The Scarlet Sisters Read Online Free PDF

“everyone’s love, doubles everyone’s pity.”
    One visitor to the brokerage office who often witnessed Byron during the period Tilton described said, “He was almost a complete idiot…although he had the Claflin beauty… Generally he sat on a lounge for a time, and then would rise and walk very rapidly about ten feet, back and forth, mumbling, grimacing and drooling. After five or ten minutes of this he would resume his seat, and remain for a short time comparatively quiet. The alternation went on continually. When his mother was in the office, she at times would seat herself beside him and fondle him. I thought then that she did so out of sincere maternal affection.”
    Other than Victoria’s martyrdom, and the continuing, vain hope that Canning Woodhull would reform, the rest of their time in Chicago is a blank, except for one melodramatic scene after Canning stayed away for a month. He was “keeping a mistress at a fashionable boarding-house, under the title of wife.” Victoria “sallied forth into the wintry street, clad in a calico dress without undergarments, and shod only with India-rubbers without shoes or stockings, entered the house, confronted the household as they sat at table.” Her tale drew tears from everyone, and the listeners “compelled the harlot to pack her trunk and flee the city, and shamed the husband into creeping like a spaniel back into the kennel” called home.
    Victoria no doubt embellished accounts of her husband’s behavior, but he did end up an alcoholic and morphine addict. And she was legally helpless to leave him. Like all married women, she was literally her husband’s property, as were any children she would bear. In most states, he lawfully had the right to beat her. In a divorce, he had the right to take the children. Even if he had had money, she would not have gotten any if she had instituted a divorce. Though the Claflins were hardly of a social class where a divorce scandal would have tainted the entire family, Victoria was nonetheless crushed, and trapped by the rules of the day.
    Tilton gives no date for Victoria’s next giant leap: impulsively taking her damaged child and drunken husband with her to San Francisco, during an unspecified time (probably in 1857 or 1858). Victoria was desperate enough, with no money or livelihood, to bravely strike out on a torturous journey that took nearly two months by sea, and more if they went from Chicago in covered wagon through dangerous Indian Territory. Her usually histrionic descriptions are startlingly absent regarding this trip to thecoast and their life there. One can even wonder if she might not have made up the San Francisco journey to hide her Midwest life, as here her story becomes elusive. How the young mother who described her Chicago existence as penniless, her clothes meager, and her lodgings squalid found the money for the trip or how they could afford a place to live, or where they settled in San Francisco, are unmentioned. If true, the venture seems to have been an impulsive disaster that lasted less than a year.
    In the wake of the 1849 gold rush, San Francisco had grown up. Miners’ shacks and shanties had given way to substantial brick houses, the U.S. Mint had built headquarters there, vigilante committees fussed about cleaning up crime in red-light districts, mud streets were being paved with cobblestones and earthquake tremors dutifully tracked. Levi Strauss had opened a store to sell his denims to the miners who still flocked to the surrounding hills. San Francisco had its streets of frontier bawdiness; the Barbary Coast, with its bars and brothels, remained a treacherous den of thieves. Newcomers arrived daily on ships that clogged the harbor, hoping to grab their share of gold.
    Canning’s drinking continued, and Victoria found herself “supporting the man by whom she ought to have been supported.” Who cared for Byron is not explained by Tilton. Victoria answered an ad for a “cigar girl” in