The Laramie Downtown Brothels
Source for the background image: Grover, Montie E., Mrs. Scrapbook (1881): Toppen Library, Special Collections, Uncat. Laramie, Wyoming.
THE CURRENT SITE OF THE FIRST STREET BROTHELS, RUN BY MABEL HARTLEY AND DOLLIE RANDAL
This door, formerly an entrance to a brothel, is now the door to an upstairs apartment next to Pedal House.
In spaces now occupied by businesses such as The Pedal House and Sweet Melissa’s, “the prostitutes were required to undergo regular physical examinations by Dr. Pelton to stave off the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. As expected, the women were responsible for the bills and costs for any treatment” (The American Heritage Center 2023).
Red Lights
Laramie’s red light district, much like any other prostitution district in any industry town in America, was advertised with the use of gaslights so that industry workers—many fresh off the railroad facing Front Street—knew where to go for libations and pleasure.
The Crib Women
When they were either desperate or demoted, many woman plied their trade in the alleys surrounding Front Street in downtown Laramie. "Cribs” referred to the specific shacks where women continued to ply their trade. Many were demoted to the status of “crib women” due to a variety of factors; many crib women desperately needed money, yet simply could not get hired by a more lucrative or prestigious establishment.
For instance, their inability to get along with other women could pose a major problem to a madam’s business. Sometimes, age was a factor in an industry founded on female desirability. And on a hierarchy with parlor women such as Christy Finlayson on top (she worked at the House of Mirrors in Cheyenne, a glamorous parlor house, before becoming a madam) and bedroll women who pursued men of industry where they worked positioned somewhere near the bottom, crib women were at the very bottom and their work paid the least.
Working Among Gamblers and Industry Men, Going to the Seamstress
According to Germaine St. John, the arrival of the transcontinental railroad in 1868 heralded the arrival of prostitution and the law in Laramie. The Union Pacific started selling lots to defray the costs of building the railroad—in particular the Johnson Hotel, which housed many brothels. As she explains in her audio tour on the Laramie Visitor Center website, many women had lost everything in the Civil War, including their husbands, and were desperate to ply a trade.
St. John goes on to say that she remembers the prostitutes with whom she interacted as “very courteous,” and flush with cash. Returning to the subject of nineteenth-century prostitution, she explains that many historians have concluded that the industry of prostitution provided a much-needed economic boost to Laramie in its infancy, and her own research reflects this also.
Of course, St. John’s personal experiences, such as her family’s pleasant business and even personal interactions with twentieth-century prostitutes (a group of Laramie prostitutes offered to give her friend a bridal shower, for example, and they accepted) are at odds with the scapegoating rhetoric of nineteenth-century journalists and moralists. In their article “Sporting Houses; Did Laramie Tolerate Them? Yes Indeed!”, the Albany County Historical Society writer, in a caption for a 1968 photo depicting the UPRR Depot courtesy of the Laramie Plains Museum, describes Laramie locals’ perception of vice rubbing off onto women in its proximity:
“Keystone Hall” was a bar, gambling casino, barber shop, restaurant and home for the proprietor and his family, according to Thomas Magee who arrived in Laramie in summer 1868. In his article “A Run Overland,” published in the December 1868 issue of the Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, he commented about the proprietor’s wife: “She was surrounded by laborers, gamblers…general dirt and grease and…looked as if she had not a soul to sympathize with her in the world, and as if she had not a comfort in life. Women have a terrible life of it in these frontier towns, and I do not wonder that many of them become unsexed by their isolation among the roughest possible specimens of men.” Note the tent on the right in back, which may have been a temporary bordello. (ACHS 2018)
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Worth consideration is whether the consistent de facto licensing of downtown Laramie provided any police protection to the prostitutes beyond the facades of the bordellos and their madams. The women often faced insidious acts from not only potential clients, but also each other.
Most incidents, trivial in a monetary sense, revealed more about the quality of life among prostitutes than the press wanted to recognize. As in Annie Ferguson’s theft of Emma Hall’s scarf and towels, the thievery showed how the women coveted what they owned, how much they coveted the cheap belongings of others, how easily they lifted things from each other, and how quickly these encounters prompted a move to another location. Emma Hall’s towels did all that for Ferguson. “One-arm Annie” left Laramie after this theft and tried life in Cheyenne. There, three years later, the brutality of prostitution caught up with Ferguson. The victim of a vicious beating at the hands of prostitute Fanny Brown, Annie Ferguson lay almost senseless when another prostitute found her.
— Anne Butler, Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery: Prostitutes in the American West, 1865-90 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1987), the quotation is from 44.