Selling Sex in the Silver Valley

by Dr. Heather Branstetter

  “Bobbie” in 1952. Shoshone County Sheriff ’s Office Files, Wallace District Mining Museum Archives.

  The sheriff ’s office files even reveal that the unlikely town of Burley, Idaho, nestled in the heart of Mormon country, permitted and regulated prostitution until at least 1970.246 Many women came from towns in California, Washington and Oregon that were known for male-dominated labor industries like mining and logging. Prostitution appears under various guises in different towns, depending on the time frame. For example, it was common to see the charge of “immoral woman” and uncommon to see the charge of “taxi dancer,” which appears to be specific to Oakland and San Francisco around the time of World War II. In Los Angeles during the 1950s and 1960s, prostitution was called sex perversion, lewd conduct or indecent exposure, and in Ephrata, Washington, it was referred to as “carnal knowledge.”

  When a woman arrived in town, she interviewed with the madam and then went to the police station to be fingerprinted and offer up her legal name for a background check. During the earlier years, the mug shots were actually portrait photos taken by local photographer Nellie Stockbridge. After her studio closed in 1962, the photos became more traditional mug shots taken at the police station, although even in these pictures, many of the women pose in friendly ways, smiling for the camera with hands on hips. The police would then begin keeping a file that noted aliases and information on spouses or male associates and the date she “checked in” to one of the brothels. When the women left town, the file makes note of that as well, mentioning it as a “check out” or usually just “out.” Four out of five women who worked in Wallace chose one house exclusively during the duration of their stay. Most commonly, the women worked four to six months and returned after leaving for a while, but some women stayed for years.

  Conditions for women in Wallace appear to have been more generally positive than in many other places, but most often they ended up in Wallace because they needed money. During this time, women did not have a variety of choices for work, and many of those who engaged in sex work did so because they didn’t believe they had better options for comparable wages. The files contain plenty of evidence that the women needed money. A number of the women’s rap sheets include crimes such as theft, larceny, forgery, fraud, writing bad checks or the more generic “obtaining money through false pretenses.” Many women were raising children after turning to prostitution at a young age, having found themselves in a socially unacceptable circumstance, such as pregnancy out of wedlock. Several files offer evidence that some women had been coerced into the profession. They became easy targets for coercion after they were raped or turned out by relatives, ran away from abusive households or somehow found their way into the “correctional” system. Some women may not have characterized the guys who coerced them into the business as pimps but instead thought of them as boyfriends or father figures they supported financially in a reciprocal relationship that offered companionship or protection. Other women simply wanted financial independence and were willing to sell sex to achieve it.

  There are several women who entered the sex industry after their stay in a California institution called the Ventura School for Girls, where each was labeled a “wayward girl.” The Ventura reformatory, “whose picturesque location and academic name masked a repressive atmosphere, typically housed girls with long histories of delinquency, sexual promiscuity, and unsatisfactory stays at other reform institutions.”247 Historian Elizabeth Escobedo has documented incarceration at the institution as so threatening that young women went to “drastic measures” such as “swallowing safety pins the night before in order to get out of it.”248 It seems unusual that this particular institution, with its draconian punishments labeled a “disgrace to the state,” shows up several times in the SCSO files.249 It is possible the madams had some kind of personal connection with the “school” (which actually functioned more like a prison), or it may be the case that the women who were sent there were more likely to end up in the sex industry afterward.

  The sheriff ’s office files confirm that women were turned away if they were discovered to have been “a hometown girl” or if their FBI background check revealed they were younger than twenty-one years old. Some women slipped through the cracks, obviously, but the effort appears to have exceeded due diligence. If the rap sheet indicated involvement with organized crime, they might also be turned away, although some women were associated with gangs that operated out of Texas and Great Falls. The records also make note of women who had been material witnesses for Mann Act cases in other cities, compelled to testify about an experience relating to someone facilitating their travel across state lines.

  “Kitty,” SCSO File 705

  Many women had pimps in other towns. This was sometimes noted in their records explicitly, as was the case for a woman who called herself Kitty. She was born in Chewelah, Washington, in 1919 and worked in Wallace for four months during the summer of 1956. The rap sheet notes that Kitty was first picked up by the police in Spokane, Washington, in 1940 and fined twenty-five dollars for “city vag” (code for vagrancy, used by many cities both to indicate homelessness and prosecute street prostitution). Eight months later, she is again charged with vagrancy in Grand Coulee, Washington, when she was told to leave town. There was huge demand for sex work there during this time, when it was essentially a boomtown as men flocked there to work on the hydroelectric dam, according to a visitor’s guide:

  In the Grand Coulee, life changed dramatically and quickly once work on the dam began in 1933. Not only did the undertaking of this massive project change forever the shape of the river, but overnight it created towns where nothing but sagebrush, sand and rocks had previously existed. Thousands came to the Grand Coulee looking for work in the midst of the Depression. They worked around the clock to finish the dam by 1942.250

  During World War II, Kitty found gainful “legitimate” employment working in Puget Sound, Washington, as a mechanic for the navy. Like Dolores and many others, she was a “Rosie the Riveter.” This element of Kitty’s file is rather typical of the women who were sex workers in Wallace during this era. Our collective understanding of the “We Can Do It” history represented by Rosie the Riveter should include women who were in the sex industry both before and after the war. The rhetoric from this era celebrating patriotism and public service disguises the fact that many of these women joined the military workforce because they needed to work and were unable to find other jobs that paid comparable wages. The Shoshone County Sheriff ’s Office records reveal a large number of women who were sex workers in Wallace preferred to work “square” jobs when the military was hiring widely but felt the need to return to prostitution after the war ended and these jobs dried up.

