Six Racy Madams of Colorado - A Bancroft Booklet

Boulder, Colorado: Johnson Publishing Company, 1988. Eighth Prnting . Trade Paperback. Very Good. 5 1/2" x 8 1/2. 65 Pages. This is a 1988 Eighth printing. Stapled binding. A little shelf rubbing to the covers is the only defect. Interior text and photographic pages are near flawless. The red-light district of Denver in 1879 any Westerner would have said that the Row is wide open. Uniformly throughout Colorado the old-timers speak of The Row or The Line when they mean the street where the parlor houses, cribs, variety halls, saloons, gambling houses, and, in Denver, the opium dens congregated. In the earliest times this street tended to run parallel, a block away, to the main street. But as the settlement grew, no matter whether it was a city, mining camp or cattle town, The Row tended to be left behind or to be forced to one side, against the mountain as in Aspen, or high on the hillside. Although the parlor houses and cribs were generally mixed in the same block, there was a great distinction between the two. The cribs were single operations run by prostitutes in business for themselves. The crib lay-out in Colorado mountain towns was usually a frame building where a bedroom with a door and one window fronted on the street. A kitchen-living room was to the rear, and a privy stood out back, often on an alley. In Denver, frequently the girls did not live in the cribs but at some nearby hotel such as the Bayonne, the Batione or even the Windsor. Some had husbands or steady lover-pimps with whom they lived in small frame houses not too far away from The Row. Consequently their reception rooms were on the streets, the bedroom next, and two or three cribs would share a mutual indoor lavatory at the rear. The crib girls charged anywhere from 25c to $2, depending on their age and attractiveness. Usually the charge was $1 to which was added the profit on beer sold and perhaps a tip. This book is the story of six of the most famous of the racy madams. . Contents in Six Biographies: Jennie Rogers Denver's Immoral Queen, Mattie Silks of Denver, Laura Evans of Salida, Lillian Powers of Florence, Pearl de Vere of Cripple Creek, and Cock-Eyed Liz of Buena Vista.