By Ann Hibner Koblitz

On March 18, 2005, the Sharlot Hall Museum will be opening a fascinating exhibit showing the results of the archaeological dig undertaken during the construction of the new parking structure on Granite Street. Entitled "Outcasts," the exhibit focuses on two communities in Prescott in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Chinese immigrants and prostitutes. At the time, both groups were "outcasts," and, under most circumstances, upstanding citizens of Prescott did not consider them "respectable."

And yet, according to the papers of the well-known physician Florence Yount (1909-1988), "many Prescott families had the custom of going to Chinatown for a family dinner on Sunday nights," "many well-known white Prescott men" attended meetings of the Chinese Masons (held on the second floor of a "Joss House"), and the Prescott city band played at the funeral of at least one prominent Chinese immigrant.

The situation of Prescott's prostitutes involved similar layers of complexity.  In this article, I would like to explore attitudes toward some "outcast" women in the 1870s, when Prescott was a rip-roaring young frontier town. At that time, Prescott's pretensions to fame rested on the fact that it was a sometime territorial capital and had the oldest English-language newspaper in Arizona (The Arizona Journal Miner, founded 1864). Ranching, farming, prospecting and mining were major activities, and the saloons, bars, brothels and prostitutes' cribs on Whiskey Row and beyond were in their heyday.

Women who frequented the rowdy establishments in the shady part of town were called by a variety of names, including "ladies of easy virtue," "painted ladies," "soiled doves," "cyprians," and "courtesans."  Although the women were mostly what we today would label prostitutes, that does not mean that they were necessarily shunned by "respectable" Prescottonians. Nor does it mean that the journalistic treatment of the prostitutes was necessarily worse than that of women that are more conventional. 

Some cases taken from the pages of the Miner illustrate this point. In September 1870, Jenny Schultz, "a lady of easy virtue" who lived on her own at the corner of Cortez and Gurley Streets, was shot and killed by William Girtrude in a robbery attempt. The Miner's headline read "Dastardly Outrage. A Defenseless Woman Shot. Arrest of the Cowardly Assailant." Later stories noted that Girtrude would have been lynched if the District Court had not been about to meet, and the newspaper editorialized indignantly when Girtrude's death sentence was overturned on appeal. Future mentions of Girtrude gloated about his poor conditions in prison, branded him with epithets like "woman-slayer," and always referred to his victim with compassion and respect. 

Less than two months later, Prescott was rocked again by the murder of the "courtesan", Ellen Stackhouse, who was found robbed and strangled in her lodgings on Montezuma Street. The murderer was never discovered, although territorial Governor A. P. K. Safford offered a $500 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the criminal. Clearly, the case had received territory-wide attention. Safford and the capital had moved south to Tucson by this time, yet the Governor still considered the case important enough to post a substantial reward: $500 went a long way when corn was seven cents a pound and a skilled miner was paid $5.50 per day plus board. 

Thoughout the first half of the 1870s, the Miner would intermittently make references to the murders of Jenny Schultz and Ellen Stackhouse. In a December 21, 1872 editorial against mobs taking the law into their own hands, Miner publisher John H. Marion, admitted having, himself, once advocated a lynching: "the occasion was pregnant with the blood of two harmless women, who were murdered by two scoundrelly villains in this town." The context makes it obvious that Marion was referring to Schultz and Stackhouse. Yet, as always, his references to the two dead prostitutes were respectful and sympathetic. 

The importance that journalists and politicians in 1870s Arizona attached to the murders of the prostitutes contrasts with the often-lackadaisical response to such crimes in our own time. For example, in the 1980s the investigation into the Green River killings in Washington State, one of the largest mass murders in U.S. history, got off to a slow start because the victims were prostitutes. 

Around the same time as the Miner was writing respectfully of Schultz and Stackhouse, it was less generous to two women who were engaged in what one would have imagined to be the most respectable of enterprises: preaching. In 1870 and 1871, Mrs. Caroline Cederholm and a Miss Garrison were in Prescott as missionaries, though the former also advertised herself as a "Physician and Nurse." The Miner duly reported the women's activities, but its tone was not terribly courteous or even serious. The newspaper contained gleeful accounts of the pair's attempts to hold Sunday services for the miners and prospectors, some of whom "were not entirely sober." Eventually, Cederholm and Garrison gave up, and were sped on their way with a piece jocularly titled "Gone a Preaching": "After a long and earnest effort on the part of these ladies to raise Prescott away up toward heaven, they became disgusted at their ill success and our want of godliness (?) as a people, and hence departed for the sunny south, in quest of more tractable disciples. May your portion be a grand success and a prolonged absence from Prescott, ladies." 

Another instance of the fluidity of women's social categories in frontier Prescott is provided by a "police blotter" story from July 1876. The Miner reported that an inebriated housewife, dissatisfied with her abusive husband, sought refuge with her friend, a "soiled dove." This, in itself, is interesting since one tends to think of Victorian-era prostitutes as so beyond the pale that no respectably-married woman would associate with them. When her husband came after her, the wife refused to go home with him, whereupon he claimed that he merely "spanked her gently on the hip as he would an erring child." Witnesses saw the scene differently, however, and were convinced that his violence was excessive. A jury (all-male, of course) not only acquitted her of her husband's charge of being drunk and disorderly, but appended to the verdict their belief that she was entitled to a divorce. Subsequently the husband was found guilty of assault and battery. The evenhandedness of the jury and the Miner in this case and their harsh view of domestic violence contrast with the leniency of the modern-day justice system toward wife abusers. And all of the examples above show that popular attitudes toward women in 1870s Prescott, be they preacher ladies, shady women, or abused wives, were often quite different from what they were in the more long-settled cities of Victorian America. 

(Ann Hibner Koblitz has her Ph.D. in History and is a Professor of Women's Studies at Arizona State University. She is the author of two books on Russian women scientists and is currently working on women's health in territorial Arizona and a cross-cultural study of fertility control.) 

 

Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number:(pb113f4i9)
Reuse only by permission.
The Joss House on Granite Street. The people of 'rip-roaring" 1870s Prescott had progressive attitudes toward some of what society considered its 'questionable' citizens, while affording little honor to two zealous missionary women.