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Madam Belle Cora: Influencer of the West
48 Plays28 days ago
Grace is a forever a lover of history, so much so that she went back to school to get her master's in it. This week's episode takes us back to the years 1849-1855 to the heart of the Gold Rush in San Francisco. Following the life of one of the most successful Madams of the city during this period: Madam Belle Cora, Grace explores just how fast Belle and similar women rose in society and just how fast they could fall.
Sources mentioned :
- The Fair but Frail: Prostitution in San Francisco by Jacqueline Barnhart
- They Saw the Elephant: Women in the California Gold Rush by JoAnn Levvy
- Dispossessed Lives by Marisa Fuentes
- Trinity Journal Feb. 2 1856, coming from the S. F bulletin
- S. F. Bulletin
- The Annals of San Francisco; by Frank Soulé
Recommended
Transcript
Grace's Passion for History
00:00:15
Speaker
Alright, let's get into it. So, for those of you who don't know me, my name is Grace, artist, and for as long as I can remember, I have been absolutely obsessed with history. And I know you hear that, and a lot of you are probably like, that's a very weird thing.
00:00:32
Speaker
I was a girl who was literally reading all the My Dear America books, which are the literal books that were the diaries that were set from different, like, girls that were from, to like, different periods. I think it was in not only the United States. I think they have some, like, European as well.
00:00:52
Speaker
But all of them had a very tragic backstory. Like, the one that set me off was, like, on the White and Lonesome Prairie was this girl who... Literally went on the Oregon Trail and I'm pretty sure her whole family member, all of her family members died and I was like, sign me up for this.
Podcast Motivation and Focus
00:01:09
Speaker
This is amazing. And then the next one was like about a coal miner girl who her father died. She had to take care of all of her sisters and then she ended up marrying this like 40 year old man In second grade, me thought, wow, this is so cool.
00:01:26
Speaker
So this podcast is essentially for anyone who was ever in that same boat. Because ever since then, history has always had near and dear place to my heart.
00:01:37
Speaker
So that is why i created this podcast. I just want to share my love of it. And also for the people who ever got asked those questions, how do you know that?
00:01:48
Speaker
How do you know that weird random fact? Because it's not weird. It's really cool. So harlots and hearses. That's why it got invented.
00:01:59
Speaker
it was also invented because one thing I noticed throughout all of my school from undergrad um all the way to my masters is that there's a lot that goes untouched when it comes to women, when it comes to gender, sexuality, and even death that goes untalked about and that kind of gets left behind in the archive itself.
00:02:20
Speaker
So what I want to do with this and what my focus is with this is kind of peeling back those archives, diving deeper and giving voices to the voiceless. Because if I'm not doing that and if others aren't doing that, then they'll just be voiceless and they'll just be left in the past.
00:02:37
Speaker
And as a person who has always really struggled with the concept of death and what happens when we die, I like to think back and think forward that maybe in 100 years or 200 years when we're all gone, someone will look back and talk about me or will talk about my friends and what we did so that I'm not just left behind or a no name in a book.
College Inspiration and Thesis Development
00:02:59
Speaker
Someone will look back at me and see my last name, Grace Artis, and be like, this is what she did. So this is for those people as well. Now, the story that I'm going to do today is actually one that is really near and dear to my heart as well. So I'm going to take us all the way back to 2019. I was a senior in college at Oklahoma State.
00:03:24
Speaker
go pokes and i was really struggling on what to do my senior thesis over i was like i should do it over like women in world war and then i was like no i feel like everyone has done that and then i was sitting there in my women of the american west class which if you're at oklahoma state and they're still offering or if they're not offering it at oklahoma state they definitely should again because that was by far the best class I've ever taken and
00:03:58
Speaker
I loved it so much. I think I talk about it all the time. But one of the things that really struck out to me and my professor, we are kind of talking about women's different roles that they had. And one of them that always comes up and if you take any class, it's prostitution.
00:04:14
Speaker
so I was kind of asking her, I was like, hey like, what, what city, if you had to choose one, had a really interesting take on prostitution. And she's like, you should look at San Francisco.
