Around 4:30 a.m. on Tuesday, September 25, 1883, Henry Collins Amadon, a fireman for the Southern Pacific railroad, left his train at the Southern Pacific’s New Depot in Los Angeles. Carrying a bell rope that he intended to repair in one hand, he walked swiftly through the dark streets of the mixed industrial and residential neighborhood north of the old Plaza and west of the Los Angeles River, happy with the knowledge that he had just been promoted to engineer.
A few shadowy figures were also making their way from the vicinity of the railroad depot on that warm morning. One was Curl Richardson, a forty-two year old bartender of a saloon near the station, whose pace was slowed by a leg wound he had suffered twenty years before at the Battle of Chickamauga.[i] Amadon passed him rapidly. When he was about 100 feet in front of Richardson, Amadon turned towards his home at the corner of Date and Sanchez Streets, which he shared with his wife, Ella, and her younger brother and sister, Thomas and Lottie. Suddenly a group of men appeared on the street before him. “My God, there is Henry,” a soft voice said. Amadon turned towards the group, recognizing one, William Smith, a fellow fireman of the Southern Pacific. “Holloa, Smith, is that you?” Amadon said, and advanced toward Smith with an outstretched hand. The two men shook hands quickly and Amadon turned to resume his journey home. As he did, a shot rang out, striking him in the chest. He dropped to the ground and a second shot, fired from another pistol, struck him in the neck. He did not hear the next three shots.
A block away, Fred Hilbert was driving a team of horses as he delivered bread from his family’s bakery. Hearing the shots, he looked down the street to see several men standing over another on the ground. As he watched, two flashes came from pistols on either side of the abject figure. His horses, terrified by the gunfire, bolted down the road, Fred struggling to control them.
Saloonkeeper and Union Army veteran Curl Richardson was several hundred feet away when he heard the first two shots. He was crossing a bridge over the zanja, an offshoot of the system of ditches that brought water from the Los Angeles River to the neighborhood. A bullet whizzed by him and he dropped to the ground. Hearing no more shots, he rose and continued towards his home. A few seconds later, three men came running towards him. When they saw him, they hurried down another street.
In the next few minutes, residents of the neighborhood gunfire emerged cautiously from their home to examine the man lying dead in the street. Edward St. Clair, a brakeman with the railroad, had been awakened a few minutes before the shooting by a wagon rattling across the railway tracks on Mission Street (now Cesar Chavez Blvd). Fearful of more violence, he and his wife hesitated before venturing down Date Street in opposite directions. He had walked a few feet when his wife called to him. There was a body in the street. St. Clair turned back and joined his wife, who was standing with other neighbors around the body. They recognized it as that of their neighbor, Henry Amadon. Amadon lay with his head towards the zanja. In his right hand, tightly clutched by his fingers, was a rope, later identified as the bell rope he had brought from the train. A pistol lay near his head, fifteen inches or so from his right hand.[ii]
In a few minutes, Amadon’s wife, Ella, and sister-in-law, Lottie Greenleaf, emerged from the house in their nightgowns along with their brother, Tom Billings, while the two Amadon children continued to sleep in their home.[iii] Shortly afterward, two Los Angeles Police officers reached the site, followed by the coroner, who later found two bullets lodged in Amadon’s body. The first had entered through the neck and passed through the right lung after fracturing a rib. The second had entered below the left nipple and penetrated the base of Amadon’s heart. Either of the wounds would have killed the railroad man.[iv]
Henry Amadon was the son of Julia M. Collins and Eliel Amadon, an impecunious Massachusetts saddler. In the late fifties, when Henry was in his early ‘teens, his family moved to Illinois. As the war broke out between the states, his father joined Company H of the 1st Illinois Cavalry, seeing action in southeastern Missouri in the summer and fall of 1861. In February 1862, while returning home to Vienna, Illinois, after the disbanding of the regiment, Eliel drowned. Two years later, Henry, aged 15, joined the Illinois Cavalry and served until the end of the war after action in Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina and Georgia.
