Read Below to Recover the Lives of the Prostitutes and Madams Residing in Nineteenth-Century Laramie’s Red Light District. Click On the “About This Project” Button Above for Crucial Background on Wyoming Prostitution.
Nineteenth-century Laramie City, in large part due to the proliferation of railroads and lucrative industries, played host to what one anonymous Laramie writer, in an 1887 article published in The Boomerang, called “a house full of shameless women as vile if possible as the men who support them.” Laramie on the other hand was referred to fondly, with a nickname gesturing to its existence as a beacon of energy and industry: Gem City. That is, despite this anonymous writer’s moralizing, the history of the American frontier makes one thing abundantly clear: wherever industry arrived on the nineteenth-century American frontier, prostitution arrived shortly thereafter.
Brothels-as-infrastructure and prostitution combined became enduring cultural institutions and legacies—Laramie’s red light district wasn’t eradicated until 1954. Arguably, of all the industries that thrived in and around nineteenth-century Laramie, prostitution was inherently the most dependable.
Source of the photo to the left and in the header: Grover, Montie E., Mrs. Scrapbook (1881): Toppen Library, Special Collections, Uncat. Laramie, Wyoming.
Click below to learn more about the nineteenth-century institution of prostitution in Laramie City.
Explore Laramie’s Sex Work Historical Sites With This Interactive Map
This grave at Laramie’s Greenhill Cemetery contains not only the much disparaged grave of Christy Grover but also the unmarked grave of brothel madam Monte Grover next to hers—graves containing the second and third wives, respectively, of saloon owner John Grover. The mundane and sensational details of their lives are key to understanding the true nature of the inflammatory ‘vice’ of prostitution that undoubtedly fueled Laramie’s infrastructural development and economic growth.
Click below to learn more about the sobering tales of Christy Finlayson (Grover), a former Cheyenne prostitute turned Laramie City brothel owner, and Monte Arlington (Grover), a housewife who inherited Christy’s estate through her new husband before “swiftly secur[ing] the title of madam of Grover’s Institute” (American Heritage Center 2023).
In nineteenth-century Laramie, the institution of prostitution was not only allowed in plain sight, but also allowed to flourish on the margins of the city, on hog ranches. Prostitutes constellated around the far-flung regions where industry workers toiled, and around military camps where “toleration of all prostitution for the gratification of the military” won out over consistent public demands to eliminate the bordello (Butler 5).
Click below to learn more about the notorious ‘hog ranches’ that surrounded nineteenth-century Laramie City.
A freight of evidence supports the idea that, while public records closely examining the individual lives of Laramie prostitutes are few and far between, the American nineteenth-century public felt very strongly about prostitution. For a Victorian public focused on women’s issues as matters of moral concern, prostitution appeared as a virulent wildfire spreading rapidly across the industrializing Western frontier, as a despicable institution of what that public called ‘vice.’
Click to learn about Laramie prostitutes and their uneasy relationship with the local law, including a woman who sought to exact revenge after an unthinking frontier man gave her syphilis.
