Inside a Wild West Brothel

Shoot outs, hard drinking and gambling. The Wild West is remembered for it's general lawlessness, but what might life have been like for the first women to join the American settlers as they moved west? **TW: This episode contains mentions of suicide** In this episode, we are investigating the lives of sex workers on the American frontier. Who were they? What were their living conditions like? And how were they treated by their contemporaries? Kate is joined for this episode by Hollie Marquess, Dr Leo Oliva Distinguished Professor of History at Fort Hays State University. This episode was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

  Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:37Speaker 01

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• 1:19Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister, and you are listening to Betwix the Sheets. And just in case you are new here, or in case you are old school but recent world political events have knocked out your frontal cortex and now your memory is suffering, I have to tell you that this is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. We call this the Fair Do's Warning, because if we tell you these things, then Fair Do's, you can't actually get angry with us if you keep listening and happen to get offended. But on a serious note, as if that wasn't as serious enough, we are actually dealing with some pretty difficult subjects today, including suicide. So you might not want to listen to this one today, in which case, give this one a skip

• 2:04Kate Lister?

  and we'll see you next time. For everyone else, on with the show.

• 2:14Kate Lister?

  The swinging doors of the saloon creak as dusty cowboys saunter in and out, their boots scraping on the rough wooden floor. The room is filled with smoke and you can smell the moonshine before you even get in here. There's a man playing piano in the corner and a barmaid serving the guests. At the top of the stairs stands a woman dressed in black lace and crimson satin. Behind her, a small crowd of similarly dressed girls lounge provocatively, waiting to be called up for work. These women are the main event for many of the men coming here tonight. They are the sex workers of the frontier.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  What do you look for in a man?

• 3:01Speaker 03

  Oh, money, of course.

• 3:02Speaker 02

  You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.

• 3:04Speaker 04

  I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing a button.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.

• 3:19Speaker 05

  Goodness, I feel for them. Goodness has nothing to do with it, do you?

• 3:28Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets: A History of Sex Scandal in Society with me, Kate Lister. The Wild West brothel madam is a figure filmmakers have known and loved for years. But what do we really know about the women who were selling sex to the cowboys, hm? Today, I'm joined by Hollie Marquess to find out when and why sex workers came to the frontier, and what would life have really been like for them? Let's do this.

• 3:58Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Hollie Marquess. How are you doing?

• 4:05Speaker 06

  I'm doing quite well. Thank you for having me.

• 4:07Kate Lister?

  I'm thrilled to have you here, because one thing that we haven't covered so far in our little history of sex work, but there's loads we haven't covered yet, but the frontier, the American Wild West. Because if there's one thing that I definitely don't know about the American Wild West... Wild West, but the image is cowboys, saloon bars. That's absolutely in the public consciousness. But you've actually researched this subject, haven't you?

• 4:31Speaker 06

  I sure have, yes. Sex work on the frontier is very important, right?

• 4:37Kate Lister?

  I think so, and it's got to be about more than just cartoon saloon girls and, you know, somebody on the piano and before somebody comes in, the swinging saloon doors and all that stuff. But what brought you to this area of study in the first place?

• 4:51Speaker 06

  I've always been drawn to the types of history that just don't make the curriculum, right? History of sex, sex work. It seems so important and yet it's hardly written about. And I live in Hayes, so my research is on Hayes City sex work. And I realized that there was quite a lot on Hayes as a Wild West place. It was very kind of famous for a while for being wild and woolly, but nothing academic on the sex workers. So somebody had to write about it.

• 5:18Kate Lister?

  Somebody had to. Just for anyone that's unsure, where is Hayes?

• 5:22Speaker 06

  Literally the middle of America.

• 5:24Kate Lister?

  Middle, middle bit.

• 5:25Speaker 06

  Yes, very rural Kansas. So out on what would have been the frontier in the 19th century.

• 5:31Kate Lister?

  I should probably ask you that. What is the frontier? Because to my mind, gleaned only from Hollywood legends, it's all cowboys and saloons and Western gunfights. And then suddenly it was the 1950s and jazz came in. That's kind of, and I know that's not right, but what is the frontier?

• 5:48Speaker 06

  Missing some bits.

• 5:50Kate Lister?

  Some gaps need to be filled in. What is the frontier? Where was it? And what time period are we talking here?

• 5:56Speaker 06

  So in the mid 19th century, there was this idea of manifest destiny, that the United States should spread coast to coast. And it was our God given right. And what they mean by that is like, white people should go coast to coast. But after the Civil War, what we're talking about is migration to places like Kansas, Colorado, Missouri, Texas. This is beyond the Missouri River. There had been movement through those places to get to like gold speculation, silver mining. But this is an effort to settle those areas. So you've got a lot of single men coming out to these areas. You also have a lot of sporadic military forts. So they're to deal with what they call the Indian problem. Fort Hays is about a mile from Hayes City.

