"The System in Vogue"

HISTORIAN GUSTIVE LARSON labeled the LDS Church's long, grudging, and uneven retreat from plural marriage, political domination, and cooperative economic practices the "Americanization of Utah." ¹ One aspect of the "Americanization" of Salt Lake City was prostitution policy. Responses to prostitution, shaped by economics, partisan politics, the Mormon-gentile conflict, and the actions of women who sold sex, sometimes overlapped, contradicted, or reinforced each other. While some people worked to abolish prostitution, powerful forces ensured the creation and maintenance of a regulationist policy much like those in other American cities. Accommodation between Mormons and gentiles contributed to broad agreement on regulation. The state developed formal and informal policies in accordance with contemporary gender, race, and class hierarchies. The policy of regulation began in the 1870s under all-Mormon governments and became more open and systematic under the mixed administrations that governed the city after 1890.

      Prostitutes and prostitution served many important roles in the community. Many citizens profited from prostitution economically or politically or otherwise favored it. Prostitution remained illegal, however, and the "public reenactment of guilt and conviction" represented by periodic arrests and fines stigmatized madams and prostitutes as criminals no matter how useful, necessary, or profitable they might have been to the community. ²

      Regulation did not satisfy everyone. Individuals and groups sometimes condemned the presence of prostitutes in their neighborhoods and demanded their removal, without addressing the larger issue of regulation. Citizens formed temporary organizations to demand action in response to specific incidents through techniques of public pressure such as mass meetings, petitions, sermons, and lobbying of city officials.

      Other reformers, especially women, used those techniques but also took more direct action, forming permanent organizations to address a variety of municipal problems, including prostitution. Some reformers founded "rescue homes" where "fallen women" could be saved through immersion in a domestic, Christian environment. Especially after 1890, some organizations included gentiles and Mormons, a sign of easing tensions after the Woodruff Manifesto. Detente was tenuous, however, and old antagonisms resurfaced. While some prostitutes welcomed the aid of reformers, others resisted rescue for a variety of reasons. Antiprostitution efforts did not seriously affect official policy. City officials and many male citizens continued to favor regulation for pragmatic reasons; and the creation of the Stockade in 1908 marked its fullest expression.

      The legal system formed the basis of prostitution policy. When the city was founded in 1847, the Latter-day Saints hoped that voluntary adherence to the church's moral teachings would maintain social order. Failing that, ecclesiastic authorities established church courts for violations of church law or disputes between members. ³ They also wrote civil ordinances (purportedly for the valley's few gentiles) punishing vagrancy, disorderly conduct, adultery, and fornication. ⁴ The legislature of the provisional State of Deseret also crafted a criminal code outlawing disorderly assembly and prescribing severe penalties for extramarital sex. ⁵ Those ordinances, which applied to males and females, demonstrated the Saints' emphasis on chastity and may also have been intended as a refutation of accusations of the immorality of polygamy. Women selling sex could be prosecuted under these broad laws. Nineteenth-century American law defined a prostitute as a vagrant with employment that offended public decency and morals, thus a type of "disorderly person." A prostitute, a keeper of a house of prostitution, a hanger-on or dependent of such a house, or a customer could be charged with vagrancy. "Disorderly houses" were defined as public nuisances that endangered public morals because dangerous persons gathered in them. As a type of disorderly house, a brothel was a public, physical, and moral nuisance. ⁶

      Salt Lake City municipal authorities did not specifically outlaw prostitution until 1858, probably because it did not seem necessary to do so. A code adopted that year subjected anyone who enticed an unmarried female "for the purpose of prostitution" to a ten-year prison term, a ten thousand dollar fine, or both. ⁷ Keeping a house of prostitution could bring a ten-year sentence and/or a five thousand dollar fine. Inveigling or enticing any female "before reputed virtuous" to a house of ill fame could earn fifteen years and/or a fifteen thousand dollar fine. Neither inmates of houses of ill fame, streetwalkers, nor customers received specific mention. ⁸ This draconian code was a product of its time. The LDS Church was in the midst of a "reformation" to reignite spiritual fervor, and the 1858 ordinances may have been meant to reinforce the LDS moral code. A greater factor was probably the impending approach of "Johnston's Army," which threatened to bring hundreds of soldiers and their supposed vices to the city. ⁹

      Municipal prostitution laws continued to evolve, gradually achieving the form that governed through the early 1900s. In 1860, city authorities proscribed prostitutes, owners, and keepers of houses of prostitution but dramatically reduced penalties from the 1858 code. ¹⁰ In 1877, the city council passed a single ordinance that applied to owners, agents, guardians, or lessees of properties used for prostitution, as well as to keepers, inmates, and those who "resorted" to brothels. ¹¹ Similar territorial statutes also applied, but these were seldom invoked. ¹²

      Four categories of law enforcement officials shared responsibility for enforcing the law within Salt Lake City: U.S. marshals, territorial (later state) marshals, county sheriffs, and the city police. The police and the municipal ordinances they enforced were by far the most important instruments of law for prostitution-related offenses. ¹³ The force, like contemporary forces in other cities, was far from professional. Its primary responsibility was to maintain order by controlling the "dangerous classes": vagrants, gamblers, drunks, and prostitutes. ¹⁴ In most cities, appointments were political plums awarded to supporters, with police receiving "on the job" training from experienced colleagues. The political and social realities in Salt Lake City affected the makeup and duties of the force. Until 1890, the department was all Mormon, and its duties included protecting Saints from the antipolygamy crusade of the 1880s. ¹⁵ The great majority of prostitution-related cases were decided in the "police court," presided over by a justice of the peace—until 1890, usually an LDS bishop. The police justice dispensed summary justice—fines and short terms in the city jail—for misdemeanors under municipal ordinances. ¹⁶

      To LDS city officials, the "dangerous classes" usually meant non-Mormons. Saints were subject to the oversight of their LDS neighbors, ward members, and church authorities, and they blamed gentiles for most of the city's crime. The soldiers, camp followers, miners, railroad workers, and even allegedly lascivious judges who came to the city seemed to represent both a threat to the Kingdom and a more prosaic threat to municipal order. ¹⁷ A. M. Musser's partisan investigations into comparative morality also claimed to prove that the disorderly classes were non-Mormon. ¹⁸ Subsequent scholars have agreed that gentile men were disproportionately responsible for crime. Rootless young men lacking the social controls of family or church drank and broke laws in other western towns, particularly those dominated by cattle, mining, or lumbering. These men also patronized prostitutes throughout the West. ¹⁹ While it is plausible that gentiles committed a disproportionate number of crimes, the Mormon-dominated police and lower court system also helped ensure that non-Mormon criminals were punished while Saints were sometimes protected.

      By the 1870s, then, a body of law forbade all aspects of prostitution and a system was in place to enforce it. LDS Church authorities, who commanded the allegiance of the majority and dominated government, continued to warn against prostitution. Persons selling or buying sex, female and male, faced legal proscription and societal condemnation. On paper, prostitution was strictly prohibited and its penalties were gender-neutral.

      In practice, however, city authorities, business interests, and average citizens established a modus vivendi with prostitution in the 1870s for a number of reasons. Some Mormons undoubtedly joined in the national consensus that prostitution should be regulated rather than abolished. Civil and religious authorities across the country outlawed and condemned prostitution yet allowed it to flourish nonetheless. The Salt Lake City Herald, mostly Mormon-owned and -edited, noted "the evil has not been suppressed in any country or in any age of which we have record. It may be checked in places, but it cannot or at least has not been stopped." The editor called for periodic fines. ²⁰ Like the members of any other faith, Mormons sometimes ignored their spiritual leaders' teachings or broke laws for their own benefit. As shown in the previous chapter, some Saints patronized prostitutes or conducted business with them.

      The backgrounds of some municipal officials also changed. Instead of the high LDS officials who had traditionally held the office, the four mayors from 1876 through 1890 were prominent Mormon businessmen. Historians Thomas G. Alexander and James B. Allen suggest that the selection of these men to govern the city indicated that LDS Church leaders acknowledged that the city was becoming more commercial and that bankers and merchants had joined them among the city's elite. ²¹ Although they were loyal Saints and often acted in the interests of their church, ²² they may have viewed abolition as impractical, impossible, or unwise from an economic standpoint. The influx of soldiers, miners, railroad workers, and others who sometimes patronized prostitutes may also have helped convince authorities that fighting vice was a losing proposition. ²³ The expensive failure to abate Kate Flint's and Cora Conway's brothels had burned city officials badly and probably discouraged further abolition efforts.

      The embarrassment of B. Y. Hampton's 1885 "city brothel" scheme probably further dissuaded Mormon city officers from action against prostitution, although Francis Armstrong, who helped fund Hampton, launched an eradication drive during his term in 1886. That attempt only strengthened the arguments for regulation. The Herald's editor applauded the action but implied that regulation was the best that could be hoped for. He asked "that prostitution shall be driven out of sight and made odious; ... that prostitutes shall be prevented from parading on the streets, painted and bedecked so as to excite the gross passions of men and envy of silly girls." ²⁴ The Tribune's C. C. Goodwin argued that the raid was misguided and would only serve to scatter "dissolute women" through the city's residential districts, a common theme of the regulationist camp. ²⁵ Goodwin was still reminding Mormons of Armstrong's failure seventeen years later and still advocating regulation. ²⁶

      The increasingly intense pressures of the antipolygamy "crusade" in the 1880s may also have relegated the control of prostitution to a minor concern. The LDS authorities and the city administration were instead concerned with what President Wilford Woodruff called "the temporal salvation of the church." ²⁷

      Another major consideration had nothing to do with the polygamy conflict. Gendered power played an obvious role in the establishment and continuation of regulation. Those who benefited most from regulated prostitution—sexually or financially—were male. There is little evidence that any women other than prostitutes and madams favored regulation. The relatively few respectable women, gentile or Mormon, willing to express an opinion about prostitution nearly always condemned the exploitation of women by lustful or greedy men, even if they did not always explicitly condemn regulation or call for abolition. But since men wielded far greater economic and political power, women's voices were long drowned out. Gender inequities also guaranteed that male patrons would be arrested far less often than female prostitutes. Many men implicitly felt they had the right to patronize prostitutes without endangering their own respectability. ²⁸ C. C. Goodwin agreed that frequenting brothels did not damn a man: "A man who has vices may be a strictly honest man in business and may be a patriot who would on demand cheerfully lay down his life for his country. Such a man, despite his vices, is a first-class citizen." ²⁹

      Whatever the mix of reasons, a policy of official toleration (if not quite regulation) was firmly in place by the early 1870s. The fragmentary evidence that remains shows that police arrested women on an irregular basis from 1872 to 1890 for various prostitution-related offenses, with months-long periods of no arrests. Despite laws against patronizing brothels, very few men were arrested. The Mormon municipal authorities had decided that although laws against prostitution were on the books, they would not be strictly enforced. And although patronizing prostitutes was a crime, few men would face consequences. The women who sold sex would bear nearly all of the legal responsibility, as well as the condemnation of respectable society. But the persistence of some women over time indicates that they successfully adapted to the policy. ³⁰

      Regulation reflected a widespread nineteenth-century belief that prostitution could not and should not be eradicated. ³¹ The most influential advocate of regulation, French physician Alexandre-Jean-Baptiste Parent-Duchatelet, proposed three principles to prevent the contamination of society:

1. Prostitutes must be confined to an enclosed milieu invisible to respectable society.
2. The municipal authorities must constantly supervise the milieu.
3. The milieu must be hierarchized and compartmentalized to prevent the mixing of age groups and classes. ³²

      Many European and American cities adopted elements of this system, sometimes called "reglementation." ³³ In general, authorities unofficially segregated prostitutes in a specified area and regulated them through periodic arrests and fines. In some cities, health officials examined prostitutes and quarantined the ill. Supporters argued that regulation kept respectable residential and business areas free of an evil that could not be eradicated in any event. Crime and drunkenness, which inevitably came along with prostitution, were likewise restricted and minimized. Some advocates argued that regulation protected "true women" by providing naturally licentious males with an alternative outlet for their uncontrollable passions. A Salt Lake City chief of police, for example, declared that "if it were not for the presence of houses of prostitution in this city, it would be unsafe for women to walk the streets alone after dark." ³⁴ While most of the city's police chiefs, especially during the Mormon era, probably maintained at least a pretense of favoring abolition, a few stated publicly that they favored a well-regulated district, and after the early 1870s, all followed regulationist policies. ³⁵

      The advocates of regulation dominated well into the twentieth century, but they did not convince everyone. "Regulationists" carried on a running argument with "abolitionists," those who favored eradication. The toleration of prostitution and male sexual license in general came under harsh criticism in the early nineteenth century, especially from evangelical women. A group of New York City women fought the sexual double standard and advocated the abolition of prostitution in the 1820s and 1830s. Historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg cites this movement as a protofeminist attack upon patriarchy through the issue of male sexual license. These moral reformers sought to foment a sense of female solidarity against male exploitation. ³⁶

      Such campaigns had limited impact. By mid-century, medical authorities had entered the debate, generally on the side of regulation. ³⁷ Activists launched renewed attacks upon regulation in England and America in the 1870s and 1880s, and some medical authorities began to side with these "new abolitionists." ³⁸ When the British Parliament enacted statutes providing for the sanitary inspection of prostitutes at military depots, Josephine Butler led a successful campaign against the legislation on grounds that it formalized the double standard and ignored men's responsibility for prostitution. ³⁹ Susan B. Anthony and others successfully fought attempts to implement officially regulated prostitution in New York City in the 1860s and 1870s. When the city of St. Louis instituted a formal policy of regulation in 1870, temperance advocates helped to defeat the experiment. ⁴⁰ Mormons observed the St. Louis experiment and claimed that it indicated the folly of compromising with evil. The Deseret News reprinted a letter from a St. Louis physician that declared the utter failure of the experiment in decreasing disease, raising the general morality of the community, or lessening "the number of clandestine prostitutes." ⁴¹ Despite such opposition, however, informal regulation was the rule in most American cities.

      An incident that began in Salt Lake City in 1890 demonstrates the real targets of prostitution laws and helps explain the attraction of regulation to many officials and businessmen, Mormon and gentile. Brigham Young Hampton, now a private businessman, erected a building on Commercial Street on land leased from the Brigham Young Estate. Hampton leased the building to Louis Bamberger, one of four German Jewish brothers prominent in real estate and mining, who subleased it to Elsie St. Omar, who opened a brothel. ⁴²

      In September 1891, Judge Charles Zane of the Third District court instructed the grand jury to indict keepers of houses of prostitution. ⁴³ Hampton claimed that the officers of the Brigham Young Trust Company (now managing parts of the estate) decided to sacrifice him to the authorities. All of the sublessees agreed to cancel the objectionable leases, including St. Omar, even though she had spent "several hundred dollars" outfitting the building as a brothel. Hampton declared that the madam "was a hundred times more Considerate than my Should be friends and I think in the day of Judgment She will out Shine Many of the B.Y.T.Co." ⁴⁴ Despite the cancellation, Hampton was indicted for keeping a house of prostitution; the same grand jury also returned an indictment against Emma Whiting for leasing no. 243 south Main to Minnie Barton. ⁴⁵ Hampton faced prosecution by the same district attorney, Charles S. Varian, before the same judge who had sentenced him to a year in prison in 1885.

      Varian dismissed both cases, however. According to Hampton, Varian declared "the Fact is these Gentlemen and Lady had nothing to do with the places." ⁴⁶ Owners of property used in prostitution could escape prosecution through the "defense of landlord" provision. If the owner could prove that he had "diligently used the power which the law gives him to suppress the improper use of the building or tenement," no charges would result. ⁴⁷ Property owners seldom faced legal action if there was a manager (i.e., a madam) to prosecute instead. By limiting legal action to madams—"fallen women" practicing an outlawed profession who were relatively powerless and who could count on little public sympathy—authorities accomplished two tasks. They could tell the community that they were punishing prostitution and at the same time protect a (usually male) property owner from an embarrassing prosecution that might bring retribution against the authorities or damage the city's reputation. Such property owners often wielded substantial social, political, and economic power. Prosecuting landlords for keeping houses of prostitution might have cast a pall over the city's business climate. ⁴⁸ In general, only madams and the owners of particularly "disorderly" houses were in danger of arrest. In this case, the "defense of landlord" provision protected a Mormon businessman and even Emma Whiting, who as Emma DeMarr had been one of the city's most notorious madams. Except for the brief period in the mid-1890s when she took back the active management of her house, DeMarr owned a brothel until 1909, apparently without facing further legal action.

