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a tobacco emporium, which were notoriously fronts for brothels. Behind the slim sampling of cigars, girls were supposed to sell favors instead of cheroots. These establishments were routine in large cities. To demonstrate just how vulgar cigar stores were considered, an 1870 guide to Manhattan brothels noted that a cigar girl was low on the list. Customers ranged from fatherly judges to toughly aggressive youths. Newspapers warned impoverished women about the “great evil consequent upon very beautiful girls being placed in cigar stores,” where customers “ultimately affect her ruin.”
    Why Victoria cited this dubious job in an otherwise meager account of her life in San Francisco seems strange, unless it was an attempt to prove herself innocent of prostitution. Tilton wrote that the “blushing,modest, and sensitive” Victoria was fired after one day because she was “too fine” for the job. The proprietor in this sordid occupation allegedly gave Victoria a twenty-dollar gold piece, puzzlingly generous compensation for a young woman he had just fired.
    Victoria then became a seamstress, her needle being the “only weapon many women possess wherewith to fight the battle of life,” continued Tilton. There are no clues as to how long she performed this job, an exhausting process of hand-stitching, before sewing machines were in general use. One day, “She chanced to come upon Anna Cogswell,” an actress, who wanted a seamstress. Victoria complained that she could not make enough money sewing, so Cogswell told her she should go on the stage. Just like that, Victoria was “engaged as a lesser light to the Cogswell star.” In those days, actresses were considered part of the shady demimonde, with stage door Johnnies waiting for a trophy in exchange for a late supper.
    With Victoria’s quick memory, she learned the part, and for six weeks earned fifty-two dollars a week. “Never leave the stage,” admiring fellow performers urged. Victoria allegedly said she was meant for something higher. Then, while “clad in a pink silk dress and slippers, acting in the ballroom scene in the Corsican Brothers, suddenly a spirit-voice told her ‘Victoria, come home!’ ” In her vision, she saw Tennie, “then a mere child—standing by her mother,” calling her to return. She raced out, still in her “dramatic adornments, through a foggy rain to her hotel. She packed up her few clothes, Canning, and Byron and grabbed the morning steamer for New York.” On board, her “spiritual states” produced “profound excitement among the passengers.”
    Mother Annie, wrote Tilton, had told Tennie—at the same time Victoria saw the vision—“to send the spirits after Victoria to bring her home.”
    The spirits may have been calling, but it was their mother who wanted Victoria back, to help support the family. With Victoria home, they now had another golden goose to put to work.

CHAPTER TWO
    Tennie
    When the newly married Victoria moved away in 1853, she had left behind eight-year-old Tennie, who would never know a normal childhood or a schoolroom. Tennessee Celeste Claflin, born on October 26, 1845, was reportedly named after one of the many states the wandering Claflins visited. Or, as another legend has it, Buck named her for the state his favorite president, James Polk, represented while in Congress. As the baby, she was alternately coddled and neglected in this sprawling, squalling family of parents and older sisters who returned with their children, extended families, and assorted husbands between divorces. None of the Claflin clan seemed congenitally able to stay married for long. The fighting continued when the family moved to the home of older sister Margaret Miles. Soon after the Claflins arrived, Margaret’s marriage ended when her husband, Enos, the town druggist, caught her in a hotel with another man and chased her down the street with a butcher’s knife.
    Without Victoria by her side, Tennie became the cash cow