Lizzie Powell: A Beautiful and Intelligent Young Lady Rebel

   Unlike most of the women arrested in Missouri by Federal authorities during the Civil War, whose stories we know almost exclusively from Union sources, Elizabeth "Lizzie" Powell kept a diary during her confinement, and it survives. The journal clearly shows Lizzie's feisty personality and her tenacious devotion to the Southern cause.
   Born and reared in northeast Missouri, Lizzie was about 24 years old when she first ran afoul of Union authorities in the fall of 1862. She and a friend, 29-year-old Maggie Creath, borrowed a carriage in Monroe County and drove to Hannibal in neighboring Marion County, where, "under the protection of the Petticoat Flag," they brought out a quantity of gun caps and other items important to the guerrillas. Both young women, being quite attractive and articulate, were accused of influencing young men to support the Confederacy.
   Lizzie was arrested on September 29 at her sister's home in Monroe County and taken to a nearby Federal camp. The officer in charge of the arresting party offered to introduce Lizzie to some other Union officers, but Lizzie demurred, telling her diary she had no desire "to be introduced to those whose acquaintance [she] had not sought and did not expect to cultivate."
   A Union order had recently been handed down requiring all able bodied young men to either enroll in Federal service or declare their disloyalty, and Lizzie was told she had been arrested for "discouraging enlistment." Taken at first to Macon, she was moved after one or two days to Palmyra and held under guard at a hotel. Later she was moved to the Palmyra home of Jacob Creath, her friend Maggie's father. There she and Maggie passed the time by talking, playing chess, and other diversions. Toward the end of the first week of October, Lizzie was officially charged with violating the laws of war, and it was recommended that she be banished from Missouri. Meanwhile, Lizzie continued to vent her anger in her diary against the "vile tyrants" infesting the state.
   By early December, Lizzie's health was failing, and she was granted a leave to return on parole to her Hannibal home. In late December, Lizzie was on the verge of being banished from Missouri when, instead, she was suddenly released from her parole altogether. Within a matter of two weeks, however, she was again in trouble for discouraging enlistments and telling her friends to join the Rebel army. She was re-arrested on January 12, 1863, but she refused the order of banishment that was drawn up against her. Since there was not good place to keep female prisoners, Union authorities paroled her to her sister's home in Hannibal until they could figure out what to do with her. A couple of days later, she was confined under guard in a Hannibal hotel. After another month and a half of debating what to do with Lizzie, authorities finally released her unconditionally in late February.
   In late April, Lizzie traveled to the West, where she met and married a young lawyer, and they later moved to Colorado. Lizzie died in 1877 after being thrown from a vehicle she was traveling in with the wife of the Colorado governor.
   My latest book, Lady Rebels of Civil War Missouri https://amzn.to/3yGocBS, contains a much more detailed account of Lizzie's story.