• 6:40Speaker 06

  And if you've seen the Kevin Costner film, Dances with Wolves, he's at Fort Hays at the beginning of this film.

• 6:46Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 6:46Speaker 06

  So that is the setting for this time period. It's, you know, right after the Civil War and that's the setting.

• 6:53Kate Lister?

  And it was pretty wild, wasn't it?

• 6:56Speaker 06

  It certainly was. So George Custer, the famed like Seventh Cavalry General, he and his wife are here at Fort Hays. And she writes that it seemed like a perpetual Fourth of July, just because you could constantly hear pistol shots. So it's quite wild. For a while, Hayes City had the eastern terminus of the railroad. So much of the nation's east to west passenger traffic is going through Hayes. So this like brief boom of population and then it's going to shrink in population, but not in reputation. It's going to be very rough and ready here.

• 7:31Kate Lister?

  And it wasn't rough and ready for the the native peoples that live there. I think we can recognize that one, but I'm always quite astounded by, is it confidence or arrogance? I don't know what it is, but these early settlers, just put into side the fact that we had no business being there in the first place, but like trying to get inside the mindset of of them packing up the wagons and just heading out. And they didn't know where they were going and they didn't know what was going to be there. Like they had no information at all. It's extraordinary that people did that.

• 8:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think that is a very modern mindset that we would never, right?

• 8:06Kate Lister?

  Never.

• 8:09Speaker 06

  But back then, there's not really the same sort of sense of upward mobility. There's kind of this hope that there'll be new opportunities out west. So some of them are there to try to strike it rich, but they're coming out for a lot of different reasons. So men who work on the railroads, men who are there for military action, men who are just trying to get elsewhere for whatever reason, outlaws. And of course, women are going to play a big role in these early towns as sex workers.

• 8:39Kate Lister?

  I suppose you did say earlier that they believed that God wanted them to do this. If you genuinely think that he's on your side and that this is his idea, that probably makes a difference to what you're doing.

• 8:49Speaker 06

  Probably.

• 8:51Kate Lister?

  Maybe, maybe I'm just being a bit too generous. But what are the men going out there for? So there's, there's like posts, military posts. You said that there's railways out there. What are they going out there to do?

• 9:02Speaker 06

  So a lot of cattle drives are going to be very lucrative. So moving cattle from places like Texas up into Kansas to be sold. And that is going to bring sex work, of course. It's really interesting during cattle drive seasons. The names of sex workers will be like cattle Annie, cattle Mary, cattle Susie. They're trying to attract the cattle drivers because they're flush with cash and they've just been with other men for several weeks. So some of it is farming, some of it is just trying to set up a saloon, set up a gambling den, try to make money wherever you can.

• 9:34Kate Lister?

  Okay, so we've got these men that are heading out there. We've got to talk about the women that are joining them, the sex workers, who are often left out of this push across America. But they were there at the frontier of this.

• 9:49Speaker 06

  Yes, they're very important to early settlement. It is important to keep in mind that jobs are largely closed to women on the frontier. So jobs that we think of as women occupying in the 20th century, like working in a shop or being someone's secretary. Those jobs are going to men. So there's little to no employment opportunity for women. On the fort, you could be a laundress if you were married to a soldier, but that's pretty much it. That's, you could do laundry or you can be a sex worker.

• 10:15Kate Lister?

  Not going to make good money with that, are you?

• 10:17Speaker 06

  No.

• 10:18Kate Lister?

  Being, doing, doing the laundry.

• 10:19Speaker 06

  No. And so they're coming to the frontier for a lot of different reasons, just like the men do. So some of them for opportunity, some of them because their husbands bring them out there and then just leave them. There had been a recent uptick in sex work because of the Civil War, right? So you've got a lot of money to be made near military encampments, but also a lot of abandonment, a lot of widows who need to survive and need to feed their children. So William Sanger did a pretty famous. Survey of sex workers in New York and about a quarter of them said that they got into the work for destitution reasons. Another quarter said inclination. And of course, he doesn't believe them. He said, well, that that can't be, they can't just want to be

• 11:03Speaker 06

  sex workers. And he goes on this whole moral tirade. But I like to think of them as having agency, right? That maybe they wanted to be independent, right? Inside of marriage, at this time in the 19th century of America, women are essentially property of their husbands. They don't have access to their own money. They don't have a lot of choice. And so this is a way out of marriage. You can make money and be independent through sex work.

• 11:30Kate Lister?

  It's a very complex thing, isn't it? Because I agree with you. I think that the agency needs to be respected, but it's a very constrained type of agency. It's like, what are the options here? Because you're not going to go out to the American Wild West and make your money as a dressmaker, or make your money as a babysitter, or it's just not there. And even back in the cities, a woman with children is really, really going to struggle. So the options are incredibly limited. It's really get married, isn't it? That's the option.