00:04:26
Speaker
specifically the San Francisco prostitutes because they actually imported a lot of them from New Orleans. So that started me down this whole rabbit hole. And I remember my parents were really shocked and taken aback when I told them that, they were like, Grace, what are you doing your senior thesis over? And I like came home and I was like, I'm doing it over prostitution.
00:04:52
Speaker
They loved that. But It was actually like a... I loved it so much because it really brought me into just like how much these women kind of like molded and shaped the town of San Francisco and what it was and kind of the different roles and hats all of these women put on. And so, and it really taught me essentially gender dynamics and how to dive deeper into gender gender dynamics. And it really shaped me into the historian that i became today.
00:05:23
Speaker
So... Shout out to that class and shout out to this paper. So that is kind of what this first episode is going to be over.
Madam Balcora and San Francisco's Gender Dynamics
00:05:31
Speaker
Specifically, am going to be focusing focusing on i am going to be focusing on the Madam Balcora, who kind of perfectly encapsulates the rise and fall of that madams and prostitutes had in San Francisco.
00:05:48
Speaker
During this period so before I kind of dive into her story I think it's really important to know what San Francisco was like during this time because you can't really know her if you don't know the context or it won't make any sense It's like putting the cart the horse before the cart. I think that's how that saying goes not the greatest on my sayings so Going all the way back to San san Francisco in 1849 when gold was first found there, which always, like, I remember even when I was researching it for some reason, I thought the gold rush was always after the Civil War. Nope.
00:06:29
Speaker
it was before before the gold rush there are only about 200 people living in san francisco like it was pretty much what we would call today like a one-stop light town in fact they only had 50 buildings like that was it so then when like news was announced that gold was found the purse The first people to like even go to the city were men.
00:06:56
Speaker
like It was not women that were flocking to the city. It was men that were leaving their homes, men that were leaving their families and going to them. And the men that were coming to San Francisco it's not like they were going pack up and bring their whole families with them. No, they were going solo.
00:07:16
Speaker
They were saying like to their wives and to their children, like, hey, you stay at like wherever their home state home city is. You stay here. I'm going to strike it so rich in San Francisco.
00:07:30
Speaker
I'm going to make so much gold and then I'll either bring you and the kids later when it's safe because they knew like, a gold town, mining town in the first seasons, it's not going to be the best place to raise a family, bring children, to bring women. They knew it's not safe.
00:07:50
Speaker
Or once I get my money, you know, once I try it for a bit, then I'm going to come home. of those people going there very very few of them were women so you have to imagine that the women who were there they would take control and take notice of this gender imbalance and they would use it to make their worth now like i mentioned earlier 1848 of of that town, of those 50 buildings.
00:08:20
Speaker
So there was not a lot when you have this mass influx of people coming in. town like houses, towns, buildings, like those don't just go up overnight.
00:08:32
Speaker
It takes time to build those. So a lot of the first buildings were made of canvas or cotton sheets or like rough shanties, like made up hastily of wood.
00:08:46
Speaker
Like even the finer, finer buildings they had at the time, Like they were made of like rough structures made of like wooden planks.
00:08:57
Speaker
A lot of historians, other historians of the period, they said they were quick to put up and easy to take down. Comfort was not a thing they had in mind with these buildings.
00:09:10
Speaker
They just wanted them up to have a place for all of the men to sleep at, all of these people to sleep at. And then another source describes like the lodging houses. The only thing that would separate the threadbare cots that they had. Because keep in mind, they know all these people are coming. They're like, well, we got to house them.
00:09:29
Speaker
Well, what's a thing that we can put up that's cheap um and that we know that can like easily like be a quick divider that we can take up and take down? It was a sheet.
00:09:40
Speaker
So they were hung from the walls in loose bunk bed fashion. So one of the sources says, like, The places of boarding during this period all shared a similar goal, house as many people as possible in one location.
00:09:55
Speaker
Now, the madams and the prostitutes, the ones that were coming in, who took, who are aware of this gender imbalance, and were like, with all of these men coming in we know that they are going to miss several things.
00:10:12
Speaker
They're going to miss the comforts of home. They're going to miss the domestic. work of home, someone to do the cooking, someone to do the cleaning, someone to do the mending, and of course,
00:10:26
Speaker
they're also going to miss sex. So a lot of the women who came into the city, they filled that need. So beyond the saloons and the gambling halls, the parlor houses, which is where you could find the prostitutes and the madams of that time, they were some of the most actually luxurious buildings and the city had to offer, especially compared to the shanties that...
