregnancy were looming dangers, most prostitutes also had money of their own, as well as the liberty to enjoy mixed company and independent travel, freedoms not available to “proper” women. Those with children or elderly parents to care for often returned to prostitution out of economic necessity. Others were dragged back by pimps or macs who missed their income.
Rising concern over forced prostitution, or “white slavery” as it was sometimes referred to, resulted in the Mann Act of June 1910, which criminalized the interstate transport of women for sex work (see sidebar on page 11). Community leaders were also recognizing that prostitution stemmed more from poverty and limited opportunity than moral failing. After women won the right to vote in October of 1911, national debates over vice and starvation wages earned by women legally continued to grow. Unfortunately for the women in Eureka, this broader social reckoning made little difference. Fred Georgeson, Eureka’s new business-focused mayor, supported warrantless raids by “red-light squads,” and sentencing disparities grew pronounced. After Frank White and Marie Smith were pulled from 210 Third St. in the middle of the night, Smith was fined $25 while White paid only $10. Jimmy Ryan was fined just $10 for striking prostitute Grace Holland in the eye, and when Lee Jackson shoved a woman into a hot stove, leaving her badly burned, he paid the same amount.
Thomas Lawson — 1912
While advocates for women’s welfare gained traction nationally, many male reformers kept their focus on liquor license violations. In 1912, Thomas Lawson of the state Anti-Saloon League toured Humboldt, denounced Eureka’s tolerance of 54 “blind pigs” (unlicensed liquor sellers) and 76 saloons, accusing officials of corruption. City leaders resisted Lawson’s call and the national push to close vice districts outright but directed officers to strictly enforce the liquor law in the red-light district. A sweep netted the city at least $750 and 14 madams, unable to sell liquor to supplement their income, closed and left Eureka.
The city also pressured landlords to double rents specifically on Black madams, resulting in an exodus of African American women from the district. Mamie Wright, however, remained. She’d arrived in Eureka in 1904 to become one of the district’s few Black madams and the only one employing white women at her “resort.” Unlike white madams who operated with little interference if they paid their fees, Wright faced harsh scrutiny. In 1907, she was jailed for a week after being falsely accused of kidnapping a young white girl with plans to force her into prostitution. The next February, after tailor and handyman Bernard Olandar was arrested in her resort and acquitted of vagrancy, the police chief told her she had caused “entirely too much trouble for one woman” and ordered her to leave Eureka. She refused.
The country was still largely segregated and African American women like Wright were excluded from most traditional employment. Since her arrival in the city, she had worked hard to build contacts, secure credit and acquire property. Though fines and legal fees often forced her to mortgage her valuables, Eureka still offered her the best and perhaps only path out of poverty. Officials stationed a special officer outside her house to deter visitors and strangle her business, but Wright’s attorney had the “blockade” lifted and she went back to work.
In the Spring of 1908, many Eurekans celebrated what they hoped was the first real move to close the red-light district when private attorney E. M. M. Frost charged Wright with keeping a “house of ill-fame” and her boarders with prostitution. Hopes were dashed, however, when they learned Frost had no interest in closing the district. Instead, he had filed the charges on behalf of one of Wright’s former tenants, who was pushing to have the women arrested so the house would be empty, giving him a chance to go in and retrieve a mortgaged trunk. Wright and the others were freed, and the women carried on as usual.
In October of 1912, Wright was again in the spotlight after a customer attacked one of her tenants before fatally turning the knife on himself. Her brothel was branded the “murder house” by the press and she was charged with operating a house of prostitution. Wright was told again to leave Eureka but instead pleaded not guilty, charged officials with targeting her “from mere prejudice” and demanded an investigation. That December, after a private hearing in which an officer admitted telling her, “No damn [n-word] wench and whore was going to run the police department,” and conceding that he shouldn’t have used the word “damn,” the mayor exonerated the police department of any wrongdoing.
Days later, attorney A.J. Monroe sent letters to property owners in Eureka’s red-light district, telling them he was invoking the nuisance abatement law to compel them to shut down their brothels by Jan. 1, 1913. Monroe denied any tie to moral reformers, the Good Government League or Wright. Instead, he said he was acting on behalf of clients whose properties had been “practically ruined for any commercial or other lawful purpose” by the district’s “open and notorious houses of prostitution.” Nine of the district’s property owners evicted their tenants but four resisted. Authorities hedged, passing responsibility from the district attorney to the board of supervisors to city officials and then to the council before landing with the mayor. Monroe warned Georgeson that he would involve the state’s attorney general and federal court, if needed, and the mayor finally ordered the police chief to vacate the remaining brothels. In the spring of 1913, Eureka’s longstanding red-light district finally came to an end.
The closure did nothing to end the women’s economic struggles or prostitution. As predicted, they scattered across the city, renting rooms above saloons and turning vacant dwellings into “lodging houses.” One madam opened a brothel as a “restaurant” on Summer Street. Wright took over the Pioneer Hotel on the waterfront.
As Eurekans considered calls to segregate the women, the city grappled with the loss of revenue once supplied by midnight raids and steady fines, which scuttled plans to buy a new fire truck. Red-light district property owners claimed the area’s closure had depressed their property values and asked the city to reduce their tax assessments. The city needed the funds and refused, as the days of easy cash from the madams and prostitutes seemed to be over.
In 1913, California’s Public Morals Committee, chaired by Fields Landing resident Assemblyman Hans Nelson, pushed through the Red-Light Abatement Act. The law empowered officials to prosecute prostitutes, madams and, notably, landlords by declaring any brothel a public nuisance and closing it for up to a year. Efforts to overturn the measure failed and it took effect on Dec. 19, 1914. In the following years, Eureka used the Abatement Act to close Wright’s Pioneer Hotel and other brothels, but the crackdown did nothing to ease women’s poverty or end prostitution.
Eureka never reestablished a formal red-light district, but the closure did not end the city’s pursuit of revenue, as noted by the Humboldt Standard on March 3, 1914, under the headline “Collect Big Sum in Fines”:
“An unprecedented business revival began at the police station yesterday … and when it concluded this morning $800 had been collected, eight women arrested for selling liquor without the necessary license having each paid a fine of $100. Two others … may fight the charges against them.”
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 II.
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