Jane Haller, Mother of Guerrilla Leader Bill Haller

   My latest book is called Lady Rebels of Civil War Missouri https://amzn.to/3yGocBS. It's more or less a follow-up to one of my previous books, Bushwhacker Belles https://amzn.to/4fFGLHf, but with a slight difference. The first book concentrated almost exclusively on women in Missouri who got into trouble with Union authorities for helping guerrillas, mostly by feeding and harboring them. The new book, on the other hand, focuses more on women who got into trouble for other activities, such as spying or delivering Confederate mail, and a lot of those activities occurred in and around St. Louis. There are a few exceptions, however. A few women who got into trouble mainly for helping guerrillas were left out of the first book but included in this one. Jane Haller is one example.
   Jackson County guerrilla leader William Quantrill formed his band in late 1861, and William Haller (sometimes spelled Hallar) was made first lieutenant. Quantrill quickly drew the notice of Federal authorities, as did some of his lieutenants. We know from extant records, for instance, that Union officials were well aware of Bill Haller and his older brother Wash at least as early July 1862, when William Kerr, a Federal spy, reported to Lieutenant Colonel Buel, post commander at Independence, that he'd been held prisoner by Quantrill's guerrillas and that Wash Haller had argued that he (Kerr) should be executed. Quantrill overruled Haller and ordered that George Todd and Bill Haller take Kerr away from the guerrilla camp and turn him loose.
   In late August of 1862, a couple of weeks after the Battle of Independence, a detail of Federal soldiers were fired upon from the bush as they were traveling the road between Independence and Lexington, and one soldier was killed. Colonel William R. Penick, Buel's successor, thought "Captain Bill Haller," as he was called in Union records, was responsible for the killing. An incident that happened a month and a half later seemed to suggest that Penick might have been correct. In mid-October, near the exact same spot where the August ambush had occurred, Haller's mother, Jane, and two other women were arrested because the carriage they were traveling in "showed signs" that they had been taking food to the guerrillas, and one of the women had shouted to somebody in the bush to warn them of the Federals' approach.
   All three women were arrested and taken back to Independence, where they were held as prisoners. In late November, Jane, who was under investigation for subversion, was banished to Pennsylvania, where she stayed with her deceased husband's relatives. Sometime in the summer of 1863, she was allowed to come back to Missouri after taking an oath of allegiance to the Union. By this time, her son Bill had been killed in a skirmish with Federals the previous spring, but whether she got back before a second son, Abe, was killed in the late summer of 1863 is not clear.
   Jane died in 1868 and is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in Independence.
   My new book contains a more detailed account of Jane Haller's clash with Union authorities.

 