      The dismissal pleased Hampton, but his bitterness against the trust company only increased. The company's officers included some high officials in the LDS Church: First Counselor George Q. Cannon was president of the company; Apostle Brigham Young Jr. was vice president; and alternate member of the High Council of the Salt Lake Stake Spencer Clawson was treasurer. ⁴⁹ The company's ownership of this building did not become a matter of public comment at this time, but brothels became a public issue and a matter of contention within the company in coming years. Elsie St. Omar continued to manage houses and played a peripheral role in a municipal scandal.

      The involvement of some Mormons with prostitution illustrates a larger phenomenon. Economic cooperation between gentiles and Mormons began before political accommodation. The advent of railroads and large-scale mining enterprises helped integrate Utah's economy into national markets. Most LDS businessmen abandoned their cooperative and exclusive business practices for capitalist enterprises, often in partnership with gentiles. Leading businessmen organized the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce in 1887 as a self-consciously nonsectarian body. ⁵⁰ The shared interest in the economic growth of the city helps explain the appeal of regulated prostitution. Regulation made good business sense whatever an individual's religious or moral principles. A well-regulated district helped protect real estate values by keeping prostitution confined. Within the district itself, prostitution and its allied businesses—saloons, restaurants, stores, boardinghouses—often earned healthy profits. Landlords and merchants often charged prostitutes higher rents and prices than they did other citizens. Cora Conway testified that merchants "charge us women more than they do any body else—They charge us two prices. They make us pay more than they do any body else. Every body knows that." ⁵¹ Owners of property already surrounded by brothels sometimes argued that they had little choice other than to rent to prostitutes. Many businessmen of all creeds or none thus came to favor regulation for self-interested reasons.

      The only women who received the full "benefits" of regulation—de facto licensing, minimal harassment, and a degree of official protection that helped women earn a reasonably predictable living—were the keepers of parlor houses located within the acknowledged limits of the prostitution district and conducted in an "orderly" fashion. Women on the lower rungs of the hierarchy, those who seemed to be acting like prostitutes outside of the district, or those inside who violated the rules often found themselves the targets of legal action. Regulation was never formalized; when citizens sometimes complained of prostitution, the police used existing laws to crack down on women who might be allowed to work undisturbed in quieter times.

      Effective regulation depended on establishing geographic boundaries. Women who sold sex outside of the boundaries discussed in chapter 2 were subject to prosecution. The chief of police noted in 1897 that ten recently arrested women were "of the kind who start houses of ill-fame anywhere and everywhere in the city. We have notified them, time and again, that they must obey the restrictions set upon them by the police to remain in stated places." ⁵²

      Women continued to bear nearly all of the responsibility and risk for prostitution. In 1886, police arrested thirty-six women as "inmates," fifteen as "keepers," and only eleven men as "resorters." (Women were also occasionally arrested for resorting to a house of prostitution.) The 1890 report listed twenty-eight arrests for keeping, eighty for "Residing in house of ill-fame," and seven for resorting. The 1891 report listed sixty-six arrests for keeping, fifteen for "Prostitution" (presumably streetwalking), and 299 for residing; no category even appears for "resorting." In 1904, 115 cases appeared in the city court for keeping, 743 for "Prostitution," and only nine for resorting. ⁵³ The police did sometimes target the men who lived with and profited from prostitutes with the goal of forcing them out of the city. City authorities considered the "cadets," "pimps," "macquereaux," prizefighters, piano players, bartenders, and others who sometimes lived in brothels as actual or potential criminals. As with prostitutes, African Americans among this class of men were especially liable to arrest. ⁵⁴

      The usual method of regulation was to arrest women on a periodic basis. The women deposited bail money to guarantee their appearance in court. When the cases were called a few days later, the women did not appear and their bonds were forfeited. The bonds/fines varied; the quarterly rate assessed in 1891 was $50 for keepers and $25 for inmates; in June 1893, the police justice switched to a monthly assessment of $17 and $8.50 respectively. ⁵⁵ The system was especially regularized in 1897-98, when keepers were assessed monthly between the twenty-second and twenty-ninth day of each month. Keeping a house of ill fame could bring a fine of $25-$100, residing in such a house, $10-$50, and resorting, $10-$20; the fines evidently varied by the length of time since a woman had been assessed. The police probably did not even have to visit the well-known brothels; it seems likelier that the madam or her agent brought the money to the police station. If an offender could not pay, she might be locked in the city jail at the rate of one day per dollar. ⁵⁶ If the authorities wanted to force a woman out, she could be "vagged"—arrested for vagrancy—and given a "floater"; that is, released on her promise to leave town. ⁵⁷

      Whether they supported regulation or not, everyone involved understood this system was de facto licensing. Prostitutes argued that paying the fine protected them from arrest for the rest of the period. Louise Dreyfus protested to the court in vain that "I have ze license, I pays ze fine every month." ⁵⁸ The same judge released another woman because she had "'paid the money regularly demanded by the city for the conduct of her business.'" ⁵⁹ The press frequently referred to the "license"; for example, twelve Japanese women paid "the regulation license fee." ⁶⁰ The Third District grand jury condemned in 1891 "the system in vogue of virtually licensing gambling houses and houses of prostitution, by collecting from them regular quarterly fines, serving as an incentive to these violators of the law to ply their avocations with greater avidity." ⁶¹ Upon taking office in 1896, Mayor James Glendinning denounced the custom "to compel the payment of a monthly license." ⁶²

      Women charged with prostitution-related offenses did not always submit tamely. Those who could afford an attorney and the time often took their chances and demanded a trial before a jury that might include friends or customers. ⁶³ Conversely, the authorities preferred a rapid process and sometimes tried to deny women their legal rights. The city tried to avoid jury trials, since they cost $10 to $20 each to prosecute (as of 1891) and tied up the court's time. One police justice maintained that persons appearing in police court were not entitled to a jury trial, but the Third District court quickly overruled. ⁶⁴ Populist newspaper editor Warren Foster accused one justice of imposing harsher sentences upon those requesting jury trials. ⁶⁵ Prostitutes were, of course, not always successful before juries. May Hart demanded a trial and was found guilty and fined about three times what an initial guilty plea would have cost. ⁶⁶ Ida Walker quixotically demanded a trial for keeping a brothel after having paid fines on a regular basis for months; she lost and paid $50 plus $12 court costs. ⁶⁷

      The municipal authorities frequently resorted to cosmetic measures that protected respectable sensibilities while keeping prostitution profitable and available. In 1891, for example, Franklin Avenue prostitutes were reportedly told that "hereafter they will not be allowed to parade the avenue dressed in a go-as-you-please or any other style; that they are to conduct themselves in a more decorous manner than heretofore, and that they must refrain from indulging in gymnastic and linguistic exercises in the back yards of the harems." ⁶⁸ Three years later, the chief of police ordered window blinds on that street be kept down; a few months later, he barred piano playing. In 1901, the mayor ordered Commercial Street women to vacate ground floors of buildings, lower their blinds, and douse their electric lights. ⁶⁹

      While regulation offered a measure of security to brothel keepers and prostitutes, they were still highly vulnerable. The authorities might raid a house they considered particularly disorderly until the women moved or capitulated to regulations. General crackdowns, although temporary, forced many to leave the city. The high mobility rate of some madams, and especially of prostitutes, testifies to their predicament. Women who followed regulations, however, earned praise and perhaps even respect. One official noted that some brothels "are under such perfect control that if a man is robbed in one of them the stolen property can be recovered within one hour's time." He claimed that a "sporting man" who lost a diamond stud complained to the police, who went to the madam; she quickly obtained the gem from the offending woman. ⁷⁰ A murder in a Victoria Alley crib elicited the chief of police's wistful comparison to Helen Blazes's orderly resort across the street. ⁷¹ In turn, cooperative women could call on the police for help with larcenous employees or abusive patrons. When two of Blazes's employees left for Denver with $400 she had advanced them, a Salt Lake detective brought them back to face prosecution. ⁷² When a salesman tried to wrench a ring off Lillie Evans's finger, the irate madam woke the police justice and obtained a warrant for his arrest. ⁷³

      The lower classes could not count on the limited benefits that parlor house women received. The same authorities who supported regulation vigorously prosecuted streetwalkers and (sometimes) crib workers. ⁷⁴ Streetwalkers could receive brutal treatment. A policeman arrested Maggie Cope, a white streetwalker, and was leading her to jail when she stumbled and fell. "The officer thought it was merely a drunken stupor, and stopping a cart, dumped the woman into it. On reaching the City Hall she was found to be dead." The coroner ruled she died of "apoplexy." ⁷⁵

      The regulation of prostitution also illustrates racial realities in Salt Lake society. Arrest records make clear official racism. While the "nationality" column in the arrest registers was usually left blank for prostitutes, African American women were often labeled "nig" or "coon." Police identified one woman only as "A China Woman." Japanese surnames were almost never recorded; instead, the police named them, for example, "Minnie Jap" or "Lottie Jap." ⁷⁶ The posting of the 24th Infantry, an all-black unit, to Fort Douglas in 1896 sparked white Utahns to express concerns about race mixing and drunken black soldiers accosting white women. ⁷⁷ The unit's white officers worried about the kind of houses which some of the soldiers frequented. Acting on complaints from the fort, the police ordered the temporary closing of most cribs on Victoria and Franklin Avenues. Japanese women were allowed to sell sex as they did "not admit the [black] soldiers to the houses." ⁷⁸

      Police justice John B. Timmony used his powers to enforce the racial hierarchy by levying particularly stiff fines against white prostitutes found with black clients. A white woman who worked near Fort Douglas admitted she was a prostitute but "pleaded that she drew the color line. The evidence introduced, however, proved differently." She received ninety days in jail at a time when brothel inmates were normally fined between $10 and $25. ⁷⁹ The same judge sentenced a "husky negro" found with a white prostitute to ninety days, although other customers were rarely prosecuted. ⁸⁰ The Tribune noted approvingly "the vigorous war being waged by the police department against the white women who associate with colored men and women is beginning to have its effects." ⁸¹

      Regulating brothels was relatively straightforward, as police could easily identify and fine the women of the established houses. Because brothels shared space with a wide variety of "legitimate" businesses and homes, however, many other women worked or lived in or passed through the district. As more women moved into the workforce, lived without the supervision of fathers, brothers, or husbands, or took advantage of new opportunities for commercial recreation, they expanded women's presence in public and complicated the distinction between "respectable" and "disorderly" behavior.

      The definition of prostitution as a form of vagrancy meant that prosecution depended largely upon a woman's "general reputation." Those women arrested as keepers or inmates of houses of prostitution were usually arrested for their reputed status, not a specific act. The prosecution of a disorderly house likewise relied largely upon testimony as to its reputation. ⁸² Such reliance meant that the appearance and behavior of women living and working in the business district were constantly subject to police scrutiny. By the standards of the "separate spheres," a respectable woman had no business on the street without a male escort. Her presence alone in public could bring charges and label her a fallen woman. Police often arrested a woman because the officer thought she looked or behaved like a prostitute: she was walking the streets alone, entering a saloon, wearing certain clothing, or talking to men on the street. Unlike male brothel patrons, once a woman lost her positive public reputation it was probably gone for good. It is likely that not everyone was equally concerned about a respectable reputation, although the nature of the sources makes it difficult to determine the reactions of those outside the elite. Many working-class women obviously cared about threats to their reputations, but some prostitutes and their friends, neighbors, and families were probably less concerned with middle- and upper-class notions of "respectability." They could empathize with or overlook the difficult circumstances that could drive a woman to selling sex. ⁸³

      Many women fought hard to defend their reputations. A woman allegedly found drunk in a saloon and arrested for prostitution "proved that she was a married woman and lived at home with her husband and her eight children, and that she was a respectable woman, having only stepped into the saloon on a business errand." ⁸⁴ Officer Benedict Siegfus arrested Louise Coleman for vagrancy when he found her in a hotel doorway at five o'clock in the morning. Siegfus "considered it his duty to arrest her for being out on the street at that hour without an escort." Coleman indignantly insisted that she had been attending a ball and became separated from her escort. She was awaiting a streetcar back to Fort Douglas, where she worked as a domestic, when Siegfus "made a very indecent proposal to her." Coleman's employer and other officers testified that she "bears an excellent reputation" and threatened to prosecute Siegfus. ⁸⁵

      Siegfus and other police officers evidently had reputations for overzealousness, and their testimony did not ensure a conviction. At a trial for a mother and daughter, Siegfus testified that the mother "is a prostitute, ... I have seen her soliciting on the street." The furious woman screamed that Siegfus was a liar and attacked him. When she calmed, she "swore positively that she earned an honest living by taking in washing, and that her daughter did likewise by hiring out as a servant." The judge believed her against the testimony of three police officers. ⁸⁶ Another officer arrested a woman for soliciting because he had seen her on the street talking to men and "Mrs. Wilson, a notorious character" (probably Ada Wilson). The woman angrily told the court "if a woman could not walk up the streets of this city without being molested and insulted by policemen, then she wanted to know it." The judge dismissed the charges and noted that "prostitution was a serious charge to bring against a woman, and it should not be brought unless there was ample proof to sustain it." ⁸⁷ Slandering a woman's reputation could be a criminal act. One man was fined $5 "for the pleasure of calling a respectable woman 'chippy.'" ⁸⁸ Once a woman was labeled a prostitute to the court's satisfaction, however, her reputation could not easily be restored. Dora Topham, the Stockade manager, understood that "my reputation as a pure woman is gone. If I give this up there is nothing left for me to do. Nobody would believe in me. Nobody would help me." ⁸⁹

      Reputation and ethnicity collided in the reporting of one woman's multiple arrests for prostitution. Under the headline "A Naughty Little Jap," the Tribune noted that "Miss Kimma ... claims to be the wife of a Second South Street restaurant keeper and of 18-carat virtue." When a jury acquitted her, she became "The Japanese Woman" and "the wife of a respectable restaurant-keeper." Several weeks later, the police "had their revenge for they caught the woman in a corner and arrested her." The woman forfeited $50 for prostitution and selling liquor without a license. ⁹⁰

      Appearance and reputation circumscribed many aspects of prostitutes' lives. Theater owners tried to segregate prostitutes from other patrons. In 1893, the doorkeeper of the Salt Lake Theater refused entrance to the parquette section to several women holding tickets because they were "of character not at all doubtful." ⁹¹ He offered them seats in the balcony or a refund, but the women refused. Among them were Malvina Beauchamp, the manager of the "Big V," and her employee Nellie Kingsley. The manager wrote Beauchamp that "women of the class to which you belong have been admitted to the theatre, and their language and conduct have been such as to offend our patrons." Beauchamp and Kingsley sued the theater for violating the 1875 Civil Rights Act and initially won $100 each, but lost on appeal. ⁹² Such incidents proved the dilemma of judging respectability by appearance. The theater's treasurer noted that a lady of "conspicuous appearance" whom he had judged a prostitute turned out instead to be "the wife of a prominent citizen." ⁹³ Some respectable women were apparently beginning to wear clothing or use cosmetics popularly associated with prostitutes. ⁹⁴

      Regulation sometimes served political purposes. The turn of a new year frequently brought crackdowns, especially under a new administration. For example, in 1896 incoming mayor James Glendinning denounced licensing and ordered city authorities to conduct waves of arrests and levy stiff fines. ⁹⁵ The Tribune's C. C. Goodwin spoke again for regulationists: "the proposed drastic remedies will simply delocalize the evil, but in so doing it will be scattered from Camp Douglas to beyond the Jordan." ⁹⁶ Glendinning quickly returned to a regulationist stance. The party (political and/or religious) out of power frequently accused incumbent administrations of profiting from prostitution. The city earned substantial sums from prostitutes, gamblers, and drunks: in 1889, for example, police court revenues totaled nearly $28,000; in 1895, over $16,000. ⁹⁷ The issue was often colored by Mormon-gentile antagonism; in 1886, the Tribune referred to periodic fines as "tithing the harlots." ⁹⁸

      Prostitutes played another role in electoral politics. Utah women had exercised the franchise since 1870 (with the exception of 1887-96), so candidates actively sought their votes. Several campaigns allegedly depended on the strength of prostitutes' votes, especially the ward-based campaigns for city council. Mormons complained that Kate Flint and her women voted while respectable but polygamous Saints could not. Mormons also claimed that brothel patrons voted Liberal in 1890 and that prostitutes would have if they could. At the state constitutional convention in 1895, the prominent Mormon Brigham H. Roberts claimed that if suffrage was granted to women in the new constitution, the only women who would vote were "the brazen, the element that is under the control of the managers and runners of saloons.... The refined wife and mother will not so much as put her foot in the filthy stream." Suffragists (including Mormons) were outraged and Roberts was easily outvoted. ⁹⁹

      Parties sought or coerced prostitutes' votes while condemning their opponents for doing the same. Madam Kitty Hicks reportedly told the Republican Tribune in 1899 that "a very prominent young Democrat" promised that under the Democrats "the houses will be allowed to run all right, and the town will continue to be wide open." ¹⁰⁰ The Democratic Herald returned the favor two years later, charging that Republican mayor Ezra Thompson had promised prostitutes a wide-open town. ¹⁰¹

      Two politicians allegedly based their careers on the brothel and saloon. R.[obert] Bruce Johnson, an African American saloonkeeper, reportedly mobilized prostitutes, vagrants, and drunks for the Republicans in the 1890s and early 1900s and for the "Americans" after 1904. His opponents acknowledged his clout, once calling him the "boss of the white slaves" (meaning those whose votes he controlled rather than women coerced into prostitution). Johnson was accused but apparently never formally charged with renting rooms to prostitutes on several occasions. ¹⁰²

      Martin E. Mulvey, a white saloonkeeper, allegedly rode brothel and saloon votes into office, where he protected regulated prostitution. Mulvey ran saloons on Commercial, State, and Main Streets, all locales where prostitutes worked, and won election to the city council from the fifth ward in 1896 as a Democrat. ¹⁰³ Mulvey joined the American Party, won reelection, and was instrumental in creating the Stockade. ¹⁰⁴

      While regulation was firmly entrenched by the late 1870s, the details of prostitution policy often caused controversy. This was especially true in the turmoil of the 1880s, when the polygamy campaign still raged and gentiles struggled for a share of political power. The Liberal victory in the municipal election of 1890 both strengthened regulation and indirectly launched the first tentative reform efforts against prostitution.

