From the time of the gold rush to the election of the first woman to the U.S. Congress, Wanton West brings to life the women of the West's wildest region: Montana, famous for its lawlessness, boomtowns, and America's largest red-light districts. Prostitutes and entrepreneurs--like Chicago Joe, Madame Mustache, and Highkicker—flocked to Montana to make their own money, gamble, drink, and raise hell just like men. Moralists wrote them off as "soiled doves," yet a surprising number prospered, flaunting their freedom and banking ten times more than their "respectable" sisters.
A lively read providing new insights into women's struggle for equality, Wanton West is a refreshingly objective exploration of a freewheeling society and a re-creation of an unforgettable era in history.
From the time of the gold rush to the election of the first woman to the U.S. Congress, Wanton West brings to life the women of the West's wildest region: Montana, famous for its lawlessness, boomtowns, and America's largest red-light districts. Prostitutes and entrepreneurs--like Chicago Joe, Madame Mustache, and Highkicker—flocked to Montana to make their own money, gamble, drink, and raise hell just like men. Moralists wrote them off as "soiled doves," yet a surprising number prospered, flaunting their freedom and banking ten times more than their "respectable" sisters.
A lively read providing new insights into women's struggle for equality, Wanton West is a refreshingly objective exploration of a freewheeling society and a re-creation of an unforgettable era in history.
Wanton West: Madams, Money, Murder, and the Wild Women of Montana's Frontier
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Overview
From the time of the gold rush to the election of the first woman to the U.S. Congress, Wanton West brings to life the women of the West's wildest region: Montana, famous for its lawlessness, boomtowns, and America's largest red-light districts. Prostitutes and entrepreneurs--like Chicago Joe, Madame Mustache, and Highkicker—flocked to Montana to make their own money, gamble, drink, and raise hell just like men. Moralists wrote them off as "soiled doves," yet a surprising number prospered, flaunting their freedom and banking ten times more than their "respectable" sisters.
A lively read providing new insights into women's struggle for equality, Wanton West is a refreshingly objective exploration of a freewheeling society and a re-creation of an unforgettable era in history.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781569768976 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Chicago Review Press, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2011 |
| Sold by: | INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
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Wanton West
Madams, Money, Murder, and the Wild Women of Montana's Frontier
By Lael Morgan
Chicago Review Press Incorporated
Copyright © 2011 Lael MorganAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-56976-897-6
CHAPTER 1
THE SUMMER WOMEN OF HELENA
1867
The first boom began in a crude camp they called Bannack, in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains of Idaho Territory. ? small party of Colorado prospectors was looking for a way over the Continental Divide but instead found gold at Grasshopper Creek near Badger Pass. By 1863 the town had about one thousand inhabitants, who, realizing the area's mineral potential, wrested it from Idaho to incorporate as Montana Territory with Bannack as its capital. In very short order they mined out about $5 million worth of precious metals, but John White, the original discoverer, was not among the happy survivors. He was murdered eighteen months after his arrival while prospecting the area for another strike.
White's widow and child were living in Illinois at the time, and word traveled fast. Prostitute Molly Welch, also known as Mary Welch, also known as Josephine Airey, also known as Chicago Joe, heard about Bannack from her friend Al Hankins, a Chicago gambler who took a professional interest. Hankins's older brother, Jeff, had been dealing cards at a casino in San Francisco when he learned about the strike and suggested Al and their younger brother, George, join him there in mining the miners. Too late to get in on the initial rush, Jeff had established headquarters at a low-class saloon and gambling den with the high-flying name of the California Exchange in a rough little mining camp near another gold deposit on the Stinking Water River.
By the time Al and George had navigated the rutted wagon trail south from the Missouri River port of Fort Benton to join him, the place had been rechristened Alder Gulch and its settlers — mostly rebel sympathizers, draft dodgers, and deserters from the War Between the States — had officially organized as the town of Varina, honoring the wife of Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president. It was the Yankee judge in charge of paperwork who changed the name to Virginia City, causing never-ending trouble for U.S. postal clerks who confused it with Virginia City, Nevada. But by that time the new settlers, whose ranks had swelled to about ten thousand, had made Virginia City Montana's capital and were too busy getting rich to care. The Hankins boys did so well at their game that within two years they found it prudent to move on. The newest gold discovery was a place called Blackfoot City in Ophir Gulch, about a hundred miles to the northwest, where the brothers enjoyed even greater success running a clip joint called the Headquarters.
