Blue Goose (Towboat, mid-1880s)

Summary

• BOAT DESCRIPTION: Sternwheel
• BOAT TYPE: Towboat
• BUILT: mid-1880s
• OWNERS: Dick Willett
• OFFICERS & CREW: Nine "frisky" women (one named "French Harriet"); two male musicians
• RIVERS: St. Croix River
• OTHER INFORMATION: Dick Willett, a house of ill fame entrepreneur of the area, branched out in the mid-1880s with a "floating palace of sin" dubbed the Blue Goose. He moored the craft, with its nine women and two male musicians, three miles north of the city at an island close by the St. Croix Boom, that great sorting and rafting place for timber cut along the upper reaches of the river. From the boom's 500 employees, according to the Stillwater Weekly Gazette, the "airy fairies caught a considerable trade." Following the complaint that "the demi-monde....(was) making disgraceful exhibitions while bathing in full view of the shore," the Goose was towed to the Stillwater levee, and the "frisky damsels" were hauled into court. They were released with strict orders to get out of town, and "French Harriet" and her cohorts were last seen panhandling down Main Street trying to collect enough money to get them back to St. Paul
• PHOTO DESCRIPTION: Floating bordello and sternwheel towboat, Blue Goose