by Kevin Murphy
On April 6, 1864, James M. Stetson joined Company H of the Massachusetts 57th Regiment, organizing at Worcester and Readville. A month later, James M. Stetson and the 57th Regiment stumbled into the Battle of the Wilderness, torturously played out from May 5-7. James Stetson suffered serious wounds in battle, and on May 30, 1864, in a dreary hospital tent in rural Virginia, he died of his wounds. Stetson served for only fifty-five days. During the War of the Rebellion, many soldiers were given a $15 Springfield muzzleloader, taught to march in formation and were dead two months later.[208]
When James M. Stetson died, his son, Ernest, was only two. The boy, of course, never knew his father, and when Ernest was only seven, his mother, Janey, married a Vermonter ten years her senior, George D. Belcher. Janey’s new husband worked as a machinist. George and Janey Belcher—along with Ernest Stetson—settled in Chicopee, Massachusetts. Ernest remained an only child until he turned nineteen. In 1881, Janey Belcher produced another boy, Fred Belcher. Stepfather and stepson continued to get along well. Ernest learned the machinist trade from George Belcher, but the younger man wasn’t happy turning and filing machine parts in a noisy, smelly manufactory. He longed for something better. Beyond his restlessness in machine work, Ernest had an unquenchable thirst for life. He dressed in loud clothes and his friends were the riffraff of the half-world. He loved fast women, houses of ill fame, the National Trotting Circuit, and bare knuckles prize fighting. In short, he chased action with abandon all his life.[209]
While still living in Chicopee, Ernest became involved with an eighteen-year-old girl who was wilder than an acre of snakes. She used the name “Cora Bordeaux” and claimed Windsor, Connecticut, as her birthplace. Regardless of her real birth name or where she grew up, on October 18, 1884, Ernest Stetson and Cora Bordeaux were married in Chicopee. A married man now, Ernest Stetson decided he needed a better job, so he finagled work as a contractor at the Warwick Cycle Mfg. Company of Springfield, Massachusetts. George T. Warwick founded the company in 1888 to build bicycles, but failed in 1890. Local capitalists reorganized the firm and bicycles were built until 1899 when automobiles were added to the mix. The company became the Warwick Cycle & Automobile Co. Unfortunately, the business folded in 1905, about a decade before the Pope-Hartford Automobile Company closed its doors in Connecticut. The Midwest became the center of the nascent automobile business and none of the New England auto companies were able to meet the brutal competition.
While at Warwick Cycle Mfg., Ernest Stetson learned from a co-worker that the really fast money was in vice—above all, houses of ill fame. Not much later, thirty-one-year-old Ernest Stetson left Warwick Cycle of Springfield in favor of Hartford, Connecticut and started using the name Billy West. Instead of taking his new wife, Cora, to Connecticut—in his Lotharian way—he brought along another member of the fast set, Grace Howard.[210]
Grace Howard was an attractive, fun-loving woman with a Rubenesque figure, who had been out behind the barn a few times. There was nothing wraithlike about Grace Howard, but she fascinated men. In addition, she had somehow picked up the rudiments of running a house of ill fame. When Grace Howard and Billy West took the train to Hartford in 1893, she was twenty-eight. It’s dangerous to attempt to calculate where a young woman descended into the irredeemable abyss, but in Grace Howard’s case, it may all be traceable to her father’s sudden death—under some truly ugly circumstances.