By 1871, Henry had moved on to California, where he registered to vote in Visalia, indicating that he was working as a “vaquero” and claiming Kentucky as his native state. The following year found him in Los Angeles, where he worked variously as a common laborer, a porter and a grocer before joining the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1883.[v]
Sometime in the late 1870s, Henry had joined the Confidence Engine Company #2, a volunteer firefighter company of 82 members. In December 1879, he was elected as the First Assistant Foreman of the organization.[vi] From this, and from evidence that he had risen to the rank of Sergeant while in the Illinois Cavalry, we may surmise that he possessed some leadership skills. At the time of his death, his coworkers and friends came forward to praise him, calling him “an amiable man . . . [and] an example of kindness and suavity.”[vii]
Henry had married Ella M. Billing, the seventeen year-old-daughter of Thomas Billing, a Galena, Illinois butcher, and Mary Sisson, in Los Angeles in May 1875. She was seventeen at the time of the wedding, he was twenty-eight. At the time of their marriage, she was living with her mother, the former Mary A. Sisson, her younger sister Lottie, and younger brother Thomas in Los Angeles.[viii] Within a few years, the couple had two small children, Maude and Arthur.
When trouble began in Henry’s marriage is impossible to tell, but it did not take long for the local newspapers to get wind of it in the hours after his death. The news of his murder had already sparked outrage among the city’s reporters. While it had occurred too late in the morning to make the editions of two daily newspapers, the Herald and the Times, the intervening day had enabled the newspapers’ reporters to hone in on the motives and events surrounding the killing and to muster their outrage at such violence. The Herald headlined the murder, “An Audacious Assassination” and sub lined it “Henry Collins Amadon Murdered in Front of His Own Residence–A Conspiracy of Murderers in Our Midst—Their Damning Deed” while the Times declared it “. . . one of the Blackest Deeds in the Criminal Annals of Los Angeles. . . .” The Times compared Amadon’s murder to those in the small city’s violent past, calling it a “murder most foul and brutal as was ever known in the blood-stained annals of early Los Angeles.”[ix] The Herald editorialized the same day that the citizenry should consider returning to vigilantism. “Yesterday morning our own city was disgraced by a deliberate and cowardly assassination. We have reached a stage in this State in which punitive justice seems to have lost all terrors for evil doers. It is useless to attempt to adjust between judges and juries the precise responsibility for this lamentable state of things. Blood guiltiness has become so rampant that the most respectable journals of California hint that a little of the Vigilance Committee energy of the old days would not be a bad idea.”[x] It was a suggestion seconded by the Tucson Citizen, which observed, “Los Angeles had her regular weekly murder on Tuesday. . . Better organize a vigilance committee and “Florence” the next one or two.”[xi]
As the investigation into Amadon’s murder progressed, the outrage of the papers and the citizens grew more intense and focused. Within 48 hours, the identity and motives of the perpetrators were known. As the Herald declared, Amadon had “a skeleton in the closet in his house, a young man seeking to alienate the affections of his wife and two children.” The young man was John Foster, a twenty-year-old brakeman with the railroad. Like Amadon, he had been at work in the early hours that September morning. His train had arrived at the Southern Pacific station at 2:30 a.m., where Ella Amadon and her sister Lottie, who had spent the night carousing bars in the neighborhood while dressed in men’s clothing, were waiting. The trio went into a saloon opposite the New Depot, where they were soon joined by two other brakemen, including Will Smith, who was working on a train coming down from Mojave. The two women had hoped to play a prank on Smith they had performed before, when, dressed in men’s clothing then also, they had sprung from behind fences and bushes to frighten him as he walked home along the railroad tracks. Foster’s arrival had forestalled the lark, however, and the group settled down to their drinks.[xii]
Ella and the young Foster were not discreet about their relationship. Several witnesses came forward after Henry’s death claiming to have seen the couple in bed together. The Times declared, “Of late, Forster and Mrs. Amadon have been most shameless in their amours; in fact, poor Henry Amadon was almost a stranger in his own house. He must have known of these unblushing indecencies, but having two children, that tie was so strong that he could not openly denounce their mother, however faithless she might be as a wife.” A later report detailed the elaborate schemes Ella undertook to trick Henry into leaving his bed so Foster could climb into it.[xiii]
After leaving the saloon, the small party headed down the dark streets towards the Amadon residence. Most likely, had it not been for the sudden arrival on the scene of Henry, whom they had not expected to return until the following day, the two couples — John Foster and Ella, Smith and his paramour Lottie, a recent train wreck widow – would have retired to separate bedrooms in the Amadon house. However, Henry did appear. Although he had been scheduled to return Wednesday morning, when he arrived at the New Depot station Sunday afternoon for the trip to Yuma he had learned that he had been promoted to engineer and had to return to Los Angeles a day early to take charge of the Yuma bound-train Tuesday afternoon. Nobody among the foursome expected to see him loom suddenly out of the darkness.
