THE BENEFITS OF SEX AND FIRE

Fire destroyed Seattle in 1889

Some visitors to the Summer House in La Conner in 1889 are on fire. A man named Mr. Back, whom others call Berg, is sleeping in the carriage house.  He is experiencing a shunning, an ostracism by the whole of Seattle in 1889, because he is viewed as the cause of the great fire there. 

Summer House is my creation.  It's clientele consist of the entrepreneurial and the top-dog type leading men from Seattle, Portland, Vancouver, San Francisco who are in Northwest Washington State -- mostly Skagit and Whatcom Counties -- to buy, sell and develop land and businesses.  They are seeking the company of like-minded men, gossip and leads, good food and libation, comfortable lodging and sexual favor from a beautiful and refined prostitute.  The Summer House madam is Sally Summer, a mentor and employer to my main character, Emeline Cummings, who helps run Summer House.  Emeline is a quick study in the art of catering to successful men and their most basic needs and she is having no trouble making a small fortune of her own.

The Real Mary Emeline Cummings 1867-1917
and my inspiration for the fictional Emeline

Madam Sally Summer has a carriage house, and there she lodges customers if overbooked. More frequently, however, she is housing someone who is hurting -- a friend, or a friend of a friend.  Sally, as with many madams of the 1800's, has a big heart.  She also understands that having friends in every strata of society will benefit her business in countless intangible ways, and increase her very tangible personal wealth.  If someone needs a private place of healing, with no interest in all the other offerings of the establishment, come hither to the carriage house.  Enter Mr. Back.

What I am about to tell you is historically true.

Mr. Back was in the carpenter shop when he noticed a glue pot smoldering with a small fire.  He doused the fire with water, causing embers to spread.  Eventually, most all of Seattle of 1889 was destroyed by fire and everyone was thrown immediately out of work.  Mr. Back was blamed.  He experienced the tried and true social equivalent of capital punishment, shunning.  He was unemployable and without a friend.   (I'll remedy that in my fiction.)

Seattle was made of wood at that time, and the streets were narrow.  The combination of strong winds, hot and dry summer, and poor transport for fire equipment caused the total destruction, although no human died.

The mayor at that time, Robert Moran, rallied six hundred business owners and leading citizens to the armory.  Two key decisions were made.  First, Seattle would rebuild but with brick and stone, and an eye toward becoming a truly great city which meant wider streets and better community services such as a fire district.  Second, Seattle would make good on its pledge of $500 to the city of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, who had just experienced a terrible flood.  This particular decision reveals a characteristic of Seattleites as generous and honorable, something that would come into play as Seattle rebuilt to become one of the great American cities.

For me, as I am creating Summer House, Emeline Cummings and the people with whom she interacts, the story of the Seattle fire of 1889 is immensely instructive.  By and large, these are people with true grit.  These are people unacquainted with resignation and failure.  These are visionary people.  They are also generous, and they have integrity.  Mr. Back may disagree with me, but all of these laudable traits are the best of human traits.  Blame and scapegoating are also in the mix.

The upshot of the Seattle fire of 1889 in real life enflamed the best of humanity in early Seattleites.  Within a year, everyone who wanted a job, had a job.  Underground Seattle was born, as the streets  were built higher up, right over old structures.  Stone and Brick were the materials.  The population doubled to twenty thousand within a year.  Tacoma sent her sister city $10,000.  San Francisco sent $10,000.  Other cities sent a total of $120,000.  Seattle's reputation as a generous and honorable city paid off.

Seattle, after rebuilding

Mr. Back is in Emeline's life at the moment, on tablets of paper and on my computer.  Something is there between them, and I don't know what, if anything, will come of the spark.

Writing about Emeline Cummings and bringing her to life has meant a change in my life.  I have no time for reading much other than historical documents.  I camp frequently during the summer, and during these travels I find myself thinking about the late 1880's and 1890's.  The hopes and dreams I have for my own life are for survival, meaning, purpose, helping others, being part of a community I care about.  I worry about my government and what political and social changes will mean for me, my life, the life of my family.  I think about my heart and my soul and I try to find places, people, thoughts, experiences that will feed and satisfy my spirit.

Based on what I know so far about Emeline Cummings, her life and her times as I am creating them, she and I are fundamentally the same.  Technology is different.  Essential and enduring thoughts, cares and concerns, the state of one's heart and soul -- these things are the same.  And we both learn from the history of Seattle and the Pacific Northwest in general.  We are strong.  When we lose or something comes close to breaking us, we rebuild.