St. Joseph Prostitution, Part Three: Wayward Young Women

   My past two blog posts have been about prostitution in St. Joseph, Missouri, during the late 1800s, focusing respectively on madam Mollie Williams and on how the system worked. This time I thought I'd take a look at how young women in the late 1880s came to turn to prostitution, focusing still on St. Joseph and Mollie Williams's "palace of sin."
   On the evening of November 21, 1884, a merchant from King City, Missouri, showed up in St. Joseph looking for Leona Mann, a 17-year-old girl who had been enticed away from the home of her relatives near King City two weeks earlier by a 27-year-old paramour named Cay Craynor. The next day Craynor was located on the streets of St. Joseph and taken to police headquarters for questioning. He denied any knowledge of Leona's whereabouts at first, but when the police chief threatened to have him taken to jail and "chained to the floor," according to the St. Joseph Gazette-Herald, he instantly weakened and told the chief that the girl was "holding forth at Mollie Williams's bagnio."
   The chief went to Mollie's place and asked that all the girls in the place be brought to the parlor. "The request was complied with," said the newspaper, "and among those who put in an appearance was Miss Mann." Leona was taken to the marshal's office, where she was allowed to talk to Craynor before being interrogated by the police chief.
   Leona told the chief she had left King City two weeks earlier in company with Craynor, who had promised to marry her. They came to St. Joseph, where they stayed at the St. Charles Hotel, and "as a matter of course her ruin was accomplished." After a few days, they went to Kansas City, where Leona thought they would be married, but Craynor refused to keep his word. On November 20, they returned to St. Joe, where Craynor deposited her at Mollie Williams's place. Leona told the chief she was anxious to leave Mollie's but that she owed the landlady ten dollars. The King City merchant stepped in at this point and said he'd pay the ten dollars. Leona "declined to prosecute her seducer," but the chief ordered him out of town under threat of being arrested for vagrancy. Described as "an innocent country girl" with "considerable beauty..., large blue eyes and auburn hair," and a form that was "almost perfection," Miss Mann was taken to a secure house in St. Joseph to spend the night, but the Gazette-Herald reporter thought she would probably return to her relatives in King City the next day.
   On Wednesday morning, September 11, 1889, Frances Hammond, "a comely looking 16-year-old girl with black hair and eyes, five feet high and weighing 114 pounds," ran away from her St. Joseph home "with the avowed intention of entering on a life of shame," according to the St. Joseph Herald. She had confided her plans to a friend of hers and had complained of mistreatment at home. Her father and the police located her Thursday night, according to the St. Joseph News, "in the ranch of the notorious Molly Williams." They took her away, and the father took her back home. The girl was "glad enough to get away," said the News, and "apparently regretted the step she had taken." However, the father planned to have Frances placed in a reformatory "to make sure of her leading a virtuous life."
   On Friday morning, June 27, 1890, a man from Champaign, Illinois, named William Ross arrived in St. Joseph looking for his daughter, whom he had heard was living in "a sporting house" in St. Joe. That afternoon Ross set out to search all the prominent bawdy houses in town. At the second one he visited, Mollie Williams's place, all the girls in the house were ushered into the parlor, according to the Herald, and Mr. Ross found himself "face to face with his own daughter," who immediately began weeping.
   Few words passed between father and daughter, but she immediately promised to accompany her dad home. "The reprimands came afterwards," said the Herald. The father could not or would not say for sure why his daughter had left home, but he intimated that she had been "coaxed away by a traveling man" from Chicago. The girl, who had gone by the name Lillian Brown while at Mollie's place, was described as about 20 years old, "not beautiful but good looking." She had supposedly "repented of her past action." Friday evening, she left with her father for Kansas City, from where they planned to take a train for home.
   Illustrating that there might be at least some validity to the stereotype of the fallen woman "with the heart of gold," Mollie Williams came to the rescue in early January 1891 to take in a homeless baby when no one else seemed to care. On Sunday, January 4, a young woman, giving her name as Mila Myers, appeared at police headquarters with an infant that she said had been left in her care by a couple named Cornwall, who had adopted it out of a house of prostitution, where it had been born to one of the inmates. The police advised Mila to take the baby to the Home of the Friendless, but the supposed charitable organization refused admittance to the child when the young woman took it there. Turning sadly away, Mila started down the street with the infant in her arms and paused in front of Mollie Williams's bagnio to contemplate her sorrowful situation. The woman finally turned in at Mollie's place, and, according to the St. Joseph Gazette-Herald, the madam "agreed to keep the little waif and find a home for it."
   Later investigation revealed that the infant, in fact, was Mila's child and that Mila was a fictitious name. According the St. Joseph Weekly News, the young woman had come to St. Joseph from Marshall County, Kansas, in "an unfortunate condition, the victim of a prominent farmer in that district." As "a last resort," "Mila" had taken up residence at Maud Norris's house of ill fame, and when the baby was born, she determined to "give up her evil companionships." She induced the Cornwalls to take the baby, but they returned it to her shortly afterwards when they were getting ready to leave town. When she told her story to Mollie Williams, Mollie "took pity on her," according to the Daily Gazette, and was able to promptly find a home for the infant.
   Although I've continued to focus on St. Joseph in this post, I'm pretty sure some the examples I've cited about how young women ended up in houses of prostitution could just as well have been drawn from almost any other town where prostitution flourished during the late 1800s or from almost any other era, for that matter. In the 1880s, women who turned to prostitution often did so because of desperate circumstances. Often they were girls running away from abusive home environments, young women who had been "ruined" and cast adrift by fickle lovers, or divorced women with few other ways of supporting themselves. I suspect the same is still true today. And this is not even to mention women forced into prostitution through threats, intimidation, and physical assault.

