The person who believes he can rise to a position of wealth and power in the state of Louisiana and not do business with the devil knows nothing about the devil and even less about Louisiana.
—James Lee Burke, Crusader’s Cross (2005)
New Orleans may have been a big city in 1884, but people noticed things. They noticed how beautiful Dora Kirby was and they were especially cognizant of her half-sister Minnie Wallace’s breathtaking loveliness. Even at fifteen, young Minnie stood out in a crowd: Taller than most girls at five feet, seven inches, with a husky voice and alabaster skin, she seemed to cast a spell on any male within her radius.1 It was a common sight to see Minnie strolling through the streets of New Orleans in company with her cousin Willie or her godfather, forty-year-old Judge William T. Houston.
Yes, people noticed, all right. Judge Houston, a married man, paid a lot of attention to those Wallace girls and squired them to balls and restaurants and carnivals. He was none too discreet about it, either. He was constantly pestering their mother, Elizabeth, to allow Minnie to live with him and his wife. “She’s too beautiful to be stuck in a boardinghouse,” he would say.2
With Dora, Judge Houston was prone to public displays of affection, no doubt thinking (wrongly) that his lofty position as district court judge would shield him from criticism. Dora herself should have known better, as by Mardi Gras of 1884, when she attended one of the balls with Houston, she was a married woman of twenty-six with two children. A weekly newspaper, the New Orleans Mascot, reminded the judge of his obligations as an officer of the court in a most humiliating way.
The Mascot was founded in 1882 as a gadfly newspaper that would not hesitate to expose political and moral chicanery wherever it was found. While the more staid daily newspapers, the Daily Picayune and the Times-Democrat (later merging into today’s Times-Picayune), often ignored the underworld or political corruption, the Mascot exposed it with demonic glee—and at the same time criticized its rivals for not doing so. Readers loved the gossip they found in the pages of their weekly Mascot.3
When, in late December 1884, Judge Houston got on a bandwagon advocating moral reform, “Bridget Magee” took him to task in “her” column. The “Bridget Magee” column comprised a mishmash of gossip and commentary related in an Irish brogue that rendered it somewhat humorous, but also difficult to read. In the Mascot of January 10, 1885, the Magee column ended this way: “Judge Houston should be the lasht man in the city to attimpt the role av moril raformer. . . . His intimate relations wid the Wallace family, ishpishally wid Miss Dora, are notorious, an’ it’s only his position on the binch that has kipt him from bein’ publicly denounced on more than wan occasion, notably at a carnival ball last Mardi Gras, fur his open an’ shameless asshociation wid her.”
And so the matter would have rested had it not been for the southern sense of honor that goaded Houston’s thirty-seven-year-old brother, James, into taking it upon himself to defend the family name against its detractors. Two days after the column came out, he armed himself with a gun, a knife, a blackthorn stick, and a former sheriff, and went calling on the editor of the Mascot, George Osmond, to “chastise” him (Houston’s word) for the insult to his brother.4
Houston and ex-sheriff (now registrar of voters) Robert Brewster climbed the stairs to the Mascot office and stopped at the first desk they came to, that of engraver Adolph Zennecke. “Where is George Osmond?” Houston asked, and Zennecke pointed to a desk at the other end of the room. Houston and Brewster approached and inquired of the next man, “Are you George Osmond?” When he told them he was, Houston—without asking whether Osmond had written the offending Bridget Magee column (he had not)—began pummeling him with the three-foot-long blackthorn walking stick. When Zennecke saw that his employer was being attacked, he ran to his aid, but before he could get there, Brewster drew his .40-caliber Colt revolver and fired at him.
When Osmond saw Brewster shooting at Zennecke, he took his own weapon (a double-action .44 Tranter) out of his desk drawer. Before he could fire, however, James Houston pulled out his pistol (also a .44 Tranter) and shot at the editor. So at this point Brewster was shooting at Zennecke, and Houston and Osmond were shooting at each other. Osmond’s first shot hit Houston in the hand, thereby putting him out of the fight. Having no weapon, Zennecke picked up a stove lid and flung it at Brewster like a Frisbee, whereupon Osmond and Brewster now emptied their pistols at each other.