  “Kitty Black” in 1956. Scan slightly altered to improve photo quality; Shoshone County Sheriff ’s Office Files, Wallace District Mining Museum Archives.

  In 1945, Kitty was picked up in San Bernardino, California, for grand theft and drunk driving. She made her way to San Diego shortly thereafter, was charged with being drunk and served a fifteen-day term in the city jail. Two years later, she was back in Spokane, where she was arrested for “Inv,” which means that she was investigated but not charged with anything. There is a noticeable gap between her 1947 Spokane arrest and her 1956 appearance in Wallace, where she arrived at the age of thirty-seven and began working in the Arment Rooms. Her record also notes that she was a prostitute in Troy, Montana, in 1955.

  It’s unclear whether Kitty’s pimp coerced her into the business or whether he found her after she was already working in the industry. The file notes her pimp lived in Spokane, which is where she was first arrested, so both are possible. When women have pimps, it often indicates coercion—they are men skilled at targeting vulnerable women, sometimes by trolling the jails and paying for their release. Other men target young girls with an unstable family life, victims of financial insecurity and those who have been labeled promiscuous or run away from home. These men know
how to find and exploit desperation or naïveté. Then they con their marks into thinking that they are loved or protected. For some women, their pimp may feel like a father figure. In other situations, the women have been manipulated or emotionally abused to feel like they can’t do any better, or they were raised in circumstances where this kind of treatment was the norm. Some women—for a variety of reasons, including cultural influences like sexism and religion—simply feel obliged to please men. Physical abuse and intimidation are only the most obvious tactics. After grooming their victims by earning their trust, either through psychological manipulation or circumstance, these men use whatever means are at their disposal to further and continue their control, including threatening to hurt the women’s children. Even though tattoos were uncommon for women during this time, many sex workers who came through Wallace’s houses had men’s names tattooed on their bodies, and these names may have been boyfriends or husbands, men they supported financially or men who coerced them into the business.

  Many women who found themselves in the Wallace cathouses likely felt coerced by their financial situation and lack of better options. Crimes indicating an addiction that created the need for money often show up on their rap sheets. Narcotics, burglary, shoplifting, forgery, drunk and disorderly, “justifiable homicide,” drunk in public, stolen credit cards and embezzling appear in the records. It was easy for just one disruptive life event to lead a well-functioning woman into a downward spiral of addiction or financial insecurity. Kitty had clearly become an alcoholic by the time the war ended, and she needed a means to support herself at least by the time she turned twenty-one.

  “Jeannie,” SCSO File 1058

  One of the more recent SCSO files describes a woman called Jeannie who was born in North Dakota on June 28, 1947, and characterized as “running with Mike Shelley” while she was in Wallace from May to August of 1970. According to the Missoulian newspaper, she married a twenty-two-year-old army veteran within four months of leaving town and then shot him with a .22-caliber pistol in their trailer home in neighboring Mineral County, Montana, around one thirty in the morning less than ten months later.251 The paper described her as a twenty-two-year-old housewife and reported that the coroner’s jury believed she “‘willfully and feloniously’ shot her husband to death.”252 Her police file notes a gunshot wound on her arm from a hunting accident but confuses the two stories and says she shot her husband in a “hunting accident”; in fact, she was the one who had been shot, by her father, at the age of fourteen.

  The details of this case remain unclear, in part because the court has sealed the records. We know she pleaded innocent to manslaughter in the district court, and we know the couple fought in the middle of the night.253 But why did Jeannie shoot her husband? He had been to Vietnam and perhaps suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder after he returned. Did he drink to numb his pain and then take it out on her physically, beating her? We know that she told him she was from Missoula and married him four months after leaving Wallace. Did he know her while she was working in Wallace? Was that how they’d met? She was beautiful, with shoulder-length black hair flipped at the bottom.

  Maybe one day, when Jeannie’s husband was drunk and angry, he said something like, “You can just go back to what you were before.” Or maybe he didn’t even know she had been a whore. She lied about her age and name, so perhaps she lied about other things as well. Many of the sheriff ’s office files include mysterious partial stories like this one.

