Selling Sex in the Silver Valley Read online

  Published by The History Press

  Charleston, SC

  www.historypress.net

  Copyright © 2017 by Heather Branstetter

  All rights reserved

  Front cover, bottom: Wallace, Idaho, looking south along Sixth Street. Historic Wallace Preservation Society. Front cover, top: Pinup girl from 1962 Lux Rooms/Plaza Rooms calendar. Oasis Bordello

  Museum display; photo by Heather Branstetter.

  First published 2017

  e-book edition 2017

  ISBN 978.1.43966.071.3

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016961715

  print edition ISBN 978.1.46713.656.3

  Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  For Joann Branstetter and Mom and Dad.

  In memory of Ken Branstetter.

  To the women and men of Wallace, Idaho, past, present and future. I am thankful for the opportunity to serve this community.

  Contents

  Preface

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  PART I. “A MINING TOWN NEEDS BROTHELS”: THE EARLY DAYS

  1. Mining Camp Lifestyle and the Politics of the Restricted District

  2. Sex Trafficking Panic and the Effect of War

  3. Prohibition, North Idaho’s “Threefold Conspiracy” and Depression

  PART II. SEX WORK IN WALLACE DURING AND AFTER WORLD WAR II

  4. The Madam Next Door

  5. Firsthand Written Accounts and Regulation

  PART III. ORAL HISTORIES

  6. 1945–1973

  7. 1973–1991

  8. End of an Era

  Notes

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Preface

  The goal of this book is to relate the way the Silver Valley valued and validated its historic traditions of prostitution, drinking and gambling in accordance with hardrock miners’ “work hard, play hard” approach to life. Much of our community’s past has been preserved in memories and stories passed on through oral history tradition, but if these stories are not written down, our history fades when memory keepers pass away. I have tried to honor the multiple perspectives I encountered during my research.

  Sex work in Wallace, Idaho, was decriminalized, socially acceptable and even embraced by community members from 1884 to 1991. It was also an equilibrium that balanced complex power relationships among madams, sex workers, town leaders, citizens and clients. The women who worked in the Silver Valley’s rooms provided a valued service by offering sex, companionship and discretion to rough mining towns in need of stability.

  In what follows, I offer a variety of viewpoints to show how our collective memories include negotiated values and culture created through myths, oral histories and official written records. I incorporated information from published sources, archival materials and interviews with a range of people. The book organized itself according to chronology and research materials: the first part is written more like a traditional history while the second two parts feature more primary sources with less interpretive analysis. I tried to balance the personal privacy of those who lived this history with my feeling that we should preserve their stories and knowledge for future generations. Since sex work is still a stigmatized issue, thirty-eight of ninety-nine oral history research participants requested anonymity. I recorded most of the interviews for quotation accuracy but only name participants according to their personal preference.

  For those who want content warnings, I should mention what may or may not be obvious: this book discusses sex in some detail, especially parts two and three. Drug use, violence and sexual assault are also a part of the narrative at times. Certain classes of people will consider some of the language in this book “inappropriate for polite conversation.” Reader discretion is advised.

  Versions of the information presented here have been published in Rhetoric Society Quarterly and Peitho. I have also shared this research on the public radio show With Good Reason and my website, abusinessdoingpleasure.com, where you can read more.

  Acknowledgments

  There are many people who contributed to this project in a huge way. Mitch Alexander, John Amonson, Rich Asher, Dick Caron, Kristi Gnaedinger, Dee Greer, Tom Harman, Jack Johnson, Richard Magnuson, Jim and Peggy McReynolds, Bill Mooney, Cathleen Ryan and Chase Sanborn really helped make this book happen. I am also grateful to Tammy Copelan at the Wallace District Mining Museum; Shauna Hillman at the Northern Pacific Depot Museum; Eva Truean, Linda Harbuckle and Zach Darrah at the Oasis Bordello Museum; Bernie Ludwick and Annette Kologi at the Wallace Public Library; Marla Anson and Debbie Ruggles at the District Court; Joanne Jaggard and Penny Michael at Wallace City Hall; Marilyn Hinsz in the Shoshone County Assessor’s Office; Janice Shiner in County Records; Don Hoffman and Mark Burmeister at City Limits Pub; and Mike Murray and Karen Mooney at Rossi Insurance. I often wrote at the 1313 Club and was grateful for their delicious coffee and breakfast. The Dayrock offered a nice place to work in the evenings. Everyone at Wallace Brewing Company supported this project in more ways than they know! Marcy Hayman and Callie Hegbloom, thanks for your encouragement. Artie Crisp, Julie Foster and Julia Turner at The History Press, I appreciate your interest, attentive reading and guidance. I can’t thank you all enough.

