Madam Millie: Bordellos from Silver City to Ketchikan

By Max Evans

Mildred Clark Cusey was a whore, a madam, an entrepreneur, and above all, a survivor. The story of Silver City Millie, as she referred to herself, is the story of one woman's personal tragedies and triumphs as an orphan, a Harvey Girl waitress on the Santa Fe railroad, a prostitute with innumerable paramours, and a highly successful bordello businesswoman. Millie broke the mold in so many ways, and yet her life's story of survival was not unlike that of thousands of women who went West only to find that their most valuable assets were their physical beauty and their personality. Petite at five feet tall with piercing blue eyes, Millie captured men's attention by her very essence and her unmistakable joie de vivre.

Born to Italian immigrant parents near Kansas City, she and her sister were orphaned early and separated from each other. Millie learned hard lessons on the streets, but she never gave up and she vowed to protect and support her ailing older sister. Caught in a domestic squabble in her foster home, Millie wound up in juvenile court with Harry Truman as her judge. This would be only the first of many brushes in her life with prominent politicians.

When physicians diagnosed her sister with tuberculosis and recommended she move West to a Catholic home in Deming, New Mexico, Millie moved with her. Expenses ran high and after a brief stint waiting tables as a Harvey Girl, Millie found that her meager tips could easily be augmented by turning tricks. Thus, out of financial need and devotion to her sister, Mildred Cusey turned to a life of prostitution and a career at which she soon excelled and became both rich and famous.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9780826327840

Max Evans

Max Evans, novelist, artist, scriptwriter, former cowboy, miner, and dealer in antiquities, resides in Albuquerque. He received the Owen Wister Award for lifelong contributions to the field of western literature from the Western Writers of America.

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Madam Millie

Bordellos from Silver City to Ketchikan

Max Evans

Introduction by Andrew Gulliford

Epilogue by Susan Berry

University of New Mexico Press

Albuquerque

ISBN for this digital edition: 978-0-8263-2784-0

© 2002 by Max Evans

All rights reserved.

First edition

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Evans, Max, 1925–

Madam Millie : bordellos from Silver City to Ketchikan / Max Evans.— 1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-8263-2782-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Cusey, Mildred Clark.

2. Prostitutes—West (U.S.)—Biography.

3. Businesswomen—West (U.S.)—Biography. 4. Prostitution—West (U.S.) I. Title.

HQ145.W47 E9 2002

306.74’2’092—dc21

2001006420

Preface: To the Life and Wild Times of Silver City Millie

I can almost hear her laughing as I write this. Her mirth was as infectious as a happy plague. It resonated into your being, and somehow you felt the triumphs dominating the enormity of the tragedies. Then, as Millie comes into focus, the eyes exude the joy of the ridiculousness of us all. There is no bitterness in that life-tested and physically battered face. It is the slightly crinkled face of a Munchkin with childlike smoothness still there—the face of a great survivor, which she certainly was. She was also, ultimately, a hell of a winner. Las Vegas odds-makers would run for cover here and make nothing but very quiet side bets.

Her often brutal honesty was almost always tempered by a humor that verged on both the slapstick and the sophisticated. The one exception being her older, invalid sister, Florence. Here, Millie’s voice and expression became both tender and somber at the same time. Her eyes looked at tears that flowed backward.

This was the most difficult book I have ever put together. No matter how I checked out some of the wild stories—wild by their locale, time of occurrence and the nature of her business—they were not only unutterably true, but actually understated in some cases. She did ask that I change a few (very few) names to protect the feelings of someone else besides herself. These changes are minor, however, and matter not one whit to her story of sacrifice, courage, and almost limitless fun.

I taped her conversations, made pages of notes, and wrote a great deal of this down, while she was still alive. I tried desperately not to let the I word interfere. It was a constant strain and struggle, but it seems that this has been achieved. I decided, however, that I would not do the usual afterword, but would instead call it, appropriately to the subject matter, Afterglow. Therein I could relate the adventures I had personally shared with Millie and her beloved third husband, Wendell Cusey.

