Good Time Girls of Nevada and Utah by Jan MacKell Collins

Author:Jan MacKell Collins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: TwoDot
Published: 2022-05-09T00:00:00+00:00

In 1876 Salt Lake City saw the arrival of Matilda Turnross, aka Emma Whiting, alias Emma DeMarr. Born in Sweden in about 1860, Emma came to America in 1873. By 1876, at the tender age of sixteen years, she was in Salt Lake City working under Madam Emma Davis. Later, in 1882, Emma and her sister Alvie (Christina Elvitina Turnross) partnered on a brothel in Bellevue, Idaho. In the fall, they returned to Salt Lake together after having made over $3,000 in Bellevue. The ladies bought a two-story adobe house and resumed running a brothel together. When Alvie married in 1883 she left the business to Emma. Two years later Emma was arrested along with several other madams for keeping a house of prostitution. She was fined $99. Twenty-four other prostitutes, some of whom surely worked for Emma, were fined $50. Next, in 1886, Alvie suddenly reappeared and sued Emma with claims she had been defrauded. Emma appears to have played dirty. She insisted that her maiden name was DeMarr, although Alvie revealed it was Turnross. She also claimed that Alvie had signed over everything to her and even presented a letter in court from her mother to ascertain that Alvie was older than she was and therefore old enough to sign over her half of the business. In reality, the letter was forged by Emma’s brother, but because of it, she won.

Emma, it appears, would do anything to maintain control over her brothel queendom, and that included working with and assisting other madams. Around the time of Alvie’s lawsuit, Emma also was reported to have gone “out to try and rustle up the amount necessary” to bail another madam out of jail. Over the next two years, Emma continued acquiring brothel property around her adobe house at 243 South Main Street. She also married, in 1888, to a saloon owner named Charles V. Whiting. Two years later, a case was dismissed against Emma for running her Main Street brothel because she had actually leased it out to another woman. In 1891, Emma leased the house again, to Minnie Barton. This time she was immediately indicted for leasing a brothel. Whether Minnie continued leasing Emma’s brothel is unknown, but it is known that she died the next year.

In 1897 Emma charged Charles Whiting with calling her “a bitch, a damned whore and a damned son of a bitch,” and giving her a severe beating.8 Yet the couple resided, perhaps off and on, at 243 South Main until 1898. In the meantime, they began investing in real estate while Emma leased most of her property to other madams. She eventually took some of her businesses back, but Madam Ida Walker was leasing Emma’s property at 243 South Main by 1900. Emma and Charles moved out of the house and continued investing in other properties for the next several years. Finally, in 1909, Emma sold all of her property for $120,000 to William Ferry, who became mayor of Salt Lake in 1915 and supported prostitution regulation.

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