After the shooting, Ella and Lottie fled inside their house and leapt into their beds, while Smith and Foster took off down the street. In another room, Ella’s brother, Tom, was awakened by a neighbor who told him Henry was dead. “What Henry?” Tom asked, and was told “Henry Amadon.” After arguing that Henry could not be dead, as he was on the train, Tom went out to look at the body. He was soon joined by Ella, who told others that she had been sleeping when the shots were fired.
In the morning, Foster visited a shoe repair shop, where he had his shoes resoled, fearing that the footprints that were sure to be found around Amadon’s body might be used to match his own. He then went to the Engine house at the depot. His co-workers there did not know anything of Amadon’s death. Foster told them, leaving out his own involvement in the event, and then went up to the upper floor and lowered the flag to half-mast in Amadon’s honor. He was still there when Police Chief Thomas Cuddy, who had personally taken charge of the investigation of Amadon’s murder, arrived to arrest him. Cuddy had learned from a railroad brakeman that Foster had been on the streets at the time of Amadon’s murder. According to the brakeman, Foster was in the company of three other men.
In a time when offences against the law, even capital ones, were dispatched with an alacrity that seems astonishing today, Foster was charged, tried, convicted and packed off to prison within sixty days. Testimony at his trial and at a coroner’s jury established that Amadon had threatened to kill Foster if he caught him with his wife, and that Foster had declared he was not afraid because he could “shoot as quick as Amadon.”[xiv] Foster routinely carried a pistol with him, even while working on the trains.[xv]
His sentence was life in prison. The Los Angeles Herald hoped that, public sentiment being so enraged against the young murder, “no Governor would be so remiss in his obligations as to pardon the prisoner from his life of penal servitude,” while the Los Angeles Times, observing that “the evidence was almost conclusive that the prisoner had some fear for his life,” foresaw a “very slight prospect that the pardoning power will ever be exercised in his case.”[xvi] Nevertheless, less than nine years later, Foster’s sentence was commuted and he was discharged from Folsom Prison. Public sentiment had shifted in his favor. Four years earlier, a petition for his clemency with the signatures of “a great many of the best citizens” of Los Angeles, including presiding judge of his trial and ten members of the twelve-person jury, was presented to the Governor.[xvii]
Ella Amadon was also tried as an accessory after the fact in the murder of her husband. Her attorney defended her by presenting evidence that she did not expect her husband to return home until Wednesday morning, and that she and her sister had dressed as men on a lark to scare William Smith. She herself testified that her husband had tried to pull a gun from his side before Foster shot him. But it was all to no avail. Her real crime was that she lied to authorities when she claimed she had been asleep when her husband was murdered, and the prosecution was able to argue successfully that her lies were intended to help Foster escape responsibility for the death. She was sentenced to five years in St. Quentin prison. She served the entire sentence. The Times hailed her sentence, observing that such prompt and determined punishments were “the best investment Los Angeles could possibly make. ‘There’s millions in it.’”[xviii]
On release, Ella tried to regain custody of her children, who were living in an orphanage under the care of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. During a custody hearing in an LA courtroom, a police captain testified that prior to the death of Henry Amadon he had observed the children living in an Anaheim brothel run by Ella’s mother, Mary Brown.[xix] It was not the first time that her mother’s profession was introduced into Ella’s legal plight. Two days after Amadon’s murder, the Los Angeles Times reported, “The mother of Mrs. Amadon has kept for several years a house of ill-fame at Anaheim, and her daughter was reared in the midst of the most evil associations.”[xx] The sentence elicited a rejoinder from Mrs. Brown, who wrote,
