Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Inside a Wild West Brothel

Episode Date: October 14, 2025

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 survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister, and you are listening to Betwicks 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 listing and happen to get offended. But on a serious note, as if that wasn't 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 and we'll see you next time.

For everyone else, on with the show. The swinging doors of the saloon creek as dusty cowboys saunter in and a little. 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. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing it. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I'm beautiful done. Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie.

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? Today, I'm joined by Holly Marquise 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. Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets.

Holly Marquis, how are you doing? I'm doing quite well. Thank you for having me. 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, but the image is Cowboys Saloon Bars. That's absolutely in the public consciousness. But you've actually researched this subject, haven't you? I sure have, yes. Sex work on the frontier is very important, right? 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? 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 realize 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. Somebody had to.

Just for anyone that's unsure, where is Hayes? Literally the middle of America. Middle, middle bit. Yes, very rural Kansas. So out on what would have been the frontier in the 19th century. 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?

I'm missing some bits. Some gaps to be filled in. What is the frontier? Where was it? And what time period are we talking here? 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. 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 there to deal with what they call the Indian problem. Fort Hayes

is about a mile from Hayes City, and if you've seen the Kevin Costner film dances with wolves, he's at Fort Hayes at the beginning of this film. Right. So that is the setting for this time period. It's, you know, right after the Civil War, and that's the setting. And it was pretty wild, wasn't it? It certainly was. So George Custer, the famed, like, 7th Cavalry General, he and his wife are here at Fort Hayes, and she writes that it seemed like a perpetual 4th of July, just because she could constantly hear pistol shuffs. 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. And it wasn't rough and ready for the native peoples that live there. I think we can recognise 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 inside the fact that we had no business being there in the first place. But trying to get inside the mindset 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. Yeah, I think that is a very modern mindset that we would never, right? Just pack up. But back then, there's not really the same sort of sense of upward mobility. There's kind of this hope that there will 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. 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. Probably. Maybe. Maybe I'm just being a bit too generous. But what are the men going out there for? So there's like post, military posts. She said that there's railways out there. What are they going out there to do?

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 susy. 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.

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. 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. You could do laundry or you can be a sex worker. Not going to make good money with that here. No. Being doing the laundry. No. And so they're coming to the frontier for a lot of different reasons, just like the men do. So some of them, 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,

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 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 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. And so this is a way out of marriage. you can make money and be independent through sex work. 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. Or do sex work. 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. It's a lot safer these days, though. It's a lot. Yes, we will say that. I want to be like, more hygienic. Yeah, you want to be very careful. I don't 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. Was some of them married that they were going out there and their wives were at home? Oh, yes. Yes. A lot of the clientele of 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. Let's say both, merry and married men. 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 going to make my way, and then they get there and realize there's nothing for them to do that this is the only way to make money? I think there's a little bit of both. Right.

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. 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 organizations, but those are going to be.

to be mostly in the cities. Frontier really doesn't have that infrastructure yet. 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? This was quite the task, right? Because I couldn't find any diary. So where are their voice? I really wanted their voices. So one of the first things that I did was look through newspapers. And I, of course, that is tainted with sex workers that are looked at as kind of like the entertainment. So they're writing about them as 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 in 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. It doesn't necessarily mean they're sex workers, right? They could be a group of nuns, I guess. But then you could cross-reference. 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 wants to check 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's 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. And what did the voices tell you that you found? 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. Oh, I think you are. Definitely. 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 enumerator 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 enumerator 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. So the occupations for that house, 18-year-old Libby Thompson's occupation was listed as Diddles. What? Harriet Parmenter. Yeah, she wrote Dittles.

Dittles? Yeah. Harriet Permanter wrote, does horizontal work. Lizzie Harris wrote, Ogles Fool. and for Nettie Baldwin, it lists her occupation as squirms in the dark. My God, that's incredible! 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. See, sex workers are funny. They are. They are. 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 scoffrey. 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. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything on her after she leaves Hayes.

So look through your addicts if anybody has a diary or something. It's 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. Yeah, a name change.

They change their birthday. They want to be 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. Oh, God. Yeah. I mean, brutal, isn't it? I'll be back with Holly after this short break. You found some incredible names during this research.

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. Okay. Or it's a way to keep your family from shame. 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 stinkfoot meg. Oh, right. And I can't imagine she would have taken the name for herself. No. Why would you want, that's not a good name to go into that line.

work with, stink foot mag. I mean, it's distinctive. Right. So I imagine she just had really stinky feet and there was a lousy Liz. Lousy Liz. I don't think that's the best business name. But we're still talking about them. Like 150 years later. You've got that, it's a distinct name.