Grace’s real name was Smith. In early 1887, her father, Henry Smith, had been sworn in as a “Special” Deputy Marshall. Along with two friends, Smith formed a three-man posse for Deputy U.S. Marshall John Phillips, on an ill-fated assignment in Oklahoma. In truth, Henry Smith worked as an Internal Revenue Agent in New York, but since 1872, U.S. Marshals had helped revenue agents—who didn’t have arrest powers—in the enforcement of whiskey laws, including those in Indian Territory. Keep in mind that before the days of personal income taxes, the federal government had limited sources of income. Tariffs on imports and taxes on whiskey were two of its biggest revenue streams and agents of the government were obsessed with the collection of whiskey taxes to the point where they would break up stills and chase down a single Indian over a few bottles of firewater. So said, John Phillips—and his three-man posse of Eastern greenhorns—headed for Oklahoma.[211]
The marshals arrested Seaborn Green (Kilajah), an eighteen-year-old Creek Indian who the Feds wanted on a federal whiskey charge. The marshals of the posse established a camp near Hillabee, Indian Territory, while John Phillips rode to Eufaula on business. The three remaining deputies took turns watching Green during the night, but somehow he got hold of the camp hatchet and butchered all three marshals. Adding insult to injury, Green then burned the men’s bodies. When Phillips returned, he was aghast, but buried his friends before tracking down Green. Phillips arrested Green on January 28 and brought him to Fort Smith. A jury found Seaborn Green guilty of three counts of murder, and on October 7, 1887, he was hanged near the courthouse at Fort Smith.[212]
Because Grace Howard’s father worked as a lawman, just like Tom Hollister’s father, the Hartford police gave her special treatment. Sometimes they were forced to include her house in a big raid, but they usually charged her with serving liquor without a license instead of keeping a house of ill repute.[213]
Amusingly, the Chicopee-Springfield sporting crowd seemed hopelessly unimaginative when it came to aliases. Grace Smith probably took the alias Grace Howard because Billy West grew up at 33 Howard Street in Chicopee. Also, Cora Stetson’s grandfather, William “Billy” West had a farm in Dalton, Massachusetts. Lastly, when Billy got his first resort on State Street in Hartford, he hired Dottie Emmons as one of his inmates. More than a decade later, Billy took the name William Emmons when he opened a bordello in Norwich, Connecticut.[214]
The plan—if anything Billy West ever put together could be called a plan—was to have his wife, Cora Stetson, join him in Hartford after he secured a lease on a sporting house and got the place up and running. When Billy West and Grace Howard hit Hartford, they pooled their money and bought out the lease of Lizzie Cadwell at 165 State Street—the Bange mansion. Levitt Knoek, a pawnbroker and hardware dealer at 188 State Street, owned the property. This house was the same place Jennie and Tom Hollister ran from about 1870 until they moved to 76 Wells Street in 1883. Perhaps influenced by all the fictitious names of tenderloin characters, Knoek began calling himself “Knock” in his newspaper advertisements. The tenderloin churned with illusion and fantasy, so one could blame a long-established businessman for joining in the nonsense.
Knoek had to remain in the dark regarding Billy and Grace’s plans for the property—or at least maintain plausible deniability—because some of the city’s religious leaders hounded the police relentlessly about closing the brothels. One of the clerics’ favorite dreams was to go after the landlords of Hartford’s tenderloin buildings. The clerics felt that if sufficient pressure were put on the landlords, the houses of ill fame would close. Well and good, but by the 1890s State Street sported so many bawdy houses that Knoek would have been surprised if Billy West and Grace Howard had other plans! So the two Springfield entrepreneurs simply walked in and continued Lizzie Cadwell’s business. Billy West and Grace Howard turned the old palace of sin into the city’s newest and most palatial den of iniquity.[215]
Before doing anything else, Billy met with Chief of Police George F. Bill and paid the necessary “licensing fees.” In the course of business, clients often asked why his place wasn’t raided. His answer? “We have never been bothered by the police because we ‘fixed’ things with the authorities.”[216]
Impatience dogged Billy West. Instead of sitting back and waiting for patrons to appear, he went out to promote his business. West walked up into Statehouse Square and took a position directly in front of the United States Hotel—on the north side of the square—where he chatted up traveling salesmen who frequented the hotel’s reading rooms. Slowly, he brought the conversation around to the sporting life. If the
salesman showed interest, Billy would direct him to the Bange mansion. Of course, West never had time to go with the man, but promised to catch up with him later.[217]
Eventually, the proprietors of the United States Hotel asked Billy West to move on, and he pulled the same stunt at Prospect Street’s Brower House. In the process of drumming up business in front of the Brower House, Billy became good friends with William “Bill” Crowley, one of the partners in the hotel and another disciple of the sporting life. Crowley later sold his interest in the Brower House to his partner Morgan Sherman and opened a hotel in Old Orchard Beach, Maine. Just as always happens when kindred souls meet, Bill Crowley and Billy West became close friends and spent considerable time at the racetrack and at prizefights. Despite this newfound bond, even Crowley had to ask Billy West to hustle up business somewhere else besides the front steps of the Brower House.[218]
As an aside, the Brower House eventually wound up in the hands of the Connecticut River Banking Company. The bank’s officers knew that it was a house of ill repute, but decided that they would simply let it run. Unfortunately, a big depositor of the bank created a fuss and the bank had to sell the Brower House. It reopened in 1900 as the Hotel Climax, an all-male rooming house. As could have been predicted, the boarders had more girls in and out of the Hotel Climax than were there when it was the Brower House; the sale accomplished nothing.[219]
The Bange mansion under Billy West featured very young girls and many of these girls were from Springfield. One especially exotic filly almost closed the place in her first week. She was only sixteen and when this fact came to the attention of the Chief of Police George Bill, he told Grace Howard to send the girl packing. At first, Grace did as she was told, but the young girl proved too great an attraction and Grace begged her to return, offering protection from the police in the deal.[220]
With that kind of attention to detail, it wasn’t surprising that the Bange mansion enjoyed a new lease on life and prospered mightily during the inappropriately named “Gay 90s.” Grace Howard had all the élan of a talented madame, and later claimed that she made Billy West $2,500 in the two years that she ran the place.