• 12:03Speaker 06

  Or do sex work.

• 12:04Kate Lister?

  Or do sex work, which you can earn a lot of money in a very short space of time. I'm not suggesting anybody turns to it. I'm just saying that the history of it, and still today, it allows people to make a lot of money in a very short space of time with no particular skill set.

• 12:19Speaker 06

  It's a lot safer these days, though.

• 12:21Kate Lister?

  It's, yes, we must say that. I want to be like-

• 12:23Speaker 06

  A lot more hygienic.

• 12:24Kate Lister?

  Yeah, you want to be very careful. I don't want to be saying that everyone in the Wild West was having a great time. These are very rough lives and difficult choices to be made. But recognizing the motivations behind those choices, I think, is really important. So they weren't bringing their wives out then? Were some of them married? That they were going out there and their wives were at home?

• 12:43Speaker 06

  Oh, yes. Yes. A lot of the clientele, the sex workers, were married. So their wives are back east, and they're not coming out. Occasionally, a family would come out. So it's not only men. But, you know, by and large, the sex workers are going to be visited by a lot of merry men. I just said that as merry men, not married.

• 13:04Kate Lister?

  Let's say both, merry and married men.

• 13:09Kate Lister?

  Do you get a sense that the women going into this work, that they've left to go out west, to go and resettle these places with the sole intention, I'm going to get there and I'm going to become a saloon girl? Or do they go out there thinking, I'm gonna make my way and then they get there and realise there's nothing for them to do, that this is the only way to make money?

• 13:27Speaker 06

  I think there's a little bit of both.

• 13:29Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 13:29Speaker 06

  I think that it's hard to parse that out sometimes because it's not like these women are leaving diaries for us, right? They don't have the time. The ones who I researched in Hay City all indicated on the census that they could read and write, which makes them a little bit unusual. But there's a big difference in I can sign my own name and I regularly read Shakespeare, right? So literacy is a thing, this is before compulsory education in the 19th century. So I get the sense that some of them are looking for adventure. Many of them are young women. They may not expect to do this work for the rest of time, although they're going to find out that there's really not a whole lot else that they can do, especially once they've begun. But some of them are forced into that situation.

• 14:11Speaker 06

  They get out to the frontier and their husband dies or runs off with someone else and what are they going to do? There's no like welfare system set up. There's some charitable organisations, but those are going to be mostly in the cities. Frontier really doesn't have that infrastructure yet.

• 14:28Kate Lister?

  So the women coming out, they're coming from all over the place, but how did you research this? Because one thing that I do know is that trying to find their voices and trying to find evidence that's not tainted because it's been written by a moralist or it's been written by a lawyer or something like that, how did you go about researching this?

• 14:48Speaker 06

  This was quite the task, right? Because I couldn't find any diaries, so like where are their voices? I really wanted their voices. So one of the first things that I did was look through newspapers. And of course, that is tainted with, sex workers are looked at as kind of like the entertainment. So their writing about them is like, look at what these girls are up to this week. But it could give me some names. I looked at census records and I was able to track people down. And that way, typically in Kansas, the occupation. Field would be blank for sex workers. So if you find a group of women that have different last names, no occupations, doesn't necessarily mean they're sex workers, right? They could be a group of nuns, I guess, but then you could cross-reference.

• 15:31Speaker 06

  So I had dockets, so court records, although that was a challenge as well. I found a set of court records that I needed and I get up to the courthouse. They finally let me upstairs in the attic to look through their stuff. And there were like 700 documents missing and they said, oh, I think somebody must have checked them out decades ago and never brought them back. Or I find a testimony, but then that got transferred to another courthouse and there was a courthouse fire. There were so many courthouse fires. So I was very persistent. I had to just really keep at it because I really wanted to get some sense of their voice. So I'm not just writing about this as this like observer from up top.

• 16:09Kate Lister?

  And what did the voices tell you that you found?

• 16:11Speaker 06

  Well, I ended up getting quite attached to one. I don't know if you're allowed to have a favorite 19th century sex worker.

• 16:17Kate Lister?

  Oh, I think you are. Definitely.

• 16:20Speaker 06

  So Nettie Baldwin was someone who I found, I think, the most on. And before I kind of tell you about her, I will tell you that the census record for her was my favorite find of this whole project. So before she comes to Hay City, she's in actually three different census records for the same year. So these women are transient. Sometimes they're moving so fast that the census doesn't capture them. And in her case, she was moving quickly enough that she sort of beat the census numerator to the next town. So she's on multiple records and I find her in Ellsworth. She was living in a house of George and Elizabeth Palmer. And out to the side of that entry, the numerator writes House of Ill Fame, so brothel. And he did that on several records that day for Ellsworth, but they are the only ones with occupations.