I raised my children as careful as any one ever did, until they were married, before I ever thought of keeping a house that you say I do. They never had evil associations. I have always been very careful of my children to raise them right, and many a wealthy mother has worse children than I have, and this has nothing to do with the foul murder that has been committed and left the poor woman and children without a protector.[xxi]
Mary Brown was present when Foster’s trial began on October 2, and although reporters puzzled as to what her testimony might be other than to assert “the eminent respectability of her and show that she had directed them in the path of virtue,” it was clear that she needed no introduction to the prominent men in the room.[xxii] She had most likely chosen Anaheim, a small town of 833 persons, to locate her bordello because it was connected to Los Angeles, then 13 times its size, by a spur of the Southern Pacific railroad. Thus, it was both accessible to her customers and sufficiently remote from LA to avoid problems with crusaders and wives. Even so, she sometimes ran afoul of Anaheim authorities, in one case at least having been found guilty of some infraction—most likely keeping an house of ill fame—and fined $50.[xxiii]
Following her daughter’s conviction for accessory after the fact, Mary Brown shook her fist at a Los Angeles Times reporter and denounced newspaper men in general, “declaring that newspapers had done the work [of convicting her daughter], calling imprecations on the heads of their writers and consigning them all to hell.”[xxiv] She took her daughter’s two children to Anaheim, where they would be “rescued” in short order by members of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, who placed them in LA’s Orphan’s Home.[xxv]
Los Angeles would hear more about Mary Brown in the next three decades. Born Mary Ann Sisson in Connecticut in 1839, she had moved with her family to Galena, Illinois by 1850. In 1857, she married English immigrant Thomas B Billings in Galena, where the 1860 Census captured them living with their 2-year-old daughter Ella. The marriage lasted at least until 1866, when their fourth child, John was born. By 1870, Mary had remarried and was living with her husband Charles T. Brown in San Jacinto in San Diego County.[xxvi] How her second marriage ended is a mystery, as is the end of her first marriage, but by the early 1880s she seems to have embarked on her career as a brothel madam. By the time of her son-in-law’s death, she had already expanded her Anaheim operation to LA, opening a brothel on Los Angeles Street.[xxvii] In the coming years, she shifted her business to a house at the corner of Commercial and Wilmington in LA’s vice district and eventually past the city limits.[xxviii]
Known to southlanders as “Mother Brown,” she was soon well known to readers of Los Angeles newspapers. In 1885, in what would become a typical story mentioning her, an eighteen year old woman named Maud Robinson was induced to enter a house of ill fame by a young hoodlum named Dan Sheely, who would be accused of numerous crimes ranging from petty larceny to murder in the next five years before landing in a San Quentin cell. The young woman had first entered a rival bordello, where she gained sufficient experience to qualify for a room at Mother Brown’s—it being the recurrent claim of the latter that she only admitted experienced prostitutes into her house.[xxix]
Stories like that of Maud Robinson would be repeated in the next 10 years. And there would be other tales of the notorious houses of “Mother Brown”: thefts, arson, shootings, drug overdoses, and seductions of underage girls. The notoriety of her brothel rivalled other famous houses of ill fame in the city’s vice districts, such as the Arlington Hotel. While police authorities rarely interfered with her business, observing that she kept her house “in accordance”[xxx] with local ordinances, at some point in the late 1880s or early 1890s Mary Brown decided to move her operation past the city limits. The new location was on the Mission Road, an adobe artery that ran along the edge of the community of East Los Angeles to South Pasadena. According to a number of reports in the local newspapers, Mother Brown’s new brothel was located near another structure known as the “Four-Mile-House.” A map from 1900 shows a number of isolate structures approximately four miles from downtown Los Angeles, or, as repeatedly described in contemporary newspapers, midway between Los Angeles and South Pasadena, along Mission Road in what is the current community of El Sereno. Her new house was remote from Los Angeles but not so far that it could not be reached easily by horse-drawn cabs.