St. Joseph Prostitution, Part Two: How It Worked

   Last time, in discussing Mollie Williams and St. Joseph prostitution, I mentioned, or at least implied, that, even though prostitution was nominally illegal, a sort of de facto licensing system existed whereby prostitutes and keepers of bawdy houses were periodically fined but then allowed to go right back to doing business as usual. I thought I might go into a little more detail this time about the extent of prostitution in St. Joseph in the late 1800s and how the ladies of the night were treated by law enforcement.
   A St. Joseph Herald newspaper article from February 1889 sheds quite a bit of light on this question. The reporter suggested that while St. Joe was rightfully proud of its educational institutions, churches, and charitable organizations, the town was also "cursed with a population that numbers into the hundreds, that are entirely without the pale of society--the courtesan." The reporter's estimate of the number of scarlet women is probably not an exaggeration, because nine years earlier the 1880 census listed at least 27 women with the occupation "prostitute." Not only had the number probably increased since 1880, but those listed in the census with the title "prostitute" obviously represented only those that openly practiced their profession and did not include those women who were still trying to maintain a veneer of respectability.
   The Herald reporter was not particularly alarmed by the fact that prostitution existed in the city. In fact, he thought the extent of prostitution in St. Joe was no greater than it was in almost any other city of comparable size. However, the fact that prostitution had spread throughout the entire city and was not confined to a certain area was an evil that called for a remedy.
   Only four established houses of prostitution existed in St. Joseph at the time of the article. The "landladies" of these places were Minnie Dixon at 777 Jule Street, Mollie Williams on Main Street between Francis and Jule, Ellen Hardy on Jule between Main and Second, and "Dutch Ella" at 317 Main Street. Minnie's place had eight or ten inmates, Mollie's had six or seven, Ellen's had between ten and twelve, and Ella's place housed ten girls.
   These women were arrested every three months. The keepers were fined $50 each, while the prostitutes were usually fined $8 each. This brought in a total of about $2,000 per year for the city coffers. The police chief told the reporter that these four places were "properly kept" with disturbances rarely occurring at them. In addition, these four houses were all located within a radius of one or two blocks of each other in an old, downtown part of the city where very few families resided and where not much business was transacted.
   The problem, as the reporter saw things, was that it was very difficult to confine prostitution just to this relatively small area. Although the four places mentioned above were the only ones openly doing business as places of prostitution, numerous boarding houses throughout the city had become assignation spots for freelance prostitutes who roomed in those houses. In fact, when the reporter asked a police official whether the prostitutes at the four downtown houses represented the bulk of St. Joe's scarlet women, the official replied, "No, not one-tenth of them. They are scattered from one end of the city to the other. They may be found next door to the millionaire, the minister and the merchant."
   The police official complained that it was difficult to control these freelance prostitutes disguised as "roomers" unless they engaged in boisterous conduct or broke the law in some other manner that drew police attention. The reporter thought the best way to deal with prostitution was by instituting a licensing system that legalized the "social evil" but confined it to a certain area of the city and cracked down on those who tried to expand it to other parts of the city.
   In 1890, there apparently was an attempt to crack down on prostitution in St. Joseph. First the amount of the fine that madams had to pay quarterly was increased to $200 instead of $50. Then, a local judge ruled that the "landladies" would no longer be allowed to simply plead guilty, pay their fines, and go back to the sporting life. Instead, they would have to face trial. The new law, however, had little practical effect in reducing prostitution or punishing offenders, because when the madams were tried for the first time after the judge issued his ruling, at the summer 1890 term of court, the jury assessed the same fine ($200) that the women had previously been accustomed to paying.
   In the fall of 1890, five madams, including the four mentioned above, were arrested and charged with keeping bawdy houses. Four of the five, including Mollie Williams, were allowed to plead guilty and pay fines of $262.50, while Ellen Hardy escaped having to pay a fine by dying. So much for the judge's new rule requiring that the madams face trial by jury.