I also felt strongly that by leaving her story in the present tense I could maintain the immediacy of her history exactly as I had listened, researched, and relaxed with the two of them. Now, as I put down the final words to this work, I feel it was the right decision. I will now hope for the near impossible: that the essence of her bravery, the dedication and suffering she afforded for those she loved, and above all that indomitable will to have a good laugh no matter where the stones fell, will be as indelible to the reader as they are to me. She is both a rising and setting sun in the cool blue mountains and the often searing, but also gloriously colored desert sky of the western half of our great land.

Max Evans

Albuquerque, New Mexico

Putting Millie in Her Place: Prostitution in the American West

An Introduction by Andrew Gulliford

The story of Silver City Millie is the story of one woman’s personal tragedies and triumphs as an orphan, a Harvey Girl waitress on the Santa Fe railroad, a prostitute with innumerable paramours, and a highly successful bordello businesswoman. Millie broke the mold in so many ways, and yet her life’s story of survival was not unlike that of thousands of women who went west only to find that their most valuable assets were their physical beauty and their personality. Petite at five feet tall and with piercing blue eyes, Millie captured men’s attention by her very essence and her unmistakable joie de vivre.

Born to Italian immigrant parents in Kentucky, Millie and her sister Florence were orphaned early and separated from each other. Millie learned hard lessons on the streets, but she never gave up, and she vowed to protect and support her ailing older sister. Caught in a domestic squabble in her foster home, Millie wound up in juvenile court with Harry Truman as her judge. This was only the first of many brushes in her life with prominent politicians.

When physicians diagnosed her sister with tuberculosis and recommended she move out west to a Catholic home in Deming, New Mexico, Millie moved with her. Expenses ran high, and after a brief stint waiting tables as a Harvey Girl, Millie found that her meager tips could easily be augmented by turning tricks. Thus, out of financial need and devotion to her sister, Mildred Cusey turned to a life of prostitution and a career at which she soon excelled and became both rich and famous.

Madam Millie, the story of Silver City Millie’s life, contains sordid details and frank language that will make many readers blush. Before condemning her bawdy, drunken life, however, readers must become aware of the full context of prostitution in the American West. Prostitution was like motherhood and apple pie. It was expected, condoned, and appreciated, if segregated.

Women of the line, also known as soiled doves or fallen angels, followed the usual precepts in the West, which were all about resource exploitation and extraction. Cows ate grass (on public land); miners dug holes (on public land); woodcutters felled trees (on public land); farmers took up homesteads (on public land that then became private land after much labor and sacrifice); and some young women also used the resources they had available, which just happened to be their bodies. The resources they extracted came from the men in the form of gold, silver, and the occasional deed to mining claims.

The ratio of men to women in the frontier West was frequently seven to one. And in the absence of other diversions, the sporting culture of most mining camps and boomtowns meant getting drunk and visiting a house of ill repute. In Virginia City, Nevada, only months after the Washoe Rush, residents numbered 2,379 men and 147 women, which prompted a prospector poet to pen these lines:

Oh the lust for mountain gold dust,

Brought us lusty mountain men;

Who, through lust for mountin’ women

Quickly lost their gold again.

Across the West there are innumerable stories, some fact and some fiction, of the flourishing red-light districts, of madams who married well, of high-priced whores in fancy houses, and poor working girls in two-room cribs or living unprotected on the street.¹ Realize that in the prudish Victorian era women did not go barefooted or bare-armed. Ankles were not to be seen. The average middle-class housewife left the front steps wearing 22 pounds of clothing. Sexual inhibitions abounded, and rarely did husbands and wives see each other naked.²

Prostitution continues in the New West in parts of rural Nevada where the nineteenth-century custom of fancy parlor houses in business districts has given way to modern double-wide trailers out among the sagebrush. One wonders why Billie had to add the line Men only to her sign? Perhaps gender equity has yet to come to certain service industries in the Silver State. Photo by Andrew Gulliford, 1981.

Across most of the United States, the golden age of parlor houses extended from the 1870s to World War I, but in the West, prostitution remained legal for much longer: in Laramie, Wyoming, through the 1950s; and in Silver City, New Mexico, until the late 1960s, when the law finally closed Millie’s famous Hudson Street houses.³ Truly, Millie was the last of the frontier madams.