      The influx of gentile voters, and the disfranchisement of polygamous Mormons and all women under the Edmunds and Edmunds-Tucker Acts respectively, resulted in roughly equal numbers of eligible Mormon and gentile voters and allowed the Liberals in 1890 to narrowly win the mayoralty and a majority of the council. ¹⁰⁵ The Tribune claimed that the win was a triumph for women: "Twice ten thousand women, who are bound in the toils of Mormonism, will, while kissing their babies to sleep to-night, thank God that the cup they were forced to drink, will be dashed from their children's lips." ¹⁰⁶ Gentiles who had long complained of Mormons' exclusive business practices planned to modernize the city and boost it as a regional economic power. Mayor George Scott's administration launched an ambitious program of improvements, including long-delayed upgrading of water systems, sewers, and streets. Ironically, Commercial Street, already well known as a prostitution district, was the first street paved. ¹⁰⁷

      The loss of political dominance in their temple city was another in a series of blows that threatened to destroy the LDS Church's temporal hegemony. The perceived moral hypocrisy of the Liberals made the loss harder to bear. Mormons insisted that the Liberals, despite their high-minded denunciations of Mormon "lawlessness," had the backing of the disorderly element. The Herald claimed that "every prostitute" and virtually every brothel customer, saloonkeeper, drinker, gambler, and criminal was a Liberal; "and what is more, a large percentage of those who lead the Liberal forces and decry Mormon morals are themselves steeped in lewdness." ¹⁰⁸ The Deseret Evening News called the Tribune "the organ of the prostitute, rumseller and blackleg" and reminded its readers that the Tribune had written that "billiard halls, saloons, and houses of ill-fame are more powerful reforming agencies here in Utah than churches and schools, ... anything to break the shackles [young Mormons] were born in." ¹⁰⁹

      The Liberals insisted that as monogamists they would foster a purer moral atmosphere, but they made it clear that they would regulate prostitution. ¹¹⁰ Liberal law enforcement seemed to prove Mormons' worst fears. Although women could not vote in 1890, prostitutes probably did favor the Liberals, who made no pretense of abolishing their livelihoods, and by several accounts more women began to openly sell sex in Salt Lake. Although it is difficult to determine if or how many more prostitutes worked during the Liberals' term, the number of saloons showed a proven increase from seventy to over one hundred. ¹¹¹

      While gentiles applauded the Liberals' infrastructure improvements, the perceived laxity of law enforcement alienated even some of their staunchest supporters. When a "Citizens' Mass meeting" was called in December 1890 to protest the deteriorating moral climate, the Tribune grudgingly conceded that conditions warranted the move. ¹¹² The "law and order" reformers included Protestant clergymen, attorneys, businessmen, and other professionals, many of them Liberals. The chairman declared "it is a slander on the people of this city for licenses to [be] granted on the supposition that the people have no objection to the running of brothels right under our noses." The editor of the Deseret News stated that Mormons "also were ready to range themselves on the side of decency, and order," an offer that generated applause. Although women probably attended, their presence was not noted and apparently none spoke. Attorney Frank B. Stephens claimed that the police only arrested prostitutes because they could not vote and called for the arrest of male owners and patrons. ¹¹³ A committee drafted a petition to the city council complaining that Liberals were "imperiling the cause of morality." Not surprisingly, the petition did not include Stephens's endorsement of a single moral standard, although it called on the government to "enforce promptly and thoroughly the laws." ¹¹⁴

      Reformers were most concerned, however, with saloons being open on Sundays. Temperance activists, including many of the "law and order" petitioners, demanded the city "enforce the laws as they exist"; brothels were an afterthought. These reformers did not call for the eradication of prostitution or the prohibition of alcohol, nor did they form a permanent organization. They wanted the city to use its coercive power against the "disorderly classes" and "disorderly resorts" for the benefit of its respectable citizens. ¹¹⁵

      The Franklin Avenue Variety Theater was a particular target. Reformers worried that the new theater would feature bawdy entertainment and drunken crowds. Its proprietor obtained a theater license after promising not to sell liquor. ¹¹⁶ The theater's success was immediate; opening night saw hundreds of people turned away. The Herald sniffed "in the house was a riff raff miscellaneous assemblage.... Cowboys, tin-horners, higher-toned gamblers and the rag tag and bobtail element generally swarmed, smoked and spit. There was not a female visage to be seen off the stage." ¹¹⁷

      Despite promises, the proprietors won a saloon license after a long struggle. Opponents saw the theater's female employees as a dire moral threat. ¹¹⁸ Complaints poured in to the police and the papers about the women who sold drinks and sex. One man reported that a "box nymph" robbed him of $10. ¹¹⁹ Another man complained "a young woman lost to shame" tried to get "money to commit vice and crime." He added that "such institutions as the Novelty Theater are on par with the practice of polygamy, and each apparently has its thugs. I have no harsh words for the poor women who are the victims in both institutions." ¹²⁰ Citizen pressure finally convinced the council to revoke the saloon's license and the theater soon went under. Ironically, when authorities forced prostitutes onto Franklin Avenue in 1894, madams converted the theater into a large brothel. ¹²¹ Dissatisfaction in Liberal ranks with Mayor Scott's lax policies may have contributed to his replacement in 1892 by Robert N. Baskin, an attorney and prominent anti-Mormon activist, as their candidate for mayor. ¹²²

      Most reformers and municipal authorities did not have much daily interaction with prostitutes, but beat patrolmen did. Policemen in the "tenderloin" naturally spent time in its businesses in the course of patrolling (and sometimes off-hour recreating); long-term officers undoubtedly knew dozens of prostitutes on sight. Some policemen used their authority to abuse and exploit women. The control of prostitution in the early 1890s exacerbated tensions within the police department, leading to violence, public scandal, and changes in the department's leadership and its control by the municipal government.

      The first controversy surrounded Captain William B. Parker. Officers complained of his harsh discipline, profane language, and alleged favoritism. Hattie Wilson, who ran a Franklin Avenue brothel, claimed that a drunken Parker came to her house after midnight on 4 July 1891 and demanded to be entertained on the piano. As only one girl "was at leisure" (who apparently couldn't play), Parker left but returned minutes later when he heard singing. Two prostitutes and an unnamed male patron corroborated that Parker attempted to drag the thinly dressed Wilson to police headquarters and that another detective struck the patron when he tried to interfere. The testimony of the women and the "resorter" carried little weight. Parker was cleared, but the council abolished the office of police captain, apparently as a backdoor means of removing him. A few months later Parker accosted one of his accusers, patrolman George Albright, and attempted to shoot him; when his gun misfired, Albright drew his own weapon and killed Parker, an action that was ruled self-defense. ¹²³

      Albright had his own connections that provide insights into prostitutes' vulnerability, their relationship with the authorities, and the strength of regulation; they also give a rare glimpse inside Salt Lake brothels. A woman named Rose Miller claimed in June 1892 that while she had worked in Sadie Noble's and Minnie Barton's brothels, Albright tried to make her his private mistress. When she refused, he threatened her life and forced himself on her several times over the course of months. ¹²⁴ Police arrested Miller and another woman as inmates of a house of prostitution just after her accusations appeared. Their landlady, the well-known Elsie St. Omar, was charged with keeping a brothel. ¹²⁵ St. Omar pleaded not guilty, claiming that she "had gone there to live in a private house, as some of her relatives were coming and she didn't want them to know of the life she had been leading." ¹²⁶ Miller and the other woman insisted they were no longer prostitutes, and Miller now swore that three other policemen had also abused her. The charges against the other woman were dismissed, but St. Omar and Miller were found guilty. ¹²⁷

      The trials of Elsie St. Omar and her boarders drew large, curious crowds, as was often true of prostitution cases. Mayor Robert Baskin found the testimony of a night on the town by city councilmen troubling and conducted his own investigation. ¹²⁸ He found that several councilmen decided on the night of 17 June to investigate Rose Miller's charges. At Elsie St. Omar's house, they discovered reporters from the Times and the Deseret Evening News interviewing Miller. Someone produced beer, and two councilmen joined the interview. A reporter told them "Marshal [Ed] Janney was with some of his men at a house of prostitution on Franklin avenue having a general good time." The councilmen proceeded to Hattie Wilson's house at 53 Franklin. The madam was evasive but eventually admitted the councilmen and reporters.

      The marshal was in a parlor with a police officer, detective George Sheets, police justice Frederick Kesler, and a deputy sheriff from Wyoming. Janney explained that the Wyoming lawman was searching for a witness in a murder case and thought she might be in a Salt Lake brothel. Janney had invited the others to join the search, which began in "the variety theater" (probably the People's Opera House on Commercial Street) and moved on to no. 243 south Main Street, then run by Helen Blazes, where they questioned the women. The officers then moved to an unnamed location on Commercial Street, and from there went to Hattie Wilson's, where the councilmen surprised them.

      The police party was in "a parlor where the floor is bare, no bedroom or beds or lounges there, only settees, and there was a woman playing a piano." "There was dancing going on and music" while women passed in and out. Kesler was reportedly stretched on a couch smoking a cigar when the councilmen entered and "said in a smiling and joking way, 'I plead guilty to the charge and will fine myself $25.00.'" Chief Janney remarked "we are caught" and worried aloud that the councilmen might do something "to injure him." The officials spent fifteen or twenty minutes drinking beer and dancing with the women, although the officials swore that the dancing was chaste.

      Janney suggested the combined party proceed to Malvina Beauchamp's "Big V" on Plum Alley, where "we were looking up some business, and I said you will miss nothing if you go, you can hear a girl there that is a very fine singer." One councilman went along "first, for the curiousity [sic], the other to see what I could see." The party danced and drank beer at the Big V and enjoyed the singer. Beauchamp had an electric call button system, and "some one would say more beer, and then a woman would shove a button." The patrolman, noting that "our business often takes us to such places," asserted knowledgeably that "women order beer as men come in, and if no one pays for it then they usually call it on the house." The party broke up when several councilmen expressed concern that Chief Janney was becoming drunk.

      Baskin reiterated three questions: how much did the men drink (and who paid)? Did anyone touch the women? And why had he learned of the "investigation" through the papers? One councilman admitted that "we were having a jolly good time, cracking jokes.... It was mutually understood and agreed that none of us would open our mouths." Only once did Baskin express legal concerns about the brothels: "You knew they were outlawed institutions? You took no steps to punish them?" The answers were negative. The mayor's position was clear: he had no objection to well-regulated brothels but felt "it is scarcely proper for members of the City Council to participate in a drunken revelry at a house of ill-fame at 1 and 2 o'clock in the morning." ¹²⁹

      Mayor Baskin fired Chief Janney, Detective Sheets, and the patrolman; Albright followed a few weeks later. The new chief immediately revised department rule five, which read "officers ... must not in uniform enter a saloon, except in the discharge of their duty." The words "gambling house, or house of ill fame" were inserted between "saloon" and "except." ¹³⁰ No real harm was done Janney and Sheets, as both were later rehired as patrolmen; Sheets would eventually become chief. ¹³¹ The mayor censured the councilmen and Kesler, but he had no power over the council and that body appointed the police justice, so the council itself decided their fates. A select committee concluded "this body has no authority to take any action" against the councilmen. The police committee (which included one of the censured councilmen) reported that "no excuse can be given for [Kesler] ... his conduct was against the honor and dignity of his high and responsible position and was open to censure." The council eventually replaced Kesler. His behavior may have been particularly embarrassing to Mormons as his father was a longtime LDS bishop. ¹³²

      This minor episode offers some intriguing insights, but the women's viewpoint is missing. The mayor did not question them and seemed little concerned with their role. Hattie Wilson's attempt to protect the officers suggests that they were frequent visitors, and the councilmen's behavior must have also reassured her. We can only speculate on the thoughts of Malvina Beauchamp and her "girls" when two reporters (taking notes?), the chief of police, a patrolman, the police justice, and four council members entered their parlor to talk, joke, drink, and dance. The evidence suggests that the madams were gracious but cautious. Elsie St. Omar and Hattie Wilson initially claimed to have no beer, probably because they had no liquor license. The women were by all accounts restrained, decorous, and modestly dressed; no one admitted to soliciting or being solicited for sex. The authorities' evening out must have been a topic of much discussion among women in the brothel district. The comfortable presence of Chief Janney and Justice Kesler—the two officials with the most power to suppress their business—could only have convinced prostitutes and madams that orderly parlor houses were in little danger.

      The authorities ignored Rose Miller's accusations in the flap over the events of 17 June. A prostitute stood virtually no chance of proving rape, especially against a policeman. A rape charge depended upon a woman's refusal of consent to an act of sex, considered impossible behavior for a prostitute. ¹³³ Miller's other charges, which constituted stalking by later standards, were not statutory offenses in the late nineteenth century. Albright's abuse did arouse some backhanded public sympathy for Miller: "No matter how low the woman may be, how vile her occupation, the imposition practiced upon her by ALBRIGHT through threats of violence show him to be infinitely lower and viler." ¹³⁴ The problem was solved to the authorities' satisfaction by Albright's dismissal, but none of the other officers Rose Miller accused were punished. Miller was arrested fifteen months later for keeping a brothel. ¹³⁵

      The Liberals' opponents tried to make political capital of this incident, but many people dismissed it out of hand. A former Liberal member of the police committee claimed that he had made "similar tours of investigation in the interest of the city" and that if the mayor had complained, he would have told him "to take a trip to the regions where his Satanic majesty presides and where his imps hold high carnival." ¹³⁶ The councilmen may have also avoided public censure because two were Democrats (and Mormons) and two Liberals, making it difficult for the partisan press to charge impropriety. ¹³⁷ The Herald suggested that Baskin should have expected such things, since "the Liberal victory was celebrated by drunken orgies in every brothel in this city." The paper continued to express support for regulation, however, as long as the worst houses were suppressed. ¹³⁸ Baskin did direct the police to close saloons on Sunday (a rule often flouted) and to raid gambling houses and several small brothels. Significantly, he took no action against parlor houses, including any of the houses visited on 17 June. ¹³⁹

      Although the brothel-hopping incident received much press, reform groups expressed little interest. Four weeks after it became public, another mostly Liberal group of "law and order" reformers met. The speakers, again all male, emphasized Sunday saloons with only one mention of houses of ill fame. Frederick Kesler, still clinging to his seat, attended; he was criticized not for his behavior on 17 June but rather because he "virtually offers a bribe to lawbreakers through the imposition of such trifling fines as to make his administration of justice a public farce." ¹⁴⁰

      The police controversies led the territorial legislature to create a Board of Police and Fire Commissioners in 1894. The council and mayor appointed two members each, but the board was to be completely independent. O. J. Salisbury, a gentile banker, chaired the first board, which included Nelson A. Empey, bishop of the LDS Thirteenth Ward, which encompassed the prostitution district. ¹⁴¹ The board did not alter prostitution policy. Orderly brothels continued to be regulated, while the city government sometimes responded to citizen pressure to deal with particularly obnoxious houses.