THE PATRONS OF SIN

Approximately every other morning, before I start my coffee or get my paper from the driveway or take the dogs out, I open the file that stores my first-draft-in-progress of my book about the 1890's madam, Emeline Cummings.  My agreement with myself is that I will put the rope in my mouth as early in the morning as I can stand, and out I will begin to wade into some kind of fast moving water.  That's what writing Emeline's story is to me.  I have no idea how fast or deep I will go when I sit down to write.  I read related historical documents the night before, so that such will be the stuff of my dreams.  At some point, the coffee does get made and all the other rituals too, but I make it to Emeline at least 3.5 times a week.

For the last month or so, I've been focused on the kinds of men who would frequent high-end whorehouses -- although, they aren't called that at the high end.  In the late 1800's, high end brothels were typically known as boardinghouses or parlor houses.  

And --surprise, surprise!  There are not reams of paper to work through about men-of-means and their away from home sex needs and appetites.  But, it's not difficult to infer. 

For one thing, there are fictional and non-fictional accounts of madams and prostitutes. In the high-end sex trade of the late 1880's in the Pacific Northwest, Madams made their fortunes -- or at least met their expenses -- from gambling and liquor rather than direct payment for sex. 

Women with the right combination of beauty, wit, charm and poise might make enough money as freelance prostitute in their twenties and early thirties to live comfortably the remainder of their lives.  There existed a circuit of such women, traveling between Victoria, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland to high-end parlor houses, boarding houses and gentlemen's clubs in these areas.  Many chose their route based upon the schedule of a few patrons -- businessmen making their fortunes in these cities and surrounding areas. 

Enter Emeline Cummings, the madam who is the subject of this blog, and my fictional account of her life and times in Skagit County and Edmonds, Washington State.   She would make her money by creating the perfect respite for traveling men who were building and investing in Skagit and Snohomish County in the late 1800's. 

Her women pay Emeline rent for the nights they use a room in her establishment and keep what the men pay them for sex.  Or what should we call it?  Cuddling?  Listening?  Spooning?  Playing Loving Mother?  Yes, to all of the above.  These needs are easy to predict and understand.

As with other high-end madams of this era, Emeline will supply the food, liquor, live entertainment such as music or magic, and gambling for fees that are greatly inflated. 

In general, who were these men, these so-called patrons of sin?  One thing they all had in common was ambition.  Some had traveled by train from the east or the plains to San Francisco, making their way by various ships and steamers to the Skagit Valley where they found land to file claim on.  They had come alone or with brothers or friends, but they worked literally day and night to dredge the sloughs (you can only dredge at low tide), cut the timber, burn stumps, plant and harvest.  

None came with female family or companions.  They all built their cabins by hand in order to homestead the land and own it.  Many went home after one lousy season of unpredictable tides, floods, sickness and near starvation.  Some prospered, and made more claims and kept building, selling, expanding, investing and grew wealthy in a relatively short period of time.  Some sent for family some point after the cabin and before the wealth.  Some never wanted to settle with one woman.  Or any women. 

Other men were hired by railroad and mining industries, to name a few.  There were bankers, lawyers, traveling salesmen -- all covering a territory that sometimes stretched from San Francisco to Bellingham, Washington and into Canada.   The late 1880's boomed in the Pacific Northwest.  Merchants did well because of discoveries of gold in the Klondike River of Alaska, and in numerous mountain streams of the northwest.  Timber was needed for construction, and the logging industry flourished, as did heavy equipment for mining, and building. 

There was big money to be had in the transport of people and goods.  Transportation in the Pacific Northwest meant land, water and mountain problems to be solved while rapidly supplying a burgeoning customer base with goods and services that poured into the region.  All of these things made some men exceedingly wealthy, traveling often and lonely. 

Loneliness, feeling uprooted, chasing ambition, gambling and liquor combine to make a human being do just about anything to feel at ease.  For women, these truths made for a living -- and for some, a fortune.

WRANGLING WHORES AND SOONERS

My creative process for bringing Madam Emeline Cummings to life includes a curiosity dive into her 1880's world, and that of her fictional mentor Miss Sally Summer of Summer House, LaConner, Washington.  Summer House is a McMansion of the day, dressed in leathers and European furniture, fine wool rugs, marble statuary, fine crystal and china with the gleam of silverware and money winking like a neon sex and pleasure sign on Swinomish Channel.  Sally Summer is the creator. 

Summer House caters to tycoons and captains of many industries from Seattle, San Francisco, Portland and Vancouver, all arriving with the tides in everything from sternwheelers to canoes.  These great men of their day were all riding and winning the waves of fortune in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century boom-boom Northwest America.  Miss Sally fulfills their every need for comfort, understanding and good sport.

To give you an idea of a successful madam of this era, I here will sketch the historically very real life Stella Carroll, a wealthy and skillful madam of the era who operated in Vancouver. 

