Brothels, Bordellos, and Bad Girls: Prostitution in Colorado, 1860-1930

Prostitution in America #1

by Jan MacKell, Thomas J. Noel (Foreword)

Prostitution thrived in pioneer Colorado. Mining was the principal occupation and men outnumbered women more than twenty to one. Jan MacKell provides a detailed overview of the business between 1860 and 1930, focusing her research on the mining towns of Cripple Creek, Salida, Colorado City, and similar boomtown communities. She used census data, Sanborn maps, city directories, property records, marriage records, and court records to document and trace the movements of the women over the course of their careers, uncovering work histories, medical problems, and numerous relocations from town to town. She traces many to their graves, through years filled with abuse, disease, narcotics, and violence. MacKell has unearthed numerous colorful and often touching stories, like that of the boy raised in a brothel who was invited to play with a neighbor's children and replied, "No, my mother is a whore and says I am to stay at home." "Delicacy, humor, respect, and compassion are among the merits of this book. Although other authors have flirted with Colorado's commercial sex, Jan MacKell provides a detailed overview. She has been researching these elusive women for the last fifteen years. Such persistence allows her to offer rich detail on shady ladies who rarely used their real names or even stuck with the same professional name for long."--Thomas J. Noel, from the Introduction

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Westerns, Sex Work

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Scriptor Ignotus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decided to read up on some local lore.

The ubiquity of prostitution in the old west is well known, and is often the subject of caricature. Most people know that men vastly outnumbered women on the frontier; which, for less scrupulous women, presented enticing business opportunities.

But it is doubtful that most people realize just how wealthy, powerful, and influential the most prominent madams became; or how varied life could be among women of the trade, from the desperately poor "signpost gals" who conducted business behind buildings or in alleyways, to the "crib girls" who rented their rooms and paid room and board with their earnings, to the elegant and fabulously wealthy madams of parlor houses which served not only as brothels but as centers of community and culture in western towns.

The most powerful madams were also, among other things, patronesses of art and education, philanthropists, and real estate moguls. Because prostitution was one of the only "careers" available to women in the 19th century, successful madams became some of the earliest prototypes of independent "career women". Their independence was the reverse side of the ostracism that came with their trade. There was a huge demand for their services, and yet prostitutes and their children were constantly barred from participation in polite society.

When young women joined the trade, they were generally compelled to eliminate all contact with former friends and family, and to adopt fake names in order to keep their former identity a secret. Despite the daily company working girls kept with one another as well as with their clients, it could be a lonely life indeed. MacKell relates poignant stories of brothel women who befriended neighborhood children, because the children were the only ones who would speak to them openly and innocently and view them without prejudgment.

Reminders of a prostitute's past life could be emotionally devastating. One Denver madam named Ella Wellington left behind a husband and children to join the trade. On a July night in 1894, Wellington was throwing a lavish party at her brothel when she was visited by some old mutual friends of the former couple. The friends told her that her former husband had remarried, and that he and the children were living happily together. The thought of being forgotten and left behind by her former life was evidently too much to bear. "Then she abruptly started upstairs, exclaiming 'O I am so happy! So happy that i'll just blow my goddam brains out!'" She went into her room, retrieved a revolver from her nightstand, and shot herself in the head. As MacKell pithily relates, "Arapahoe County clerk William R. Prinn happened to be lying in Ella's bed at the time and later gave his statement to the coroner."

Then, as now, the life of a prostitute could be a dangerous one. A serial killer targeted several Denver prostitutes during the 1890s, prompting the brothels and parlor houses to take measures for their protection. Mattie Silks, the most successful of all Denver madams, had iron bars installed on the windows of her brothels and limited business hours. The killer was never apprehended.

Reaching its efflorescence in the 1880s and 90s, the trade dried up in Colorado as the state itself did. In the 1890s, the federal government stopped buying silver. As the state's burgeoning economy had depended on silver mining as a staple, many of the state's boom towns withered away overnight. By the 1920s, the great Colorado parlor houses were relics; reminders of the thriving institutions they had once been. Pearl deVere's Old Homestead in Cripple Creek is now a museum, and during the summer months, for a small fee, you can see one of the last surviving examples of what is now only a staple of the remote mythology of the American west.