The extent of prostitution in the American West can only be imagined. In Cripple Creek, Colorado, in the 1890s—when Cripple Creek gold brought the entire nation out of the 1893 depression—the red-light district stretched for five miles. Stingaree Gulch in Rawhide, Nevada, in 1907–8 stretched a fourth of a mile long, with five hundred to six hundred women of every race and nationality.

What were the legitimate employment opportunities for single women in the West? Teaching? Clerking? Dressmaking? Max Evans tells the story of rural Oklahoma teachers who were astounded to learn that ladies of the night made as many dollars in an evening as they themselves made all month; for that reason at least three teachers chose to forsake their ABCs.

Julia Bulette, a crib girl in Virginia City, Nevada, worked on her own and became very popular with the local fire department. The only known photograph of her shows her attired in a fireman’s front shirt with belt and helmet that have the insignia of Virginia Engine Company No. 1, of which she was an honorary member.⁴ Cock-eyed Liz from Buena Vista, Colorado, received an eye injury in a drunken brawl. She was known for having trained her pet magpie to repeat the words, Come in boys, come in.⁵

Madams moved west as entrepreneurs, and though the new western history has touched on many topics, the business end of frontier prostitution remains virgin territory, so to speak. Knowledgeable madams first tried the cowtowns of Kansas and then moved west into the mining camps of Colorado.⁶ Moving east from San Francisco into the uproar of Virginia City, Nevada, madams issued tokens worth from five cents to fifty cents.⁷ In the brawling, bustling western mining camps, according to Mark Twain in his classic book Roughing It, full jails and hordes of prostitutes were signs of prosperity. He wrote, Vice flourished luxuriantly during the heyday of our ‘flush times.’ The saloons were overburdened with customers; so were the police courts, the gambling dens, the brothels and the jails—unfailing signs of prosperity in a mining region—in any region for that matter.⁸

Why did women seek out the sporting life? Many had been abused or abandoned as children and could not maintain stable relationships, but some women simply wanted a gayer, more exciting life than being a farm wife and mother or being married to the factory floor back east. Prostitutes wore fine clothes and makeup, which other women did not—hence the phrase painted ladies. Ladies of the night had intriguing nicknames. For instance, in the notorious Blair Street district of Silverton, Colorado, prostitutes answered to the names of Nigger Lola, Sheeny Pearl, Denver Kate, Gipsy Brown, Diamond Tooth Leona, 21 Pearl, Dutch Lena, Blonde Peggy, Minnie the Baby Jumbo, and Oregon Shortline.⁹

Historical accounts of prostitution are interesting for what they reveal: consider the 1872 charge against Mary Brady, who lived north of Laramie, Wyoming, and who was hauled into court for keeping a common, ill-governed and disorderly house to the encouragement of idleness, drinking and fornication. Clearly in Wyoming in the 1870s the Protestant ethic was in danger.¹⁰

The language used to describe the demimonde included phrases such as bawdy house, tenderloin district, dance hall girls, brothel dwellers, saloon workers, crib women, streetwalker, camp followers, fallen women, and simply working girls.¹¹ Youth was their best asset. Most prostitutes lived hard and died young, frequently of a drug overdose, because laudanum, a liquid derivative of opium, was easily available on the frontier.¹² On the Comstock in Nevada in 1875, of 307 prostitutes, 88 were white, 75 Asian, and 55 Irish. Thirty-five were eighteen years old or younger. Soiled doves settled in as part of the social fabric in the hastily constructed mining camps. Women may have turned tricks at night, but during the day they did laundry, and in a medical emergency, such as a smallpox or flu epidemic, they aided their communities.

A Colorado legend is the story of Silver Heels, an attractive young dance-hall girl in Alma who received silver heels as a gift from appreciative miners. During a smallpox epidemic she risked her life to minister to the sick. Because of her close contact with infected miners, she caught the disease and became horribly disfigured, thus losing her attractiveness as a dancer and prostitute. Her career ruined, she left the mining camp though miners begged her not to go. An itinerant artist painted her beautiful face on a local barroom floor, and a nearby mountain was named in her honor.¹³

Across the West the tenderloin districts had their own geographical parameters, such as Market Street paralleling Larimer Street in Denver, Myers Avenue in Cripple Creek, State Street in Leadville; in Telluride cribs were located close to the San Miguel River. In Nevada an ordinance against the proximity of whorehouses and churches stipulated that brothels must be at least 400 yards from a house of worship. So lest they be found guilty of violating a town ordinance, city officials in one Nevada mining boomtown recruited the necessary laborers and equipment and moved a local church.

