The Harlot's Horse Race

In the early years of the California Gold Rush, the “soiled doves” who flocked westward did so in the expectation of more opportunities for general good fortune, more personal freedom, and of course, greater wealth. Their suppositions were correct. For a time, prostitutes held a privileged place in a society whose population was 92% male.

A surplus of lonely men meant a plentiful market for prostitutes. In fact, one Protestant missionary claimed, the ratio of harlots to honest women in 1852 was so great that the latter class had to conduct themselves with the strictest propriety, or risk receiving suspicious looks. Prostitutes not only enjoyed high earnings, they tended to boldly flaunt their status as women of low morals; their silk or velvet gowns always displayed the latest Paris or London fashions, and jewels glittered at their ears, wrists, and half-exposed bosoms. They could afford it.

Those blessed with comeliness combined with business savvy, unflappable temperaments, and executive abilities—women such as San Francisco’s Belle Cora and Irene McCready—were famous for their opulent mansions, lavish parties, and clienteles of wealthy, prominent men. In the hierarchy of the trade, they occupied the highest rank. Common streetwalkers were at the bottom rung of the ladder; and below even that were the pitiable, abused, indentured Chinese prostitutes.

Most fallen women were somewhere in the middle: girls who earned prosperous incomes and enjoyed a fair amount of personal independence, whether they were a brothel owner or just one of the house’s “borders.” Few, however, made it into the more upscale parlor houses; they lacked a certain refinement of manner, and the requisite self-discipline. The lower-middle girls were a simpler lot, less inhibited, more prone to questionable behavior such as making a spectacle of themselves while under the influence of alcohol, or indulging in raucous behavior just for the fun of it.

On an ordinary Monday in April, 1856, two very drunken trollops—just for the fun of it—made unwilling witnesses of the decent citizens of Sacramento while they indulged in a rollicking horse race on city streets. One of them was Ida Vanard, who operated a house of ill-fame on Fourth Street. She was notorious, not for her occupation, but for being acquitted—at a sensational trial three years earlier—of premeditated murder for stabbing another prostitute. On that April Monday in 1856, Ida was in trouble again: out on bail, but scheduled to appear in court the following week, this time charged with the attempted murder of two gold miners who had visited her brothel a few months past, in December, 1855.

The other debauched female was Ida’s friend, roommate, and fellow sister-in-sin, Margaret Emerson. Better known as Margaret McClane, she was the mistress of career criminal James McClane, currently confined to Sacramento’s floating prison brig the La Grange, from which, a few days earlier, he had attempted to escape. Suspecting that Margaret had provided him with the elements he had fashioned into rudimentary tools, authorities had forbidden her any future visits.

Barred from visiting her inamorato, Margaret felt like blowing off some steam. Ida, for her part, needed no excuse to whoop it up, and both had probably been drinking since noon. Laughing and yelling, lashing their steeds—their jests freely interspersed with profane oaths that assaulted the ears of their captive audience, who wisely stayed on the sidelines—the two young women thundered past storefronts and the prominent Orleans Hotel on Second Street, until ... at the corner of Second and I Streets, Ida suddenly fell off her horse.

Landing hard on the street, Ida was momentarily stunned, but—as if in affirmation of the adage that God takes care of fools and drunks—was not seriously injured. Someone carried her to Miller’s nearby stable, where someone else doused her with a bucket of water. Recovering, but still a bit dazed, Ida allowed a stable employee—perhaps Miller himself, knowing that Ida would pay him later—to bundle her into a carriage and send her home.   

Margaret watched this scene in silence, and then—in an action that baffled the onlookers—dismounted her own horse and tried to climb aboard Ida’s. Since she, too, was quite inebriated, she may have done so clumsily, further irritating an animal that had already had enough. The horse threw her off, though she managed to land upright. All at once aware that the game was finished, Margaret decided to walk the two long city blocks home and started out, reportedly reeling with every step.

The crowd sent up a parting chorus of “baas” and “boos,” but neither woman was arrested for their disreputable conduct.