What happens when genealogical research reveals that some of your ancestors might not have been very good people? Well, in David and Rose Donovan’s case, they wrote a book about it.
“The Nastiest Saloon in Iowa: Murder, Prostitution and Corruption in the Heartland” grew out of a family research project that started with a rumor about the “scandalous death” of Rose’s great-grandfather, Erastus Wallace Scott.
“We didn’t intend to write a book,” Rose Donovan said in a recent interview with The Gazette. “We were just trying to find out a little more information about my great-grandfather.”
Scott’s 1912 death had indeed been scandalous, with the Des Moines newspapers at the time describing it as a murder-suicide perpetrated by Scott after a much-younger woman had turned down a proposal to become his third wife.
After Scott’s death, the Des Moines Register described him as “one of the most notorious police characters in Des Moines.”
While Rose had years ago learned how Scott died, she hadn’t found many details about his criminal past. That’s where her husband, David, and his amateur genealogy skills came into play.
Iowa natives
A little background about the Donovans: They both are Iowa natives — Rose grew up in Des Moines and David in Carroll. They met while attending journalism school at Iowa State University in the 1970s. After graduating in 1980, they moved to the East Coast. Rose, now 68, stayed with journalism as a career, working at newspapers in the Washington, D.C., area, including the Washington Post. David, also 68, changed gears and decided to attend law school, eventually becoming a lawyer. He spent most of his career at a D.C.-based international firm.
The pair stayed busy with work and family, raising three kids and eventually moving to a small town on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. David retired about six years ago, just as the COVID-19 pandemic was forcing businesses to close and people to stay home. That’s when the work that would eventually become “The Nastiest Saloon in Iowa” really got started.
David Donovan started scouring the internet and newspaper archives for information about Erastus Wallace Scott. It turns out, there was plenty to find. Scott had attracted a lot of press attention in the Des Moines area in the early 1900s, and not much of it was positive.
“He just kept finding out more and more and more, and he would bring this to me and say, ‘Oh my God, you can’t believe this! Look how crazy this is,’” Rose Donovan recalled.
From his post as a saloon keeper at a seedy establishment on East Court Avenue, near what today is Des Moines’ East Village, Scott became a crime boss of sorts among a crew that consisted primarily of his cousins. They were referred to in Des Moines newspaper accounts as the Carter Gang, and their criminal exploits were numerous. The Donovans uncovered instances of prostitution, theft, land fraud, police corruption and murder.
“Nobody we talked to knew anything about all this prostitution going on in (Iowa) and all the police corruption, and it just seemed so different from what anybody we knew had ever thought of as the … history of Des Moines,” David Donovan said.
That incongruity — between the idea of wholesome, “Little House on the Prairie”-style Midwest history and the reality of a bustling, crime-infested red-light district in the center of Des Moines — is what compelled the Donovans to turn the project into a book.
“The story got crazier and crazier, and it moved from being a story about my family and this one man into … a forgotten story of Des Moines history,” Rose Donovan said.
Yellow journalism
The fact that the Carter Gang’s exploits occurred during the era of yellow journalism — when newspapers were eager to sensationalize stories to sell papers and gain an upper hand over the competition — proved helpful to the Donovans’ research efforts.
As noted in the book’s introduction, the Carter Gang was the subject of more than 550 newspaper articles between 1900 and 1920. Many of those articles were quite vivid, with the writers taking a lot more dramatic license than is typical in modern-day journalism.
For instance, the Donovans uncovered an account of Scott’s second marriage in the Davenport Daily Times. Under the headline “She marries a murderer,” the Daily Times on March 16, 1904, wrote: “Lulu Hannan, a winsome Des Moines girl of but 19 years, has consented to become the bride of E.W. Scott, who, besides being 40 years of age, is accused of murder. Only two wetks (sic) ago Scott shot Morris Shea in an East Des Moines saloon, claiming self defense.”
The book also includes a March 1908 editorial from the Des Moines Register about the scourge of venereal disease in this era of rampant prostitution, when the advent of widespread antibiotics still was several decades away: “Lurking in the shadows, shunning the day and thriving in the blackest night, a great, ugly, scarlet monster is fastening its blight upon this fair city, silently mysteriously.”
This style of turn-of-the-century newswriting left an impression on the Donovans.
“When I go back and read the book, the parts that I like the best, frankly, are the parts we just lifted right out of the newspaper,” David Donovan said. “Nobody writes like that anymore.”
Family history
As the elements for the book started to come together, Rose Donovan said she never hesitated about sharing such unsavory aspects of her family history with a broader audience.
“I can’t say I have ever been very emotional about it, because these people were so far gone,” Rose said. “I didn’t know any of them. And to me, I approached this as a journalist. It was a good story that hadn’t been told, and that was the overriding emotion.”
The only relative whom she wondered about was her grandmother, who was Erastus Scott’s daughter. Rose never knew that grandmother well, as she was living in the Phoenix area by the time Rose was born. But she apparently never mentioned her father’s criminal past to anyone, including any of her six children.
“He was front page news all over the Des Moines newspapers, and so the idea that the succeeding generations didn’t know anything about him and didn’t know these stories, I just find fascinating,” Rose Donovan said.
While the story of Erastus Scott now has been told, David Donovan isn’t done yet looking into his wife’s family tree. He’s been looking into her mother’s side of the family, and has uncovered some surprise ties to the Mormon migration through Iowa in the 19th century.
“I’ve been studying that family for a long time, and I’ve been in touch with a number of Rose’s new cousins,” David Donovan said, but he’s still weighing whether it’s something that can be turned into a book.
Rose, meanwhile, has her own ideas on what to work on next.
“I think my next project might be trying to find some skeletons in Dave’s family closet,” she said with a laugh.
The Gazette is a newspaper based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It is owned by Adams MultiMedia, which is The Star Democrat’s parent company.