St. Joseph Prostitution, Part One: Mollie Williams

   When I was researching and writing my Wicked Joplin book https://amzn.to/3X6gmuS, I was struck by how much prostitution there was in Joplin during its early days, particularly the late 1880s, and how open it was. Joplin, though, wasn't the only town in Missouri where "the oldest profession" flourished. St. Louis and Kansas City, the state's largest cities, are two examples, but St. Joseph is perhaps a less obvious example. St. Joseph was about two to three times as populous as Joplin during the 1880s and 1890s, but it probably had at least two to three times as many prostitutes as well. And, if anything, prostitution was even more open in St. Joe than it was in Joplin. A whole slew of women were even listed with the occupation "prostitute" in St. Joseph in the 1880 census.
   Joplin, of course, was a rip-roaring mining town in its early days that drew a lot of young, single men, and anywhere there was a concentration of young, single men, whether it was a mining camp or a military post, women willing to entertain them for a fee were bound to follow. I suppose the prevalence of prostitution in St. Joseph was a carry-over from its early days as a bustling frontier town, when it was the western-most railroad terminus in the United States and a jumping off spot for people headed west on the Oregon Trail.
   One prominent St. Joseph lady of the night during the 1880s and 1890s was Mollie Williams. Mollie first made the news in November of 1879 when she and Mattie Leftwich, one of her fellow bauds, were mentioned in connection with a larceny charge against a man. In 1881, Mollie was cited for "keeping a bawdy house," and she was cited numerous times over the next ten years or so for the same offense or for being an inmate of a bawdy house. For the latter offense, she was usually fined about $10, while the former carried a stiffer fine of $100 to $262.50. In most cases, Mollie simply pled guilty, paid the fine, and went back to business. That's how it apparently worked. All the madams and prostitutes in St,. Joe were periodically fined (usually at each quarterly term of court) and then allowed to resume their sport. It was more or less a de facto system of licensing, which was similar to how Joplin officials also treated prostitution in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
   Occasionally, Mollie made the news for reasons other than being charged with prostitution or keeping a bawdy house. For instance, in May 1884, Zell, "an inmate of Mollie's "maison de joie," as the St. Joseph Gazette-Herald called her place at 118 Main Street, complained to police that she had been attacked with a wine bottle by a "sister in sin" named Vic, who also boarded with Mollie. In July 1885, Mollie was cited for disturbing the peace, and in November 1886, she was charged with selling liquor without a license.
   About six a.m. on the morning of January 16, 1888, "five bloods supposed to be from the wicked city of Leavenworth, entered the palace of sin run by Mollie Williams on Main Street," according to the Gazette-Herald, "and proceeded to wind up an all-night spree by tearing through the house and making mischief generally." Angered by the quintet's behavior, Mollie summoned authorities and caused the hell-raisers to be arrested. They paid fines of three dollars each and headed back across the river to Kansas.
   More to come next time about St. Joe prostitution.

Lizze Reed's Resort

   I recently read in the Joplin Globe that Len Rich, a Webb City marshal who was killed on August 10, 1902, at a place in Webb City called "Lizzie Reed's resort," was getting an additional marker installed 120 years later at his gravesite in Mount Hope Cemetery to memorialize the fact that he was killed in the line of duty. More about that incident later, but it turns out that Rich's murder was not the first notorious incident that happened at or in connection with Lizzie's place.
   A two-story structure located on Main Street (now Broadway), Lizzie's resort was a house of ill repute that catered to the rowdy young men populating the mining town of Webb City. Not all places that earned the moniker "house of ill repute" in the late 1880s and early 1900s were what many people today might think of as houses of prostitution. Many were merely boarding houses where some or all of the female tenants had questionable reputations but were not necessarily prostitutes in the professional sense of the word. It's not altogether clear exactly where Lizzie's place fell on this continuum of ill fame, but hers was apparently pretty close to an actual house of prostitution.
   In the early morning of July 27, 1900, about a year and a half before the marshal was killed at Lizzie's resort, "a young girl of questionable character" named Lillie Garrison (aka Pearl Smith), who boarded with Lizzie, killed herself by "putting a bullet through her brain" at a nearby restaurant. Not yet sixteen, Lillie was described as a small, neatly dressed, "rather good looking" girl at the time of her death. She had come to Webb City from Carthage about six months earlier, and her parents still lived at Carthage. She was reportedly despondent over an ill-fated romance with a Webb City boy and had informed Lizzie and others of her intent to kill herself. Lizzie had tried to get her to go home to Carthage and had given her some money to make the trip, but instead she had "gone to hell," as she phrased it in her suicide note.
   About noon on Saturday, February 8, 1902, a shot rang out from an upstairs room at the Commercial Hotel in Webb City followed immediately by a woman's scream. Diners on the first floor and other occupants of the hotel, rushing to the room to investigate, found a young man named Wheeler Snarr, lying dead on the bed with a bullet through his head and a young woman named Nettie Kelly, whose room it was, standing over him with a Bulldog pistol in her hand. To the first person to arrive on the scene, Nettie exclaimed, "My God! I shot him, and he said the gun was not loaded."
   Nettie had come to Webb City a couple of months earlier and taken a room at Lizzie's resort. Just three or four days before the shooting, she and some other girls at Lizzie's place had been arrested (presumably for prostitution), and Snarr, who managed a gambling room above Parker's saloon in Webb City, had paid Nettie's fine. She then moved to the Commercial, where Snarr stayed, and took a room just one or two doors from his room. Snarr had apparently stayed all night with Nettie on the night before the shooting, as his clothes were hanging on a bedside chair and his own bed appeared not to have been slept in.
   One of the people who hurried to Nettie's room to investigate the shooting was Constable Len Rich. Nettie explained to him and the others that Snarr had told her on more than one occasion that the gun was not loaded and she had even seen him remove the bullets from the weapon. She had picked up his gun and playfully pulled the trigger several times until the hammer had come down on a chamber that, unknown to her, still contained a bullet.
   Rich nonetheless placed her under arrest to await an inquiry. Very soon after the shooting, a coroner's jury convened at the scene. Lacking evidence to the contrary, the jury was convinced by Nettie's denials and what appeared to be her genuine shock, and they ruled that Snarr had died by accidental gunshot wound.
   Late on the night of Saturday, August 9, 1902, brothers Joe and Jim Gideon, 21 and 23 years of age respectively, were creating a disturbance at Lizzie Reed's place in the upstairs room of one of her girls. Lizzie tried to get them to leave or to settle down, but they refused to do either. Finally, Lizzie summoned authorities.
   When Marshal Rich and two other officers arrived shortly after midnight to try to arrest the unruly pair, they were immediately met by gunfire, and Rich fell dead. The other two officers returned fire, and in the melee that followed, Joe Gideon was shot and killed, one of the other officers was knocked down with a club, and Gideon's brother was shot and wounded and placed under arrest. It was reported at the time that the brothers had been feuding with some of the Webb City officers in recent weeks and had deliberately created the disturbance to try to lure the lawmen to the Lizzie's place so they could waylay them.
   In the aftermath of Marshal Rich's killing, Lizzie Reed was taken into custody. In reporting her arrest, one area newspaper said she had been "running a bad house...under the protection of the police and paying a license to the city and giving the policemen free beer." The reporter wondered whether Webb City officials would now protect her or send her to jail.
   How much time, if any, Lizzie spent in jail is unclear, but the newspaper charges were at least partially substantiated at Jim Gideon's trial in the fall of 1902. The defense claimed that when Marshal Rich went to Lizzie's place on the fateful night, he was not acting in an official capacity but rather was going there to protect Lizzie and her establishment. One of the officers who accompanied Rich when he was shot even testified that Lizzie turned to the Gideon brothers when the officers arrived and said, "Here is the law that protects me." The testifying officer also said he did not see Jim Gideon with a pistol on the night of the tragedy, and Gideon was acquitted of murdering Marshal Rich.