Meanwhile, Josephine Airey, who had been saving her money, grew impatient with the economics of working on her back in Chicago's tenderloin and decided to do some pioneering of her own. Clients flush from the Montana diggings informed her that the remote territory had a serious shortage of professional women. Mostly there was Lizzie "Nigger Liz" Hall, a strong and enterprising black woman, and Carmen, described as a "full blossomed Spanish rose who would just as soon stick a stiletto into your gizzard as stand at the bar and have a drink with you."
Prostitutes did so well there that sometimes respectable women also turned to the trade, especially when starvation faced families whose claims did not pay and those who had no savings to tide them through the fearsome Montana winters that made mining impossible. One of Josephine's clients produced a wrinkled clipping from a Virginia City newspaper dated New Year's Eve 1864 and read it to her, knowing she had no formal schooling.
"Three little girls, who state their name to be Canary, appeared at the door of Mr. Furgis, on Idaho street, soliciting charity," it began. "The ages of the two elder ones were about ten and twelve respectively. The eldest carried in her arms her infant sister, a baby of about 12 months of age."
Actually Martha Jane Cannary, who later become famous as Calamity Jane, a prostitute, teamster, and pioneer scout, would have been younger than the twelve years for which the Virginia paper gave her credit, but 1864 had been a desperate winter for her family, and selling herself might well have been their only out, as the miner who read her the clipping had suggested.
Josephine was moved by the story. She had escaped to America out of similar poverty in Ireland at age fourteen, reluctantly leaving two younger sisters behind. She'd gotten her start in the miserable sweatshops of New York but could not tolerate the brutal overseers she watched work some of her fellow wage slaves to death. Her strictly Catholic family would never condone the choices she'd made when she embraced a much easier lifestyle in Chicago, but she had good reason to have chosen her profession. There had been little help for exploited girls like her when she'd landed in New York.
Towns like Virginia City were too wild to organize any kind of relief. Nor was there any law enforcement to help the miners victimized by vicious prostitutes and their pimps, the Montana man reported. What the territory needed were honest whores.
Airey was no beauty, but a fresh-faced Irish lass of twenty-two with a delightful brogue and a stunning figure. She dressed her dark, curly hair in an exotic fall and sported an expensive wardrobe accessorized with frills, laces, and jewels. The fact that she was illiterate was countered by her extraordinary aptitude for math. Her social skills matched her sharp wit. She was, as reputed, a woman of her word, and she was physically as tough as a professional wrestler.
By the time Josephine got organized to leave Chicago, the stampede had moved to Last Chance Gulch, about eighty miles to the north of Virginia City, where a party had struck pay dirt on Prickly Pear Creek. Carmen and Lizzie Hall soon moved into the new camp, joined by a second black woman named Fanny Bird, who on June 14, 1865, became the first whore to put her name on land records there. That was just after General Lee surrendered to Grant, ending the Civil War, but despite heavy Southern sympathies, Montanans were apparently too busy chasing riches to draw color lines. In fact, most of the prostitutes servicing white men in some of the outlying gold camps were black or Chinese, although Last Chance soon enjoyed a white majority.
By 1867, when Josephine Airey arrived via stagecoach from Fort Benton, there were already forty ladies of the evening in residence, but as the county seat and port of entry with a virtually all-male population of more than a thousand, Last Chance Gulch welcomed her as Chicago Joe. It was a rude settlement of hastily built log houses, bars, stores, and hotels; its muddy streets were filled with splattered pedestrians and screaming teamsters and their wagons, oxen, and horses. Airey liked the action. On April 5, just after the settlement was renamed Helena, she purchased a crude, one-story log cabin on Bridge Street in the red-light district with a down payment of $375, with $675 due in three months. Then, investing her remaining capital in some minor carpentry and hiring three musicians and several pretty inmates from the district, she went into competition with Fred White, who had been running the town's only dance hall.