      By the time of the councilmen's night out, substantive changes were well under way in the city. The early 1890s were a period of great transition, as LDS Church leaders and members sought to adjust and accommodate to the nation's economy, society, and political establishment. ¹⁴² The capitulation on polygamy drew the most attention. President Wilford Woodruff issued his so-called Manifesto on 25 September 1890, counseling Mormons not to enter into plural marriages. Although some gentiles found the statement ambiguous and remained suspicious, and some Mormons continued to contract plural marriages, most accepted that the manifesto meant the beginning of the end of polygamy and the federal authorities eased their "crusade." ¹⁴³

      The lessening of tensions extended to politics as well. The People's Party and the Liberals disbanded, and activists organized branches of the national parties that included Mormons and non-Mormons. Robert Baskin left the Liberals and received the backing of a nonpartisan citizen's committee, including many Saints, and won reelection as mayor in 1893. ¹⁴⁴ LDS Church authorities consciously retreated from politics, although their occasional interference sparked fierce reaction from political activists across the religious spectrum. ¹⁴⁵ Economic accommodation, already well under way, also picked up steam. The LDS Church sold or privatized most of its business concerns, including a street railroad, a gas company, and Zion's Co-operative Mercantile Institution (ZCMI), and solicited outside investment in many financial enterprises. ¹⁴⁶

      Reformers also found some common ground. For example, temperance work, including a newly energized branch of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), attracted interest across religious lines. The speakers at a temperance rally in July 1892 included Protestant ministers who opposed polygamy, but also many Mormons. ¹⁴⁷ Historian Carol Cornwall Madsen cites these activities as among the first that united reformers during what she calls the "Decade of Detente." ¹⁴⁸ Members of Mormon and gentile women's clubs founded the Utah Federation of Women's Clubs in 1892. Detente was not immediate or complete, of course. When a mixed group of women assembled the Utah display for the Women's Pavilion at the Columbian Exposition in 1893, Cornelia Paddock contributed copies of her anti-Mormon novels. ¹⁴⁹

      Many reform efforts were temporary and limited in scope. In 1892 Mary Post and twenty-five others petitioned the city council to remove "the immoral class of tenants from Franklin Ave." so that residents "would be able to rent their houses and be able to pay the city taxes on the same." ¹⁵⁰ Such petitions posed a dilemma for the authorities, who did not want to lose the votes of respectable property owners. On the other hand, regulation's supporters argued that brothels had to be located somewhere. The Franklin Avenue houses were established, localized, and relatively orderly. When residents there complained of prostitution, those complaints did not carry much weight with city hall, since most residents were working-class and many were African American. Any crackdown on Franklin would force prostitutes elsewhere, and people who perhaps wielded greater economic and political clout would complain of the influx.

      This particular petition, however, fit Mayor Baskin's plans to "make this the best governed city in the Rocky mountain region" (and perhaps counter charges of Liberal immorality). ¹⁵¹ The police notified prostitutes that they had a week to leave Franklin. ¹⁵² The police complained, however, that the move was a mistake. When a gambler and a hack driver reportedly "carved themselves into pieces" over a prostitute living on State Street, the police captain was not surprised: "This, ... is the result of driving the women of the town off Franklin avenue. They are located in the business blocks all over the city, and are almost absolutely beyond police control. It is almost impossible for us to make a charge of prostitution stick against the women that are doing business in these blocks. They ought all to be kept on one street, where they could be watched and controlled." ¹⁵³ Franklin Avenue remained a location of choice for authorities, and in early 1894 they ordered the police to force all prostitutes back. That campaign, which included the unusual step of arresting "every man found resorting to the dens that are maintained in respectable localities," was reportedly successful by summer 1894, but the move aroused new complaints. ¹⁵⁴

      Just after the 1892 cleansing of Franklin Avenue, some citizens began to look beyond police action and the techniques of mass meetings, speeches, sermons, and petitions. A group of reformers sought to change the behavior of individual women. An evangelical revival meeting inspired several ministers and laypersons to create a rescue mission. ¹⁵⁵ Their council, dominated by evangelical male Protestants, included Sarah Reed, a Presbyterian and WCTU officer. Reed proposed maternalist solutions to prostitution. She first suggested the need for a police matron at the city jail, explaining that female prisoners (mostly prostitutes) "are cared for by men entirely, and deprived of the attention and care that only the sympathetic nature of a good Christian woman can give." ¹⁵⁶ Reed further proposed "a home for fallen women.... There is now no place where such women coming out of the jails can go for reformation." ¹⁵⁷

      This proposed method of rescue had deep roots. Since the early nineteenth century, those women and men who had helped to construct the "cult of true womanhood" had stressed women's potential to do for society what they did for the home: make it clean, pure, moral, and safe. Women used their most widely respected role—that of mother within the home—to justify their participation in moral reform efforts. Middle-class Protestant women sought to address the perceived disorder and immorality of the western United States by establishing "home missions," including the Industrial Christian Home for plural wives in Salt Lake City. ¹⁵⁸ Although that institution was not particularly successful, antipolygamy activists could claim victory over the last of the "twin relics of barbarism" in 1890. ¹⁵⁹ With the apparent solution of that problem, which had monopolized the reform energies of Utah's activist gentiles, some reformers were ready to apply similar techniques to other moral problems.

      Some of the same persons who had fought polygamy—clubwomen, missionaries, evangelical Protestant ministers and their wives—now turned their attention to prostitution. The presence of those particular reformers or their successors, the similarity between the Industrial Christian Home and Reed's proposed home for fallen women, and the emphasis placed upon a proper "Christian" atmosphere appear to have discouraged the participation of more than a few Mormons who might otherwise have joined the effort.

      In late 1892, the rescue mission issued a prospectus for its "rescue home." Mary Grant Major, a director, stressed female solidarity and the responsibility that Christian women bore for their "sisters." ¹⁶⁰ Like the directors of the Industrial Christian Home, Major and her colleagues believed in the redemptive power of a pure, Christian, maternal, domestic atmosphere upon a woman who had been sinned against, whether by a Mormon husband, a seducer, or a brothel procurer. Some men agreed that a good mother's influence was the best hope for saving fallen women. LDS Elder John Henry Smith, speaking in favor of rescue work, stressed a mother's responsibility to keep her daughters pure. Mayor James Glendinning asked a rescue worker about the mothers of girls in the home; the worker replied that "many of them had no mothers, and that others who had mothers would be better off if they didn't have." ¹⁶¹

      The home found a suitable location in late February 1893. Dr. Helen Ritchie offered the rental use of her house and agreed to serve as matron of the "Anchorage." Mary Grant Major boasted that "for the first time in the history of this city, there stands within it a home from whose door no destitute woman shall be turned. Within that home waits a kindly Christian woman with sympathy and help.... The home will be open alike to destitute or fallen, those who have taken but one wrong step or those who have sunk to the blackest depths, yet who have found room for repentance. The thought has been to refuse no one whom God would receive." ¹⁶² From the home's inception, funding was tenuous; the mission relied mainly on contributions raised in Protestant churches. ¹⁶³ The directors suggested that an appropriate source would be the fines collected from prostitutes. By using that money for rescue purposes, the city could cleanse itself of the sin of profiting by women's immorality and exploitation. While the proposal to use fine money for "saving many others from the horrors of such an existence" gained some support, the city council considered such a use illegal but eventually appropriated $100 per month. ¹⁶⁴

      The executive committee included women with strong evangelical Protestant connections, including Sara McNiece, an officer of the WCTU and wife of a Presbyterian minister and antipolygamy activist. Their petition laid out the home's purposes: to provide "an avenue of escape from [prostitutes'] life of shame" and "a thorough reformation and change of heart and life." The home would accomplish two goals: "reform these degraded women and at the same time protect society by diminishing their number." ¹⁶⁵

      To judge by the petition's language, the home's founders seemed ambivalent toward the women they intended to save. The founders expressed sympathy for their "fallen" sisters but it is not clear whom they held responsible. What little rhetoric survives hints that they believed a fallen woman had been betrayed by a lover, a brothel procurer, or a negligent or abusive parent, but they also blamed that woman for having "taken but one wrong step." The rescuers' ideology of true womanhood implicitly assumed that no women would enter a brothel voluntarily. ¹⁶⁶ Fallen women had to be "sav[ed] ... from themselves" and prove "worthy of ... a future of respectability and honesty." The founders were certain that a complete break from the past and immersion in their version of middle-class true womanhood were the proper and necessary antidotes to the "life of shame" that would inevitably lead to an early death. ¹⁶⁷

      The daily operation of the rescue home combined voluntary with coercive elements. ¹⁶⁸ As originally envisioned, admission was voluntary and women could leave at any time, but the executive committee and the matron strictly supervised those who chose to enter. The "inmates," as they were sometimes called, ¹⁶⁹ had to divorce themselves completely from their past lives. They were not allowed to send or receive letters without going through the matron. The rescuers instructed inmates in domestic industries—"sewing, cooking and other useful accomplishments"—so that they could "earn an honest living." The directors sought to reestablish a fallen woman's status as a true woman who could work in a proper home and eventually marry a respectable man. Like the antipolygamy activists, the antiprostitution reformers assumed that all women aspired to marry, raise children, and manage a home. ¹⁷⁰

      The authorities had a different view of the home's purpose and contributed to a change in its character. The city council referred the original petition to the police committee, perhaps indicating from the outset that the council envisioned a penal use. ¹⁷¹ The authorities used the home as an alternative to imprisonment, especially for young women who might still be "saved" but who would be further degraded by incarceration. Within months of its opening, the police justice "committed" an "incorrigible maid" to the home. Another woman found drunk was offered her choice of the home or jail. ¹⁷² Also rescued was seventeen-year-old Maggie Stewart, who was reportedly born in Pittsburgh and abandoned by her mother at fourteen months, then adopted by a "Samaritan" who made her "the drudge of the household." After her adopted mother's death, Maggie spent three years in an orphan's asylum before her birth mother "reclaimed" her and brought her to Butte, Montana. For unspecified reasons "then began the downward march on the path which has for its goal shame and degradation." Maggie came to Salt Lake City and worked in a variety theater until police arrested her for prostitution. The directors of the rescue home negotiated her release and brought her, "friendless, penniless and ill," to the Anchorage "where she will be tenderly cared for and nursed back to health and strength." ¹⁷³ The police justice dismissed a charge of prostitution against another woman on whose behalf the rescue workers "endeavor[ed] to secure a home." ¹⁷⁴ The U.S. attorney ordered the release of two other girls ("white, though not of the lily order") arrested for fornication with black men and brought them to the home. ¹⁷⁵

      These women's fates are unknown, but others resisted the rescuers' ministrations. A tearful nineteen-year-old named Annie Ricker told the police justice that she would give up prostitution if she could find a job to support herself and her young brother and sister. She was placed in the home, but that night a rescue worker complained that Ricker "was creating a disturbance there, and requested that she be removed forthwith." By the time the police arrived, she was gone. ¹⁷⁶

      Stories like Annie Ricker's obscure the fact that many women probably welcomed the home's assistance. A pregnant or ill unmarried woman might have few alternatives, especially if she was a penniless prostitute. Although the home's records apparently no longer exist, periodic newspaper reports indicate that at least several dozen women received much-needed childbirth services, vocational training, or medical care. The rescuers focused most of their attentions on young, presumably more easily redeemable women, although there were exceptions. Sallie Davis, a twice-married homeless woman frequently arrested for drunkenness and prostitution, reported that the mission twice tried and failed to reform her. ¹⁷⁷

      The home continued to evolve throughout its existence. In early 1899, a city ordinance "authoriz[ed] the chief of police to send any unfortunate females that may be sentenced by the police justice, to the Woman's Home or confine them in the city jail." The ordinance was interpreted to mean that a runaway from the home could be incarcerated in the city jail. ¹⁷⁸ In six years, the home had metamorphosed from a private, voluntary reformatory to a quasi-penal institution subject to municipal oversight where women could be coerced to stay. By the time that change had occurred, the rescue home had experienced severe financial troubles and a change in management.

      The home had the bad luck of being founded at the outset of the worst economic depression the nation had known. The panic of 1893 heavily damaged Utah's economy and increased competition for charitable dollars. In November a relief committee was created to help the poor, ill, and unemployed. Rev. R. G. McNiece, president of the rescue mission, reminded citizens that the new committee, although worthy, was a temporary expedient. The rescue mission did not merely feed people or provide them with work; its goal was to "reclaim the fallen and the lost." ¹⁷⁹

      The relief committee, however, attracted more attention and more prominent citizens. Perhaps because of its purely secular nature, the committee included gentiles and Mormons, including some former opponents. Its "visiting committees" included Mormons Emmeline B. Wells, editor of the Woman's Exponent, and Emily S. Tanner Richards, a longtime suffrage advocate and wife of a prominent LDS Church attorney. Non-Mormons included Isabel Cameron Brown, a former member of the Industrial Christian Home Association; the rescue home's Mary Grant Major; and Cornelia Paddock, the antipolygamy activist. The presence of former antagonists in the polygamy debate in the same organization demonstrates the extent to which "detente" prevailed in 1893 and the ability of women to cooperate once polygamy seemed settled. ¹⁸⁰

      In October 1894, a group of "Christian ladies" led by Cornelia Paddock moved to revive the rescue home, which had foundered some months earlier, probably from lack of funding. ¹⁸¹ Paddock was elected president of the "Woman's Home Association of Salt Lake City" (WHA). The other officers included more old enemies. Dr. Ellen B. Ferguson was chosen first vice president and later served as secretary. Cornelia Paddock and Ellen Ferguson seem unlikely allies, and the reasons for their cooperation are not clear. Ferguson, a convert to Mormonism, helped found Deseret Hospital and was a longtime suffrage advocate and president of the Woman's Suffrage Association. ¹⁸² Ferguson and Paddock apparently knew one another as suffrage allies and as opponents in the polygamy debate; the Anti-Polygamy Standard had attacked the LDS physician when she spoke publicly in defense of plural marriage. ¹⁸³ Both women had experience with public activism and an interest in public morality, and had long advocated a single sexual standard and the prosecution of brothel patrons. ¹⁸⁴ Ferguson told a WHA meeting that "every fallen and disgraced woman in this city is the sister of those present.... This work of rescue devolves upon women, but the men should come forward and give of their means to assist them." ¹⁸⁵ Other WHA officers included Mary I. Tisdale, later president of the Central Christian Church's Ladies Aid Society, and Mrs. Winfield S. Hawkes, a WCTU member and wife of the Congregational minister. ¹⁸⁶ While Ferguson left the WHA within the year, Tisdale and Hawkes remained active for the next four years.

      The WHA divided its reform targets into two categories. The first included those destitute, homeless, or unemployed through no fault of their own; the second, "fallen women." Cornelia Paddock and her coworkers expressed divergent attitudes toward these groups, reflecting the Victorian dichotomy between true and fallen women. Women in the first category remained "respectable" because their shortcomings were economic; they had committed no moral transgression. Fallen women, however, were at least partially responsible for their condition, and WHA rhetoric did not distinguish between prostitutes and women who had been seduced. Paddock described fallen women as "erring girls" and "hapless ones" "groping in the darkness of immorality." She evinced concern for "the miserable condition of these outcasts" who deserved a "share in the divine compassion that caused our elder brother to sweat great drops of blood." ¹⁸⁷

      Unlike her criticism of lustful Mormon men, Paddock did not publicly condemn the male customers, landlords, or seducers of these women. Nor did she publicly advocate legislative or police remedies for prostitution, let alone the kind of federal intervention she had championed in the 1880s. While antipolygamy activists had sometimes compared plural marriage with prostitution, Paddock did not invert the comparison, at least publicly. The WHA concentrated on individual women who wanted to reform (although some minors were involuntarily committed to its care). Neither Paddock nor other WHA members apparently took an explicit stand on prostitution policy, although it can be inferred that they favored abolition.

