Murders in the red-light districts of the west occurred with alarming frequency. What with the violence and mayhem that accompanied the prostitution profession, it was not uncommon to see newspapers riddled with stories of women who met an untimely end in one form or another. Although suicides were regularly reported, death at the hands of another were often passed off as simply the norm in the red-light world. Plenty of good girls hooked up with bad men, at a tragic cost. Her mother gave birth to nine children in all, two of whom had died by the time the Petermans appeared in the census at Lead, South Dakota.
Emery worked as a teamster while Carrie raised the children. By the time Isabelle was seventeen, the family had relocated again, to Deadwood.
Somehow she met, and subsequently married, Columbus Clinton Heskett, a farmhand-turned-gambler from Missouri. Founded circa , Arrowhead was initially a railroad construction camp.
By the time the name was shortened to Arrow, there were sixteen saloons and a bevy of brothels. But the town was already in decline by All was good for about a year, until Heskett got into some sort of trouble. According to one source, he was running a saloon when he was jailed for forging checks and asked Llewellyn Felker, his bartender, to keep an eye on Isabelle. By the time Heskett could do so, however, Isabelle had thrown her husband over in favor of Felker.
The Daily Bonanza would later report that the couple finally eloped one night while Heskett was not home and headed to Nevada. But Felker was already married and his wife, the former Anna Goodwin, was in Longmont, Colorado, with no idea of what her renegade husband was up to. But Felker was certainly no winner.