Victoria's Famous and Unrepentant Madam, Stella Carroll

What drove Stella Carroll to become a madam?  She was born in Ozark Missouri poverty, promptly abandoned by mother; alcoholic father; brother and sister not much help.  From living in a leaking dirt sod house, this pitiful foursome went to Oklahoma and raced for the border to find and stake land in order to homestead -- one of many Sooners, as they are now called.  So called because some people cheated at the starting line and crossed over the border to get a jump on the land grab.   

Something about Stella and her eye:  She found a well-situated parcel, dispatched her brother and sister to do the same and her father did as well.  She parlayed her alluring beauty and this land and others into personal wealth that brought her to fame as a madam in Vancouver.  She did the necessary crawling and climbing the ladder from whorehouse to parlor house, at the pinnacle of the prostitution food chain.  She was wicked smart about investment, and kept land and prostitution as her anchor businesses.  Much money is made for madams at the high end of prostitution, from gambling, food and drink, as well as entertainment.  So, to answer the question, what drove Stella Carroll was money and independence. 

So then with Miss Sally Summer of Summer House.  And so it is with my Emeline Cummings.  She begins not in the boudoir but in the kitchen -- and lest you think she is frying up chicken and making biscuits to earn her keep, consider this month's food availability to a wealthy "boarding house" like Summer House in LaConner, Washington in 1889:

Meats: Beef, lamb, mutton, veal, buck venison.

Poultry:  Chickens, ducklings, fowls, green geese, leverets, plovers, pullets, rabbits, turkey poults, wheateaters, wild ducks (called flappers).

Vegetables: Artichokes, asparagus, beans, cabbages, carrots, cauliflowers, celery, cresses, endive, lettuces, mushrooms, onions, peas, radishes, small salading, sea kales, sprouts, turnips, vegetable marrow, various herbs.

Fruit: Apricots, cherries, currants, figs, gooseberry, melon, nectarines, pears, pineapples, plums, raspberries, strawberries, various nuts. 

It is Emeline's job to plan meals for sometimes a dozen or more diners -- men with discerning palates --  procure the food, plan for substitutions if the tide is uncooperative and the food does not arrive, keep food fresh so no one gets sick -- Remember that all of everything anywhere here must come by water.  There are mishaps and there are logjams. 

Cooking is not the be all end all of Emeline's duties at Summer House, as she is a young woman of many talents.  She cares for more and more of Summer House, including the entrepreneurial beauties that fill the bedrooms upstairs with clients.  Emeline's apt assistance on many fronts enabled her mentor to tend to growing her own robust nest egg.  Emeline learns about life in Summer House, and about what it takes to be an independent woman of means at the close of the nineteenth century and the dawn of the next. 

She has been with Miss Sally, as she calls her boss, for only a few months and Emeline Cummings already has money in the bank, a little horse rental business and will soon be investing further on account of a fire on the waterfront.  She has received many marriage proposals on account of her natural beauty and vitality.  But her answer is always no, because that is not what she wants. 


 

entre vous

THE BLOCK OF SIN

In today's blog, I let you in on some of the latest quirky finds in my research of the times and places surrounding my fictional character, Madam Emeline Cummings. 

This week, as I manufactured the slivers and flecks of Emeline Cummings' life, I began discovering social engineering escapades left and right that were actually occurring in 1890-1908 western US.  I found two in particular to be of great interest, and I hope you will take an interest as well. 

One such effort of social engineering over a hundred years ago happened in Salt Lake City.  The mayor and some of the councilmen invented a novel way to corral all purveyors of flesh into a "block of sin" as it was sometimes called.  It ultimately became known as "The Stockade", technically Block 64 of downtown, between 1st and 2nd Street South and 5th and 6th Street West.

The block of sin actually led to the greater proliferation of prostitution -- the exact opposite of what was desired, or expected.  It was no half-hearted effort -- but it bombed, nevertheless. 

Wealthy and Respected

Madam Dora Topham

The city wanted to crack down on prostitution, once and for all.  Enter the famous-in-her-time Madam Dora Topham, one of the most successful madams of the west.  She considered herself a reformer.  She operated in Ogden and had invested her money wisely.  When Mayor Bramsford of Salt Lake City came to call, she was worth a half-million dollars. That used to be a lot of money!   He recruited her to bring the "Stockade" to life and manage it prudently.

She purchased the land herself, started a corporation called "the Citizens Investment Company" and sold shares to finance the construction of what amounted to a humongous brothel with one hundred brick cribs from which prostitutes could conduct their business, paying up to $4 per day for rent.  The block of sin was a business, run like a business by Madam Topham.

"Stockade" Final Day of Construction

Meanwhile, in my Emeline's neck of the woods....