[Annie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a completely unique book (and, as it happens, the exact book I was looking for. I sought it and it appeared).

This book gives an interesting, personal portrait of many of Colorado’s early sex workers, as well as contextualizing those personal stories in the larger picture of the role sex workers played in Colorado’s development.

It definitely focuses heavily on the eastern slope, particularly Denver, Colorado Springs (originally called Colorado City, which she doesn’t really explain—she just keeps calling it Coloraado City which no longer exists), and Cripple Creek (once booming, now it’s quite a small town a dozen miles west of Springs where there’s a prostitution museum and, by no small chance, where the author happens to reside). Ergo, those one the western slopes might be a bit let down by the coverage given to them (Grand Junction and Durango are, I believe, mentioned just a couple of times).

I loved learning about my new home from this unusual lens. As it turns out, I now live just two blocks from the old red light district (once called Holladay St., now Market St.). The House of Mirrors, perhaps the most famous brothel in Denver, was located at what is now 1942 Market St. (formerly 518 Holladay).

Some of the stories are alarming, many are funny, and so many are quite inspiring. Denver Kate, for instance, was a lifelong sex worker, but in her old age she did laundry and cleaning for younger sex workers. She put her two daughters through the University of Colorado at a time when few women had such educations, much less the daughters of a single mother, much less a sex worker.

Yes, these “soiled doves” raced their horses illegally down the streets, often suffered from serious addictions, shot rival prostitutes and cheating lovers. But they also donated money to charities, cared for the sick, housed the homeless when no one else would.

As with today’s sex workers—a career which encompasses diverse stories, ranging from the exploited victim to the empowered businesswoman.

[Missy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I greatly enjoyed some parts of this book, and truly appreciate the amount of research that went into it. It was wonderful in that it inspired me to do some research of my own in the online photo archives of the Denver Public Library, and by visiting some of the sites mentioned in the book. So, if you are a Colorado history buff, pick this one up!

That said, I found the way it was organized a bit difficult to follow...There were so many little tidbits of information on a single person or location scattered throughout the book that it felt disjointed. This made it difficult to keep track of a particular Madame, for instance. Just as I'd become intrigued with a person's story, she'd be dropped from the narrative for 50 or so pages. (Granted, many of them did "keep moving" and I loved that the author included things like census records and tracked some of these women so exhaustively. The author writes about them with respect, too, which is a big plus).

[Natalie · Rating 1 out of 5]

A titillating title and dedicated compilation of data, but terribly organized and full of platitudes, conjectures, and insignificant details...The author intended to get first-hand accounts of some of the book's characters, but I would not consider "she made the most incredible cookies" to be a substantive character description.

[Amber · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very narrow/specialized book in geography and timeframe. I suspect the ideal target audience are either academics needing the book for research, or curious locals interested in knowing more about a salacious past in their city. It’s certainly well-researched and organized, but began to feel repetitive to me as a reader after a while.

[Rachel Jackson · Rating 2 out of 5]

My most common thought throughout Brothels, Bordellos, and Bad Girls was something like this: "For the love of god, please hire a proofreader next time." The book was almost unreadable in some spots with how many typos and errors there were, some of which you can probably pin down on typing errors that aren't the authors fault. But when Jan MacKell gave different statistics to the same facts she talked about a chapter prior, spells names wrong within one page, or worse one paragraph ("Jessie" James in one sentence, "Jesse" James literally in the next sentence), and says things like "it is fun to speculate" about certain women, I lost trust and authority in her being able to tell this story.

Unfortunately, like the other books I have read about prostitution in Colorado, MacKell's work is again very face-value and not much deeper. It is a rolodex of town names and women's names, in some chapters a literal listing of the girls' names who worked there, and not much cohesive, coherent narrative connecting prostitution as a theme in the west. It really wasn't until the last three chapters that I felt there was some sort of overarching theme, and that was only when MacKell was talking about the end of prostitution, during prohibition, and as the famous madams got older and more tired of paying fines and facing the law. I especially found the story of the town of Ramona fascinating, as a solution the people made to the dry town of Colorado City, and how the determination of these people to have their own red-light district changed the shape of Colorado Springs in history. But this was only a few pages, and then MacKell seemed to go right back into simply listing a summary of the life stories of these prostitutes from Pueblo or Cripple Creek. It didn't make any sense.

