Fair left school in a year to marry Thomas Gracien,[4] but shortly abandoned him to join her mother operating a boarding house in San Francisco (around 1856 or 1857).

[4] In September 1862, Fair opened the 37-room Tahoe House Hotel in Virginia City, Nevada on South C Street,[5] after silver was discovered in the nearby hills.

[8][2][9] In April 1871, Fair faced her first trial where she claimed that the shooting was the result of temporary insanity caused by a severely painful menstrual cycle.

[5][2][10] Fair's case was appealed with the support of suffragettes, including Emily Pitts Stevens, founder of the California Woman Suffrage Association.

The case furnished some elements of the story of Laura Hawkins in the novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner.

[12] The CBS radio program Crime Classics dramatized the case in an episode entitled "The Incredible Trial Of Laura D. Fair" that aired on August 17, 1953.