• 17:06Speaker 06

  So the occupations for that house, 18-year-old Libby Thompson's occupation was listed as diddles.

• 17:12Kate Lister?

  What?

• 17:13Speaker 06

  Harriet Parmenter, yeah, she wrote diddles.

• 17:15Kate Lister?

  Diddles.

• 17:17Speaker 06

  Yeah. Harriet Parmenter wrote, does horizontal work?

• 17:22Speaker 06

  Lizzie Harris wrote Ogle's Fools. And for Nettie Baldwin, it lists her occupation as squirms in the dark.

• 17:29Kate Lister?

  My God, that's incredible.

• 17:32Speaker 06

  Yes, I was so excited to find this and I have to think that they were just having a little bit of a go at him. Because the same census enumerator visited other brothels and did not write occupations.

• 17:42Kate Lister?

  See, sex workers are funny. They are funny.

• 17:45Speaker 06

  They are.

• 17:45Kate Lister?

  Funny people.

• 17:47Speaker 06

  So while she's in Ellsworth, she was with this loser boyfriend, Bill McClellan, William McClellan. And they're in bed one night and someone comes into their house to try to shoot him. Ends up shooting a couple of other men dead, another sex worker is dead and Nettie gets a bullet to her chest and survives. He gets off scot-free, like, yeah, she's fine. They end up moving to Junction City and then Newton and then finally to Hayes by early 1871 or 1872. And so I was able to track her kind of before. She spends quite a lot of time in Hayes and she and the boyfriend are like in front of the court quite a lot. So I have a lot of records on them.

• 18:29Speaker 06

  Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything on her after she leaves Hayes. So look through your attics if anybody has a diary or something.

• 18:37Kate Lister?

  Always a way with sex worker history is you get these little brief moments where they're in the records that they've turned up and you can trace them for a bit and then they just vanish. They just go, it's a name change or it's something. They've just gone.

• 18:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, a name change. They change their birth dates. They want to be like fresh and new and young in each new town. But you could also just die on the side of a road and nobody's going to write that down. So.

• 19:02Kate Lister?

  Yeah, I mean, it's brutal, isn't it?

• 19:06Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Holly after this short break.

• 19:22Kate Lister?

  Hello Betwixters, I am jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there. And the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.

• 20:04Kate Lister?

  You found some incredible names during this research.

• 20:09Speaker 06

  I did, so what makes Hayes City a little different is that most of them use regular sounding names. Some historians note that taking on like a fun name would be like an initiation to the sisterhood of sex work.

• 20:23Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 20:24Speaker 06

  Or it's a way to like keep your family from shame.

• 20:27Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 20:27Speaker 06

  It's also a way to advertise, right? I mentioned Cattle Annie, Cattle Mary. But if you have a unique something about you, there's a lot of like Peg Leg Susie and One-Eyed Liz. And it's a way to be remembered. Early on in Hayes, there was a Stink Foot Meg.

• 20:44Kate Lister?

  Oh, right.

• 20:45Speaker 06

  And I can't imagine she would have taken that name for herself.

• 20:48Kate Lister?

  Why would you want, that's not a good name to go into that line of work with. Stink Foot Mag, it's distinctive.

• 20:54Speaker 06

  Right, so I imagine she just had really stinky feet and there was a Lousy Liz.

• 20:58Kate Lister?

  Lousy Liz.

• 20:59Speaker 06

  I don't think that's the best business name, you know?

• 21:03Kate Lister?

  But we're still talking about them, like 150 years later. You've got, it's a distinct name, you'd have to give them that.

• 21:13Speaker 06

  It's true. Maybe she meant like lousy morals and instead of like, I'm lousy in bed.

• 21:18Kate Lister?

  Maybe she did. But what were the living conditions of these women? Because again, it's very easy to overly glamorize it. And we're back to that image of the saloon and all that stuff. But this was a really, really tough life. What kind of living environments were they in?

• 21:32Speaker 06

  There are a number of different types of sex work that happens on the frontier. And this historian, Anne Anne Butler, writes that she notes four styles. And the highest would be someone who worked in a brothel. And that category is really broad. So you could have like a really fancy kind of high end music, gambling, fine liquor. And you could have something much smaller, but typically there's a madam who is sort of coordinating the events of the evening. Below that were saloon girls or dance hall workers who engaged in sex work. The next rung would be someone who worked in what was called a crib. So like a really small, flimsy house or shack. And this is all about volume. This is not about like entertaining anybody in the parlor with a fine drink. This is like sometimes upwards of 75 people a night.

• 22:17Kate Lister?

  Holy mother of fuck. Wow. Okay.

• 22:20Speaker 06

  Right. The lowest would be what would amount to like a street walker, someone who is working from the streets. And newspapers will often use these terms really interchangeably. And also it's not uncommon for people to do multiple types of sex work. So maybe you work in the saloon, but you also work in a crib occasionally or your circumstances change. So it's not like you're a brothel worker and that's the end of that story.