In parlor houses like those run by Silver City Millie, women felt safe, ate well, were protected, and knew they were part of a sorority of sisters. A nineteenth-century maxim was, A parlor house is where girls go to look for a husband and husbands go to look for a girl. In sparse, two-room cribs, women entertained men alone and were subject to rough beatings by drunks and other kinds of abuse. Rates varied, but during the 1849 gold rush, depending upon the sexual services rendered, brothels charged between twenty-five cents and two dollars. In the first part of the twentieth century, five dollars answered for a quick date, while between fifteen and thirty dollars allowed an amorous cowboy to spend the night—and a month’s wages. Exotic sexual favors cost more. In her heyday, Millie and her girls brought in buckets of cash, and she frequently paid for new brothel furnishings with five-dollar bills.

Women promoted their wares or marketed themselves in a variety of ways. Girls would display their bosom by leaning out of upstairs windows in tight dresses or showing off their upper arms. They would come down to the dance-hall floors in low-cut, short-skirted dresses. As a marketing tool, girls had full-length photographs taken of themselves handsomely attired to give to their best customers as a fond remembrance. If found in a man’s personal effects, these stately portraits bore no hint of scandal. Such cartes de visite were inscribed with the girl’s name.

In various red-light districts girls would take an airing in the afternoon to show off. Jennie Rogers in Denver kept a high four-in-hand coach and toured her girls through Denver’s streets. When scandalized city officials insisted that prostitutes wear yellow ribbons, she had all new, yellow outfits made for her ladies and proudly paraded them through Denver. Silver City Millie’s technique was to let her women, particularly her new girls, walk Millie’s poodle downtown while the dog wore a special cocked hat. This simple gesture signaled to any interested males that a new working girl had arrived and that she would be available that evening.

Working men understood working girls. Soiled doves averaged twenty minutes of bed time with a client and usually engaged from four to six men per night.¹⁴ Girls did piece work, and men who were paid by the pound of beef or by the ton of ore understood the ladies’ working conditions. In the copper-mining town of Butte, Montana, the prostitutes’ wages rose and sank with the wage scale of the miners. The men understood. They knew all about exploitation.¹⁵

Madams made fortunes not only by taking half the wages their girls made each night, but also by selling vast amounts of liquor. In 1880 in Denver Jennie Rogers and Mattie Silks made fortunes by charging a dollar for a bottle of beer and five dollars for a split of champagne. Against a three-hundred-dollar monthly liquor bill, alcohol sales averaged three thousand dollars per month. Working girls drank colored water, but got a cut of the profits from drinks their patrons bought and a percentage of the tips. The ladies also paid for their room and board, which included handsomely furnished bedrooms with enamel or brass beds, dressers, commodes, slop jars, rockers, straight chairs, rugs, lamps, lace curtains, and even writing desks.

Madams expected their girls to dress in the very latest styles and to keep extensive and expensive wardrobes. Girls had their own trunks, filled with seven or eight evening dresses and two or three afternoon costumes. Frequently they charged their clothing against the madam’s account, and she would get a kickback from the seamstresses. Women from the tenderloin often had their clothing prices marked up higher than the same dresses sewn for good women.

Ladies entertained their customers with singing, dancing, and games, and their favorite card game was panguingui, because you could leave and come back to it later in the night. A madam’s share of the take was used to buy off police and pay fees and fines, to keep the house running, and to hire servants, piano players, and bouncers as needed. The very best houses across the West would get cowboys drunk, laid, and back in the saddle by dawn without robbing them or pinching their poke.

Fallen women worked sundown to sunup and had to worry about angry men, potential rivals, and the uninitiated who kept falling in love with them. The lucky ones married their customers, became madams, or turned respectable. The others died young.