Judge Lynch Clubs William Woodward to Death

  In early June 1900, eighteen-year-old Lurena Thomas of Searcy County, Arkansas, swore out a complaint against her thirty-five-year-old stepfather, William Woodward, charging him with rape or, as one report phrased it at the time, "forcing her into improper relations with him." Woodward, who lived in Richland Township (the northwest part of the county), was arrested on or about June 8 and brought before a local justice of the peace for a preliminary hearing on the charge. The defendant, who had a prior reputation for mistreating both his stepdaughter and his wife, was bound over for trial, and an officer started with the prisoner for the county jail at Marshall, about 20 miles to the east. When the officer stopped to borrow a saddle from a neighbor, Woodward made a break for freedom. The officer fired a shot at him but missed, and Woodward made his escape. The fugitive managed to get loose from his handcuffs and hurried back to his home.
   Fetching a Winchester rifle, he went to a nearby field, where he found Lurena and her mother, thirty-nine-year-old Margaret (who was also the mother of six younger kids by Woodward), working in a cotton patch. Lurena started running when she saw her stepfather with the rifle, and he immediately opened fire at her. Two of the bullets took effect, mortally wounding her. Woodward then tried to give his wife the rifle, urging her to kill him. When Margaret refused to do so, Woodward shot himself in the breast. The wound likely would have proved fatal, but Woodward didn't live long enough to find out.
   Lurena died about 3:00 a.m. the next morning, and one hour later a mob of about fifteen men entered the Woodward home with clubs and beat her rapist and killer to a pulp. He was barely breathing when the mob departed, and he expired soon thereafter. Woodward had said after first shooting Lurena that he was not sorry for the heinous deed, but on his deathbed he reportedly expressed regret for killing her and claimed that he loved her. But few people had any sympathy for him.