• 22:46Kate Lister?

  Do we get any sense that men were selling sex there? I mean, I know that they must have been, but did they turn up in the records?

• 22:52Speaker 06

  They must have been, but not in Hays City.

• 22:55Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 22:55Speaker 06

  I get the sense that there is less of a need for men to sell sex because men were readily available for sex for free.

• 23:02Kate Lister?

  Ah.

• 23:03Speaker 06

  With each other.

• 23:04Kate Lister?

  Okay, there we go. Just going back to living conditions and seventy five people visiting an establishment a night, I mean, I've got to ask about the health of these women. I mean, the health of everybody is pretty bad, but what are we talking about here?

• 23:19Speaker 06

  So the first thing that I always think of is just the hygiene, like everyone who the students are all like, what would you do if you could go back in time?

• 23:26Kate Lister?

  Wash.

• 23:27Speaker 06

  I wouldn't because everybody would be so smelly. Disease, you're under constant threat of venereal disease and also abuse, right? There's no real protections for them. So not only that, their living conditions are, you know, frequently bad, but their cash flow is unstable, they're very transient. So it seems like it's a very chaotic lifestyle. Disease prevention at this time is pretty rudimentary. They would wash their customers' genitals before and after. Part of this is so a venereal disease couldn't be blamed on their house. They could say like, well, you didn't get it from me because I washed you, which we know isn't actually going to prevent anything.

• 24:05Kate Lister?

  No.

• 24:05Speaker 06

  But in that process of washing, they could sort of see, is there any pus? Is there anything that I can notice? And then potentially turn them away if they're in a position to do so. They also used various douches with all kinds of ingredients that they would have gotten from the local druggist, like carbolic acid, mercury chloride, potassium permanganate, mixed with a little laudanum. And they're trying to both prevent sexually transmitted infections, but also pregnancies.

• 24:36Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 24:37Speaker 06

  So usually that's going to be abortifacients, where you're taking something that's so poisonous that abortion is going to be a side effect because they don't have access to safe medical care.

• 24:49Kate Lister?

  Do you have any sense of how many women in Hazed City were selling sex? I only ask that because the history of sex was expressed in the 19th century and in Britain is they're prone to these insanely wildly exaggerated numbers of like 250,000 women on the streets of London alone. And when you kind of break that down, it's like, that would mean everybody in London is like, that's obviously not true. But what kind of numbers are they talking about in Hazed? City, are they similarly prone to exaggeration?

• 25:18Speaker 06

  They are, but you also have to think about the population. So when the railroad was the eastern terminus, we have about thirteen hundred people in the town. Once that leaves, the town shrinks to about three hundred people. But in that same year, the county sold thirty seven liquor licenses. So it's this wild west town, right? And the sex workers are dependent on both the people who live in the town, but also the nearby fort, any kind of passersby. So in a town of about three hundred, on the census records, usually about eight to ten.

• 25:49Kate Lister?

  That's a lot for a town of three hundred.

• 25:51Speaker 06

  And that's only what's being captured on the census on that one day. A lawyer who had been in Hay City at this time, D C Nellis, he estimated anywhere between ten and fifty at any given time.

• 26:02Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 26:03Speaker 06

  I usually found around eight to ten, not just in the censuses, but in the arrest records.

• 26:09Kate Lister?

  So what was the, and it's difficult to get a handle on this one, but the general social attitude to sex work at this time in this space? Because zooming out, if you're going to France or Britain or Germany, they have this very complex attitude. In Britain, they called it the great social evil and sort of forward facing. It's all very like, this is terrible and awful and we must not do it. But then you sort of scratch the services like, yeah, but everybody's doing it. It's a really odd like state of cognitive distance to get themselves in. But what's it like in America on the frontier where really high numbers of women are doing this? Probably that's really the only work that women can do. And also they must have been integral to the economy of that area. What was their attitude to this?

• 26:53Speaker 06

  So it's definitely integral to the economy. And I think if we were in a bigger city with these like moral reform women, they would have had that moral indignation. But on the frontier, things are a little different, at least initially. So in these early frontier towns. Sex work was really vital to keeping the town going, right? If the sex workers are who are bringing the men from the fort on payday to come to town, they're not just buying sex, they're also going to the gambling dens and they're going to the saloons, they're patronizing these businesses. They also ultimately paid for the sheriffs and the justices of the peace through their near monthly fines. So they would be arrested about once a month, they would pay their fine and then they would be set free.