Into this wild, western world came diminutive Millie, a waitress turned whore who had a lot to learn. Early on she was brutally raped. After recovering in the hospital in Las Cruces, New Mexico, she went back to work to support her invalid sister and began a series of apprenticeships with madams across New Mexico. She went to work in whorehouses and later bought them. As a lover to politicians, sheriffs, and oil-patch workers, Millie learned a lot. Her story, Madam Millie, takes the reader into a vanished world of large Chrysler roadsters and drunken revels in forgotten hotels like the Burlison in McCamey, Texas, the De Vargas in Santa Fe, the Alvarado in Albuquerque, and the Crawford Hotel in Carlsbad.

Millie marries, only to lose her first husband and her sister at the same time to tuberculosis. Devastated, she goes on vacation, turns a few tricks, meets a handsome young man, and becomes involved in gun running into Mexico. No picaresque novel could have more twists and turns. At one point she even breaks into jail to rescue an imprisoned whore, whom she promptly hires.

Millie gets off luxury trains wearing only a bathrobe, and she buys a haunted whorehouse in Deming, New Mexico. Eventually she owns seven bordellos in three states and no fewer than thirty-six big Chrysler automobiles. Her raw story continues with a vivid account of being badly beaten by her second husband. He broke her jaw, her nose, and caused an eye to come out of its socket. In retribution she pushed him into an open septic tank.

Millie’s insatiable sexual appetite was matched only by her tastes in liquor, Estée Lauder cosmetics from Neiman Marcus in Dallas, and custom boots from Abercrombie & Fitch in New York City.

Though her language was blunt and coarse and she lost much money, Millie also gave thousands of dollars to charities, to the Catholic church, and to poor Hispanics who had no food or could not pay their gas and light bills. Max Evans writes that Millie helped put young men through college, and she and her third husband routinely delivered Christmas packages to needy families.

Beyond the prurient details of bordello management, Madam Millie details a dense web of community relationships in which Millie stood, or lay, at the very center. She was eventually forced out of business—coincidentally, just when Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Great Society welfare programs began to take effect even in segregated New Mexico. Up until then there had been few institutions that did charity work in the poverty-ridden southern half of the state—except for Millie herself. She was losing business in the late 1960s anyway in Silver City, a college town, because in her words, How can we charge for the same thing the college girls give away for free?

From 1987 to 1990 I directed the Western New Mexico University Museum in Silver City, where I taught a summer Elderhostel course titled Boomtowns and Bordellos. While the geology and botany instructors could take their Elderhostel students on field trips, I had no such option, so I asked Millie to speak to my class. She agreed.

I’ll never forget her sitting on a small wooden stool in an old campus classroom with creaky wooden theater seating. Despite the hard seats, the senior citizens in the class were spellbound and did not move. As Millie began to talk, my Elderhostel students sat electrified and listened to her every word. She told many stories about herself and her profession, but she never told enough about her charity work. I learned from others that during the vicious copper strike against Phelps Dodge Company in the late 1950s, Hispanic strikers had had very little money saved, and they ran out of food. Millie fed their children for months. It was only white bread, bologna, and cheese, but it was food. The strike was immortalized in the film Salt of the Earth—a film so radical in its time that the director and actors were all blacklisted in Hollywood as dreaded communist sympathizers. Despite possible boycotts by her wealthy patrons, many of whom were middle managers, Millie had her own convictions. She fed the poor. She fed the families of the strikers.

Millie is gone now, but just as she endured in life, she will endure in print because of Max Evans’s work. He has written an affectionate portrait. Max made the time and had the dedication to pursue Millie’s full story. A roustabout and raconteur himself, just as he wrote about cowboying from atop a saddle, he saw Millie as a savvy whore who knew how to turn a trick and make a buck, but who was also a vital part of her community. This woman who had listened to thousands of men finally found one man to listen to her.

Frederick Jackson Turner got it wrong. He wrote that the frontier ended in 1890. No, it ended in the late 1960s when Silver City Millie finally closed her Hudson Street houses. This memoir is like the woman herself, unvarnished, rough around the edges, shocking, full of humor and tragedy with moments of deep friendship and awful brutality. The complete, unexpurgated story probably can probably never be printed, but nearly all of it is here.

