Abandoned and destitute, a woman accuses local fortune teller of exploitation
After collapsing on a Walla Walla street, a young woman details a coerced journey from Boise and a harrowing attempt to force her into sex work.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
A woman, giving her name as Mrs. Bessie Rhodes, was picked up at the corner of Colville and Cherry streets yesterday, where she had fallen due to heart trouble. Taken to St. Mary's hospital, she told a story of hard luck: she had come to Walla Walla from Boise with a woman known as Madame Patti, a fortune teller who promised her work. Upon arriving, Rhodes claims Madame Patti revealed her true intent: to force Rhodes to become an inmate of a house of ill fame on Rose street. Rhodes refused and eventually found temporary domestic work with a Mrs. Augustavo, but after being let go, she was left destitute and collapsed while seeking employment. Madame Patti denies the charges, claiming she brought the woman to Walla Walla as an act of kindness.
“She said that there was a great deal of money to be made in Walla Walla if I would assist her. She said she would go on with her fortune telling and that I should become an inmate of one of the houses of ill fame.”
This account exposes the dangerous power imbalance faced by unhoused or transient women in early 20th-century Walla Walla, where 'fortune tellers' and brothel keepers often operated in a gray market of exploitation. The tension between the woman’s claim of trafficking and the suspect's dismissive deflection remains a dark reality in the histories of frontier boomtowns.
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