• 27:37Speaker 06

  The fines were pretty small, so in 1872, there was a new undersheriff and he arrested eight women. And the fines ranged from $1 for people who were sex workers to Nettie Baldwin paid $6 for being what amounts to a madam and Lizzie Goddard paid $9. And if they didn't have the money to pay, someone else could pay for them. Or sometimes they would let them leave if it was the weekend, go work for the money and then bring it back the next day. So there's this kind of tacit acceptance, right? That this, it's like a license to operate. I found that, so Frank Shepherd, the undersheriff who arrested all of these women, he frequently went to the brothels.

• 28:19Speaker 06

  In 1872, Nettie Baldwin actually brings a charge against him for beating her in her house.

• 28:25Kate Lister?

  Oh, I don't like him anymore.

• 28:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, I don't like him.

• 28:27Kate Lister?

  No.

• 28:28Speaker 06

  She had witnesses, so two other sex workers were called to be witnesses, Lily Thompson and Molly Whitecamp, and the sheriff, Alexander Ramsey, was a witness. He doesn't have any witnesses for his side. They find him guilty and they fine him $5 and he couldn't afford to pay. So she had the month before been fined $6 and she was flush with cash. He doesn't have the $5 to pay, so he has to sit in jail for three or four months until they consider his fine worked off. And I find that really interesting on two counts. First, that he didn't have the money and she did, but that she felt comfortable bringing a charge against this undersheriff means that there was some level of acceptance for her.

• 29:08Kate Lister?

  Yeah, there must have been.

• 29:09Speaker 06

  And that he was found guilty. Yeah.

• 29:11Kate Lister?

  It's like, not only is she confident enough to bring that charge, that she recognizes an injustice has happened, but that they actually, they had the legal mechanisms for this person to be punished. I don't know if that would have happened in the UK, to be completely honest.

• 29:24Speaker 06

  And I think that as part of this frontier is a quite different place.

• 29:28Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 29:29Speaker 06

  At least initially, early on. And they're also, they're buying houses. So there are mortgage records that I was able to find. And one of them, Nettie Baldwin takes over a house called The Sporting Palace. It's a bar now, but it was a brothel called The Sporting Palace, and it changed hands between a number of sex workers and sometimes their loser boyfriends. And the D listed all of the contents of the house. And so, looking at the contents of the house, I could gather that this was a brothel, not a crib, because it had enough beds and washstands for seven or eight sex workers, just in this one house.

• 30:02Kate Lister?

  What else did they have in the house?

• 30:04Speaker 06

  They had a bureau with mirrors, they had window curtains and fixtures, mattresses, a water cooler, two ladies' trunks and contents, five bedsteads, 35 yards of carpet, two sofas, six glass lamps. So they're listing everything. It doesn't seem to be a really high-class establishment, but certainly a brothel, not a crib.

• 30:27Kate Lister?

  Yeah. Did you get any sense, this is a bit of a difficult one as well, but of people being coerced, of there being sex trafficking at this time? And I know, again, it's like choices, but they're constrained by circumstance. Like, if Nettie is a madam, is she exploiting people? Was there people being trafficked and forced into this? And do you have records of that?

• 30:51Speaker 06

  I didn't get any of that sense, based on the limited records that I had. But if they can bring a charge against the law,

• 31:00Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 31:01Speaker 06

  they could probably also have gone to the law and say, hey, you know, Nettie's forcing me to do something that I don't want to do. So that doesn't mean that it didn't happen, but it didn't show up in my records.

• 31:12Kate Lister?

  And what was the law? They were being charged. What were they being charged with?

• 31:16Speaker 06

  It really just depends. So sex workers were part of a number of trials and provided witness testimony. So Nettie Baldwin witnessed a fight, and so she was a witness there. She was also a defendant in a case where another sex worker accused her of hitting her. This woman's name is Alice. She said Nettie hit her, and that her boyfriend, William McClellan, threatened to kill her. So they often would fight with each other. About a month after she bought the sporting palace, she witnessed a fight between her boyfriend, William McClellan, and a man named Jack Wright. Essentially, they get into a fight in the bar, and McClellan shot Jack Wright. He was arrested. He pled not guilty. I'm not sure on what basis, because everyone saw him.

• 32:00Speaker 06

  But she testifies as a witness in the defense. At this trial, Tommy Drum, who owned the saloon, said, "It looks too damn dry in here," and brings in a decanter of whiskey. And before people would take the stand, they would take a shot, including the judge. So everybody's drinking in the court. He was able to get this case transferred to Ellsworth, and his friend there was the district attorney. So it gets dropped. He gets away with murder, which is not going to be the only time this happens. She serves as a witness in another murder trial about six months later in a different bar, Sy Goddard Stanshall. She was there with a guy named Thomas Hine, who was from the Sixth Cavalry. And he went to get a drink. And a private Frank Glishman was there

• 32:45Speaker 06

  and sort of bumps into him. And so Thomas Hine just shoots him in the chest. Fuck. And yeah, he just steps over the body and walks out into the street. So she is a witness for the defense. Another sex worker who was there with Frank Glishman was a witness for the prosecution. So they're violating the city ordinances through their profession, but the law relied on them to provide testimony. And that testimony was considered accurate, reliable witness testimony.