      The WHA initially attracted wide support. An early meeting attracted about one hundred people, including Protestant clergy and Mormon authorities. Rev. William D. Mabry, First M.E.; Rev. Hawkes; Wilma Burton of the Davis Deaconess Home, M.E.; and LDS elder John Henry Smith spoke for rescue. Burton complained that many women lacked necessary domestic skills: "There are women in this city who cannot properly cook a beef steak; neither do they understand the use of the needle. [Fallen women] should be instructed in these directions, in order that they may make good housewives." Mabry, Hawkes, and Smith advocated a single moral standard for men and women, a central tenet of WCTU and LDS rhetoric (although non-Mormons long had difficulty accepting the latter's sincerity, given polygyny). The speakers condemned the police and city authorities for indifference in the face of the "ruin" of young girls. ¹⁸⁸

      The rescue home received a boost from a December 1894 appearance by General William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, before a large crowd in the Mormon Tabernacle. Booth argued for vigilance to protect the morality of young people but Christian charity for those who had fallen. The WHA also benefited from its shared membership with local women's organizations. Deaconess Wilma Burton and WCTU president Helen Tibbals addressed the Woman's Suffrage Association and its president, Ellen B. Ferguson, on the city's morality. Reformers created a joint committee to lobby the Board of Police and Fire Commissioners for a police matron. ¹⁸⁹

      Meanwhile, the police were responding to citizen complaints about prostitutes on Franklin Avenue. Twenty-six "respectable women" asked that prostitutes again be moved from that street in October 1894. The police responded with a raid that netted five housekeepers and fifty-seven inmates. ¹⁹⁰ A similar petition followed from a Dr. F. Gardiner and sixteen others. ¹⁹¹ Chief Arthur Pratt preferred the women stay where they were: "To keep the prostitutes where they are now probably is an injustice to fifty persons, whereas to remove them to some other quarter would undoubtedly be extremely repugnant and equally unjust to 500 or more residents and taxpayers." Wherever they ended up, Pratt wanted prostitution "within restricted limits, properly patrolled." ¹⁹²

      Pratt was correct that any movement would bring new complaints. Owners of Commercial Street property counterpetitioned that an influx of what they euphemistically called the "present residents of Franklin avenue" would cause "great damage and almost irreparable injury." The most important signatory was the Brigham Young Trust Company. The trust company's attorney argued before the Board of Police and Fire Commissioners for the suppression of prostitution but found little support. All of the commissioners and Chief Pratt responded that suppression would only scatter fallen women, but they disagreed on where they should be segregated. Two commissioners suggested the district be moved out of the heart of the city, while two others favored keeping in women where they were. ¹⁹³

      The trust company petition coincided with yet another from Franklin Avenue. These petitioners, however, profited or sought to profit from prostitution. They asked that the city "not remove our present tenants" since "much money has been spent by us for improvements on our property on this street within the last six months with the understanding that this matter was finally settled." Dr. Gardiner had apparently experienced a change of heart (or tenant) since he joined this new action. The landlords may have realized that prostitutes paid better than other tenants. ¹⁹⁴

      Despite the above petitions, the authorities ordered all prostitutes off Franklin Avenue by 1 January 1895. This forced move, the third in sixteen months, probably caused women to lose rent payments, furniture, and other property. The collector of water rates shut off service to several women who refused to pay water taxes until they found "undisturbed anchorage" elsewhere. ¹⁹⁵ The cautious commissioners denied they told police to force the women to any particular location. Chief Pratt claimed he "ordered at least a dozen of the leading ones" to stay off Commercial Street and advised many to leave town. ¹⁹⁶ Commercial, however, was the logical destination and at least two madams quickly moved there. Essie Watkins moved to the former Times building with six women, and Gussie Blake came to Commercial with five more. Their presence was particularly embarrassing for some city authorities. Chief Pratt was part-owner of the Times building, while Blake secured property belonging to a bank whose president, O. J. Salisbury, was a former president of the Board of Police and Fire Commissioners. The attorney for the Brigham Young Trust Company complained that the company had spent $60,000 to refurbish a building on Commercial and was having difficulty finding respectable tenants.

      The dispute reopened old antagonisms. The Tribune recalled that the company had long rented to prostitutes, while the Mormon press emphasized the presence of prostitutes in gentile-owned buildings. ¹⁹⁷ The women themselves were caught in the crossfire. Watkins, Blake, and their women were arrested; within a week, Watkins moved to a former Kate Flint property, where she stayed for two years. The experienced Essie predicted no change in prostitution policy: "I am not going to do any business until this affair blows over, ... but when houses open again I shall open and try to make money again. I imagine that I will have to remain quiet for about three months, and then everything will go on as usual. Till then I am going to live decent." ¹⁹⁸ Watkins returned to operate briefly on Commercial Street in late 1897. ¹⁹⁹

      Gussie Blake was more persistent and faced more determined legal action. A U.S. marshal charged her with keeping a house of prostitution and selling liquor without a license. Blake was convicted of the liquor violation, but she continued to operate, leading the Brigham Young Trust Company to swear out more complaints. The pressure was evidently successful, as Blake disappeared from the records. ²⁰⁰

      The latest "cleansing" of Franklin Avenue resulted in a temporary decline in the number of prostitutes and the relocation of some women. ²⁰¹ As usual, the discreet and orderly houses in Block 57 were unaffected. The cautious Helen Blazes remained on Franklin and was arrested in early February. Blazes told the police justice that she was "simply awaiting there until such time as the matter of the demi-monde's destination is decided." She eventually settled into Sadie Noble's former house at 166 ¹ /2 west South Temple before establishing her long residence at 7 Victoria Place. ²⁰²

      Throughout this time, the Woman's Home Association also struggled to find a home. Cornelia Paddock complained that the WHA had searched for nine months and interviewed the owners of some thirty houses but had been unable to find one who would rent a building. She must have been frustrated by her inability to offer refuge to displaced Franklin Avenue women. In the interim, the WHA proposed to open sewing rooms for destitute women and extracted a promise from the laundry association to employ women from the association in preference to other applicants. ²⁰³ A year later, Paddock reported that financial troubles continued to hinder the association in "caring for erring girls," but some women had been helped. "Sixteen fallen girls have been sent to us to be cared for, or have come of their own accord"; eight were sent to Ogden to the "Home of [or "for"] the Friendless," a WCTU-run rescue institution; two were "earning their own living in respectable places"; four were "returned to their friends"; one "of unsound mind" was turned over to county authorities; and one was "under our care in this city." The report did not specify whether these "erring girls" were prostitutes or simply unmarried pregnant women. ²⁰⁴

      The rescue effort received a boost only days after this report. Charles Nelson Crittenton, a wealthy evangelist who helped found a chain of homes for unwed mothers named for his deceased infant daughter Florence, addressed some four thousand in the Mormon Tabernacle. Crittenton claimed a 25 to 30 percent success rate in reforming fallen women. He donated $500 to an Ogden woman and the "Home of the Friendless" became part of the National Florence Crittenton Mission. ²⁰⁵

      The WHA operated in association with the bolstered Ogden home, which served all of Utah, and Paddock became a member of the Ogden organization. The Salt Lake organization finally established its own "rescue station and home of the friendless" by April 1896. ²⁰⁶ Paddock appealed frequently for material assistance, but emphasized the spiritual as well. She explained to one audience that education and training, while important, could not save fallen girls; only "a touch of the divine hand" could do that. One girl had been taken from jail and "saved" before dying, while another whose mother had "sold her into a life of shame and iniquity" had been healed in body and soul and sent to California to keep her away from her mother. ²⁰⁷

      Despite funding problems, the rescuers actively sought out subjects. Paddock attended the trial of two girls under sixteen charged with soliciting and volunteered to place them in the Ogden home, to which all agreed. ²⁰⁸ Some women, however, showed no inclination to accept the promise of respectability training. Paddock and another woman attended the trial of fifty-eight women arrested in a mass raid. The judge announced that "the ladies were present to offer homes and respectable employment to all who would abandon their life of sin," but there were no takers. ²⁰⁹ One woman, the mother of a ten-month-old child, complained that the rescue workers could not offer a job that would support her family and chose jail instead, evidence to a reporter of "the total depravity of some of these unfortunate sisters of sin." ²¹⁰

      At her trial, Bertha Brown was defiant to the point of appearing "enfeebled" in mind and morals. She told Paddock "I'll be of age in one month, ... and then I'm going to be a thoroughbred, see!" The judge, however, committed her to the care of the WHA. Brown's experience further demonstrated the dual (if not contradictory) nature of the rescue home. When she became violent and attempted to run away, the matron turned her over to the police. Paddock emphasized that "we have no bolts or bars to keep any girl, but we generally find the law of kindness strong enough to hold those who are brought to us. Moreover, we never let any girl go. If we find it impossible to keep her, we turn her over to the authorities." ²¹¹

      Little evidence exists of what motivated these women to reject the WHA's aid, but economics are the likeliest explanation. Despite prostitution's dangers, it did hold out the promise of substantial earnings. Some women may also have preferred the relative freedom and independence of brothel life compared to the domestic sphere. Historian Ruth Rosen notes that prostitutes often expressed contempt for respectable culture and a preference for their own. ²¹² Some women may have chosen the madam's version of maternalism over the strict isolation and discipline offered at the rescue home.

      The WHA continued to struggle with a low profile and public indifference, in spite of Paddock's appeals. A handful of Sisters of the Good Shepherd came to Salt Lake City in late 1896 to found a Magdalen Home "to care for and protect poor, frail, misguided and misdirected girls who have no homes and who are ostracized by the world." The Herald, perhaps indicating Mormon antipathy toward Cornelia Paddock, claimed "no such institution has before been established in our midst." Little further evidence of this home has been found. ²¹³

      Paddock and other reformers sought also to prevent women from "falling." A number of overlapping reform efforts began in Salt Lake City in the 1890s and gained momentum in the new century. Some continued the tradition of Protestant evangelical-based moral reform, while other avowedly secular groups advocated environmental changes to solve the city's perceived problems. These reform efforts were part of the vast, amorphous national reform climate known as "progressivism." ²¹⁴

      The unwillingness of the Board of Police and Fire Commissioners to suppress prostitution inspired one reform effort. Former chief of police Arthur Pratt's effort to regain his office sheds light on the workings of the board and the class bias of chastity policing. Mayor Glendinning fired Pratt in 1896, reportedly because of his "failure to enforce the laws against gambling and prostitution" and his refusal to divulge the names of two rendezvousing lovers arrested two years earlier. Detectives observed the two in a hack several times and finally arrested them. Pratt sent the woman home since she was "the wife of a well-known business man, a woman of prominence in social circles, ... [and] the mother of a family." ²¹⁵ Such consideration was seldom extended to working-class lovers and certainly not to prostitutes.

      The ex-chief took legal action to compel his reinstatement. Pratt testified that from its inception until 1896, the majority of the board had ordered him to regulate rather than suppress vice. Even when the board, at Glendinning's urging, ordered the crackdown of February 1896, some members came to Pratt and requested that he refrain from total suppression. Three commissioners consistently opposed abolition, especially Worden P. Noble, who told Pratt he "wanted [brothels] to run; did not want to live in a town that did not have them; he said he owned over $150,000 worth of property, and it would ruin the town if they did not have them." Commissioner Frank B. Stephens, who had earlier expressed sympathy for prostitutes and advocated the arrest of customers and owners, supported the crackdown on gambling but not prostitution. ²¹⁶ The Utah Supreme Court reinstated Pratt in 1897. ²¹⁷

      The Pratt controversy sparked debate about prostitution. Rev. Frank Lockwood, M.E., declared that officials told him "it was the policy of the city simply to divide with these women their revenue." The disgusted minister urged the creation of a "civic federation, or a good citizens' league" to combat prostitution. ²¹⁸ The police chief responded that regulation kept the city "freer from the outward evidence of vice than almost any other city of its size in the country." The police board chairman boasted that Salt Lake was "the best regulated city of its size in the country, ... you will never see women of bad character plying their calling, and show me another city of this size where such is not the case." ²¹⁹

      Other clergymen took up Lockwood's call for a campaign against vice. ²²⁰ Reformers founded the Salt Lake City Municipal League, "an influential, non-partisan, non-sectarian association, embracing all the forces that are now laboring to advance the municipal, philanthropic and moral interests" through "investigation, publication, agitation and organization, together with the exercise of every moral influence needed." The league's officers crossed religious lines and included veterans of both sides of the polygamy debate. The reluctant president, Henry W. Lawrence, was a businessman and an ex-Mormon. ²²¹ City attorney William McKay stated that the league needed to convince two members of the police board, Louis Cohn and Worden Noble, that they were wrong about brothels being "an absolute necessity in this city from a business standpoint." ²²²

      The commissioners voted to extend all assistance to the league but pointedly asked that body to make formal charges backed by proof of corruption or malfeasance. McKay challenged the board to explain its policy toward Ada Wilson's plush new "Palace" brothel, which had opened a few months before in a Brigham Young Trust Company building on Commercial Street. The city attorney claimed to have received an invitation to a "grand opening ball," but despite his complaints to the board, the house was still running. McKay claimed the only change made in the Palace's debut was the transformation of the "grand opening ball" into a "reception." ²²³ Heber J. Grant and other high-ranking LDS officials also received Ada Wilson's invitations to her opening ball. According to Anthon Lund's diary, they were "astonished to find that they had been [emphasis mine] in a regular whore-house." Lund's phraseology is intriguing; did the Palace appear so respectable they did not know it was a brothel? ²²⁴

      The Palace caused consternation within the trust company as well. According to the Tribune, since its successful campaign against Gussie Blake and Essie Watkins the company had attempted to rent or lease only to legitimate businesses, with few takers and a resultant financial loss. The directors decided to strike the "moral clause" from its leases, which stated that the company could break the lease if a tenant carried on immoral or illegal business. Company president George Q. Cannon and two directors argued against this change but were outvoted. The building was subleased to Ada Wilson. Wilson reportedly spent $15,000 to fit out the building as a brothel; B. Y. Hampton claimed (improbably) that it was the biggest west of New York. The building had some unlikely tenants. The Palace shared the second floor with the Gospel Relief Mission; by 1905, the relief mission had moved to another ex-brothel: no. 5 Plum Alley, formerly Malvina Beauchamp's "Big V." ²²⁵

      The Palace became grist for the Municipal League. Rev. Lockwood complained that five hundred invitations had been issued to the opening, "scores of these to boys under 18, requesting their presence from 8 in the evening to 4 in the morning." ²²⁶ Two years later, Populist-turned-Socialist Warren Foster scolded LDS Salt Lake Stake president Angus Cannon for ignoring the brothel. ²²⁷ Another minister reported that when Wilson heard that the city's ministers were condemning her, she snapped "let the preachers be damned." ²²⁸ The madam's arrogance was justified: she knew that her prominent landlords would protect her from sporadic reform efforts, and indeed her house ran openly for the next decade. ²²⁹

      Supporters of regulation argued that if prostitution was abolished, women who wished to reform had no place to go. Cornelia Paddock challenged that assumption, writing in 1897 that the rescue home had already "received and cared for thirty-four women and girls belonging to the class of which these papers say that the Christians of Salt Lake will not lift a finger to help them." The home was always crowded, and Paddock noted that the WHA could care for more women if it could afford a larger house. The Municipal League recognized her efforts; by April 1897, she was serving on its philanthropic committee. ²³⁰

      From its inception, the league proposed to enter politics. One female member appealed to women to bring "the home influence" to bear as a purifying agent in politics. ²³¹ The Populist Party nominated Henry W. Lawrence for mayor on a platform containing league priorities, including the "rigid enforcement of all laws" concerning prostitution, but the nonpartisan John Clark won the city in November 1897. ²³² Clark promised to end the "miserable failure" of the Board of Police and Fire Commissioners, which was allowed to expire on 1 January 1898. Control of the police reverted to the mayor and council, who continued to practice regulation. The Municipal League lost public support and faded before being revived in the early 1900s. ²³³

      Cornelia Paddock and other activists continued their quieter efforts. "Social purity" advocates across the country fought perceived immorality on a number of fronts. For example, they waged a campaign to raise the age of consent for women. ²³⁴ Utah's legislature raised its age from fourteen to eighteen in 1896 at the urging of lobbyists, including Emmeline B. Wells. ²³⁵ Paddock used the new law to pursue legal action against a man accused of fathering a child with a sixteen-year-old orphan who took refuge at the WHA home. ²³⁶ Paddock also fought the saloon. She told an audience that alcohol was "the worst factor in the ruin of young girls" and called on mothers to prevent their daughters from "buying beer, entering Chinese joints or risking other perils of life." ²³⁷ In a case that may illustrate divergent cultural values between immigrants and a native-born evangelical Protestant, Paddock stopped a child on the street with a pail of beer. A saloonkeeper admitted selling it to the minor but argued that the child's father, a Polish Jew, had told him to sell the child beer. The saloonkeeper was fined $25 and had to post a bond. ²³⁸