There were many sides to Millie. She was feisty and combative and fiercely loyal to her confidants, but she also had a deep sense of community commitment. Before the institution of welfare and aid to poor struggling Hispanic families, unwed mothers, and hungry children, there was Millie, and in southwest New Mexico she was an institution. Nothing in this book is politically correct. Don’t look for polite figures of speech and gentle euphemisms about the sexual act. This is a tale of prostitution and drunken soirées straight out of the madam’s mouth. For the cattle barons, miners, cowboys, college students, railroaders, politicians, and businessmen who frequented her establishments, she found a need and filled it. She had clean whorehouses, and consequently she kept both men and women off the street in decades when divorce was taboo. Her ladies did not solicit. They stayed in the houses, and men knew where to find them.

Madam Millie is not a dry statistical study of selling sex in the Southwest. It is not a litany drawn from police blotters and court records. Rather, this is the inside story of managing bordellos and prostitutes, from one who lived it. Just take her story for what it’s worth. Millie would want it that way.

Andrew Gulliford, Ph.D., is the director of the

Center of Southwest Studies and a professor of

Southwest Studies and History at Fort Lewis

College, Durango, Colorado.

1 Areas of prostitution became known as red-light districts from the habits of railroaders who visited the ladies. Because railroaders might be called out at any time of the day or night to make a train, they would leave their railroad lanterns with the red light shining out in front of the brothel they were visiting, so the trainmaster could find them.

2 Teaching an Elderhostel class about bordellos, I learned a sad family story about sex, abstinence, and the nineteenth-century lack of sex education. A student from Wisconsin took me aside and told me the story of her ninety-five-year-old grandmother who decades before had had a difficult time birthing her third child. She could not stand to bear that pain again, so she went to her family doctor and explained how she wanted no more children. She did not know the phrase birth control, which would later be coined by Margaret Sanger. In his curt Germanic way, her family doctor told her how not to get pregnant again: Lock the bedroom door. And she did. My student told that story to share her thoughts on sexuality and to explain that in a sexually repressed society, bordellos had their usefulness. Her grandmother and grandfather had had a strained and hollow marriage.

3 In Washington, D.C., during the Civil War there were five hundred brothels and over five thousand prostitutes. Most of the district disappeared during a morals crusade at the time of World War I. Construction at the building site of the new National Museum of the American Indian uncovered many bottles, and hence an archaeological site, on the Mall. A review of the historical record revealed that the location had been home to one of the most famous of Washington parlor houses. The madam of that house is buried in the Congressional Cemetery. For additional sources on bordellos and archaeology, see Elizabeth Scott, ed., Those of Little Note: Gender, Race and Class in Historical Archaeology (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994); Robert Schmidt and Barbara Voss, eds., Archaeology of Sexuality (New York: Routledge, 2000); and Historical Archaeology 25, no. 4 (1991).

4 Douglas McDonald, The Legend of Julia Bulette and the Red Light Ladies of Nevada (Las Vegas: NevaPublications, 1980).

5 Caroline Bancroft, Six Racy Madams of Colorado (Boulder: Johnson Publishing, 1991). Also see Anne Seagraves, Soiled Doves: Prostitution in the Early West (Hayden, Idaho: Wesanne Publications, 1994).

6 For prostitution in cowtowns and mining camps, the classic sources are Robert R. Dykstra, The Cattle Towns (New York: Atheneum, 1979); and Duane Smith, Rocky Mountain Mining Camps: The Urban Frontier (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1974).

7 During the California Gold Rush, Chinese women became virtual sex slaves. In some mining camps the quoted price, expressed pejoratively in pidgin, was 5 cents lookee, 10 cents feelee, 25 cents dooee.

8 Mark Twain, Roughing It (New York: New American Library, 1962), p. 271.

9 Allen G. Bird, Bordellos of Blair Street (Pierson, Mich.: Advertising, Publications and Consultants, 1993).

10 Silver City Millie owned a bordello in Laramie, which she bought in the winter of 1945 when, in her words, the snow was as high as a giraffe’s ass. For the best early study of Laramie prostitution, see Carol L. Bowers, Less Than Ladies, Less Than Love: Prostitution in Laramie, Wyoming, 1868–1920 (master’s thesis, University of Wyoming, 1994). The standard academic reference on prostitution in the West is Anne M. Butler, Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Mercy: Prostitutes in the American West, 1865–1890 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987). For a look at Salt Lake City’s prostitution, see the forthcoming book by Jeffrey Nichols, to be published in 2002 by the University of Illinois Press. He argues that Mormons were baffled by military authorities who condemned polygamy but condoned prostitution. Mormons in the nineteenth century thought polygamy far more acceptable than visits to brothels.