I also always find it frustrating how these part-time historian authors that I've been reading fail to connect prostitution to a broader women's history narrative. Again, there was one fascinating section (sadly less than a page's worth) where MacKell talks about how female Chinese immigrants were brought to the United States and sold into sex slavery and the kind of torture they underwent because they were foreign. Most of the rest of the book talked about the success of some of the wealthiest madams who had the most luxurious houses. And while MacKell does talk about the violence and murder that happened in these red-light rows, the discussion of the torture of the Chinese women was the first (and really only) time we got a glimpse of what prostitution was like on a physical, emotional level. There is, strangely, very little talk of sex abuse or physical torture from clients to the women, except for this part. So it frustrated me that there was very little talk about the violence done to these women, rather than the disease they encountered or scuffles between other women in the row. She could have connected it more to modern prostitution and sex trafficking and made more of a point about what it looks like and what it's disguised as now (considering she did cite several census listing other professions). But she didn't, and instead made it seem like while maybe the prostitute life wasn't exactly glamorous, you could still make a decent living and do well for yourself. When in fact most of the women were on the move constantly, fearful for their health and safety, and unsure of how they were going to make a living.

Also, as someone who lives in Northwest Colorado, very disappointing that there was zero mention of prostitution in this region other than one tiny mention of Hahn's Peak in the middle of nowhere. There was nothing about the entire northwest corner, which seems like a huge oversight into the research of this subject, because this area is where some of those Denver prostitutes would flee to and then continue to make their way west. Unfortunate that a whole region and history was forgotten about.

[Timothy Roessler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prostitutes don’t get much respect. This is especially true in the sex mad and puritanical United States. That makes nearly any book that tells the story of “sporting ladies” worthwhile in itself. For Brothels, Bordellos and Bad Girls: Prostitution in Colorado 1860 - 1930, author Jan MacKell put in more than 12 years of research. And it shows in the both the broad scope and in the details she’s discovered.

As you’d expect, many of the stories are tragic. Girls escaping horrific families only to plunge into disease or drug addiction. Suicides, overdoses, and murders run throughout the pages. If the life didn’t kill you, gonorrhea lurked, ready to take your job and melt your brain. Denver even had its own Jack the Ripper in the 1890s, serially murdering working girls.

But there’s another side, one that you don’t hear about much. Several resourceful and tough women made the best of their time in the demimonde. Some married well, to newly rich miners and traders. Others made durable fortunes as madams and owners of saloons.

Not only that, but a few showed that some whores do have a heart of gold. A surprising number donated to charity, helped the poor, fed strays, and sent money back home to poverty -stricken families. Many worked as nurses in the 1918 pandemic, something that seems remarkably brave.

In Trinidad, a group of sex workers got together and created a union of sorts, that looked after each other, set up a mutual aid society and even provided a retirement home.

So it’s a rich story, and more complicated than you’d guess.

Among the many large and colorful characters, the epic madame Mattie Silks stands out. You wish a writer with the combined talents of a Balzac and a Twain would writer her story one day. Out of nowhere, she makes it big as a beautiful madame. The chamber of commerce even hired her to, uh, persuade a railroad honcho to build a line into Denver. She pocketed $5,000 for the month or so she spent with the executive.

Mattie once fought a duel with another madame over her cheating fancy man. Luckily for both of the ladies, the bullets missed them and, in a stroke of poetic justice, one hit the guilty guy right in the throat. He survived. Mattie took him back. She retired a few decades later at the top of her game.

MacKell focuses largely on the period up to 1912, reasonably enough because that’s when the West was actually pretty wild. A flaw is that there’s not much broader context for the prostitution. It’s specific and granular, which is good, because you don’t get a lot of ideological slant thrown in/ Yet, it’s not so good because you miss the larger societal trends.

