GIRLS OF THE GULCH
 “The merchants saw that cowboys had what they wanted.”

 In one of the final scenes of a 1972 John Wayne movie, set in the late 1800s, young cowboys wind up a trail drive by pushing their herd of longhorns down a saloon-lined dirt street enroute to the stockyards. 

Although The Cowboys was filmed in Colorado, New Mexico and Hollywood, the end-of-the-trail town is identified as Belle Fourche, on the northwest edge of Dakota Territory’s Black Hills.

Western movies of the time were wholesome and decent, so the director bypassed an opportunity to add true-life drama to that Belle Fourche street scene.

            The daughter of one of those early day cowboys grew up listening to her father’s stories about cattle drives to Belle Fourche. Otto Reimer recalled loud whoops from trail-weary young men as they caught sight of garter-clad legs dangling from second story balconies above saloons. He said the soiled doves threw garters and handkerchiefs down to the mounted cowhands and, in return,  the men enthusiastically tossed their wide-brimmed hats in the air as the girls stretched out bare arms to catch them.

Once the longhorns were safely secured in stock pens along the river, the cowboys cleaned up, then returned to the saloons to wash trail dust from tonsils with a few shots of whiskey and reclaim their hats in the upstairs brothels.

Like Abilene and Dodge City, Belle Fourche was a wild, wide-open cattle town. After the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri River railroad laid tracks into town in the fall of 1890, herds were sometimes lined up for miles, waiting their turn to be loaded on railroad cars and sent to eastern markets. Nearly 8,000 carloads of range cattle were shipped out of Belle Fourche over a three-month shipping period in the fall of 1895.

            The main street running north and south, Fifth Avenue is still commonly called Saloon Street by old-timers. Saloons and brothels were a necessity in Belle Fourche, said early day citizen Al Challis in a 1961 issue of the Belle Fourche Daily Post.

            The ranchers would come in town to ship and if we didn’t have any entertainment, they would take all that money to Deadwood. The cowboys wanted to gamble, to drink and dance, and they wanted girls. The merchants of Belle Fourche saw that the cowboys had what they wanted.

             Dora DuFran’s house of ill repute was advertised as “Three D’s – Dining, Drinking and Dancing – a place where you can bring your mother.” But Reimer said the cowhands skipped the frills and got right to the basics when they talked of heading for Belle Fourche and “Diddlin’ Dora’s.”  After his first visit to the disreputable resort, a sheepherder remarked, “I wouldn’t want my mother to know I had ever been there.”

Just a few months before her death in 1903, Calamity Jane was cooking and washing clothes for Dora’s Belle Fourche girls. A faded ledger in the local museum notes that in 1908 Madam DuFran was fined $200 for selling liquor without a license. 

Published in 1995, a self-guided walking tour of historic downtown Belle Fourche said Dora’s brothel was above one of the many saloons that lined Fifth Avenue. However, the 1964 book Pioneer Footprints locates the Three D’s in a two-story, white frame building along the river, a building that was wiped out in the 1924 flood. Perhaps the notorious Madam DuFran operated at both locations. She was noted for having a “chain-store” operation, owning brothels in Deadwood, Lead and Rapid City.

            An 1895 fire destroyed those early buildings on Saloon Street, but they were quickly rebuilt and prostitutes were still active long after the big trail drives ended.

            While attending high school in Belle Fourche in the early 1900s, Lon Newell worked for a lady milliner who sent him to a brothel with new bonnets for the girls. “I had to wait in the kitchen while they tried them on,” Newell said. “The madam would take those models off the market then, so the town women wouldn’t end up with the same hat.”

In a 1988 interview, 87-year-old Ray Oliver recalled that the town once boasted a “traveling whore house” that floated up and down the Belle Fourche River.  

It was just on this side of where the community hall is now. Where Harold’s Club sets was a whore house then. They used to gather down there at that place and ride the ferry up and down the river. …That was what you call a floating whore house. 

            Oliver, a blacksmith who moved to Belle Fourche in 1916, said the town was a “friendly community.”

“You used to see a lot of whore houses here,” Oliver said. “Then in 1919 they tried to spoil all a man’s fun. They voted out prostitution and voted in prohibition.”

             In a 1988 interview, he described how one prostitute thwarted a policeman’s attempt to catch her breaking the law. According to Oliver, “Hi” Hantz  was climbing a ladder up to the woman’s second story window, hoping to catch her in the act. The prostitute heard him coming, grabbed her chamber pot and dumped the contents on the lawman’s head.

Laughing loudly, Oliver said, “As far as I know he never tried it again.”  

            Otto Reimer’s description of driving longhorns down Saloon Street is just one of many colorful tales Carol Cox of Lakewood, Colorado, remembers hearing from her father.

Raised on the family ranch on the Belle Fourche River northwest of Wasta, Cox listened closely to her dad’s recollections of his years as a cowhand.

Born in Wahoo, Nebraska in 1886, Reimer left home at the age of 13 to break and train horses for a rancher. In the next few years he handled the remuda for several large ranching operations of Dakota Territory, including the Matador, Turkey Tracks, VVV and Mill Iron.

“Dad had a unique gift in handling horses,” Cox recalls. “I suppose today he would be called a ‘horse whisperer’ because he seemed to be able to talk to them.”

            Reimer greatly admired Jimmy Craig, general manager of the Three V outfit who lived at ranch headquarters 12 miles northwest of Belle Fourche. An immigrant from Scotland, Craig imported Scotch whisky by the case, lining the driveway to his ranch home with the empty bottles.

“Dad told so many interesting stories about his cowhand days,” Cox said. “I was intrigued by the one about the cowboys tossing their hats up to the girls and couldn’t resist asking Dad if he ever tossed up his hat. There was a twinkle in his eye when he answered my question.”

Cowboys from Dakota Territory cattle ranches "duded up" when they went to town. Perhaps the two men wearing caps, Otto Reimer (bottom row) and his brother John (top row) neglected to reclaim their cowboy hats from the girls at Belle Fourche brothels.