Today, I have two fragments to share. Why fragments instead of a whole story? Partly because I’ve written such long posts recently. But each one has its own appeal!

The first fragment is from October 1901, when the Los Angeles Evening Express introduced us to 18-year-old Lena Duarte, “a woman of ill repute.” Duarte had written an obscene letter to a former friend, Mabel Smith.

I call this story a fragment because I can’t figure out what was actually wrong with Lena’s letter. On October 17, 1901, the Los Angeles Times wrote the most complete account, opining this letter of Lena’s got her “in a peck of trouble.”

“Her words create a stench that permeates the very atmosphere,” ran the article noting Lena was charged with “sending a lewd and obscene letter through the mails.”

“It was addressed to ‘My Dear, Loving Mabel,’ and in the body of the letter it even said, ‘Now, duckie,’ and so far as her bosom friend, Mabel, was concerned, it was all affection, but the language was something awful,” the paper reported. “It was written a month ago, and the green monster,  jealousy, must have cut their love in two since then, for Mabel [brought] charges against Lena.”

Of the six words the paper quoted, the letter sounds like many other letters one friend might write to another in this era. But for whatever reason, the letter resulted in a 6-month sentence in San Quentin.  I’m mystified!

In any case, Lena Duarte had the last laugh.  “Mabel Smith, the woman who informed against her, has also been arrested for having sent an obscene letter to Gene Murphy, a disreputable character of Fresno. This information was given to Postoffice Inspector Hall by the Duarte woman.“

 

The other fragment I chose purely because the mugshot looks like a Hollywood headshot. This fellow, C.H. Stickels, is straight out of central casting!

I couldn’t find any articles about the crime that sent him to San Quentin in August 1901. I did find he served time earlier in Albuquerque. In January, he was in prison there for stealing a revolver. The local paper wrote: “It was wrong that the boy should have been sent there in the first place.”

He looks a little like Curly Bill in Tombstone, doesn’t he?