Airey was pleased to call herself a manager, but she worked regular shifts as staff, too, and found it rough duty. ? hurdy-gurdy house, as Josephine's dance hall was disdainfully labeled, usually charged men a dollar a dance and strongly recommended the purchase of drinks at highly inflated prices for the customer and his lady at the end of each set. There was more money to be made by arrangement in the hall's back rooms and in smaller houses Airey would eventually purchase with the profits. But placer mining — panning gold out of surface gravel — which was Helena's main employment, was hard, dirty, mind-dulling work. Although wages were high, the mining season was as short as the work hours were long. Many unwashed customers arrived armed with pistols, drank to excess, and were hard, if not downright dangerous, to deal with. Since women were scarce, especially those who were single and respectable, Josephine and her girls were alternately fought over and manhandled. The town's police station was conveniently located in the middle of the red-light district, but since officers generally ignored "proprietor prostitutes," the girls ensured their own safety by hiring burly bartenders and bouncers to keep peace.
Luckily, veteran operators like Big Lou Courselle, who'd come north from a lively California district, and Carrie Whitney, a survivor of rough-and-tumble Kansas cattle towns, joined forces in dealing with the town's disruptive elements. Then there was Eleanor Alphonsine Dumont, also known as Madame Mustache because of the dark hair that shadowed her upper lip, who had gambled her way through most of the West's famous boomtowns. A well-brought-up French Creole from the Mississippi Delta, Dumont dabbled in prostitution as a sideline but forbade swearing and rough behavior in her house, establishing a precedent for the district.
As in Virginia City, times were tough for many who found themselves in Helena without resources, and more than a few turned to Josephine, who could be as generous as she was obsessed with making money. Too often the loans she made were not repaid, but, mindful of her own harsh beginnings, she continued to make them because there were few community agencies to meet the needs of those in trouble.
Airey could definitely afford her philanthropy, of course, because she and the rest of Helena's thirty-seven independent, property-owning prostitutes were doing extremely well. According to public records, they made 119 separate property transactions totaling more than $50,000 in a five-year period as the district expanded, accounting for 44 percent of the town's real estate transfers. Respectable merchants dealt with them openly, buying and selling property, occasionally loaning capital for their ventures or borrowing from them. One-third of the town's white demimonde population (twelve proprietor prostitutes) reported an average of $2,500 in personal wealth in the bank. Even street whores without capital could expect to earn $223 a month.
By comparison, stonemasons and carpenters commanded no more than $100 a month and bank clerks earned $125, while the highest legitimate wage a female could make was $65 as a sales clerk. However, Helena's good money was guaranteed only from June through September during the mining season. Business slowed to a crawl during the frozen Montana winters, motivating so many prostitutes to leave town that they became known as the summer women.
It was during this hiatus, perhaps, that Josephine Airey reconnected with gambler Albert Hankins, her old friend from Chicago who had first alerted her to Montana's potential. He had become a rich man since she had last seen him, wisely moving out of Blackfoot City just before that stampede ended to invest his winnings in a fine club in Salt Lake City. There he'd fallen in with a group of Mormons who apparently found gambling no more sinful than polygamy. He had won their trust by joining their church, he explained.
In truth, Hankins had actually gone on trial in Blackfoot City for absconding with the savings of four prostitutes he and his brothers had imported from San Francisco to staff their dance hall. The girls, nicknamed "the herders," had been so popular with the town's mob of womanless miners that would-be customers had to be limited to just one dance an evening. Living together, pooling their resources, the herders had amassed a sum of $4,000 from their shares of the proceeds, which Al managed to convince the court he had not stolen. The local vigilantes proved more skeptical, however, and soon thereafter decided to hang all three Hankins brothers, whom they believed to be harboring murdering highwaymen and thieves in their crooked gambling saloon. Jeff broke his leg in a mad dash to escape. Al and George managed to rescue him and make it to safety, but Jeff would limp for the rest of his life, and they all agreed it had been a close call. The vigilantes were actually nothing but a pack of thieves themselves, the Hankins brothers would always explain when some version of the story surfaced. The vigilantes, in Blackfoot at least, simply used their guise as protectors of respectable folk to rob, maim, and kill successful miners and gamblers.