The Equality Colony 1898

Skagit County, WA

In my book, The Boardinghouse Journals of Madam Emeline Cummings, Emeline's property abuts the Equality Colony in Skagit Valley. 
In actual history, The Equality Colony existed in the Bow-Edison area through the 1880's and '90s and into the first decade of the twentieth century, disbanding in 1904.  It was a socialist colony that grew and prospered under a national organization, The Brotherhood of Co-operative Commonwealth, headquartered in Warren, Maine. 

The colony expanded several times and wound up with 600 acres, a printery, creamery, lumber operaton and many buildings including "apartment dwellings for inhabitants of the colony, kitchen, dining hall and so forth.  Their expansion will play a role in my fictional Emeline's early history. 

Children of Equality Colony 1889

The purpose of the Equalty Colony was to nudge the state of Washington toward Socialism, with the national intention of a Socialist continent.  They disbanded in 1904 without having been successful.  I find it interesting that some of the principles of the colony are being debated nationally today, well over a hundred years later. 


Now ---  Back to Salt Lake City ---

I must tell you that the Stockade fared no better at its mission than the Equality Colony of Skagit County, Washington.  But, failure was for a very different reason.  Prostitution, being the oldest profession, doesn't like to be corralled.  Some prostitutes did move into the Stockade, but only half the cribs were rented.  Madam Topham, being a chief investor, didn't want to lose.  She recruited prostitutes from out of town to fill the Stockade.  Salt Lake City prostitutes who had stayed unaffiliated with the Stockade were still doing business as usual in Salt Lake City. 

The net result was increased prostitution in Salt Lake City -- the opposite of what the mayor and council wanted.  Red faced and scandalized, the City eventually plowed over the entire operation -- literally -- and everyone pretended it never happened.

Whatever happened to Madam Dora Tophem?  She was convicted and sentenced to eighteen years in prison when a minor boy was discovered with a prostitute at the Stockade.  The governor eventually commuted her sentence. 

I can't help but notice that successful madams generally know men in high places. 

Dora Tophem, convict, was freed.  She moved to California to raise a daughter and conduct various successful businesses there.  In 1925, she was helping an employee with a car when she was crushed between two cars, and died. 

Dora Topham in California

Is it just me or does she look happier?

THE BIRTH OF A MADAM

This faded photo is what I have of my  maternal great-grandmother, Mary Emeline Cummings. 

Mary Emeline Cummings 1867-1917

In fact, until recently, I didn't even know who she was.  I didn't know that she was rumored in the family to be "an entertainer" before she married Isadore Benoit, my maternal great-grandfather, in 1889.

It all came out on a lovely fall day in 2016 while I visited with my cousin, Margo and her mother, my aunt, Carol.  Carol is my mother, Ruth's, sister.  My mother died more than thirty years ago. 

Margo and Aunt Carol generously shared family pictures I had never seen before, and some new-to-me stories.  Aunt Carol told me that her father's mother worked as a prostitute, commonly referred to in the family as an entertainer.  The veil was thin, as everyone knew she worked as a prostitute and she was looked down upon because of it.   That is all that is known.  

Mary Emeline Cummings Benoit died in 1917.    

Mary E. Cummings Benoit married in 1889

The picture to the right is Mary Benoit, as she was known after she married Isadore Benoit. 


Our visit was wonderful, as we don't see each other often.  And on the forty-five minute or so trip home, my mind was fixed on a new version of great-grandmother.  In my imagination, I called her Emeline Cummings -- prostitute in the old west.  

By the time I got home, she was a madam, living where I live, in Edmonds, Washington.

I decided right then and there -- on I-5 and 196th in Lynnwood -- to write a book about Emeline Cummings, her life as a madam, and to start it when the real Mary Emeline Cummings got married:  1889. 

"The Boardinghouse Journals of Madam Emeline Cummings" is the title of my book in progress.

Because I have a ground zero starting point, much research lies ahead.  Follow this blog to take that journey with me, won't you?  I'm tippy toeing through unknown territory, and I could use some travelling companions.

I'm trying to persuade my Aunt Carol and my cousin Margo to let me post their pictures here.  If and when they agree, I will add them.  They started my wheels turning to raise the imaginary Madam Emeline Cummings, and tell her story.  Until then,

Thank you for joining me!    Author Bridget Clawson

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Little known about madams is that the most successful were wealthy and prominent (sort of) members of their community through charitable donations and public works funding.  Madam Dora DuFran was one such madam, operating in Dakota Territory.  She ran respectable houses and made significant donations to the community as it was developing.  She called her places "Parlor Houses", while some madams preferred the term "Boarding House" -- as will Emeline Cummings --- but only when she gets her own place!