00:10:52
Speaker
the men were used to. So much so that a reverend, actually, when he was riding home and his occupation would have pitted him against prostitution, he commented on one the wonder and beauty of the house.
00:11:06
Speaker
um It was Reverend William Taylor. He actually wrote this. It's theorized about Belcora's parlor house, actually. That it was beautiful within, furnished with brush Brussels velvet, silk, and a mask.
00:11:21
Speaker
Heavy furniture of rosewood and walls hung with beautiful paintings. Music from pianoforte, melodone, and harp. No house more prominent prominent or beautiful for a situation in the city.
00:11:36
Speaker
So these parlor houses, they all had to compete with each other. And the madams knew this because if a house wasn't grandeur enough, these men would just go and leave it for another. yeah And because, keep in mind again,
00:11:52
Speaker
These women, there were very few other like women in the city. These men had left behind societal norms. Societal norms were by all means, not so much a thing of the past, but they had to be foregone because these men were coming into a place unknown.
00:12:14
Speaker
They were having to put behind their past, their differences two by all means, tried to get a better future for themselves. So with that, and with that in mind, there are these prostitutes here who in any other city, specifically a city in the east, they would have been looked down upon.
00:12:38
Speaker
They would have been a cast below them, cast to the side, but come in here where i believe I have it quoted. where men outnumbered women 50 to 1.
00:12:54
Speaker
So these prostitutes were looked upon fairly well and for the most part were treated with respect in the early days. And when I say with respect, I'm acknowledging that obviously these women did.
00:13:15
Speaker
by far, face their own fair share of violence. They obviously, like, injured their own hardship, and they obviously, because with their profession comes putting themselves in harm's way, putting themselves at the mercy of man and what that entails.
00:13:33
Speaker
When I'm saying they were treated upon fairly well,
00:13:39
Speaker
that's, like, being, like, comparative to how other prostitutes in America and in the world were treated at that time. Like if you look at prostitution towards other parts of the city, prostitution towards other parts of like, let's say in other states, like in the east or in the south, it's going to be very different, the attitudes towards them and how they were treated by society and different women um and different men The kind of the best example that I can give of this is a fireman's ball that happened. It was the fireman's ball of 1850 and there were 500 males and females in attendance.
00:14:21
Speaker
Now given that at the time there are only 2000 women reported to be living in the city at the time. And many of them were prostitutes. The chances were high that many of the women at the ball were also in that trade.
00:14:34
Speaker
Also, there are accounts of men tipping their hats at the street at these women, um, ah, Let me take it back. Men at the time tipping their hats in their street towards these women, men opening the doors, men fully regarding these women, not as equals, but just regarding them in general. And as a way, prostitutes were not only viewed as an acceptable date for the balls, but even a sought after date.
00:15:00
Speaker
So this is all to say that these women flocked to the city ah were in the city because something's special and different was going on in San Francisco during this time.
00:15:16
Speaker
It was rare. It was not an all occurrence that you can find in any other city. But as with Bell Cora's story, and the reason I kind of set this up is because that doesn't change stay the same.
00:15:30
Speaker
And what makes it shift is when we see all of these men, when their wives start coming into the city, into San Francisco, When respectable society starts making its way, the feelings towards these women will shift and the high and the celebrated status of these women will come crashing down.
00:15:56
Speaker
And to me, it's kind of sad. These women were once sought after. They were celebrated. They had the best houses. They had the most sought after places. Men looked after them. Men cherished them in a way.
00:16:12
Speaker
And just like that, like a flip of a coin, they were nothing. They were nothing.
00:16:20
Speaker
And I think it's really interesting. And a lot of the times I always get asked, like, why do you study history? Why do you always care so much about people in the past?
00:16:36
Speaker
And the reason is is, because you can always see reflections of the past and today. You can see how someone can be once celebrated, at least for a woman.
00:16:50
Speaker
You see it all the time in media. The thing that comes to mind the most right now talking about this is Pamela Anderson. She was one of the most sought after woman during her time in the eighties and nineties.