While Josephine Airey was established in Helena long enough to be aware that Al Hankins's reputation in the territory was dubious, she may not have heard the details of his adventures in Blackfoot. She may also have missed the news that criminal charges had been filed against him by a Deer Lodge County prostitute who accused Hankins of fleecing her of $2,000. Or perhaps Josephine just didn't care, for the handsome twenty-seven-year-old gambler, whose real name was Prince Albert Hankins, must have appeared a prince indeed in contrast to the unpolished mining men with whom she'd danced away the past two summers. ? fine physical specimen, Hankins was famous in the region as a champion sprinter who won almost every footrace he entered, even against Indians. Although born on a farm in Indiana and trained as a saddler and horse trader, he had ornate taste, as did she. He loved horses and had plans for owning a stock farm as well as another gambling house. His ambitious business schemes matched or topped her own, and so Josephine Airey allowed herself to fall in love as she had never done before.
Elegantly garbed in the latest fashion, which favored her hourglass figure with a tight bodice, deep velvet hoop skirts, overskirts, and a provocative little bustle and ornamented by extravagant ruffles, flounces, and expensive jewelry, she wed the frock-coated dandy in Helena on Valentine's Day 1869. Marking the auspicious occasion was a fire that leveled much of Helena's legitimate business district. Built in a narrow valley, Helena was like a wind tunnel in a blaze. Two more conflagrations that followed set back the economy even further, but Josephine — whose property escaped all three of the disasters — took advantage of the lull. On June 15, 1869, she purchased a lot two blocks closer to the center of town for four dollars, then resold it that afternoon for $150 to Catherine Harrison, who thought even better of the new location. The reason for the quick turnover was undoubtedly word of a gold rush to White Pine, Nevada, which caused Josephine to put the rest of her property under the management of an associate and pack her portmanteau.
Albert Hankins had always found it hard to resist a good stampede, and the White Pine strike, billed as the "biggest and brightest of them all," attracted thirty thousand to the slopes of Mount Hamilton in the fledging state during the summer of 1869. British who had missed out on the California rush led the way, and there were also a surprising number of blacks encouraged by the ending of the Civil War and passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution guaranteeing them citizenship. The problem was that new gold deposits were discovered daily and all over the place, which made it risky to pick a site on which to establish a whorehouse or gambling hall. Al didn't like the look of it. The gold was quick to give out and so was Hankins's marriage to Josephine. Albert headed back to Chicago almost immediately to build a grand gambling casino in partnership with brothers Jeff and George.
Josephine's reaction to his leaving, and to his marriage to the fifteen-year-old daughter of a well-heeled Indiana farmer on Christmas Day the next year, is not known. Nor is there any solid proof that Hankins left Josephine pregnant, although it is believed that she had a son by him or someone else she met during this unsettled period. According to rumor, she placed the baby with a family outside the territory, paying his way but never seeing him after his adoption.
Having no close friends of record, Josephine appears to have kept her own council, although we do know she quickly dropped her married name. Then, a year after her wedding to Hankins (which is public record), Josephine Airey rejoined the summer women of Helena to take up where she had left off. Her story was simply that she and Hankins had gotten a divorce, although no record of it has ever been found.
* * *
In the summer of 1870 James T. "Black Hawk" Hensley was disgusted with himself and with life in general. He hadn't come all the way from Missouri working as a teamster and surviving Chief Black Hawk's Indian War in Utah to live a life of abstinence on declining wages, holed up in a ten-mile gulch on the upper Blackfoot River. Although several million in gold had been taken from the long, narrow valley since Welshman Richard Evans had discovered it with a Yankee in 1865, Lincoln City remained isolated near Montana's Great Divide. It offered virtually no amenities except a piss-poor saloon selling rotgut liquor at outlandish prices. There were only nine grown women in a population of 187, and all of those were married except for seventeen-year-old Julia Galter. Unfortunately, Julia was the daughter of the richest man in town, who happened to be a rancher with nine other kids but who guarded her as if she were his prize cow. Most gold camps had a string of whores, but with the exception of some ranch hands, two doctors, and a couple of Chinese laundrymen, the rest of Lincoln's citizens were all miners, and business wasn't good.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Wanton West by Lael Morgan. Copyright © 2011 Lael Morgan. Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
One: Madeleine
Two: The Summer Women of Helena—1867
Three: Butte, the Black Heart of Montana—1877
Four: Miles City and the Wild West—1880
Five: Last of the Silver Years—1887
Six: The Celestial Sex Trade—1900
Seven: Respectable Purple Paths—1900
Eight: Reflection—1900
Nine: The Beginning of the End—1911
Ten: New Options—1916
Eleven: The Wages of Sin—Epilogue
Notes
Index