• 33:17Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Holly after this short break.

• 33:35Speaker 07

  What started the Civil War? What ended the conflict in Vietnam? Who was Paul Revere? And did the Vikings ever reach America? I'm Don Wildman, and on American History Hit, my expert guests and I are journeying across the nation and through the years to uncover the stories that have made America. We'll visit the battlefields and debate floors where the nation was formed, meet the characters who have altered it with their touch, and count the votes that have changed the direction of our laws and leadership. Find American History Hit twice a week, every week, wherever you get your podcasts. American History Hit, a podcast from History Hit.

• 34:33Kate Lister?

  They're very much a part of this community and this infrastructure, quite clearly, and they have access to legal recourse and they have access to money and buying their own places. Were they respected, or did it still have that stigma around it?

• 34:48Speaker 06

  They would never have been considered like a respectable woman, like what we think of as a woman with class. They would never have been treated in that way. But they were considered pretty essential to the town, and not just in the sense of being trial witnesses and providing economically, but for entertainment reasons. And I'm not talking about the sex work here. I'm talking in the newspapers.

• 35:11Kate Lister?

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 35:13Speaker 06

  This is before Netflix, right? So people would read the newspaper and say, what did those sex workers get up to over the weekend?

• 35:20Kate Lister?

  That's incredible.

• 35:22Speaker 06

  There was a lot of really fun commentary in the newspapers and reporting on fights, reporting on, you know, Alice is drunk again and yelling in the streets, or they hit each other. There was a really fun newspaper report that actually had to do with Nettie Baldwin and Bill McClellan. He ended up beating her up. And she comes to the court as a victim of the crime. He... Was fined a hundred dollars and he jumps up and says, well, that's more than it used to cost to kill a man, which it's not really a thing you should say to a judge, right? Like you're basically saying like, I could hire a hitman for less than that. But they ended up, they let him go because they had mixed up the dates and they accidentally tried him on a Sunday. So they just let him out.

• 36:05Kate Lister?

  This is insane. This is like a soap opera.

• 36:09Speaker 06

  And it was for readers of the newspaper as well. They are looking to not just the sex workers, but people who are considered part of the vice district as their entertainment. A crowd of drunk people at one point took the sign for the Hay City Sentinel, the newspaper, and they put it out in front of one of the brothels. And so the next morning, these women were incensed and they marched it back and they said that their good name of their house was not going to be sullied by this miserable rag. And, you know, so they're playing little pranks on each other. They are really integral to the town. Of course, that doesn't mean that they necessarily always had a good time, but there was a story that I came across of recollection. So it was from 1926.

• 36:53Speaker 06

  They were interviewing C W Miller, who owned a hardware store about his days in the Wild West past. And he recalled a story where the druggist, Jimmy O'Brien, he comes running into the hardware store and says, I need to borrow a gun. And he's like, well, what do you need a gun for? And he said, they've got nine of our town girls in jail. What are we going to do? So, meaning nine of the sex workers had been arrested and it was Friday night. Like, what are we going to do if the sex workers are in jail over the weekend? So he borrows the gun, goes to the jail, shoots the hinges off of the door and out they go. And the interviewer asked, well, did they get rearrested? And he said, certainly not. The sheriff had done his duty the first time and didn't feel that there was a need of inviting further complications.

• 37:38Speaker 06

  So it does seem like there is a bit of playfulness. But we also have to remember that their lives were difficult. Women often use drugs and alcohol to kind of numb, you know, the things that are going on in their life. They would. Take laudanum to retire. So historian noted that the most popular means of retirement from sex work was completing suicide, usually through an overdose of laudanum. So we've talked about how frontier jobs are not available. That's especially true if you have sort of aged

• 38:19Speaker 06

  out of sex work, or if you're experiencing like late-stage syphilis, does not look pretty. And we did have one who completed suicide pretty unusually. She walked into a bar. Her name was Lou Sherwood. She walked into one of the bars and starts yelling, "It's all for you, Fred," and stabbing herself in the chest.

• 38:38Kate Lister?

  Holy shit, man.

• 38:41Speaker 06

  Unfortunately, the patrons of the bar thought that it was a theatrical performance, so they started clapping as she was bleeding out. So she's stabbing herself like nine times, which takes a lot of fortitude, I think, to more than once. And she bleeds out. We don't know who Fred was or what he did, but she ends up being the last woman who was buried at the Boot Hill Cemetery. She joined the body of another woman. So yeah, it was not a glamorous lifestyle.

• 39:10Kate Lister?