00:17:02
Speaker
I may be off of that. I was born in the nineties and I did not watch Baywatch, but I did watch the Pam and Tommy on Hulu and have like followed up on that.
00:17:14
Speaker
She was so celebrated. She was gorgeous. She was smart. And everything came crashing down with her sex tape. A thing that she participated in, in the private of her own home and the private of her honeymoon that got leaked.
00:17:33
Speaker
Tommy faced no repercussions from it. None. But she did. It ruined her whole career.
00:17:42
Speaker
And it was okay
00:17:47
Speaker
because she had posed with Playboy.
00:17:51
Speaker
Makes no sense.
00:17:55
Speaker
And it also is just very sad as well. The kind of double standards that women are always held to comparative to men.
00:18:05
Speaker
But that could be a whole rant for a whole different day. So we are going to talk more about Belcora and kind of what a badass she was.
00:18:17
Speaker
So, so Belcourt's early life. So life with a lot of madams at the time and a lot of prostitutes and honestly, lot of women. We do not know much about her.
00:18:31
Speaker
We really don't. Um, but from the limited sources, we do have surrounding Belcourt's background. There were two kind of floating around and also With these, I don't want add too much credit or credibility to them. They really can't be verified. They're coming from a source of a source of a source. so you can't really even call them a primary or secondary source.
00:18:58
Speaker
It's really tricky ground to even call it that. But this is kind of speculation onto how she got her start. So one of the first is that she came from Baltimore.
00:19:08
Speaker
from a father who was a clergyman. Then she met a man who seduced her. The father cast her out and she went to New Orleans. She lost the child that she had with a man. And from there, that's how she met Charles Corral.
00:19:25
Speaker
The second story, and this one is said to be started by the San Francisco police, is that Belle actually came from respectable parents. She was working at a seamstress shop, and she was working with some clientele who worked at a sex parlor called the Lutz. Here or she learned that the real money came from not making the dresses, but from wearing them and taking them off for clients at the Lutz.
00:19:50
Speaker
Also, in this version, she apparently went to Charleston first, Then she was a mistress to a man there. That man was killed. Then she went to New Orleans. What's important to note, none of these stories came from Bell.
00:20:06
Speaker
They all came from a person of a person who a person. It's all hearsay and it all fuels the narrative that Bell is a fallen woman and that only fallen women are ones who can engage in the profession of prostitution.
00:20:21
Speaker
So I found this a lot when ever I did my research surrounding prostitution and it was very very popular and some of the very early days of history especially regarding women that only women were seduced who either had a really really bad childhood or essentially were left and abandoned by men. So these fallen women tropes.
00:20:49
Speaker
So only them could engage in prostitution because there's no way that women can enjoy sex.
00:21:00
Speaker
There's no way there's no other way essentially that women would want to be do this profession. There's just, there's simply not. how How dare women fall to this level?
00:21:16
Speaker
Essentially was the narrative going around. So that's why these sources and why i include them fall to that.
00:21:28
Speaker
What's the truth with Bell's story? We don't know. The only thing we know for sure is that Bell was born in Baltimore. And for sure, she met Charles Cora.
00:21:47
Speaker
That's where she got her last name. They met in New Orleans in 49 when Belle was 22 years old and Charles was 33.
00:21:58
Speaker
And Charles was a gambler. And they took a steamboat to san San Francisco and they arrived in San Francisco December 28, 1849. eighteen forty nine and they followed a lot of other gamblers and a lot of other prostitutes. That's all we can say for certain. And that brings us to a really important method of study when it comes to studying women, minorities, and anything that's out of the norm.
Challenges in Historical Research
00:22:25
Speaker
when it comes to history and to this i credit my historiography class which any of you that are like what's historiography it's a very very long and difficult word to spell at least for me of the history of studying history so how is history written and if you're just looking for a really good book in general an amazing book honestly this book we read a lot of books in that class and this one and there's another book about pigs and i can't tell you anything else just it was about pigs and how pigs got domesticated and i can't remember the name but i just remember i loved that it was about pigs but anyways back to this book dispossessed lives by marissa fuentes
00:23:13
Speaker
phenomenal book what is essentially all about the overarching theme is about silence in the archives and explaining like why it's important specifically what she she's the one who coins this phrase what she used it for is changing the perspective of the enslaved so she focuses on enslaved women
00:23:39
Speaker
essentially how these women faced violence, not only in their actual life, but violence in the archives as well, for how their voice was being silenced, both past and present.