Billy West had been enjoying the sporting life for about two years when his wife, Cora Stetson, arrived in Hartford. Of course, now she would use the name Cora West. Since Grace Howard and Billy West were not expecting Cora, trouble erupted immediately. Billy solved this little dilemma by convincing Grace Howard to leave, so that Cora could run the house. Grace assumed that her friendship with Billy would continue, but when she later needed a $50 loan, Billy gave her a huge horselaugh—textbook Billy West.[221]
As a result of their 1884 marriage, Cora last name was technically Stetson, while her husband strutted around Hartford as Billy West. After Cora cemented her position as the madame at 165 State Street, she pressed her advantage by forcing Billy West to marry her again. They became William and Cora West in 1895. However, marriage meant so little to Billy West that the license was practically worthless. Sadly for Cora, Billy West had the attention span of a child. The only ironclad fact that Cora could bet on with any certainty was that Billy would eventually leave her. The characters of the demimonde had no loyalty or commitments—only appetites.
With Cora running the State Street place, the money continued to pour in. It was about this time that Billy West established his reputation as a sport. “He attended all the prize fights, and became chummy with Adolph “Al” Russell, Jim Campbell, “Harry” Rosenthal, “Mo” Harris, Jim Manion and others of the Capitol City sporting crowd. He wore fancy clothes and spent exorbitant sums of money. While sitting ringside at the fights, he became friendly with a couple of New York sports—Herman Rosenthal and “Billiard Ball Jack” Rose, who suffered from alopecia universalis, an ailment that caused the complete loss of hair on his body.
Jack Rose became a nationally-known fight promoter and lived in Hartford for a time. Rose partnered with Mo Harris in the Charter Oak Athletic Club (1891), and he was constantly starting “joints” like the Tremont Hotel in Bridgeport, a future gambling Mecca he bought in 1898 with Al Russell. He also had the Jack Rose Social Club on Main Street in Hartford (1902) and the Grand Athletic Union in New York (1908).
Herman Rosenthal had amassed quite a bit of money with New York gambling houses, but he was a world-class complainer. To restore harmony among the New York sports, Jack Rose arranged for four gunmen to silence Rosenthal for good on July 16, 1912, in front of the Hotel Metropole on W. 43rd Street. The four gunmen—Harry “Gyp the Blood” Horowitz, Louis “Lefty Louie” Rosenberg, Frank “Dago Frank” Cirofici, and Jacob “Whitey Lewis” Seidenshner—were executed on April 13, 1914 at Sing Sing, while another behind the scenes puppeteer, New York Police Lt. Charles Becker, sat through a similar fate at Sing Sing on July 30, 1915. Jack Rose was the only one who walked. Though Rose never stopped looking over his shoulder, he died of natural causes in 1947.[222]
The New York gamblers played rough, but Billy West was more of a lover than a fighter. In the spring of 1897, beautiful, petite Gertrude Camp caught Billy’s eye. Gertie was one of the hundreds of girls who worked at Plimpton Manufacturing Company on Pearl Street—the source of all U.S Government stamped envelopes after 1874. Plimpton’s didn’t exactly have a reputation for its outrageously good-looking women, but the company really set a standard when it hired Gertie Camp and her friend Maggie Doyle—two legendary head-turners. Apparently, each of these girls spent the evening hours discovering their special talents, and after confidences were exchanged, they decided to go into business together.[223]
One reporter daydreamed, “Maggie Doyle is a pretty girl, a very pretty girl, one of those plump, squeezable girls that makes one think of love, lusciousness, voluptuousness, and so on. . . .”[224] Unfortunately for the girls’ new business, a tall, dark stranger from Springfield caused Maggie to swoon and the lovers relocated to New York’s tenderloin district. Some members of the demimonde swore he was a lawyer; a few said he had come into inherited wealth; still others claimed that he descended from a very respectable old Springfield family. The only thing that everyone agreed on was that no one knew his real name—and probably no one ever would.[225]
Of course, all this romance left Gertie Camp high and dry, but Gertie was a beauty and a real charmer. Not long after Maggie left town, Billy West fell hard for Gertie. He set her up in a lavish set of rooms on Church Street and began spending his free time there while Cora kept an eye on the Bange mansion.