  No, no, not at all. Did you get any sense of like what happens after for any of the women? Because that's always the bit that seems to be missing in so many of these stories is, as we were saying earlier, you just lose track of them. And I always want to know, how did it work out for you? Were you all right after this? Did you go on and get a job? Did you get married? Like, what happened to you? Did you manage to trace anybody?

• 39:34Speaker 06

  I have not, and I would really like to. I would expect that many of them, once the attitudes shift in Hayes, that they move further west to like the nearest frontier town. But realistically, most of them probably would have either been the victim of some kind of violence or died from venereal disease.

• 39:53Kate Lister?

  Yeah, yeah. So when do things start to change then? Or is Hayes still a town where sex workers run the roost?

• 40:02Speaker 06

  Not anymore, at least not that, not that I know of. I know, we're so much less fun now. In the late 1870s, Volga Germans started to settle on the plains. So these are Germans who had gone to Russia and then are going to come to the plains and they're going to settle in Ellis County. They're going to set up little towns like Catherine, named for Catherine the Great. And they are going to, at first, not be welcome in the town either. But eventually, the economy shifts and family farming becomes like the main driver of the economy, not so much the saloons anymore. And once that happens, I started to see a huge shift in tone in the newspapers.

• 40:43Speaker 06

  So there started to be editorials like, do we really want to bring our children up in a town where we can see sex workers on the street? Maybe they should set up further out of town. They also started to experience higher fines. So those fines that we talked about that were like $1 or $6 were now $100 or $250. And so those fines became untenable. So there are records of one person bonding out for $250. Another person, it says that her admirer paid her $100 fine. But that really is going to run a lot of them off. Towards the end of where my study ends, in about 1883, there was a trial for three women, the Heiss women, Susan Heiss and her two daughters. And there was so much negativity in the papers.

• 41:28Speaker 06

  And I think part of it was this shift had happened, but also because it was a mother and two daughters. Now, these are adult women. These aren't like 12 year olds. These are adult women. But the idea, I think, in the town was that she had corrupted her daughters and we needed to run them off. We've been cursed with them. But I did tell you that my favorite source was the census record. I also found a subpoena for these women. So they must have brought it with them to the court. And it was just tucked in a docket book. I was flipping through it and they said, this docket book smells bad. It survived a fire. And I'm flipping through and the subpoena just is loose in there. The historical society didn't know that it was there, so it was not in any kind of protective sheet.

• 42:11Speaker 06

  But I could just hold the subpoena for this woman and her two daughters. So that was a really neat find, I think.

• 42:18Kate Lister?

  That's incredible. So as a final question then. Where you are in in Hays or just America in general, do you think that it's coming to terms with its sex worker past? I mean, like, in Australia, it took the Australians an awfully long time. I think it's about like the 1980s before people started to go, hang on a minute, it's pretty cool that we're descended from convicts. And now they and now they love it. But for the longest time, there was like, oh, we're not really talking about that. Is that the case in America? Have they have they come to terms with this past? Is it something that they're proud of? Is it something that they still hush up?

• 42:51Speaker 06

  Yes and no. So I had two reactions to this mainly. I ended up getting a new dentist over this because he's working on my teeth and he's asking me what I'm researching. And he says, Well, I hope that you don't find any of my relatives. And I thought, I'll get a different dentist if you're not going to be proud to have your relatives be strong, independent women. But most people were very excited that I was finally talking about these women. And Hays, for a long time, has really glamorized its Wild West past. There's a lot of plaques downtown, which will tell you this was the Sporting Palace, or this is Cy Goddard's Dance Hall, or this was Tommy Drum's Saloon. And so we have really latched on to that past with like, Wild Bill Hickok and Custer and all of those famous people

• 43:35Speaker 06

  that you hear of were in Hays for a time. So that is really important. So most people in town were very excited. I was getting a lot of requests to speak. And most people, I think, are embracing that past.

• 43:47Kate Lister?

  That's amazing. Holly, you have been incredible. I knew that you would be. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

• 43:54Speaker 06

  So if you go to the Fort Hays State University webpage and search up my name, all of my recent publications are there with links.

• 44:01Kate Lister?

  And are you on social media at all? Or are you smarter than that, quite frankly?

• 44:05Speaker 06

  I'm on Blue Sky. I can't

• 44:08Kate Lister?

  God bless Blue Sky.

• 44:10Speaker 06

  I can't tell you what my username is. I think it's just my name. I'm not entirely sure off the top of my head.

• 44:14Kate Lister?

  There can't be many Holly Marquises. You must be the only one there.

• 44:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, and it's Holly with an Ie, too, so.

• 44:20Kate Lister?

  Yeah, go look her up over there. You have been wonderful. Thank you so much for telling us about some of these extraordinary women.

• 44:32Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Holly for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along, whatever it is that you get your podcasts. If you want us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected]. This podcast was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.