‘Another wife used not a whip but a rock’

I found an amazing map of my hometown of Davenport, Iowa, dated 1888. It provides a three-dimensional, overhead view of the city with breathtaking detail. Look, for instance, at the corner of Fourth and Brady. You can see the churches, sense the architecture. Is Building No. 69 a hotel?

Maps have their limits, however—or maybe it’s just my imagination that’s limited. I don’t actually see hookers. For that I need Sharon E. Wood, author of The Freedom of the Streets: Work, Citizenship, and Sexuality in a Gilded Age City (2005). Turns out that Davenport, ca. 1888, was a den of sin:

Downtown, she spotted her husband near Fourth and Brady flirty with two young women who were “not such as she cared to have him associate with.” She caught up with the trio, “pounded” the two women, then grabbed a whip from a nearby buggy and thrashed her husband. Another wife used not a whip but a rock to attack her husband when she unexpectedly spotted him on Second Street “with one of the most degraded creatures of the town.” On another occasion, a young woman chanced to meet her fiancé “in company with a woman whose companionship on the streets he would have avoided in the day time.” After protesting his behavior, she left, then returned with a revolver, firing several shots at him. When another man intervened to take the revolver from her, she ran toward the river and was narrowly averted from suicide. A similar encounter ended more tragically, with the shamed woman returning home to end her life with a dose of morphine.

Maybe Good Ol’ 69 was a brothel . . .

PREVIOUSLY: “No,” he croaks. “No! I won’t come back to Davenport.”

IMAGE: Davenport, Iowa, Henry Wellge, Cartographer, 1888