11 Near military posts, houses of prostitution on the frontier could be particularly rough affairs, which housed only the coarsest of frontier women and often went by the soubriquet of hog ranch.

12 Bird (Bordellos of Blair Street, pp. 47, 96, 132–33) states that in Silverton prostitutes who committed suicide, or tried to, used carbolic acid and other vile poisons, including one concoction whose trademark was rough on rats. Opium addiction by a prostitute is portrayed in the film McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Other cinematic portrayals of prostitution in the West are more lighthearted, as in The Cheyenne Social Club or the flirtatious relationship between Miss Kitty and Matt Dillon in Gunsmoke. A gritty sense of violence in the West and physical abuse of prostitutes is the premise for revenge in The Unforgiven.

13 The Silver Heels story is still told in Alma, Colorado, at the Silver Heels Bar, but another version of it comes from Utah. See Wayland Hand, Folklore from Utah’s Silver Mining Camps, Journal of American Folklore (July–December 1941): 54–214. After Silver Heels left, she may have returned. Some years later a richly gowned woman wearing a heavy veil returned to Alma and walked among the graves of local plague victims, but no one learned her identity.

Silverton, Colorado, had one of the highest incidences of fatalities from the Spanish flu pandemic of any community in the United States. The small town lost 150 people to the flu, but many more were saved because of prostitutes who became nurses. Six soiled doves died during the last week of October and the first week of November 1918. Their ages ranged from twenty-three to thirty-six years. See Freda Peterson, The Story of Hillside Cemetery (Oklahoma City: Privately printed, 1996).

14 In a front-page article in the Silver City Daily Press, 2 May 1988, Silver City Millie railed against an Associated Press (AP) wire story that was full of errors about the bordello business. She said, I’m hot as a smoking .45 about the inaccuracies, particularly the matter of timing the period a customer was allowed with one of the girls. She stated that alarm clocks were not used. Instead they had spring-wound timing clocks. She explained that alarm clocks just weren’t intended for that particular application.

15 In Butte, Montana, in 1947, at a meeting of the state’s business and professional women, the local madam Jew Ida wanted to attend the conference. Business executive Robbie Robinson told her, You can’t come in here. This is a meeting for professional women not whores. Jew Ida responded, But Robbie, I’m the most professional woman here.

1: Death without Taxes, First Time in Court, and the Gifts of Greeks

In the concentrated empire Mildred Clark Cusey created, she could be ranked in her dedication with Catherine the Great. She was as tough as chrome plating and tender as new grass. Millie was a whore, a madam, an entrepreneur, and above all, a survivor.

From becoming an orphan at the age of six, with an invalid sister as her sole legacy, she made herself into a madam of many houses who met with soon-to-be presidents and first ladies, senators, judges, bishops, movie stars, all sorts of national and international figures—as well as cowboys, miners, and bums. It is rather miraculous, she says, that all the above characters averaged out about the same.

It would have seemed incomprehensible that someday Millie would own and operate a chain of whorehouses—not unlike the early fast-food chains that have taken over America—from the sun-fried Mexican border reaching all the way north to the permanent ice of Alaska.

Some thirty years after Millie was orphaned, an incident occurred in Silver City, New Mexico, that at least in part proves the theory that one’s upbringing and

Reviews for Madam Millie

[librarycin · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

3.5 starsMillie and her sister were orphans in the early 20th century after their parents died within a short time frame. Although, they were in and out of foster homes, they mostly managed to stay together. When Millie’s older sister Florence, got sick, it was suggested she head for someplace dry. They ended up in New Mexico, with Florence in a sanitorium and Millie needed to find a way to make enough money to pay for Florence’s care. It’s how Millie got into prostitution, and not long after, she started buying and running the whorehouses, herself. She married a number of times, but held on to those whorehouses, and added to them. Millie was feisty, that’s for sure. She was also well-respected. And had a few brushes with the law. I’m not sure she was someone I would like, but it takes all kinds. She has lots of good stories. The book certainly kept my interest. Overall, it was good.