Brewster later died in the hospital, but the amazing thing is that neither Osmond nor Houston was seriously injured, and Zennecke was not hit at all. The pistol-packing intruders were obviously terrible shots. Not so the defender Osmond, however: The coroner, Dr. Stanhope Jones, said that three bullets entered Brewster’s chest, two of them fatal.5
Many New Orleanians were upset that the two men who had acted in self-defense, Osmond and Zennecke, were held without bond, while the aggressor Houston went free on $2,500 bail. But, then, Houston was no ordinary citizen.
James D. Houston was an ambitious man, a political mover and shaker who preferred working behind the scenes. Almost singlehandedly, as advisor and campaign manager, he was responsible for the election of Louisiana governor Samuel McEnery, and he also personally financed the Grover Cleveland presidential campaign in Louisiana. He was a former criminal sheriff of New Orleans and at the time of the Mascot shooting incident held the office of tax collector.6
Houston was no stranger to duels, fights, or assassinations. In 1882 he was the second for the state treasurer of Louisiana in his duel with the editor of the New Orleans Daily Picayune. By that time, Houston was said to have “filled a private graveyard in years gone by.” In 1883 at a critical voting location, he shot and killed the leader of the campaign to elect McEnery’s opponent, later claiming (falsely) that it was self-defense.7 And there would be even more violence in his future.
Just before the Mascot shooting, that newspaper had printed a satirical series of hypothetical tombstones projected twenty-five years into the future and bearing the names of prominent politicians. James D. Houston’s monument featured dueling pistols and a knife, with an inscription: “Here lies James D. Houston, who died happily with his boots on. He was a generous and devoted friend to himself.” (Ironically, the now-dead Robert Brewster also had an entry, with a mourning dove that looked like a vulture on a broken column.)8
The Mascot claimed that its morals charge against William T. Houston regarding the Wallace girls wasn’t James Houston’s prime motive in seeking revenge, that he had been anxious to do so ever since he found that he couldn’t bully that newspaper into backing McEnery. It defended its printing of the gossip by saying that it “simply made public what had been talked about for months” and that it had received complaints about the judge’s behavior from citizens. (As we shall see, it is highly likely that some of these complaints came from James Wallace, Minnie’s father.) Before printing the column, the Mascot investigated and had the information corroborated by what it termed “responsible people.”9
Readers agreed with the newspaper in its criticism of the judge. “A Mother of a Family” wrote in to compliment the Mascot for not favoring the privileged. In other papers, she pointed out, no mention would be made of a young society woman’s causing a scandal, but “if a poor working girl drinks too much lager,” she would be fair game. The Mascot itself bragged that it was completely independent of influence and did not “bend the knee to moneyed aristocrats nor fear the murderous bullies of a corrupt government.”10
Just who was this Wallace family at the center of such a sensational and scandalous sequence of events?
When Minnie Wallace was born at 83 North Rampart Street in New Orleans on January 14, 1869, a temporary peace reigned in her family. Her parents, thirty-nine-year-old Elizabeth and forty-one-year-old James E. Wallace, had been married since July 1865, after Elizabeth’s divorce from her first husband, Irish native Dr. Patrick Kirby. James Wallace was a successful attorney and also served as a U.S. commissioner, making more than enough to support Elizabeth, Minnie, and Elizabeth’s eleven-year-old daughter, Dora Kirby.11
A couple of years after Minnie’s birth, the family welcomed another addition: three-year-old William “Willie” Willis, the son of Elizabeth’s niece, who had just died of consumption. Willie’s father wasn’t up to taking care of a little boy, so Elizabeth took him in and raised him like her own son. Minnie thought of him as a brother, since they were only eleven months apart in age, and the two were inseparable. When Willie was ten, his father died, too, leaving him officially an orphan.
But all too soon, cracks appeared in the façade of the Wallaces’ life. James was drinking more and more, and funds were at a premium. An energetic and ambitious woman, Elizabeth began taking in boarders to support the family. She harped at James for his drinking, and he retaliated by accusing her of sleeping with the boarders. In 1873, the two separated.