You’ll learn a great deal about these remarkable and admirable women who changed the West as much as those more respectable whores in politics and business.

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of info! wow.

[Tambra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting Read. Learned a lot about the ladies. I enjoyed it.

[Sheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not the most readable book on the subject, partly because she organizes it by town, not by person. Much of it is essentially a list of the prostitutes active in a particular town throughout history, along with where they came from, sometimes where they went, when they show up on the census or local directories, their various addresses, etc. I will say she uses this approach as a reminder that the experience of prostitution varied from person to person and situation to situation -- some towns used prostitutes as a money source while treating them like dirt, while others towns treated them as reasonably human beings.

She recognizes that saloon girls and dance hall girls were sometimes prostitutes, sometimes not, but would end up associated with the demimonde in the minds of proper society either way. She doesn't directly grapple with the fact that women in other fields -- even laundresses, sometimes -- who lived in the red light district could end up dealing with rumors they were prostitutes as well, or that they were at high risk of assault in a lot of those places, which is one reason "proper women" sometimes did nothing to help prostitutes. It was generally harder on a woman's reputation to associate with prostitutes than it was on a man's, and often she faced physical dangers trying to do so.

There are little gems of interesting information interspersed, and some fun stories, although the author tends to treat rumors and people's memories from years and years later as factual, which I did not like. She also resorts to pure speculation a time or two, including stories about women who may or may not have been prostitutes, and not just women working in related fields, either. Prostitution is a tough subject to research, particularly if you want to give the prostitute's perspective on things. This book, like many books on the subject of prostitution in the nineteenth century, inadvertently tends to minimize the average prostitute -- who was poor and illiterate and generally died young, and whose customers could be facing similar conditions -- in favor of the more glamorous, successful and educated women who ended up as madams or otherwise lasted much longer on the job than the average of five years.

It is difficult to find stats on prostitution from the time, but it's unlikely it was any safer then than it is now. Currently, prostitution is the most dangerous career: the average prostitute gets physically attacked about once a month (this would include rapes), and the death rate for prostitutes in the U.S. is 204 out of every 100,000 -- much higher than jobs we think of as highly dangerous. Alaskan fishermen, for example, die at a rate of 129 out of every 100,000; loggers at 111 per 100,000 workers. Those are all fairly current rates: in general, men and women died at a higher rate in the nineteenth century -- a woman faced a lifetime risk of one in eight of dying in childbirth alone, for example, while miners in some careers knew very well they were signing on for black lung or some other fatal disease that would kill them young, over and above all the other hazards they faced.

While the author of this book does mention the dangers and the high death toll of prostitution, because of the structure of the book, it "feels like" there are about the same number of prostitutes thriving as there are prostitutes dying, which simply was not the case. This book is heavily tilted toward "success stories," and although the author regularly reminds the readers that these success stories were rare, the very fact that you hear about as many successful prostitutes as you do prostitutes getting killed or committing suicides can't help but skew things a bit in the reader's mind.

One thing this book stresses that is absolutely true -- many prostitutes wanted to disappear, and they often succeeded in doing so. The average prostitute's life doesn't appear in many books because it is really difficult for serious historians to get hold of, not just because the average prostitute was illiterate and left no records, but also because prostitutes had so many ways of dodging record-keeping by others. One thing I did appreciate about this book is that the author recognizes some of her own limitations, even thought she doesn't necessarily discuss them in great detail. I think she sometimes presents as fact things that are pure speculation, but I also think she was trying to present things as they really were, she just gets caught up in her own imaginations now and again.

[Trent Rock · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just what the title says...All about COLORADO soiled doves....Great pictures....Well researched..I thought this book was a little more colorful than "Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery: Prostitutes in the American West, 1865-90"..They are both good books on the subject....It will make any trip to Cripple Creek seem way more interesting!!!!

[Jen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Obviously a lot of history and research went into writing this book (i.e. a lot of names and dates) but not much personality.

[Kirsten · Rating 4 out of 5]

Indy research...