Despite the fact that Mother Brown’s house was outside city limits, city newspapers urged for its closure. In late May 1892, two young men persuaded two fifteen-year-old girls to accompany them to Mother Brown’s, “a blasting, blighting, stygian, iniquitous resort” according to one newspaper, where they plied them with liquor and attempted to assault them.[xxxi] The girls escaped the young men, but reporters for the local papers got wind of the story. Within a few days, the newspapers were reporting that the same group of young rakes had frequently brought young girls “not yet out of short dresses” to Mother Brown’s.[xxxii] While the outraged newspapers demanded action against the young “toughs” it also called on the county Sheriff and District Attorney to close down the “sink of iniquity.”[xxxiii]
Within a few weeks, Mary Brown’s son, Thomas B. Billings, was arrested for selling liquor without a license and keeping a disorderly house for assignation purposes. The prosecution’s case centered on the events of late May. The prosecution and press were confident that Billings would be convicted of the disorderly house charge, which was first to be heard, but in fact after seven hours of deliberation the jury reported that it was hung, with ten members voting to convict and two to acquit. Local newspapers slammed the two holdouts, quoting one juror who charged that that they were known associates of Billings and that one of them had been drunk during deliberations. A week later, Billings was acquitted of selling liquor without a license. No further action was taken against him.[xxxiv]
Despite the public’s outrage, the two young men who had seduced the young girls met with no punishment. One of them, Dolph Greene, a hack driver who would become a notorious local con artist and wife beater, lit out of town at the first sign of trouble, but returned once it was clear that the authorities had no case against him or his friend. The girls were both over the age of consent, at the time fourteen, and neither claimed she was coerced into sexual relations. Of all the participants in the latest drama at Mother Brown’s, only one, Edna Percival, received any punishment. With her mother’s consent, she was sent to the Reform School for Juvenile Offenders in Whittier, where she perished in a kitchen fire the following year.[xxxv]
In August 1892, Mary Brown married Timothy W. Lyons, a thirty-five year old carpenter. She and Lyons continued to operate the disreputable roadhouse until January 1896, when they sold the business to a hack driver named W. E. Christie. According to the LA Times, “That fat farie, who is not fair, but more than forty, has hied herself to some retreat to the mountains.” Whether her husband accompanied her is not clear: two years before he had been charged with the attempted rape of a servant girl working at the roadhouse, but had claimed that he could not recall the events as he had been “too drunk to remember anything.”[xxxvi]
Christie ran the roadhouse with his wife until October 1897, when it burned down after a fire broke out on the second floor.[xxxvii] Mary Brown died in April 1901. She is buried, along with her son Tom Billings and daughter Lottie, in Angelus Rosedale Cemetery. Her older daughter Ella is buried, along with her own daughter and son, nearby.[xxxviii]
BOOKS FROM BAY CITY PRESS:
[i] Historical Data Systems, comp. U.S., Civil War Soldier Records and Profiles, 1861-1865 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc., 2009.