  I acknowledge research participants by name in the bibliography if they have chosen to be “on the record,” but there were also many people helping me “off the record.” Some of their words are quoted anonymously in this book. There were also many people I did not quote directly, but they influenced my thinking, offered important insights or helped me with the research. Here is a list of those who are not otherwise acknowledged in the record of citations: Mike and Sam Achord; David Albertini; Clyde Albright; Hollis Anderson; John Andrasco; Nichole and Tom Baumann; Carole and Doug Bell; Eileen Bieber; Cheri Breidt; Jerome Bunde; Bill Carlson; Bobby Christian; Dick and Antje Cripe; Dave DeRoos; Norma Douglas; Bob Dunsmore; Rob Fairweather; Barbara and Wray Featherstone; Robert Field; Doris Fleming; Nick Fluge; Anita Garcia; Gian Ghigleri; Fred and Gordon Gibler; Denny Gravely; Wayne Greenfield; Sano Haldi; Tommy Hayes; Phil and LouElla Hodges; Archie Hulsizer; Dan Hussey; Steve Jemmings; Wayne Jurkovich; Jerry Keane; Troy Lambert; Mike Lavigne; Paul Levitch; Jim Lieschner; Dick Lilienkamp; Leigh, Lori and Lynn Lutich; Elmer and Corki Mattila; Dan McGee; Ken McKinnon; Marty McNamee; Shirley Messerly; Dottie Mitchell; Ted Nickelby; Brian Nixon; Bruce Nyman; Patti Pennington; Loren and Kay Pitt; Roy Reel; Severin Robinson; Betty Scott; Ted Sproles; Bryan Stepro; Dylan Stiegemeier; Scott Stranger; Randy Thatcher; Ellie Thompson; Amy Tosh; and Jeri and Susan Walker.

  I am grateful for the teachers who taught me how to think and write: Janet Adams, Dan Anderson, Bill Balthrop, David Barber, Kim Barnes, Carole Blair, Jane Danielewicz, Tom Drake, Rick Fehrenbacher, Gregg Flaxman, Karen Frank, Nick Gier, Karen Hegbloom, Jordynn Jack, Jason Johnstone-Yellin, Douglas Lind, Erika Lindemann, Chris Lundberg, John McGowan, Kerry McKeever, BP Morton, Michael O’Rourke, Joy Passanante and Todd Taylor. Thank you for your influence on my life. My women’s writing group at VMI also provided friendship and feedback—thank you Julie Brown, Valentina Dimitrova-Grajzl, Deidre Garriott, Jennifer Gerow, Meagan Herald and Rose Mary Sheldon. The Wallace Distri
ct Mining Musuem provided material support, funding and guidance for this project. Thank you Gordon Ball, Rob McDonald and Emily Miller for helping me secure funding for this project, which was also supported by a research grant from the Virginia Military Institute. Thank you to Deborah Vigil at the North Idaho College Library. The University of Idaho Library Special Collections and Archives provided crucial research materials: thank you Julie Monroe, Garth Reese and, especially, Amy Thompson and Erin Stoddard.

