Davenport Writers Group

 

Members of the Davenport Writers Group engaged in a heated literary discussion. left to right: Arthur Davison Ficke, Floyd Dell, Suasan Glaspell, and George Cram Cook.

Des Moines Baseball Team 1906

Des Moines baseball team, 1906..

Top row, left to right: Ben Caffyn, M. E. Cantillion, Louis Mauske.

Second row: Babe Towne, Andreas, George Hogreiver, Mike Welday, Roscoe Miller.

Lower Row: Charles Dexter, George Magoon, Frank O’Leary, Bill Shipke, Eddie Cicotte, Grover Gillen.

Upper right corner.: John J. Doyle, captain and manager.

(From the Des Moines Register. September 2, 1906)

Lillian Russell The Iowa Girl Who Took the World By Storm

Lillian Russell was born Helen Louise Leonard in Clinton, Iowa, in the early 1860s . Her father ran a newspaper, her mother scared the local men by speaking her mind, and the baby came out howling like she already had headlines to make.

 She grew up in Chicago, where sin had a better rhythm. Helen sang too loudly, laughed too big, and drove her mother half mad. She got kicked out of a church choir for “indecorous behavior,” which is Victorian code for being interesting. Someone told her nice girls didn’t go onstage. Helen said, “Then I guess I’m not nice.”

 

She was eighteen when she ran away to New York — the filthy, electric carnival of the Gilded Age. Tony Pastor looked her over, saw the cheekbones, the mouth, the trouble. He said, “Helen Leonard sounds like someone who does laundry. You’ll be Lillian Russell.” It was a name made for scandal and silk sheets.

 

By 1881 she was onstage in The Pirates of Penzance, and America lost its collective mind. The New York World called her “the prettiest girl in America.” Another paper called her “a soprano who makes an entrance like a cavalry charge.” A Boston critic said she was “more bosom than brilliance.” She framed that one, saying, “At least he noticed.”

Murder in Davenport's Fairmount Cemetery

Kate Ryan

They found her at dawn in Fairmount Cemetery. A workman on his way to the gate saw a horse first—head down, reins slack. Then a buggy smashed against a tree. Then, farther down a ravine, a woman in black.

She was face-down, her hat in the grass. A hatpin was still in her hand. When the police rolled her over, they found a bullet hole between her eyes.

Her name was Kate Ryan, though in Bucktown she went by Rose Earl. She worked at Babe Foreman’s house, one of the licensed brothels in Davenport’s red-light district.

Since 1893, the city had made vice official business. The police collected monthly fines from the madams, and the girls worked without fear of raids. It was cleaner that way, they said. Predictable. Kate’s boss paid twenty-five dollars for the house license and ten more for each girl. Kate Ryan was legal. Until she wasn’t.

The man everyone blamed was Peter Shardis, known to the streets as Pete Sardine. He was thirty-five, short, with a limp and a bottle habit. He’d come from Greece eight years earlier, drifted between Moline and Davenport, working in foundries until he drank his way out of them.

Grace McDaniels The Mule Faced Lady

Grace McDaniels and her son, Elmer

They say every carnival needs a monster. Iowa built one on a farm.

Grace McDaniels was born near Villisca in 1888— a cold little dot of America where even the cows look bored. She came into the world with a red mark running down her face, the kind of thing that makes old women cross themselves and whisper about God’s unfinished business. The doctors didn’t have a clue. They called it a “port-wine stain” because it sounded classier than “weird, red mistake.”

 

Grace grew up hiding behind scarves and hand-me-down shame. She tried powder, veils, anything short of duct tape. Iowa is an awful place to look different — too flat, nowhere to hide. She probably spent half her childhood dreaming about disappearing into the corn.

 

At some point, she stopped fighting it. That’s the thing about humiliation — it either kills you or makes you bulletproof. Grace figured if the entire world was going to gawk, she might as well sell tickets.

 

So she packed up her pain and took it to Chicago in 1933. The World’s Fair — a temple of progress powered by electricity, gasoline, and cruelty. For a dime, you could see the future, or a human being in a cage. Grace joined the sideshow under a hand-painted banner: THE MULE-FACED WOMAN.

Edward Bonney Frontier Thief Turned Detective

Edward Bonney at Mother Long's (unfortunately Bonney
never posed for a portrait. This image is from his book.)

Edward Bonney came to Nauvoo in the spring of 1844 with a half-smile and a forged past. He’d been a miller, a hotel keeper, and a counterfeiter. Now he was playing saint among saints. The city was busy building heaven on earth, but under the hymns and handshakes was a different congregation—men who printed money at night and buried bodies by day. Bonney recognized the smell. He’d once reeked of it himself.

 The Hodges were the first cracks in the holy façade. William and Stephen—farm-boy faces, dead eyes. They’d killed a man during a robbery gone wrong, then tried to hide behind the good name of the Saints. Iowa wanted blood. Burlington got it. 

 

The gallows went up behind the courthouse. The crowd pressed close, hungry for justice or entertainment—it was hard to tell. One brother prayed aloud; the other cursed the sheriff. When the trap fell, the sound was short and heavy, like a door slamming on the frontier’s soul. 

She Killed Her Baby And Got Away With It

Nellie Taylor

Des Moines, 1909. Everyone was dying dramatically. Fifteen murders. Twenty-five suicides. Five people flattened by streetcars. Ten by trains. It was like the Grim Reaper had a summer home there.

 And then,  Nellie Taylor came into the mix.

 

She was twenty-three, pretty, well-dressed, and apparently powered by poor decisions and unresolved trauma. Her husband, Glen, got himself killed while working on the railroad. Then she fell for one of his friends, Everett Humble—which is a terrible name for a man who absolutely wasn’t. They planned to get married until she got pregnant and he did what men named Everett Humble apparently do and ghosted her like a coward with a mustache.

 

So, Nellie had a baby. Then she panicked. The children’s homes wouldn’t take it, her parents didn’t know about it, and her mental health was circling the drain. So she decided that murder was her “only course.”

 

She told the police that calmly, like she was reading a weather report. “I undressed it, took the string from its shirt, and tied it tight around its neck.” That’s what she said. Straight face. No tears. No tremble. Just… logistics.