[ii] LAH, Nov 14, 1883, 3;
[iii] LAT, Nov 21, 1883, 4
[iv] LAH, Sep 26, 1883, 3
[v] A job as a cowboy on a western ranch was a predictable profession for an ex-cavalry sergeant and the son of a saddler, but his claim of Kentucky as his native state is curious. Perhaps the registrar asked, “Where are you from?” and Henry misunderstood it to mean, where did you last live? Kentucky was just across the Ohio River from his Illinois home and it is possible that Henry spent the post-war years in that state.
https://apps.ilsos.gov/isaveterans/civilMusterSearch.do?key=3811; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1st_Illinois_Cavalry_Regiment;
https://civilwar.illinoisgenweb.org/acm/cav001-h.html;
https://apps.ilsos.gov/isaveterans/civilMusterSearch.do?key=3810;
Boston Post, May 28, 1855 Page 3
Sanford, W. L., History of the Fourteenth Illinois Cavalry, R. L. Donnelly and Sons, Chicago, 1898, p. 339.
California State Library; Sacramento, California; Great Registers, 1866-1898; Collection Number: 4-2A; CSL Roll Number: 136; FHL Roll Number: 978594;
LA City Directory 1875, p. 310; 1878, p. 11; 1879-80, p. 92; 1881-82, p. 24; 1983-84, p. 36.
[vi] LA City Directory 79-80, p. 213; LAH, Dec 4, 1879, p. 3
[vii] LAH, Sep 26, 1883, 3
[viii] The Highland Park News-Herald (Highland Park, California) · 27 Mar 1950, Mon · Page 3
[ix] LAH, Sep 26, 1883, 3; LAT, Sep 26, 1883, 4.
[x] LAH, Sep 26, 1883, 2
[xi] Tucson Citizen, Sep 29, 1883, 3.
[xii] LAH, Nov 21, 1883, 3
[xiii] LAT, Oct 3, 1883, 4; LAH, Nov 20, 1883, 3; Jul 2, 1887, 7.
[xiv] LAT, Nov 15, 1883, 4.
[xv] LAH, Nov 15, 1883, 3.
[xvi] LAH, Nov 22, 1883, 3. LAT, Nov 16, 1883, 2.
[xvii] LAH, Feb 17, 1892, 8. California State Archives; Sacramento, California; Secretary of State California State Archives Folsom Prison Registers.
[xviii] SFC, Nov 28, 1883, 3. LAT, Nov 28, 1883, 2.
[xix] SFC, Jul 10, 1887, 10; Jul 12, 1887, 8.
[xx] LAT, Sep 27, 1883, 4.
[xxi] LAT, Sep 29, 1883, 4.
[xxii] LAT, Oct 3, 1883, 4.
[xxiii] LAT, May 25, 1882, 3
[xxiv] LAT, Nov 21, 1883, 4.
[xxv] LAT, Nov 30, 1883, 4. LAH, Jul 12, 1887, 12. LAT, Jul 3, 1887, 1.
[xxvi] United States Census, 1850, Galena Illinois; Illinois Marriage Records
[xxvii] LAEE, Jan 5, 1881, 3.
[xxviii] LAT, May 25, 1886, 4; Sep 28, 1887, 1. LAH, Apr 27, 1887, 1.
[xxix] LAT, Oct 13, 1885, 1; Jan 23, 1886,4; Jul 17, 1886, 1; Aug 3, 1886, 1; Mar 22, 1887, 2; Sep 1, 1887, 2; Sep 23, 1887, 1; Oct 23, 1887, 2.
[xxx] LAH, May 25, 1886, 5.
[xxxi] LAEE, May 29, 1892, 1; May 30, 5; Jun 3, 1892, 1.
[xxxii] LAT, Jun 3, 1892, 6.
[xxxiii] LAT, Jun 3, 1892, 6; Jun 4, 2. LAEE, Jun 3, 1892, 1.
[xxxiv] LAT, Jun 10, 1892, 3. LAH, Jun 17, 1892, 3; Jun 23, 1892, 3.
[xxxv] LAT, Oct 3, 1893, 7.
[xxxvi] LAT, Nov 26, 1893, 17; Jan 29, 1896, 6.
[xxxvii] LA Evening Post-Record, Oct 5, 1896, 3.
[xxxviii] https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/75602480/mary-lyons; https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/75599395/ella-may-mackel