You'd have to give them that. It's true. Maybe she meant like lousy morals. Or maybe she did. I'm lousy in bed. Maybe she did. But what were the living conditions? conditions are these women? Because again, it's very easy to overly glamorize it. 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? There are a number of different types of sex work that happens on the frontier. And this historian Anne Ann Ann 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. Holy mother fuck. Wow. Okay. 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. Do we get any sense that men were selling sex?

I know that they must have been, but did they turn up in the records? They must have been, but not in his city. 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 with each other. Okay, there we go. Just going back to living conditions and 75 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?

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? And 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. No. But in that process of washing, they could sort of see, is there any pus? Is there anything that I do. can notice and then potentially turn them away if they're in a position to do so. They also used

various duches with all kinds of ingredients that they would have gotten from the local druggists 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. 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. Do you have any sense of how many women in Hayes 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. It's like, That's obviously not true. But what kind of numbers are they talking about in Hay City? Are they similarly prone to exaggeration? They are, but you also have to think about the population. So when the railroad was the eastern terminus, we have about 1,300 people in the town. Once that leaves, the town shrinks to about 300 people. But in that same year, the county sold 37 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 passers by. So in a town of about 300, on the census record, usually about 8 to 10. That's a lot for town of 300. 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 10 and 50 at any given time. Wow.

I usually found around 8 to 10, not just in the census, but in the arrest records. 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 service, it's like, yeah, but everybody's doing it. It's a really odd 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? 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 were 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 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. 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, right? That this, it's like a license to operate. I found that, so Frank Shepard, the undersheriff, who arrested all of these women, he frequently went to the brothels. In 1872, Nettie Baldwin actually brings a charge against him for beating her in her house. Oh, I don't like him anymore. Yeah. I don't like him. No. 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 find him $5, and he couldn't

afford to pay. So she had the month before been fined $6, and she was flush with Cass. 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 the under sheriff means that there was some level of acceptance for her. Yeah, there must have been. And that he was found guilty. Yeah. It's like not only 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. And I think that as part of this frontier is a quite different place. Yeah. 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 they're loser boyfriends. And the deed 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. What else did they have in the house? 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.

I mean, so they're listing everything. It doesn't seem to be a really high-class establishment, but certainly a brothel, not a crib. 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 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 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. And what was the law? They were being charged. What were they being charged with? 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 that he 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, 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, Cy Goddard Stans Hall. She was there with a guy named Thomas Hein, who was from the Sixth Cavalry, and he went to get a drink, and a private Frank Glissman was there and sort of bumps into him. And so Thomas Heine just shoots him in the chest.

Fuck. And, yeah, it 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 Glysmann was a witness for the prosecution. So they're violating these city ordinances through their profession, but the law relied on them to provide testimony. And that testimony was considered accurate, reliable witness testimony. I'll be back with Holly after this short break.

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? 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, a bit for entertainment reasons. And I'm not talking about the sex work here. I'm talking in the newspapers. Oh, wow. Okay. This is before Netflix, right? So people would read the newspaper and say,

what did those sex workers get up to over the weekend? That's incredible. 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 $100. 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 the 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. This is insane. This is like a soap opera. 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 a recollection. So it was from 1926. 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. He was, 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 re-arrested? 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. So it does seem like there is a bit of playfulness. Yeah. 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 Lodnum to retire. So historian noted that the most popular means of retirement from sex work was completing suicide, usually through an overdose of loddenham. So we've talked about how frontier jobs are not available. That's especially true if you have sort of aged out of sex work or if you're experiencing 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. Holy shit, man. 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. 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, 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? 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. Yeah.

Yeah. So when do things start to change then? Or is Hayes still a tent? where sex workers run the roost? Not anymore. At least 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 planes

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. 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 were so much negativity in the papers.

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, but I could just hold the subpoena for this woman and her two daughters. So that was a really neat find, I think. That's incredible. So as a final question then,

where you are in Hayes 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 to 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 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 come to terms of this past?

Is it something that they're proud of? Is it something that they still hush up? 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 Hayes 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 that you hear of were in Hayes 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. That's amazing. Holly, you have been incredible. I knew that you would be. And if people want to know know more about you and your work, where can they find you? So if you go to the Fort Hay State University web page and search up my name, all of my recent publications are there with links. And are you on social media at all, or are you smarter than that, quite frankly? I'm on blue sky. I can't tell you what my... God bless Blue Sky. 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. There can't be many Holly Marquises. You must be the only one there. Yeah, and it's Holly with an IE, too, so...

Yeah. Go look her up on. You have been wonderful. Thank you so much for telling us about some of these extraordinary women. 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 betwixta at history at history hit.com. This podcast was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixta Sheets, History of Sex scandal and Society, a podcast, by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.