      Most of Paddock's energies were devoted to rescue work. In September 1897, she reported that seven children had been born at the WHA Home since May. Paddock noted that sickness was so rampant that "our station has been a veritable hospitable [sic]." The WHA received free medical care from Drs. Luella Miles, James N. Harrison, and John A. Hensel. ²³⁹ Cornelia Paddock's work, however, was cut short. She died on 26 January 1898 after an operation for uterine cancer. Ironically, her death raised the profile of the WHA and probably extended its life. Eulogists noted that she had often carried on the rescue work almost alone, and remorse over this fact seemed to contribute to an outpouring of support, although some Mormons still resented her antipolygamy activism. ²⁴⁰ Shortly after her death, two workers from the national WCTU helped raise over $200 for the home. ²⁴¹ They gave two presentations on social purity in the assembly hall, one each to women and men. Emmeline B. Wells presided at the women's meeting, and the speakers included Lulu Loveland Shepard, a schoolteacher and local WCTU officer who would become increasingly involved in purity reform. The speakers emphasized the importance of continuing Paddock's efforts in the face of municipal indifference. ²⁴²

      The WHA renamed its house "The Cornelia Paddock Rescue Home" and chose Anna C. Plummer, a schoolteacher and wife of a surgeon, as its new president. The rescuers petitioned the council's police committee for an increase in the monthly appropriation from $50 to $100 (the appropriation had been halved during the financial panic). Newly restored chief of police Arthur Pratt spoke highly of the home "as an adjunct to the department, as a place where young girls and other women not hopelessly lost could be sent without having to go to jail." The committee appropriated $75, with the proviso that the chief be granted the power to commit juvenile offenders to the home. ²⁴³ By early 1899, the home's directors were reporting a sounder financial picture. The home had cared for twenty girls, experienced five births, one death, and one marriage, and placed seven girls in respectable homes in the previous ten months. ²⁴⁴

      Just as the home seemed to gain a secure footing, it began to experience a different kind of trouble. Neighbors complained to the council about "scandalous actions," including the correspondence between "two youths of respectable families" and "a tough young inmate, planning as to her future actions when she should be released." A councilman suggested that the home, which was "in one sense, a place of detention," be moved away from densely populated areas and kept isolated and guarded. ²⁴⁵ Fifteen-year-old Bertie Todd, committed to the home after her mother complained of her "incorrigibility," testified to the bad influence of some women: "I never knew how bad girls could become until I entered the home. There is vulgarity everywhere and some of the girls at the home ought not to be allowed to live. For myself, I'd rather go to jail, the penitentiary or the Reform school rather than to return to the home. My godmother has promised to take good care of me, and I am willing to work as hard as I can, but please don't send me back there." Bertie was released and allowed to live with her godmother. ²⁴⁶

      The home's directors sought "better and more isolated quarters" in the southeastern part of the city, but each proposed site drew criticism from residents. One exasperated minister complained "there is room enough for houses of prostitution, which bring these girls into lives of shame, but there is no room for a home which would surround them with Christain [sic] influences; with environments which would be entirely wholesome." ²⁴⁷ Rev. William Paden concluded that the home "must find a community that was so respectable that rescuing the lost would not hurt it, or a community so disrespectable that rescuing the lost would not hurt it." He suggested that as the first option seemed to be failing, Commercial Street would meet the second. A home there would not only save individual women but would also "drive the evil from the street." The WHA was unable to find a suitable location, however, probably due to the high rents that prostitutes and other businesspeople could pay. ²⁴⁸

      Not all citizens approved of the WHA's mission. One man suggested that "falling" was permanent, unforgivable, and genetic. Rescue homes put "a premium on illegal motherhood.... The soiled offender knows she will be cared for, a good home will be found for her offspring with its hereditary dower of vile tendencies, and she, in spite of all that is done for her, will return, renovated and refreshed, to her paths of vice." Better that the money be used for (unspecified) preventive measures. ²⁴⁹

      Some reformers agreed that prevention was the best solution. While the WHA searched for a home, the local WCTU promoted social purity. Several WCTU members supported the WHA, including Sarah Reed and Lulu Shepard. The Salt Lake WCTU called for the arrest of prostitutes' customers rather than the "one-sided morality" that punished only women. Their demand echoed the national organization's call for a single sexual standard, the "white life for two" which Frances Willard advocated. ²⁵⁰ A WCTU committee that met with Chief of Police Thomas Hilton made little headway, eliciting instead a defense of the double standard and regulation. The reformers complained that only women had been arrested in a recent wine room raid; Hilton responded that they were all fallen women there to "roll" drunken men. When the WCTU women suggested publishing the names of men found with prostitutes, Hilton appealed to their mutual Christianity: such a course would only bring shame and disgrace to "wives and little ones." To the union proposal that houses be abolished, the chief advocated instead the "isolation and concentration" of brothels. Hilton concluded patronizingly that the reformers' "hearts were all right, but their ideas were not practical." ²⁵¹

      The WCTU was interested in more than rescue work in 1899. At the social purity meeting, Shepard also condemned the election of Brigham H. Roberts to Congress. Roberts was known to have plural wives, and some gentiles (and some Mormons) argued that his election violated the Woodruff Manifesto and the conditions for Utah statehood. The House of Representatives eventually denied Roberts his seat, and the controversy eased. Shepard's stance portended her future anti-Mormon activities and made problematic her cooperation with Mormon reformers. ²⁵²

      The rescue home never did find a suitable location. Former police justice W. W. Gee opened his own house to the WHA in January 1900, but that brought another petition for removal. One opponent declared that the home was a bad influence on his children and grandchildren and vowed to protect them from women whose "own parents could not keep them in the straight and narrow path" and who were now being cared for by women with "mistaken ideas." Supporters crashed the opposition meeting to argue the home's merits. Henrietta Gee, the judge's wife, drew on well-worn arguments when she declared it "ridiculously inconsistent of men to protest at the presence of a Rescue Home when those same men were married to four women and spending their time begetting illegitimate children." ²⁵³

      By June 1900, the WHA had new quarters. This time angry neighbors not only petitioned the council, garnering 243 names, but threatened to have the home abated as a nuisance. While the city attorney rejected such a prosecution unless proof was offered of its lewd nature, the action forced yet another move. In December the WHA abandoned the effort and turned over its effects to the Salvation Army. That organization had little better luck. Citing continued opposition, Charlotte Mathis, the officer in charge, announced the home's closure in 1902. Mathis regretted the loss of the institution that had helped many women to be restored to their families, find work, or make "noble, self-sacrificing wives." The redeemed women "ma[d]e good Christians who are zealous in trying to bring the happiness of a pure life to others." ²⁵⁴

      The failure of rescue demonstrated the continued strength of regulation and was in fact ironically consistent with the city's policy toward prostitution. The neighbors of the rescue home did not see a pure, Christian, maternal refuge, but rather a disorderly resort full of fallen women that threatened to corrupt their children and injure their property values, and they demanded that it be segregated and strictly regulated. The rescue home did not even provide the economic benefits that brothels did. The brothel district stayed and prospered, while Salt Lake City's rescue home faltered. ²⁵⁵

      The failure of rescue also demonstrated the relative impotence of voluntary actions. Despite widespread publicity, support from many community leaders, and their own hard work, antiprostitution reformers were chronically underfunded and able to reach only a handful of the many women who needed or wanted their help. Although voluntary associations continued to attempt to influence conditions, reformers increasingly turned to the state to solve the city's moral problems.

      Prostitution continued to be a matter of sporadic concern. In late 1902, a miner named Daniel Ryan was found dead in an outhouse on Victoria Alley. Authorities concluded that a pair of African American crib women accidentally killed Ryan with a dose of morphine in a robbery attempt. Reporters and reformers flocked to the alley and were aghast to discover conditions on the street that had been the heart of the prostitution district for three decades. ²⁵⁶ They expressed the same mix of condemnation and sympathy that rescuers offered fallen women. One reporter found a "babel of blasphemy, a sink of debauchery" "redolent of the stained souls of the inmates." ²⁵⁷ The presence of young boys particularly horrified the respectable. One prostitute supposedly preferred youths since "it takes no morphine in beer or rough treatment to get [the money]; they give up easily and are glad of permission to enter my house." ²⁵⁸ A few people, however, sympathized with the women driven to sell sex in such wretched conditions. One observer condemned the cribs' owner, Joseph J. Snell, and the city for extorting rent and fine money respectively. ²⁵⁹

      Lulu Shepard and the WCTU spearheaded an investigation of the alley, supported by the Ministerial Association, which represented the city's Protestant clergy, and the LDS Church. LDS president Joseph F. Smith appointed businessman B. F. Grant and John Hansen, city editor of the Deseret Evening News, to a "moral purity" committee which included Frank B. Stephens and other prominent gentiles. The committee found that conditions were indeed bad, although perhaps not as bad as the papers claimed. ²⁶⁰

      Joseph Snell counted on the authorities' regulation policy to protect him. He noted that with neighbors like Helen Blazes at 7 Victoria, Ida Walker at 243 south Main Street, and the women of 222 south State, he could hardly expect to rent to respectable tenants. ²⁶¹ Snell failed to mention that police regularly arrested those women but never him. Remarkably, even with attention focused on the alley, no reformer publicly condemned those other brothels steps from Snell's cribs. Mayor Ezra Thompson defended regulation: "If those dives must exist in the city, it is better to have them all bunched together and under strict police supervision." ²⁶² Lulu Shepard's investigation proved in vain; between the strength of the regulation interests and renewed Mormon-gentile antagonism, Victoria Alley was soon forgotten. Five years later, Snell still rented cribs and still defended himself by pointing to other brothels. Complaints from neighbors, and from the crib workers themselves concerning high daily rents, led the police to close five of "the most disreputable resorts" (a move that would have scarcely improved the crib women's lot). ²⁶³ Despite a murder, publicity, investigations, sermons, and petitions, women were still selling sex in Snell's cribs in 1908. ²⁶⁴ Instead of suppression, police captain John B. Burbidge proposed a new and stricter version of the regulationist system:

There is no question but that these women should be removed from the district which they now occupy.... The only thing that prevents this being done is the fact that we have no place to put them. Although they are violating the law and could be punished for their offense and, I suppose, be prevented from plying their trade, such a course would be impracticable in a city the size of Salt Lake.... We are now searching for a place to which we can remove these women. They should be removed from Commercial street and Victoria alley to some place centrally located in order that it might be well policed and at the same time far enough away from the respectable business center. ²⁶⁵

      1. Larson, "Americanization" of Utah.

      2. Hobson, Uneasy Virtue, p. 47. On regulation, see Pivar, Purity Crusade, pp. 13-17; Haller and Haller, Physician and Sexuality in Victorian America, pp. 238-42; and D'Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, pp. 111-16.

      3. Firmage and Mangrum, Zion in the Courts, pp. 214-16.

      4. Appendix B: "Ordinances of the High Council," in Morgan, State of Deseret.

      5. Territory of Utah, Territorial Ordinances of Utah (1851), sec. 20, 24; in Morgan, State of Deseret, pp. 216-17.

      6. Mackey, Red Lights Out, pp. 28-121.

      7. "An Ordinance in Relation to Offences," Book A, Salt Lake City Council Ordinances (1858), part 1, sec. 9.

      8. "An Ordinance in Relation to Offences," Book A, Salt Lake City Council Ordinances (1858), part 2, sec. 14.

      9. Peterson, "Mormon Reformation"; Quinn, Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power, pp. 142, 181, 246, 24This code was adopted 20 Mar. 1858, two days after the decision was made to abandon Salt Lake City. See Arrington and Bitton, Mormon Experience, p. 168.

      10. "An Ordinance Relating to Houses of Ill-fame and Prostitution," Book B, Salt Lake City Council Ordinances (1860), sec. 1.

      11. "An Ordinance Relating to Houses of Ill-fame and Prostitution," Book C, Salt Lake City Council Ordinances (1877), sec. 1, 3.

      12. Utah, Compiled Laws (1876), sec. 138, 166. See also Mackey, Red Lights Out, p. 123.

      13. See Campbell, "Governmental Beginnings," p. 154; Gleason, "Salt Lake City Police Department," p. 13; "An Ordinance Authorising a City Police," Book A, Salt Lake City Council Ordinances (1851); Book A, Salt Lake City Council Ordinances, p. 31; "An Ordinance Authorizing a City Police and Defining the Duties of Policemen," Book B, Salt Lake City Council Ordinances (1860); Salt Lake City, Great Salt Lake City Charter and Amendments, Revised Ordinances (1875), sec. 5; and "An Ordinance in Relation to the Police," Book C, Salt Lake City Council Ordinances (1884). See also Alexander and Allen, Mormons and Gentiles, p. 107; and Carpenter, Souvenir History of the Salt Lake Fire Department, table 21, p. 95.

      14. Monkonnen, Police in Urban America, p. 10.

      15. Gleason, "Salt Lake City Police Department," pp. 63, 217; Abraham H. Cannon Diaries, 5:133, photocopy in JWM. On police training, see Monkonnen, Police in Urban America, pp. 1-11.

      16. Similar courts existed throughout the nation; see Mackey, Red Lights Out, p. 76.

      17. Tullidge, History of Salt Lake City, pp. 241-42. See also "Salt Lake City Council Minutes," Book B, pp. 106-7, 15 Sept. 1858.

      18. Historicus, "Offences in 1882."

      19. See Gleason, "Salt Lake City Police Department," pp. 19-33; Alexander and Allen, Mormons and Gentiles, pp. 52-55, 66. On disorderly young men throughout the West, see Dykstra, Cattle Towns, pp. 239-92; R. White, "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own," pp. 328-32.

      20. Salt Lake City Herald, 22 Jan. 1879, in JH, 22 Jan. 1879.

      21. Alexander and Allen, Mormons and Gentiles, pp. 132-33.

      22. For example, see Abraham H. Cannon Diaries, 11:140-42.

      23. For example, see Brigham Young, 27 Aug. 1871, Journal of Discourses, 14: 224-5.

      24. Herald, 5 June 1886.

      25. Salt Lake City Daily Tribune, 9 June 1886.

      26. Salt Lake City Goodwin's Weekly, 3 Jan. 1903, in JH, 3 Jan. 1903.

      27. Diary of Wilford Woodruff, 25 Sept. 1890, quoted in Arrington and Bitton, Mormon Experience, p. 183.

      28. D'Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, pp. 79-80, 111-15.

      29. Tribune, 15 Nov. 1889.

      30. In the late 1870s, for instance, police arrested thirty-six women for "keeping a house of ill fame," twelve for "prostitution," fifty-four for "being the inmate of a house of ill fame," four for "lewd and lascivious conduct," one for "renting a house for prostitution," and one for "lewd and lascivious conduct and prostitution." Police arrested four men for "keeping," five for "prostitution," one for being an "inmate," six for "renting," and eight for "lewd and lascivious conduct and prostitution." No men were identified as patrons. "Police, Record 1875-1878." For similar patterns, see "Police, Record 1871-1875," Salt Lake City Fifth Precinct Court, "J. P. Docket Book, Feb. 1880-Jan. 1884"; Salt Lake City Fifth Precinct Court, "J. P. Docket Book, July 1886-Oct. 1890." This study does not address same-sex prostitution. The context suggests that many men arrested as "prostitutes" were probably patrons. D. Michael Quinn discovered clear evidence of male prostitution in Salt Lake City; see Same-Sex Dynamics, pp. 316-20.

      31. Pivar, Purity Crusade, pp. 13-17.

      32. Parent-Duchatelet, De la prostitution, 2:513; quoted in Corbin, Women for Hire, p. 4. See also Harsin, Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Paris, pp. 96-130; and Corbin, p. 9.

      33. For example, see Gibson, Prostitution and the State in Italy, pp. 13-37.

      34. Tribune, 23 Feb. 1898.

      35. See, for example, Tribune, 26 Jan. 1904; Herald, 7 Sept. 1907. On police and prostitution, see M. Haller, "Historical Roots of Police Behavior," p. 316; Fogelson, Big-City Police, pp. 20-21; and Harring, Policing a Class Society, pp. 191-95.

      36. Smith-Rosenberg, "Beauty, the Beast, and the Militant Woman," in Disorderly Conduct, pp. 109-28; Hobson, Uneasy Virtue, pp. 51-76.

      37. D'Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, pp. 143-50; Smith-Rosenberg, "Abortion Movement and the AMA, 1850-1880," in Disorderly Conduct, pp. 217-44; Sanger, History of Prostitution; Hobson, Uneasy Virtue, pp. 86-100; Acton, Prostitution Considered, cited in Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, pp. 42-47.

      38. Pivar, Purity Crusade, pp. 88-99.

      39. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, passim.