  Mike and Nancy Branstetter, I appreciate your constant support and love; Joann Branstetter, thank you for sharing your wisdom; Katie and Joe Bauer, it’s so nice to be able to live close to you and the nieces; Sam Branstetter, you are one of my biggest inspirations. I am also so grateful to have supportive friends: Sara Agre, Jocelyn and Mathias Bachman, Kelly Bezio, Katie Comer, Siobhan Curet, Jameela Dallis, Michael Faris, Sara Hamann, Coye Heard, Josh Iddings, Tara Kearns, Jessica Kee and family, Kristen Lacefield, Amanda Henry Lind, Judith Madera, John McNally, Aimee Mepham, Mary and Dave Platz, Nicolaas Rupke, Ryan Shirey and Aina and Naomichi Sawada. I appreciate your continued presence in my life. Risa Applegarth, Erin Branch, Sarah Hallenbeck, Chelsea Redeker and Lindsay Rose Russell, thank you so much not only for being good friends but also for reading and responding to my writing in thorough and thoughtful ways. I am so lucky to know you.

  Introduction

  I thought all towns had whorehouses,” Kristi Gnaedinger told me in 2010 when I interviewed her for this project. She grew up in the small silver mining community of Wallace, where her father was one of the doctors who examined the women who worked in the houses. Gnaedinger herself worked as a maid in a brothel called the U&I Rooms during the mid-1970s. “I didn’t know [Wallace] was different until I got to be a teenager. I just thought that was the way it was,” she told me. Many locals reiterate Gnaedinger’s point, including Patti Houchin, who used to give the women rides into and out of town: “Everyone just thought it was normal.... You grew up with it, didn’t really know any different.” Or, as former miner Bill Mooney explained, “it was just common, normal here, the gambling and the prostitution. Only later you look back and see that it was unusual, only after perspective from the outside.”

  Since the town’s founding, professional prostitution had been the norm in Wallace, and it continued to be accepted by the majority of residents, despite its illicit nature. To this day, many residents “wish we had the houses again” and add that the community was “never ashamed of them, you know: they were there for a purpose.”1 The “houses,” as the brothels are often called, adapted to and endured major reform periods during which other restricted districts shut down. Across the United States, most cities had abolished designated zones for prostitution by 1920, but in the Silver Valley, the sex industry flourished openly through the late 1980s, with one house continuing to operate until 1991. The brothels were not legal, yet they were accepted by most of the residents.

  The beginning of the town of Wallace in 1886. This picture was taken from the hill northeast of town, looking southwest. Historic Wallace Preservation Society.

  For more than a century, Wallace’s underground economy, built on Wild West–style brothels, hard drinking and illegal gambling, functioned much as it had during the early days beginning in 1884, before Idaho became a state. As historians Patricia Hart and Ivar Nelson observed in 1984, the town’s rowdy mining camp heritage was apparent “in its attitudes toward public vice. That heritage and Wallace’s isolation in the mountains led to an unabashed and unrepentant acceptance of drinking, gambling, and whoring, seen as commonplace elements of town life.”2 Most community members believed—and continue to believe—that places like Wallace, full of single miners, require an outlet for sexual release provided by professionals. Maurice Pellissier, who was Wallace’s mayor during the period when the houses closed, put it this way: “I’m eighty; the houses have been here my whole life. What would this place have been like if they weren’t here? There was a need for this sort of thing.” Mining towns in the American West simply accepted prostitution as an integral part of the culture, as inseparable from mining as gambling and drinking.

  Located in northern Idaho along Interstate 90 midway between Missoula, Montana, and Spokane, Washington, the Silver Valley is geographically isolated within the Bitterroot Range of the Rocky Mountains. The area once produced more silver than anywhere on earth, but as of this writing, only two mines remain in production. The town of Wallace has now shifted toward tourism, marketing its history and outdoor recreation. Even though there are fewer than one thousand residents year-round, Wallace has three museums that highlight its history. The Wallace District Mining Museum educates visitors about the mining industry, the Depot Museum offers information about the influence of the railroad and tourists who are curious about the long-lived sex industry can tour one of the town’s historic brothels at the Oasis Bordello Museum. Although the main floor may appear to be a tourist trap, the guided tour of the rooms upstairs often surprises those who visit. This journey into the not-so-distant past begins at the base of a long, narrow staircase, winds by an old jukebox where men paid for drinks to sneak around liquor licenses, continues down a narrow hallway and enables a peek into tiny rooms preserved since the last women to work there abandoned the establishment in early 1988. Several women who used to work in the Oasis have even returned to take the tour themselves, pausing to grab cash hidden beneath the base of a statue on the bedside stand. All of this according to one version of the story, that is.

