The wages of sin

            How much did the girls of the gulch charge?

            Hmmm. An interesting question posed by a Deadwood Magazine reader in North Dakota. The answer is not readily available, at least concerning the women who entertained lonely miners in the early day gold rush camp.

            Whatever coin of the realm the girls collected in the houses in Deadwood’s Badlands District, they didn’t leave written records of their financial affairs.

Prostitution in Deadwood, or anywhere else for that matter, has always been a secretive business. Working girls and madams never used their real names and were equally reticent about proceeds of their cash business. Even the loquacious Pam Holliday, madam of the Frontier Rooms, better known as the Purple Door, declined to answer questions about the financial operation of her brothel when she spoke freely to reporters after the 1980 closure of the last four Deadwood brothels.

            The first girls brought into the gulch the summer of 1876 by Madam Mustache and Madam Dirty Em likely collected their wages of sin in gold dust, the universal means of exchange at the time. Gold dust was worth $20 an ounce until 1879 when the value was established at $17 or $18.

Veterans of gold camps in other areas, the madams may have had the gold scales and “blower” that were essential equipment for anyone who had anything to sell. The blower was a shallow tin box, open at the narrow end. Poured into the blower, gold dust was gently shaken while blowing on it, separating sand and dirt from the heavier gold. With a piece of carpet beneath the blower to catch any spilled dust the merchant or bartender could collect a “tip” for every sale.

Scales weren’t necessarily used for smaller transactions. Bartenders, clerks, faro dealers and madams were adept at extracting a pinch or two of dust from a prospector’s buckskin gold sack.

There are no records establishing how many pinches a girl could get for her services, but the women-starved miners who outnumbered females 200 to one weren’t at all reluctant to pay the price for feminine companionship.

The best way of determining what that price might have been is to look at costs of other services or commodities available in the gulch in those early years.

Jack Langrishe’s theatrical troupe performed to sold-out houses with an 1876 ticket price of $1.50. It’s safe to assume the girls charged at least that much or even more for intimate entertainment. It’s an immutable rule of commerce – the scarcer the commodity the higher the price.

Deadwood’s first hotel, Charles Wagner’s Grand Central, wasn’t at all grand. Weary travelers paid $1.00 a night for a rudely constructed bunk or just space to spread their own blankets on the floor.

Miners who lived on biscuits and beans paid $10 for 100 pounds of flour to make the biscuits, although during the first winter flour prices hit $60 for a 100-pound bag. Beans were 18 cents a pound; coffee, 34 to 38 cents a pound; eggs 75 cents to a dollar a dozen. 

From earliest days, part of a brothel’s profits came from liquor. Without liquor licenses, the madams supplied drinks to patrons who were expected to make a “donation” for drinks for themselves and the girls. In the 1970s that “donation” was $3, despite the small amount of liquor in the girl’s glass.

Many ‘76’ers kept diaries, or depended on their recollections when writing books about the Black Hills gold rush in later years, but none of them mentioned personally patronizing prostitutes or said anything about what the girls charged. Nor do men living today admit to visiting Deadwood houses for anything more than “a drink after the bars closed.”

In 1979, reporters for the Sioux Falls Argus Leader posed as customers at the Deadwood upstairs houses under the guise of “shopping around.” They quickly learned that money was never discussed until a man was alone with a girl in her bedroom where he could choose from a verbal “menu” of services at varying prices – cash up front, of course. One girl declared “you can’t get anything here for less than $40.”  Regular customers and others interviewed said minimum prices were $20 to $30.

In Nevada she could get only $60 for an “all-nighter” while in Deadwood she’d made up to $300 a night from one man, claimed former prostitute “Love Lee.”

“April” was perfectly willing to discuss money during a telephone interview with Deadwood Magazine in the early 1990s.

She worked at the Green Door during the 1977 fall hunting season and affirmed that customers selected services of choice from a menu, at a basic price of $1 a minute. Collecting cash in advance, the girl took her fee to the linen room where a small dresser had eight slots in the top, one for each girl. After dropping the money in her assigned slot the girl “never saw it again until Dixie gave us our share.”

The madam kept 40% of the night’s take, returning 60% to the girls who had to pay for their own clothing, personal necessities, drug prescriptions, laundry and dry cleaning.

Average take for a night’s work was $50, but the hunting season was a brothel bonanza. April netted around $300 by personally servicing 28 customers the last night she worked in Deadwood.

Like any other job, pay was commensurate with talents, skills and time put in by the prostitute. Some of them apparently did quite well for themselves. Girls and madams were heavy spenders at area clothing and shoe shops, drug, liquor and grocery stores, car dealerships and jewelry stores. And the men who came to town to see the girls enhanced Deadwood’s economy with money spent at bars, lodging facilities and back room poker games.