      40. Pivar, Purity Crusade, pp. 50-56; Burnham, "Social Evil Ordinance"; Wunsch, "Social Evil Ordinance."

      41. Salt Lake City Deseret Evening News, 26 Apr. 1876, in JH, 26 Apr. 1876.

      42. Brigham Y. Hampton Diary, pp. 241-Hampton is wrong on the facts or the chronology; he says he leased to Bamberger on 1 Aug., but the lease from Bamberger to Elsie Anderson (alias St. Omar) was executed on 12 July 1890; see Salt Lake County Recorder, "Lease and Lien Book L," lease, pp. 299-301, filed 14 July 1890. For Elsie St. Omar's career as a madam, see Tribune, 23 Aug. 1890; and SLCPD, "Arrest Register, 1891-94," 7 Feb. 1891, 3-4; 30 Apr. 1891, 28; 7 Aug. 1891, 56; 28 Oct. 1891, 79; 21 June 1892, 134.

      43. Brigham Y. Hampton Diary, pp. 241-42, and Tribune, 15 Sept. 1891.

      44. Brigham Y. Hampton Diary, p. 242. See also "Liens and Leases, Book O," lease, pp. 540-41, 10 Nov. 1891; and People et al. v. Brigham Y. Hampton, case no. 830 (3d dist. criminal case files, 1892). For the company, see Brigham Young Trust Company Records, file no. 853, Corporation Files, Salt Lake County Clerk.

      45. People v. Hampton, case no. 830; People et al. v. Emma Whiting, case no. 832 (3d dist. criminal case files, 1892).

      46. Brigham Y. Hampton Diary, p. 240.

      47. "An Ordinance Relating to Houses of Ill-fame and Prostitution," Book C, Salt Lake City Council Ordinances (1877), sec. 3.

      48. See, for example, Tribune, 9 Nov. 1889, 31 Jan. 1897.

      49. Brigham Y. Hampton Diary, pp. 241-48; Brigham Young Trust Company Records.

      50. Arrington, "Commercialization of Utah's Economy"; and Alexander, "Temporal Kingdom," chap. in Mormonism in Transition. On the Chamber of Commerce, see Arrington, Fox, and May, Building the City of God, p. 333.

      51. Conway v. Clinton et al., case no. 586 (3d dist. civil case files, 1877). For high rents, see Tribune, 28 Nov. 1894.

      52. Tribune, 3 June 1897.

      53. For 1886, see Tribune, 16 Feb. 1887. For 1890, see Tribune, 28 Jan. 1891. For 1891, see "Annual Reports of the Officers of Salt Lake City, Utah Territory, 1892," p. 136; Tribune, 1 Jan. 1892. For 1904, see "Annual Reports of the Officers of Salt Lake City, 1904," pp. 29-30.

      54. For crackdowns on men, see Salt Lake City v. Victor La Grasle, case no. 679 (3d dist. criminal case files, 1901); Tribune, 3 Feb. 1901; Herald, 30 Oct. 1901, 29 Apr. 1903. For black men, see Tribune, 7 Feb. 1900; Herald, 1 May 1903. Some accused the police of trying to force out black voters associated with R. Bruce Johnson; see Herald, 4, 12 Aug., 5 Sept. 1903.

      55. For quarterly assessment, see SLCPD, "Arrest Register, 1891-94," pp. 1-228, passim; for monthly, see pp. 228-464, passim.

      56. SLCPD, "Arrest Register, 1896-99," passim.

      57. See, for instance, Salt Lake City Herald-Republican, 16 Jan. 1912.

      58. Tribune, 7 Sept. 1898.

      59. Tribune, 2 June 1899.

      60. Tribune, 9 June 1891.

      61. Tribune, 8 Dec. 1891.

      62. Tribune, 29 Jan. 1896.

      63. See, for example, the jury trials won by Irene Mudd and Mary Langary, SLCPC, "Book of Miscellaneous Offenses, 1893-5," pp. 130-32, 10 Mar. 1894.

      64. Tribune, 22, 23 May 1891.

      65. Salt Lake City Living Issues, 15 Oct. 1897.

      66. Tribune, 1, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11 Dec. 1891.

      67. SLCPC, "Book of Miscellaneous Offenses, 1893-5," p. 272, 14 Aug. 1894; and "Arrest Register, 1891-94," passim.

      68. Tribune, 30 Aug. 1891.

      69. Tribune, 24 Apr., 21 Aug. 1894; Herald, 6, 7 Mar. 1901.

      70. Tribune, 28 Mar. 1897.

      71. Herald, 15 Dec. 1902.

      72. Herald, 25 Aug. 1893.

      73. Herald, 10 Oct. 1901.

      74. Herald, 11 May 1892, 7 Aug. 1907.

      75. Tribune, 19 Mar. 1890; Deseret Evening News, 19 Mar. 1890; Salt Lake City Death Records, death certificate no. 15877, p. 397.

      76. "Arrest Register, 1891-94" and "Arrest Register, 1896-99," passim. "Miss No Name" was arrested on 2 Aug. 1894, and described as "Am < Cold" (American Colored) and a "sport," a common all-purpose designation for prostitutes, gamblers, and vagrants of both sexes. For "A China Woman," see "Police, Record 1871-1875," 11 Mar. 1873, pp. 220-21. An example of the casual attitude that reporters and policemen took toward names: "Zula Ashbury," "Zula Azhburg" ("Arrest Register, 1891-94," p. 271, 22 Dec. 1893); "Zella Ashberry" ("Arrest Register, 1891-94," p. 245, 7 Aug. 1893); "Zella Ashbury" (Tribune, 9 Aug. 1893); "Lulu Ashburg" (Tribune, 23 Dec. 1893); "Zulu Ashley" (Tribune, 6 Nov. 1894); "Zula Ashburg," People v. Nellie Davis, case no. 1190 (3d dist. criminal case files, 1895); and "Zula Anderson" (Herald, 16 Jan. 1895); all are likely the same African American woman.

      77. Tribune, 20, 23 Sept., 22 Oct. 1896.

      78. Tribune, 10 Dec. 1897. On the 24th Infantry, see Clark, "History of the Twenty-Fourth United States Infantry Regiment in Utah"; and Nichols, "African-American Soldiers and Civilians in the News."

      79. Tribune, 20 June 1899.

      80. Tribune, 3 June 1899.

      81. Tribune, 29 Dec. 1898.

      82. Mackey, Red Lights Out, pp. 31-76, 143-54.

      83. Matthews, Rise of Public Woman, pp. 3-4; D'Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, pp. 130-37.

      84. Tribune, 22 Oct. 1892.

      85. Tribune, 18 Dec. 1890.

      86. Tribune, 17 Jan. 1893.

      87. Tribune, 9 Sept. 1899.

      88. Tribune, 28 May 1890.

      89. Herald, 1 July 1909.

      90. Tribune, 2 Feb., 20, 21 Mar. 1893.

      91. Tribune, 3 Mar. 1893.

      92. Quote from Kingsley v. Salt Lake Dramatic Company, case no. 11774 (3d dist. civil case files, 1893); Beauchamp v. Salt Lake Dramatic Company, case no. 11780 (3d dist. civil case files, 1893); and Tribune, 7 Mar., 9, 23 Apr. 1893.

      93. Tribune, 5 Mar. 18

      94. Peiss, Cheap Amusements, p. 66.

      95. Tribune, 7 Feb. 1896. For other examples, see Tribune, 7 Feb. 1891; 25 Feb. 1894; 4 Jan. 18

      96. Tribune, 7 Feb. 18

      97. Annual Message of the Mayor with the Annual Reports of the Officers of Salt Lake City, Utah, for the year 1889, p. 92; Annual Message of the Mayor with the Annual Reports of the Officers of Salt Lake City, Utah, for the year 1895, p. 42. Police court clerk Charles B. Glenn insisted that the fines were not licenses and were handled properly (Tribune, 2 Nov. 1891), but Glenn absconded with about $900 in fines (Tribune, 15, 18 Jan. 1893).

      98. Tribune, 10 Oct. 1886.

      99. Utah Constitutional Convention, 1895, Official Report of the Proceedings and Debates, 2:469. See also Ivins, "Constitution for Utah," pp. 103-6; and J. White, "Woman's Place Is in the Constitution."

      100. Tribune, 6 Nov. 1899.

      101. Herald, 3 Nov. 1901.

      102. For Johnson as "boss of the white slaves," see Herald, 27 Oct. 1903. See also Herald, 6 Jan., 28 Oct. 1903. For Johnson as an "American," see Herald, 5 Oct. 1907. For accusations of Johnson renting rooms to prostitutes, see Herald, 21 Dec. 1902. For Johnson's saloons, see Polk, Salt Lake City Directory (1896-1907). See also Tribune, 12 Aug., 19, 28 Dec. 1893.

      103. For Mulvey as saloonkeeper and councilman, see Polk, Salt Lake City Directory (1896, 1897, 1906, 1907). For Mulvey as a Democrat, see Tribune, 31 Oct. 1903, in JH, 31 Oct. 1903.

      104. Herald, 20 Aug. 1907; see chap. 4.

      105. Alexander, Utah, the Right Place, pp. 198-99; Alexander and Allen, Mormons and Gentiles, pp. 99-100.

      106. Tribune, 11 Feb. 1890.

      107. Alexander and Allen, Mormons and Gentiles, pp. 100, 108-23; "An Ordinance Levying the Tax and for the Assessment of Property on Both Sides of Commercial Street, in Paving District No. 1 of Salt Lake City, for the Purpose of Paving Said Street," Book C, Salt Lake City Ordinances (1890); Herald, 1 July 1890; Deseret Evening News, 11 Nov. 1890. A local legend holds that Liberals paved Commercial Street so that wives would not spy the telltale red dirt of the street on their husbands' shoes and trouser cuffs.

      108. Herald, 21 July 1889.

      109. Deseret Evening News, 16 July 1885, quoting Tribune, 6 Mar. 1881. The Tribune claimed to be quoting a Mormon.

      110. Tribune, 9 Aug. 1890.

      111. Alexander and Allen claim thirty new brothels opened; see Mormons and Gentiles, p. 118. The source of this estimate is uncertain. See also Erickson, "Liberal Party of Utah," p. 121. For numbers of saloons, see Polk, Salt Lake City Directory (1890-92).

      112. Tribune, 29 Dec. 1890.

      113. See Tribune, 30 Dec. 1890; Polk, Salt Lake City Directory (1890).

      114. "Salt Lake City Council Minutes," Book M, pp. 368-69, 30 Dec. 1890.

      115. Tribune, 13 Jan. 1891.

      116. Salt Lake City Times, 26 Nov. 1890; and Utah, Compiled Laws (1876), sec. 153.

      117. Herald, 16 Dec. 1890; Tribune, 16 Dec. 1890. On variety theaters, see Nasaw, Going Out, pp. 13-14, 18.

      118. Times, 5 Jan. 1891. For the license fight, see Tribune, 30, 31 Dec. 1890; Herald, 1 Jan. 1891; Tribune, 7, 22, 31 Jan., 4 Feb., 18, 25 Mar., 14 Oct., 8, 16 Dec. 1891.

      119. Deseret Evening News, 3 July 1891; Tribune, 4 July 1891. See also Johnson, "That Guilty Third Tier," p. 578; Nasaw, Going Out, pp. 13-14.

      120. Tribune, 21 Nov. 1891. See also Tribune, 2 Dec. 1891.

      121. Tribune, 25 Feb. 1894. See also "Fire Insurance Map of Salt Lake City, 1895," sheet 41. The People's Opera House similarly failed; see Tribune, 4 Aug., 16 Oct. 1892; 3 Mar., 7 June 1893.

      122. Baskin, Reminiscences; Tribune, 8 Feb. 1892; and Erickson, "Liberal Party of Utah," p.

      123. Tribune, 2 Sept., 27 Nov. 1891; "Salt Lake City Council Minutes," Book N, p. 127, 1 Sept. 1891.

      124. Deseret Evening News, 18 June 1892. "Rosa Miller" was arrested on 7 Dec. 1871 ("Police, Record 1871-1875," pp. 50-51) and "Rose Miller" on 30 July 1872 (pp. 138-39), but she does not appear from 1875 to 1878; the context of the 1892 incident suggests this is a different woman.

      125. Deseret Evening News, 22 June 1892; Herald, 23 June 1892; and Tribune, 22 June 1892. For Elsie St. Omar's previous arrests, see SLCPD, "Arrest Register, 1891-94," pp. 34, 7 Feb. 1891; p. 28, 30 Apr. 1891; p. 56, 7 Aug. 1891; p. 78, 28 Oct. 1891.

      126. Herald, 28 June 1892.

      127. Tribune, 28, 29 June 1892; People et al. v. Elsie St. Omer, whose real name is Elsie Anderson, case no. 366 (3d dist. criminal case files, 1892); People et al. v. Rose Miller, case no. 369 (3d dist. criminal case files, 1892).

      128. Tribune, 20 Apr., 28, 29 June 1892.

      129. Tribune, 7 July 1892.

      130. Tribune, 6 July 1892; "Salt Lake City Council Minutes," Book O, p. 41, 5 July 1892; Tribune, 1 Jan. 1893.

      131. For the firing of the police officers, see Tribune, 6 July 1892. For Janney's firing, see Tribune, 1 Oct. 1892. For Sheets's reappointment, see Tribune, 17 Aug. 1892. For Janney's reappointment, see Polk, Salt Lake City Directory (1897).

      132. For "no authority," see Tribune, 13 July 1892; for "no excuse," see Tribune, 10 Aug. 1892. See also Tribune, 11, 24 Sept., 6 Oct. 1892; and Kesler's obituary, Tribune, 14 Jan. 1935.

      133. Butler, Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery, pp. 111-12.

      134. Times, 20 June 1892.

      135. Tribune, 24 Sept. 1893. "Rose Miller" appears in the 1900 census as the keeper of a boardinghouse in Mercur City, Tooele County (U.S. Bureau of the Census, Twelfth Census [1900], Tooele County, Enumeration District No. 146, sheet 6, line 81).

      136. Deseret Evening News, 7 July 1892.

      137. Herald, 9 Feb. 1892.

      138. Herald, 25 June 1892.

      139. Tribune, 11, 12 July 1892; "Arrest Register, 1891-94," p. 139, 142-43.

      140. Tribune, 2 Aug. 1892. See also Deseret Evening News, 2 Aug. 1892; Herald, 2 Aug. 1892.

      141. Polk, Salt Lake City Directory (1894-95); and Tribune, 12, 20 June 1894.

      142. See Alexander, "Mormon Revolution," chap. in Things in Heaven and Earth; Alexander, Mormonism in Transition; Mauss, "Mormons as a Case Study in Assimilation," chap. in Angel and the Beehive; and Quinn, Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power, pp. 325-41.

      143. On reaction to the Manifesto, see Tribune, 8 Oct. 1890; Van Wagoner, "Interpreting Woodruff," chap. in Mormon Polygamy; and Alexander, Things in Heaven and Earth, pp. 268-70.

      144. Lyman, Political Deliverance, pp. 150-84, 255; Shipps, "Utah Comes of Age Politically," p. 94; Tribune, 29, 30 Oct., 8 Nov., 19 Dec. 1893.

      145. See Quinn, Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power, pp. 331-55; Lyman, "Tumultuous Interim to Statehood," chap. in Political Deliverance; Shipps, "Utah Comes of Age Politically"; Lyman, "Statehood, Political Allegiance, and Utah's First U.S. Senate Seats"; W. White, "Feminist Campaign for the Exclusion of Brigham Henry Roberts"; Bitton, "B. H. Roberts Case"; Iversen, "Resurgence of the Antipolygamy Controversy, 1898-1900," chap. in Antipolygamy Controversy; and Salt Lake City Kinsman, Sept. 1899-July 1900.

      146. Arrington, "Aftermath," chap. in Great Basin Kingdom. 147. Herald, 25 July 1892.

      148. C. Madsen, "Decade of Detente." For temperance activity, see Tribune, 2 Mar., 25 July 1892. The Utah WCTU was formed in 1883 (Madsen, p. 307).

      149. Madsen, "Decade of Detente," p. 313; Derr, Cannon, and Beecher, Women of Covenant, pp. 137-40; and Parsons, History of Fifty Years, p. 88.

      150. "Salt Lake City Council Minutes," Book O, p. 140, 18 Aug. 1892; Tribune, 19 Aug. 1892.