  Oasis jukebox. Oasis Bordello Museum display; photo by Heather Branstetter.

  Oasis hallway from madam’s room. Oasis Bordello Museum display; photo by Heather Branstetter.

  Pegasus statue and scarf one of the women knitted for Paul, a regular client. Oasis Bordello Museum display; photo by Heather Branstetter.

  The last remaining house, the U&I Rooms, which had operated continuously since the 1890s (if not earlier), finally closed its doors only weeks before 150 FBI agents raided the area in “the biggest single Federal law-enforcement raid ever in the Rocky Mountain region,” according to New York Times columnist Timothy Egan.3 Locals deny that the investigation ended sex work in the region, however, citing a struggling economy, AIDS and brothel management transition for the closure of the houses. According to another interpretation, the goal of the raid was to prosecute the sheriff for racketeering, and such a charge required the investigation to target both gambling and prostitution. While it does seem clear that federal intervention was not primarily responsible for the closure of Wallace’s whorehouses, the FBI raid ultimately coincided with and probably catalyzed the end of the Silver Valley’s regulated sex work industry.

  Throughout the twentieth century, Wallace was seduced by the women in its upstairs rooms because their presence provided a tangible connection with the libertarian Wild West ethos of its past: the red-light district offered evidence that the town continued to inhabit a rebellious space outside the law, a place where people said “live and let live.” Single miners, high school boys and sexually frustrated married men could visit discreet professionals without worrying about social consequence, and most women in town accepted the houses in exchange for the perception of increased personal safety. History professor Katherine Aiken suggested to me that the presence of tolerated prostitution also gave the “upright” members of the community an excuse to whisper about otherwise taboo topics. Historically, brothels provided “respectable” people with “an affirmation of their own morality”; as long as “prostitutes are at once tolerated and stigmatized they can serve as social safety valves offering those services while indicating the activities’ inherent deviance.”4

  Oasis Red Room. Oasis Bordello Museum display; photo by Heather Branstetter.

  Like human nature itself, Wallace’s cathouses—the word perhaps most often used by locals in reference to the houses— offer a messy tangle of contradictions wrapped up in a complex package oriented toward efficiency and survival: they were famous and
secret, commonplace and exotic, classy and trashy, operating without regard for the law but in accordance with a strict code of conduct. Part of the appeal surrounding the presence of prostitution in Wallace was comfort in knowing that commercial sex exchange happened in a designated space according to specific “rules.” It was an orderly business, and that was no accident. The madams emphasized the way in which they served the community through donations to support children and families in need. As former judge Richard Magnuson put it, “Dolores thought she was in public service.”5 Magnuson was referring to Wallace’s most famous madam, who also argued that the houses were instrumental in saving marriages and bringing money into town. “It was a fact of life that was the best-known secret ever kept in this area,” another research participant said.6 According to local residents, the sex industry kept the residential streets safe at night, attracted truckers and college kids throughout the region and was even internationally known, drawing visitors from Montreal and recognition in London.

  At 611 Cedar Street in the 1890s, the Western Bar featured beer brewed locally at Sunset Brewery. Pictured to the right is the U&I Saloon. The U&I brothel operated continuously from this time until 1991. Historic Wallace Preservation Society.

  As times changed, the Silver Valley’s communities could point to the brothels and know the area hadn’t abandoned its mining camp roots—and accompanying libertarian values—which created a kind of shared identity. Local storytelling and word of mouth continues to connect sex work in Wallace to the town’s sense of itself as a mining town. Wallace’s brothel managers appealed to regional values and preferences to ensure their profession was integral to the area’s understanding of its history and purpose as a mining camp. Madams catered to residents’ perception of community need as they promoted a positive image that emphasized service, civic duty, discretion and a sense of humor. The idea that there was a reciprocal relationship between the town and its brothels provided a solid foundation for the long-lasting underground vice economy in Wallace, which continues on as the town transitions to a tourism economy.