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