      151. Tribune, 11 July 1892.

      152. Tribune, 2 Sept. 1892.

      153. Tribune, 22 Oct. 1892.

      154. Tribune, 21 July 1894. For the movement to Franklin, see Tribune, 25 Feb. 1894; Polk, Salt Lake City Directory (1894-95). See also "Arrest Register, 1891-94," p. 274, 10 Jan. 1894; and p. 311, 18 June 1894; "Fire Insurance Map of Salt Lake City, 1895," sheet 41; and "Fire Insurance Map of Salt Lake City, 1898," sheet 113.

      155. Tribune, 5, 15 Sept. 1892.

      156. Tribune, 12 Oct. 1892. For Sarah Reed, see "Session Minutes," 30 Mar. 1872-17 Aug. 1886, in First Presbyterian Church Records, 1871-1983, JWM. On the matron, see Tribune, 30 Nov. 1892; 19 Dec. 1894; 27 Jan. 1895.

      157. Tribune, 26 Oct. 1892.

      158. On maternalism, see Baker, "Domestication of Politics"; Gordon, "Putting Children First"; Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, pp. 317-31; and Michel and Koven, "Womanly Duties." On home missions, see Pascoe, Relations of Rescue, pp. 3-10, 21-29, 36, 62-68, 76, 82.

      159. Tribune, 8 Dec. 1891; Baskin, Reminiscences, p. 232.

      160. Tribune, 12 Dec. 1892. See also The Woman's Exponent 19 (15 Feb. 1891); Herald, 13 Dec. 1892; and Tribune, 17 Dec. 1892.

      161. Deseret Evening News, 18 Dec. 1894; Tribune, 11 May 1896.

      162. Tribune, 26 Feb. 1893. See also Tribune, 19 Jan., 3 Apr. 1893; and Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections, p. 416. Cornelia Paddock submitted Utah's report.

      163. Tribune, 26 Feb. 1893; and Utah Gazetteer (1892-93).

      164. For the fine proposal, see Tribune, 20 Mar. 1893; and "Salt Lake City Council Minutes," Book O, p. 710, 7 Apr. 1893. For the $100 appropriation, see "Salt Lake City Council Minutes," Book P, p. 138, 2 June 1893; and Deseret Evening News, 3 June 1893.

      165. Tribune, 29 Mar. 1893. See also "Petition of Elijah Sells et al.," "Salt Lake City Council Minutes," Book O, p. 674, 28 Mar. 1893. Elijah Sells, whose name does not appear elsewhere in connection with the rescue effort, was a former secretary to the Utah Commission; see Salt Lake City Directory (1889). For the officers, see Polk, Salt Lake City Directory (1891-92); and Utah Gazetteer (1892-93).

      166. Tribune, 26 Feb. 1893. On similar rescue ideology in Boston, see Hobson, Uneasy Virtue, pp. 75-76.

      167. Tribune, 29 Mar. 1893.

      168. John A. Mayer proposes a spectrum from "social" or wholly voluntary means to wholly coercive in "Notes Toward a Working Definition of Social Control in Historical Analysis."

      169. See, for example, Tribune, 19 Dec. 1894.

      170. Tribune, 26 May 1893; "Petition of Elijah Sells et al.," Tribune, 29 Mar. 1893; and Hobson, Uneasy Virtue, pp. 64-66.

      171. "Salt Lake City Council Minutes," Book O, p. 763, 21 Apr. 1893.

      172. Tribune, 23 Aug. 1893; and Herald, 23 Aug. 1893.

      173. Tribune, 25 Mar. 1893.

      174. Tribune, 25 June 1893.

      175. Tribune, 3 May 1893. See also Tribune, 1 June, 27 Aug. 1893.

      176. Tribune, 19, 20 Apr. 1893.

      177. Tribune, 27 Mar. 1890, 8 Sept. 1894. For Sallie Davis's arrests, see SLCPC, "Book of Miscellaneous Offenses, 1893-5," p. 172, 11 May 1894; p. 183, 25 May 1894.

      178. "Salt Lake City Council Minutes," Book V, p. 59, 28 Feb. 1899. See also Tribune, 1 Mar. 1899.

      179. Tribune, 3 Nov. 1893. See also Arrington, "Utah and the Depression of the 1890s."

      180. For the "visiting committees," see Tribune, 10 Nov. 1893. See also Van Wagenen, "Sister-Wives and Suffragists," pp. 404-73, passim.

      181. Tribune, 26 Jan., 24 Oct., 1894.

      182. Tribune, 19 Dec. 1894; Waters, "Pioneering Women Physicians, 1847-1900"; and Derr, Cannon, and Beecher, Women of Covenant, p. 109.

      183. Anti-Polygamy Standard 2, no. 9 (1881). See also "Mormon Women Missionaries," National Citizen and Ballot, Sept. 1881, quoted in Van Wagenen, "Sister-Wives and Suffragists," p. 339; see also pp. 333-47.

      184. On Ferguson, see Stone, "Dr. Ellen Brooke Ferguson."

      185. Deseret Evening News, 19 Dec. 1894.

      186. Tribune, 7 Nov. 1894; Polk, Salt Lake City Directory (1891-92, 1894-95, 1901).

      187. Tribune, 3, 6 Jan. 1895; 15 Apr., 16 Nov. 1897.

      188. Deseret Evening News, 18 Dec. 1894; and Tribune, 19 Dec. 1894.

      189. Tribune, 14, 19 Dec. 1894.

      190. "Salt Lake City Council Minutes," Book Q, p. 577, 16 Oct. 1894; and Tribune, 17-19 Oct. 1894.

      191. Tribune, 24 Oct. 1894; and "Salt Lake City Council Minutes," Book Q, p. 586, 23 Oct. 1894.

      192. Tribune, 28 Oct. 1894.

      193. Deseret Evening News, 27 Nov. 1894.

      194. Ibid.; see also Tribune, 28 Nov. 1894.

      195. Tribune, 25 Dec. 1894.

      196. Tribune, 5, 31 Dec. 1894, 4, 5, 6, 10 Jan. 1895. Pratt's quote is from 4 Jan.

      197. Deseret Evening News, 5 Jan. 1895; and Herald, 16 Jan. 1895. For O. J. Salisbury, see Polk, Salt Lake City Directory (1891-92). For Gussie Blake (née Foote) in the Salt Lake Valley Loan Trust Co. building, see "Deed Book 4T," trustee's deed, pp. 517-18, filed 3 July 1895; and "Mortgage Book 3W," mortgage, pp. 30-33, 19 Dec. 1894. See also Tribune, 21 Aug. 1897.

      198. Herald, 22 Jan. 1895. See also Tribune, 16, 22 Jan. 1895. For Watkins's move to 44 east Second South (former Flint property), see "Chattel Mortgage Book E," p. 601, 25 Feb. 1895.

      199. See chap. 2.

      200. Tribune, 20 Jan. 1895; Herald, 22 Jan. 1895; People v. Gussie Blake et al., cases no. 1227, 1228 (3d dist. criminal case files, 1895); and Tribune, 19, 21, 24 Feb. 1895.

      201. Tribune, 19 May 1895.

      202. Tribune, 1 Feb. 1895. See also Tribune, 2 Feb. 1895; Polk, Salt Lake City Directory (1896-1908).

      203. Tribune, 3 Jan. 1895. See also Tribune 6, 19, 27 Jan., 17 Feb. 1895; and Herald, 6 Jan. 1895.

      204. "Fourth Quarterly Report of the Woman's Home Association," Tribune, 24 Jan. 1896.

      205. "Articles of Association of the Florence Crittendon [sic] Rescue Home," Weber County (Utah) County Clerk, Articles of Incorporation Record Books, 1871-1961. For Crittenton's visit, see Deseret Evening News, 13 Aug. 1895, in JH, 13 Aug. 1895; Deseret Evening News, 27, 29, 30 Jan. 1896, in JH, 27, 29 Jan. 1896; and Emmeline B. Wells Diary, 29 Jan. 1896, photocopy in Emmeline B. Wells Papers, JWM. On Charles Crittenton and the Florence Crittenton Missions, see Crittenton, Brother of Girls; Aiken, "National Florence Crittenton Mission"; Beard, Woman's Work in Municipalities, p. 123; Odem, Delinquent Daughters, p. 115; and Kunzel, "Maternity Home Movement," chap. in Fallen Women, Problem Girls. The "Florence Crittendon [sic] Rescue Home" of Ogden was incorporated on 18 Mar. 1897; see Weber County (Utah) County Clerk, Incorporation Case Files, file 80; and Weber County (Utah) County Clerk, Articles of Incorporation Record Books, 1871-1961, Book D, pp. 285-90.

      206. Tribune, 25 Apr. 1896. That home, at 812 west Eighth South Street, was listed in 1898 as "Crittenton Home"; that label does not reappear. See Polk, Directory of Salt Lake City, 1898.

      207. Tribune, 11 May 1896.

      208. Tribune, 24, 28 Sept. 1895.

      209. Tribune, 8 Feb. 1896.

      210. Herald, 8 Feb. 1896.

      211. Tribune, 22 May 1896. See also Tribune, 20 May 1896.

      212. Rosen, Lost Sisterhood, pp. 102-8.

      213. Tribune, 29 Dec. 1896, 1 Jan. 1897; Herald, 4 Jan. 1897. The Magdalen Home appears in Polk, Salt Lake City Directory (1897, 1898), but not after. On Good Shepherd rescue activities elsewhere, see Butler, Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery, pp. 65-67.

      214. On moral progressivism, see Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America; Crunden, Ministers of Reform; and Keller, Regulating a New Society.

      215. Tribune, 4 Nov. 1894. See also Van Wagoner and Van Wagoner, "Arthur Pratt, Utah Lawman," pp. 30-31; Tribune, 7, 18 Dec. 1894; and Gleason, "Salt Lake City Police Department," p. 85.

      216. Tribune, 31 Jan. 1897.

      217. Tribune, 7 Feb., 15 June 1897.

      218. Tribune, 11 Jan. 1897.

      219. Tribune, 18 Jan. 1897.

      220. Tribune, 1 Feb. 1897.

      221. Tribune, 12 Mar. 1897. On Lawrence, see Tribune, 16 Apr. 1897, Henry W. Lawrence Collection, JWM; Dimter, "Populism in Utah," pp. 129-31; Tullidge, History of Salt Lake City, pp. 168, 321, 379-80, 390-91, 401, 429-30, 506-7, 587, 590, 607-8, 611, and biographical supplement in same, p. 50; Griffiths, "Far Western Populism"; Walker, "When the Spirits Did Abound"; and McCormick, "Hornets in the Hive." See also Polk, Salt Lake City Directory (1897). For Corinne Allen, see Knudsen, History of Utah Federation of Women's Clubs in Utah Federation of Women's Clubs Records, JWM.

      222. Tribune, 28 Mar. 1897.

      223. For the "grand opening ball," see Tribune, 30 Mar. 1897. See also Tribune, 4 Jan., 31 Mar. 1897.

      224. Anthon H. Lund Diary, 8 Apr. 1897, microfilm copy in CA; Brigham Y. Hampton Diary, p. 247; and Quinn, Same-Sex Dynamics, p. 319.

      225. Tribune, 4 Jan. 1897. For Wilson, see "Chattel Mortgage Book E," entry no. 108660, p. 638, filed 15 Jan. 1897; "Fire Insurance Map of Salt Lake City, 1898," sheet 103; Polk, Salt Lake City Directory (1900-1903, 1905).

      226. Tribune, 5 Apr. 1897.

      227. Foster, "Open Letter to Angus M. Cannon."

      228. Tribune, 1 Feb. 1897.

      229. For Wilson at 33 Commercial (the Palace), see Polk, Salt Lake City Directory (1898-1908). For Wilson's arrests, see Salt Lake City Court Criminal Division, "Minute Book, 1905," passim; Salt Lake City Court Criminal Division, "Minute Book, 1908," passim.

      230. Tribune, 15, 27 Apr. 1897.

      231. Tribune, 25 June 1897.

      232. Living Issues, 22 Oct. 1897.

      233. Alexander and Allen, Mormons and Gentiles, p. 126; and Tribune, 17 Dec. 1897; 25 Feb. 1898. Clark's comment is from Annual Message of the Mayor with the Annual Reports of the Officers of Salt Lake City, Utah, for the year 1897, p. 19.

      234. Beard, Woman's Work in Municipalities, p. 109; Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, p. 192; Epstein, Politics of Domesticity, p. 125; Blocker, American Temperance Movements, pp. 82-83; and Odem, Delinquent Daughters, pp. 3, 8, 12, 30-38.

      235. Age of Consent, in Laws of the State of Utah, Passed at Special and First Regular Sessions of the Legislature; Emmeline B. Wells Diary, 30 Jan. 1896.

      236. Tribune, 10, 11 Oct., 22 Dec., 1897.

      237. Tribune, 20 July 1896.

      238. Tribune, 7, 17 Nov. 1896.

      239. Tribune, 21 Sept., 16 Nov. 1897.

      240. JH, 26 Jan. 1898; Salt Lake City Death Records, Certificate D8444; Deseret Evening News, 27 Jan. 1898; Tribune, 27, 28 Jan. 1898, 27 Nov. 1899; and Herald, 27 Jan. 1898.

      241. Tribune, 7, 8, 14 Feb. 1898.

      242. Tribune, 22, 23 Feb. 1898; and Emmeline B. Wells Diary, 29 Jan., 1, 3, 16, 21-23 Feb. 1898. For Shepard, see Polk, Salt Lake City Directory (1894-95, yearly thereafter until 1908).

      243. Quote from Tribune, 6 Dec. 1898. See also "Report of 'Cornelia Paddock Rescue Home,'" Tribune, 11 July 1898; 20 Oct., 6 Dec. 1898; "Salt Lake City Council Minutes," Book V, p. 59, 28 Feb. 1899; and Polk, Salt Lake City Directory (1897-99).

      244. Tribune, 19, 21 Jan. 1899; and Polk, Salt Lake City Directory (1899).

      245. Tribune, 2 July 1899.

      246. Tribune, 15 July 1899.

      247. Tribune, 3, 27, 29 Nov. 1899; quote from 27 Nov. See also Polk, Salt Lake City Directory (1898).

      248. Quotes from Tribune, 29 Nov. 1899; see also Tribune, 3 Dec. 1899.

      249. Tribune, 29 Nov. 1899.

      250. Tribune, 18 Nov. 1899; Epstein, Politics of Domesticity, pp. 125-29.

      251. For the interview, see Tribune, 23 Nov. 1899. For Reed's response, see Tribune, 26 Nov. 1899.

      252. Tribune, 18 Nov. 1899; and Bitton, "B. H. Roberts Case."

      253. For the home at Gee's house, see Tribune, 14, 24 Jan. 1900. See also Tribune, 6, 8 Feb. 1900 and Deseret Evening News, 8 Feb. 1900; Tribune, 10 Feb. 1900; and Deseret Evening News, 27 Feb. 1900. Quotes from Herald, 1 Mar. 1900; see also Deseret Evening News, 1 Mar. 1900; and Tribune, 1 Mar. 1900.

      254. For the final campaign against the WHA, see Tribune, 1, 5, 9, 13, 27 June 1900; and C. A. Doyle et al., petition 3723, "Salt Lake City Council Minutes," Book V, p. 216, 5 June 1900; and Tribune, 16 Oct., 12 Dec. 1900. For the closure, see Herald, 15 Jan. 1902.

      255. The Crittenton Home in Ogden operated until 1933 and sometimes received women from Salt Lake City. See "Articles of Incorporation of the Florence Crittendon [sic] Home," Department of Commerce, Division of Corporations, Incorporation Case Files, Closed 1871-1974. See also Herald, 17 Feb. 1907.

      256. Herald, 14-22, 24-25, 27-28, 30 Dec. 1902; 6, 18 Jan. 1903; Deseret Evening News, 19 Dec. 1902; and State v. Mary Jane Smith, case no. 988 (3d dist. criminal case files, 1903).

      257. Herald, 18, 19 Dec. 1902.

      258. Herald, 19 Dec. 1902.

      259. Herald, 22 Dec. 1902.

      260. Herald, 20, 27, 28, 30 Dec. 1902; 1, 3, 5, 6, 10, 25, 26, 27 Jan.; 23 May, 1903; and Deseret Evening News, 5 Jan. 1903.

      261. Herald, 20, 22 Dec. 1902.

      262. Herald, 20 Dec. 1902.

      263. Herald, 10 Sept. 1907.

      264. Salt Lake City Inter-Mountain Republican, 19 Dec. 1908; Herald, 18 Dec. 1908; and Tribune, 18 Dec. 1908.

      265. Herald, 5-7 Sept. 1907; quote from 6 Sept.