Possibly as a result of her husband’s position as commissioner, Elizabeth Wallace became acquainted with New Orleans district judge William T. Houston. Judge Houston was a married man, but he found himself increasingly drawn to the blooming and beautiful Dora Kirby, now a teenager. He began taking her around to various places and interesting himself in her upbringing. And, as little Minnie began to grow, everyone could see that she would be even more comely than her half-sister. Judge Houston noticed this, too.
Elizabeth Wallace may have decided at some point to raise her younger daughter in such a way as to assure her financial future as the wife of a wealthy man. She sent Minnie (and maybe Dora, too) to a convent school in New Orleans, the Ursuline Academy, where she learned the social graces and how to play the piano, as well as academic subjects. In 1882, Minnie transferred to the St. Louis Institute, another girls’ school, although she left just two years later without graduating. Judge Houston more than likely paid her tuition.
On Minnie’s thirteenth birthday, January 14, 1882, she was christened in New Orleans’ Christ Church, with Judge Houston as her godfather. And, although her birth certificate, filed in 1869, shows her middle initial as A., she would now be known as Minnie Mabel Houston Wallace. James Wallace, her father, was not present at this ceremony, as ever since the official divorce in 1880, granted by none other than Judge Houston, Elizabeth had forbid him to see Minnie.12
Wallace worried about his daughter and the way she was being raised. There were tales of raucous revelries at his ex-wife’s succession of boardinghouses, where men of questionable reputation gathered, men like “Handsome Charlie” Crushers and Jim Ruley, both of them gamblers and “fast men.” Minnie played the piano for them, while Dora, who had a wonderful voice, sang. At these various establishments—44 Dauphine Street, 27 Bourbon Street at the corner of Customhouse (both addresses squarely within the confines of the legal prostitution section later called Storyville), and 222 Canal Street—the word spread as to the incredible beauty and accomplishments of the landlady’s daughters.13
These boardinghouses run by Elizabeth and her daughters were prime watering holes for gamblers and politicians. Parties featured too much alcohol and too little restraint, and there was even a report (unsubstantiated) of a murder. The Mascot pointed a judgmental finger at members of the “Grand Old Party of morality and virtue” comprising the bulk of the partygoers. The food must have been pretty good, too, as local restaurants complained that their big spenders never patronized them again once they had a taste of the fare at the Wallace House—or maybe it was the atmosphere. Most of these rich and powerful men were infatuated with Minnie and her not inconsiderable charms.
On April 22, 1879, twenty-one-year-old Dora married portrait painter Edward George Findlay, nearly twenty years her senior. This was a hurry-up wedding, as their son Milton Howard Findlay was born just three months later—if, indeed, Milton was Edward’s child at all.14 Two years later, on June 8, 1881, Edward Kirby George Findlay, nicknamed Edwin, was born. And they all lived together at 44 Dauphine, 27 Bourbon, and 222 Canal Streets.
In 1884, the Wallace boardinghouse business got a welcome boost when New Orleans hosted the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, whose purpose was to showcase Louisiana’s agricultural gifts and mark the end of the Reconstruction period that followed the Civil War, as well as to heal the rift between the North and the South by giving a bang-up party that northerners would want to attend.15
And attend they did, although not in the millions as originally—and optimistically—predicted: Between its opening on December 16, 1884, and its closing on June 1, 1885, a mere 1,158,840 attendees filed through the gates of the Cotton Exposition. This may have been the result of poor timing (a winter opening, which would not have made a difference to southerners, but would have influenced travel plans of northerners) or a lingering mistrust of the South. An example of the latter can be seen in the reluctant agreement of the City of Philadelphia to send the Liberty Bell to the fair on a railroad flatcar. The reluctance stemmed from Philadelphians’ fears that the southerners would hijack the Bell and melt it down to make a statue of Jefferson Davis.16
Nonetheless, a Northerner from Emporia, Kansas, wanted to be among the first attendees at the fair. And with the entry of forty-eight-year-old James Reeves Walkup, our story properly begins.