00:23:51
Speaker
So she essentially created this new method of study, kind of a reading against the archives of figuring out what's there, and what's not being said and why that's important so using the silences and kind of building upon that and what does it what does it reveal and kind of adding historical context to the shifts and through that i've used it in pretty much kind of every bit of research that i've ever i've kind of just i want to really focus on this like main quote by her because it
00:24:27
Speaker
will perfectly encapsulate what I'm just trying to summarize. It says, my book does not simply seek to recover enslaved female subjects from history obscurity.
00:24:40
Speaker
Instead, it makes plain the manner in which the violent systems and structures of white supremacy produce devastating images of enslaved female personhood.
00:24:52
Speaker
and how these pervade the archive and govern what can be known about them, rather than leaving enslaved women vulnerable to the readings and misreadings of whoever chooses to make assumptions about them.
00:25:06
Speaker
My book probes the constructions of enslaved women and the archive records using methods that at once subvert and illuminate biases in the accounts in order to map a range of life conditions that profoundly challenge an assumption about the slave experience in the caribbean systems of domination so
00:25:31
Speaker
if that doesn't like enhance you enough i got dill's reading that but so essentially like she's using all of this to kind of like work backwards essentially like why it's it matters is the archives are flawed
00:25:47
Speaker
The archives are flawed. And I feel that this goes like without saying, but I'm going to say it anyways. Case in point, a lot of what we have left over from San Francisco, specifically what I use, like the annuals, these were, it was kind of like the newspapers, but it was a lot of like, essentially like, it was like a group of men, i believe it was about like five or six men who essentially wrote the towns going on of the time.
00:26:14
Speaker
But they were White men.
00:26:20
Speaker
White men are not going to know the experiences that the women were going through.
00:26:27
Speaker
That's just a matter of fact. They're not. They're not going to keep note of everything that didn't suit them.
00:26:38
Speaker
So by then, and just like what we saw with Belle's background, one of her backgrounds came from a San Francisco police officer, he's not gonna write accordingly about Bell's background.
00:26:53
Speaker
He's not. It's gonna have biases, so we have to work against that. Many of the newspapers, the only reporters at the time were men, a lot of them adams and the and prostitutes, many did not keep accounts of the lives they lived.
00:27:10
Speaker
So all of the records that we have are writing about these women who were not them. They're coming from a lens of either judgment, filled with lust, filled with hatred,
00:27:24
Speaker
or just simple observance. But it's not the women's. can be filled with violence. So we have to work backwards.
00:27:35
Speaker
Also, i do want to point out that there were minority populations living in San Francisco during the time. Latina and the Chinese. They feast...
00:27:46
Speaker
faced horrible treatment as well, specifically the Chinese. I could do a whole different episode of that and we'll probably do it in the future. That would just take a whole lot more research, but it's very interesting, especially of the Madame Atoy, who was actually Bell Cora's biggest rival at the time as well. Going back to the San Francisco Bulletin, which was the top bulletin at the time in the main newspaper.
00:28:12
Speaker
a lot of their stuff isn't digitalized. I kept wondering why I couldn't find anything, then I looked at their newspaper, and then it said only stuff after 1909.
00:28:24
Speaker
But it was really weird. It was between 1909 to 1920 had been digitalized. Everything else you kind of have to go to the Library Congress for. Also, when you search Cora's name, El Cora, the only thing that comes up is stuff for Charles Cora.
00:28:39
Speaker
And then you have the historian's greatest nightmare, it's natural disasters. That destroys a lot of stuff too. So you have to read in between the archives and the sources to find the bits and pieces of what may have been the real Bell.
00:28:58
Speaker
And the truth of the matter is, we may never and will probably never know who the real Bell Cora was. But by doing it this way, we can uncover more and more layers and more and more essences of her and start to paint a wholer picture. And I think that's just as important.
00:29:19
Speaker
So back to kind of going.
