Madams and Working Girls
The earliest record of prostitutes arriving in Deadwood occurred in July 1876 when Charlie Utter’s famous wagon train arrived. The women were accompanied by two madams with the intriguing professional monikers Madam Dirty Em and Madam Mustachio. According to one account, when the prostitutes arrived in town, miners lined up along the street and cheered. Prostitution was to become an industry in Deadwood that endured through the years almost without interruption until 1980, when the State’s Attorney’s Office, along with the local and federal law enforcement, closed the last four brothels in town.

It was difficult for a woman to make a living in the American West of 1876 if she did not have the protection of a father or husband. Single women often turned to prostitution as their only option. In some instances unsuspecting women were lured West by offers of the chance for adventure and the promise of respectable employment, only to find themselves penniless and virtually enslaved in dance halls or brothels.

Women pressed into service charged men to dance, hustled drinks and, in curtained areas and private boxes, sold sexual favors. It was not uncommon for customers to find their pockets picked and valuables stolen at the end of a long evening.
Prostitution in Deadwood was largely confined to the Badlands district on Lower Main at the north end of town. Saloons and theaters occupied the first floor while brothels opened for business on the floors above. By 1900 the Badlands occupied an entire block of two-story brick buildings on the west side of Main Street, from the Mansion House on the corner of Wall Street (where the Fairmont Hotel now stands) to the end of the block.

Most of the women who found themselves in this profession remain anonymous. Violence was common, and prostitutes had little protection from abuse and battery at the hands of their customers and employers. According to pioneer John S. McClintock, a Gem Theater prostitute named Tricksie shot a man through the front of his skull for beating her up. The attending doctor put a probe through the man’s head, amazed that he survived the gunshot.

Drug use and alcoholism was rampant as a means of escape. Opium and its derivatives, laudanum and morphine, were the drugs of choice. Suicides were common, often the result of deliberate overdoses by mixing laudanum and alcohol. Deadwood doctor F.S. Howe, who frequently administered to the prostitutes, always took his stomach pump when summoned to the Badlands in the middle of the night.