“ She was a voluptuous creature.” So said veteran San Francisco police detective Ben Bohen in 1890 when recalling Belle Cora (depicted at right), the most notorious woman of Gold Rush–era California. The beautiful and cultured Cora ran San Francisco’s preeminent bordello. Among her clients and friends were influential politicians, businessmen, lawyers and judges. But when Belle’s lover shot and killed a prominent U.S. marshal, she found herself in direct conflict with not only the city police and prosecutor but also the feared 1856 Committee of Vigilance. Despite such formidable adversaries, in the end her true nemesis proved to be another woman, a California pioneer of an entirely different cloth.
San Francisco’s Gold Rush vixen was born Arabella “Belle” Ryan in Baltimore, Md., in 1828. Belle and sister Anastasia, two years her senior, were orphaned in childhood. The Ryan girls attended grammar school, but as teens they went to work in a dressmaking shop. Detective Bohen, a few years Belle’s junior, also grew up in Baltimore and knew the Ryans. As he later explained, the sisters often delivered gowns from the shop to the “hurdy gurdy” girls in a nearby bordello. “The girls were compelled to go to and from this place frequently, and in time developed a desire to lead the free and rollicking life of the women for whom the dresses were intended, and shortly afterward commenced a career of dissipation.”
In 1848 a restless Belle boarded a steamship bound for Charleston, S.C., where she took up with a lover. Her choice of companions was poor, for he was soon killed. Belle then boarded another ship, this one bound for New Orleans. There, as Bohen recalled, “She met Charles Cora. He was a prosperous gambler and was struck by her beauty.” Twenty-year-old Belle was indeed attractive, with a round face, thick brown hair, hazel eyes, a fair complexion and a plump, well-endowed figure. She in turn fell for the dashing gambler.
Cora was a well-known figure in the