Belle Cora's Defiance and Success
00:29:25
Speaker
reversing it back kind of more to like who Belle was one of the Books that I read is the fair but frail if you were looking at a book that kind of dives into the history of San Francisco from its start to its end Highly recommend so this is a quote by Hubert Bancroft who Was this huge like historian guy who like wrote 39 volumes
00:29:53
Speaker
and like the 1800s, 18, about it anything and everything you can imagine. And so he describes Cora like this. And if anyone described me like this, i kind of think I could die of happiness.
00:30:12
Speaker
So he goes, Like Cleopatra, she was beautiful she was very beautiful, and besides the power that comes with beauty, rich, but also foul, flaunting her beauty and wealth on the gates thoroughfares, and on every gay occasion with a senator, judge, and a citizen at her beck and call, and being a woman as proud as she was beautiful, rich,
00:30:37
Speaker
Let's see if I can read. Rich, she not infrequently flung back her stainless sisters, the looks of loathe contempt with which they... Let me start that over.
00:30:49
Speaker
Back upon her stainless sisters, the looks of loathe contempt with which they so often favored her.
00:30:59
Speaker
So you read that and you're like, what? But essentially he's saying that like, she was very beautiful. The girl was very rich. Oh yeah. Power to quit Bell. And she was known to flaunt.
00:31:11
Speaker
She had the senators, she had the judge and normal citizens, but also the stainless sisters is what got me. And I was like, so those were the women who, when women, the wives and society start coming back, they started casting judgment at Bell and started flaunting her those looks of contempt.
00:31:35
Speaker
Belle gave the looks right back. She them back.
00:31:40
Speaker
Hell yeah. So, Belle and Charles make it all the way from New Orleans to San Francisco. They had a few successes while they were there. They made it they went to a few fine towns of Sacramento, Sonora, Marysville.
00:31:59
Speaker
Charles had mixed success as a gambler. i think they said Bell was known to like bail him out a few times, start a few gambling houses with him. Bell on the other hand, she had success with pretty much every house she opened.
00:32:11
Speaker
In 1952, they made it back to San Francisco where she opened up her most successful house yet on DuPont Street, making her the city's most successful madam.
00:32:24
Speaker
And in 1855, she had enough success where she opened up another house. And in 1855 is also the year where everything would kind of come crashing down.
00:32:37
Speaker
So,
00:32:39
Speaker
It was November 1855 when her and Charles were enjoying a show at the theater in their box seats. We've done it many times before, like they always have. Seated in front of them were the U.S. Marshal w h Richardson and his wife.
00:32:55
Speaker
The wife pitched a fit when she noticed who was sitting behind them. Richardson asked um Charles and Cora to leave. Charles was like, we're not leaving.
00:33:06
Speaker
This is just as much as our place to be as it is yours. the Marshall and his wife had a full on Karen moment and they called the manager of the theater over. The manager of the theater actually agreed with the chorus and was like, yeah, no, like they can stay. They don't have to leave. Like they paid for the seats. They have every right as much to be here as you. So they left.
00:33:34
Speaker
But the problem is two days later, the marshal would actually confront Charles at the saloon. Shots would be fired. And then Charles would become a wanted man for shooting and killing U.S. marshal.
00:33:51
Speaker
Belle, using her wealth, would be the one to supply the lawyer, the best criminal defense lawyer actually at the time in San Francisco, And they would go with the route that it was actually all in self-defense and that the marshal was the one that provoked and went after Charles.
00:34:11
Speaker
But Belle was smart. She knew that the jury and the judge, knowing that Charles was a gambling man and that Charles was with Belle, a prostitute, would not believe the story. So she raised money to pay off witnesses,
00:34:31
Speaker
and the jury which I know sounds really really bad it's bad but I just want to say it was not unusual in the city of San Francisco at the time however it was discovered and the press had an absolute field day with this I want to read a article that came from the San Francisco Bulletin so the money of the gambler and the prostitute succeeded, and Cora has another respite.
00:35:08
Speaker
The jury cannot agree and are discharged. Will Cora be hung by officers of the law? No. Rejoice, ye gamblers and harlots. Assemble in your dens of infamy tonight and let the costly wine flow freely and let the whelking ring with your shots of joy.