In the summer of 1898, Gertie Camp captivated everyone at Charter Oak Park, the horse track in the Elmwood section of West Hartford. (In 1874—a year after Burdette Loomis opened Charter Oak Trotting Park on New Park Avenue—the train station in southeastern West Hartford took the name Elmwood.) Charter Oak Park had never seen such a beauty. Billy West was floating on air and after the season closed at Charter Oak Park, he and Gertie began to follow the National Circuit Trotting races.
Billy West had plenty of time for Gertie Camp in the summer of 1898, thanks to a visit by Secretary Samuel Thrasher of the Law and Order League of New Haven. This upstart group demanded that all the houses of ill fame in Hartford be closed, which put Chief Bill in a tough spot. Hartford’s reputation as a wide open city put enormous pressure on Chief of Police George Bill, and though he received his marching orders from the mayor not Samuel Thrasher, he simply had to do something. So in early May, Chief Bill sent the following notice to all the brothel keepers—
To________________________:
Owner, Agent or Lessee of No. ___________________Street.
You are hereby notified that the above premises are used as a house of ill fame. Under the Statute (Section 1,531) if you permit your premises to be used after notice from an officer of the community, you are liable to a fine not exceeding $500, or imprisonment not more than six months. This notice is given in accordance with the above law and for the purpose of carrying out its provisions.
Respectfully,
GEORGE F. BI
LL
Chief of Police[226]
According to Chief Bill’s order, the houses of ill fame had to close by July 1, 1898, or he would personally drive the proprietors out of town—as the statute provided. Owing to this memorandum, the fast women of Hartford were in a dither. Some were going out to the roadhouses near New Britain and some to a roadhouse on East Windsor Hill; others were preparing to open new houses in the suburbs; still others took up residence with friends. While everyone else scrambled, Billy West closed his place on State Street and took Gertie Camp to the races. As long as the money lasted, a long vacation wasn’t a bad idea. But trouble followed Billy West around, probably because he was such an inveterate plunger. At Cleveland, in the middle of August, Billy bet almost everything he had on a horse—and lost. Three weeks later, Billy and Gertie were back in Hartford.[227]
When Billy West and Gertie Camp returned in September 1898, everything had changed. Gertie returned to her lavish digs on Church Street and Billy reopened the Bange mansion—but it wasn’t the house of old. Billy West was scrambling. Now he was without the fancy diamonds he used to wear on his fingers and couldn’t even afford a good winter coat. Though counterintuitive, all of the houses did not close when Chief Bill issued his threat. Some proprietors defied his order and, in no time at all, the vast majority of them were back in business.
Nevertheless, in the three months that the Bange mansion was closed, State Street had lost its reputation as the heart of the tenderloin. Grace Howard opened a bordello on Trumbull Street with her lover, Harry Arnold. From there, she rented rooms in a building on Upper Main Street—the 500 block—at Needham’s Corner, a quarter mile north of Statehouse Square. Later, she leased rooms above The Hartford Times on the corner of Main Street and Central Row. Though Ada Leffingwell tried to groom Grace Howard to take over 5 Arch Street, Grace ultimately turned back the clock and took the Bange mansion off Billy West’s hands in late 1901.[228]