  “Doris,” SCSO File 475

  The story of Doris’s suicide attempt and later “belligerence” with the nuns at the hospital was told to me in a recent oral history.254 Her SCSO file mentions the Owl Taxi and indicates she was sent to Spokane, “not to return.” This woman is characterized as Irish and was born in 1926 in Tacoma, Washington. She worked in the Arment Rooms from August 1, 1952, to January 19, 1953, and then again from April 1, 1954, to April 4. The police report from the “Sisters” at the Providence Hospital on April 4, 1954, seems most concerned about her disrespectful attitude toward the nuns:

  Who: Doris Johnson

  What: Belligerent Patient

  Called to the Providence Hospital, at 1:15 pm this date. Was asked to come pick up a women [sic] who was giving the Nurses and Sisters plenty of trouble. When Jerry and I went up there Jerry thought it was the big house keeper that had been working at the Arment. We were both surprised to see this little red head. I don’t think she weighs a 100 lbs. The hospital had cleared through Dr. Petterson and had been advised to call the Police and have said women taken to County Hospital. The women was very belligerent and using foul language, at all the Sisters at the hospital. We took this Doris Johnson, to the County Hospital. She was wearing just her sleeping cloths [sic] and that is the way we took her to the Hospital. Her cloths are still at the Providence Hospital.

  Report Received by Jerry-Bert

  Handwritten on the back of the sheet is the follow-up:

  Checked Arment, and Sandy, said that her and Vick of Owl Taxi took this woman to hospital at 7:17 am this date. The girl had taken a bunch of sleeping pills. Sandy had tried to get Dr. M [illegible] but couldn’t, finally got Dr. Petterson on phone and he advised Sandy to take her to hospital. This woman doesn’t have any cloths at Hospital, all Sandy could get on her was her bath robe. Sandy is getting all the girl’s stuff together and I told her you would see her tomorrow.

  Put on bus 4/6/54 for Spokane—not to return.

  It’s almost shocking to read that final line, which looks so callous and insensitive, considering she had felt so hopeless she tried to end her life.

  “Bobbie,” SCSO File 490

  A Swedish woman named Bobbie, born in San Francisco in 1924, worked in Wallace from November 6, 1952, to January 16, 1953. Twenty-eight at the time, she is described as five feet, four and a half inches, with a scar on her right eyebrow and left throat, two abdominal scars, one blue eye and one brown eye. The rap sheet says that her 1943 San Francisco arrest classified her as “quarantined” for “vagrancy.” There is a history of permitting sex workers to be quarantined for sexually transmitted infections, going back to the reform era extending from the early 1900s to the 1920s. In this case, however, the code probably just indicated prostitution regulation.

  In February 1945, Bobbie is called a “Taxi Dancer” in Oakland, California. This label might have referred to the practice of charging a fee to dance with men at dance halls, or it could have been code for prostitution. By 1946, she is in New York City and receives a suspended sentence for what looks like a vagrancy law. Such laws were used to regulate everything from sexuality to radicalism because they were both broad and ambiguous and thus used to sidestep the Fourth Amendment’s proscription against arrest without probable cause.255 Bobbie worked at the Rose Rooms in San Francisco eight months before arriving in Wallace. By the time she landed in Wallace, she was associated with a pimp named Chuck Johnson, who was hanging out with Clyde McLean, who ran a game at Silver Strike.

  By Christmas, Johnson was in jail in Yakima with a guy named “Corky.” McLean was a pimp and gambler who stayed at the Samuels Hotel in December 1952 and had connections in Miles City near the oil patch in Williston, South Dakota. He was likely the pimp for Wallace sex worker Shari Shores, who is in the Wallace Police Department files, and Billy Banning, who was a sex worker at the Rex Rooms in Kellogg. Banning sent him money by wire. The men were probably connected with a gang out of the Great Falls/Billings area in Montana. The sheriff ’s office and police departments in the valley tried to run off girls who were associated with pimps involved in organized crime because the conflicting power dynamics led to instability. The file notes that Wallace police chief Hugh Marconi had been “playing Shores very strong—seen in various places in district also going in back way early in morning.” Bobbie left the U&I in a taxi shortly before 6:00 p.m. on January 14, 1953, and Shari left at 6:00 p.m. the next day, also by taxi.

  “Peggy,” SCSO File 913

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p; The sheriff ’s office files contain a particularly remarkable case file detailing part of one woman’s life story. Peggy was admitted to the Nevada State Hospital, a mental institution, in 1965. While there, she helped in the kitchen and was placed in a “square” job locally, but she only stayed “about two days and then left” for “Winnemucca, Nevada to resume her former occupation as prostitute.” Within five months of her release, Peggy turned up in Wallace and began working for Loma Delmonte in the Jade Rooms, where she would remain for five months before getting chased off. Her SCSO record indicates she was “run out of town” after the police characterized her as a “Hope Head” (the intended word was “hophead,” slang commonly used at the time to refer to an addict).

  Peggy’s Nevada State Hospital admission history and mental health examination, recorded by male psychiatrist Jules Magnette, was sent to the Wallace police chief on January 14, 1966. After 1996, a federal comprehensive health information privacy law would prevent this sort of information exchange without a patient’s permission, but health information was not yet protected the way it is today.256 Accompanying the file is a note from the hospital’s administrative secretary explaining that Peggy spent about a month in the institution.