00:35:26
Speaker
Your triumph is great. Oh, how you triumphed. triumphed over everything that is holy and virtuous and good triumphly galled yes legally your money can accomplish anything in san francisco weep ye virtuous women of san francisco ye wives and daughters of honest mechanics and merchants weep for the times of which you have fallen mourn and mourn for the degradation of your adopted state the bras and harlot peaked because she is not allowed to come into your society
00:35:59
Speaker
may hire her pyre more to shoot down with impuity your natural protectors your father or brother to glut her revenge then boast of her ill-gotten gold as being more powerful than the cause of virtue innocence and truth we have yet to rid this town of those pirates and their degraded female associates gamblers we warn you remember vicksburg you may yet be stuffed to drip with this impious woman belcora to drift with uptide may carry you through our entrance to our harbor be just how much the tide has shifted against these women these women who were once celebrated these women who were once invited to balls and had the grandest parlors
00:36:53
Speaker
Now, the brazen harlot. When it comes to the trial itself, and the newspaper article kind of gave it away, so no decision could be made and during the first trial.
00:37:07
Speaker
It became a hung jury. So he was taken back and he awaited a second trial. But the crowd and town didn't like that.
00:37:17
Speaker
And they felt that it was kind of all Bell's fault that, you know, she paid off people and that's why everything had gone down the way it did. So a vigilance committee had formed, not just for this trial. There was a lot of other stuff going on in San Francisco at the time that was leading because of it. But this was one of the reasons. and so
00:37:38
Speaker
A vigilance committee came and held a second trial for Charles and found him guilty and hung him. May 26, 1856. It was also that day where Charles and Cora were wed, as the priest would not grant Charles his absolutions unless he wed the woman he was living with for so long.
00:38:04
Speaker
Two days later, So imagine this, you had just married and watched your husband be hanged. And then two days later, the San Francisco Bulletin printed a letter to the Villegance Committee signed, Mini Woman of San Francisco. The letter asked the committee to request Belcora to leave the town. It states,
00:38:31
Speaker
The women of San Francisco have no bitterness towards her, nor do they ask it on her account, but for the good of those who remain as an example to others. Every virtuous woman asks that her influence and example be removed from us. And this is my favorite move of all.
00:38:51
Speaker
The request was ignored. And Bell continued to live in San Francisco and conduct her business at her house in Waverly Street. until she died.
00:39:05
Speaker
Now, Belcora would not go on to live much longer. She only lived six years more. She would die young. um i believe she was 36 or 35. She would actually end up dying of pneumonia, which is actually very sad. Her and Charles would actually go on to be buried next to each other.
00:39:24
Speaker
The original grave that they buried Charles in, she learned that they would actually not honor her request of burying them together, so she went and had him moved closer at another cemetery so they could be. And I believe you can still go visit their grave to this day. But I just think her story...
00:39:44
Speaker
perfectly encapsulates the rise and fall of madams and prostitution in San Francisco and how the changing landscape surrounding them and how they were viewed in society. Also, I think it kind of just goes to show how Belle kind of always went to the beat of her own drum. She never let anyone else dictate what she could or couldn't do.
00:40:09
Speaker
Like, going back to the quote that Bancraft said about her. She didn't shy away when people gave her those looks of contempt.
00:40:23
Speaker
She gave it right back. And I think that is present in how she acted when she got the letter from the vigilance committee who were asking her to move.
00:40:35
Speaker
But this was her city. She was here Not at its founding, but pretty much close to it. She had one of the most successful businesses there.
00:40:49
Speaker
She had two at one point. She wasn't going to leave it behind. No. She fought for it. She worked for it. She earned her place to be there.
00:41:01
Speaker
And screw it if society didn't think that. She knew what she did.
00:41:07
Speaker
I think at the end of the day, like,
00:41:11
Speaker
bribing of juries and judges and witnesses aside, I think we can all stand to be a little bit more like Belle.
00:41:24
Speaker
That's just my opinion. But yeah. So that's this episode for this week. Let me know if you guys like it. um If you do, subscribe, share, repost.
00:41:38
Speaker
I'm going to keep doing stuff like this. If you have any stories or any other things concerning death, sex, gender, weird things, you want to know more about the history about, let me know in the comments.
00:41:50
Speaker
You can follow me on social media and let me know there. um and yeah, thanks for the listen. Hope you had fun.