Good Time Girls of the Pacific Northwest by Jan MacKell Collins

Author:Jan MacKell Collins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: TwoDot
Published: 2019-10-17T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

Prostitution in Portland

Often, the best that a good time girl could hope for was life in a big city, where she could settle down and open or work at her own bordello. Historian and journalist Stewart Holbrook noted that “Along with the loggers, even if most historians have rather prudishly ignored it, came a notable migration of fancy women from the old sawdust towns. They had seen altogether too much daylight in the swamps of the lake states; and now the more enterprising among them went out and bought new bonnets with sweeping feathers and one-way tickets to Spokane or Portland or Seattle.”1 For many of these women, Portland proved to be just what they were looking for.

An early product of the Oregon Trail, Portland was incorporated in 1851 with eight hundred residents. The young city initially was as proper as any early Western town. In February 1852 the Morning Oregonian advised that in spite of the rainy weather, ladies should maneuver their long dresses through the mud “revealing nothing beyond the top of a well-laced boot.” To reveal anything above the ankle and “lift the robe in public is a dangerous experiment,” lectured the paper. By 1864, however, even the far-off Montana Post knew that bawdy houses had made their debut in Portland and other places. In some towns, city officials were already requiring licenses of their dance-halls, which could cost upward of one hundred dollars each month.2

Portland’s first documented madam of note was Nancy Boggs, who opened her bordello in 1870. Born in Pennsylvania, Nancy was still married but raising her daughter alone when she first appeared in Portland during the 1860 census. Over time, Nancy tried a variety of careers, including that of a seamstress and dressmaker, before turning to prostitution. During the twenty years she was in Portland, ten of them were spent on the Willamette River—for Nancy’s brothel was actually housed on a bright crimson barge, measuring roughly eighty feet long by forty feet wide. The barge was settled in the middle of the river between Portland and East Portland. There were two floors, with a saloon and dance-hall on the first and rooms for ten to fifteen girls on the second. Smaller boats transported customers from shore. Nancy’s female employees knew how to handle the sin-ship; during unusually high water on the river in 1876, Nancy and her girls are said to have “manned the unwieldy ship in a masterful fashion.”3

Nancy’s barge could accommodate men on the shores or fishermen in the water from Linnton to Portland and all the way south to Oregon City. Being on the river, the lady answered to no authority. Three river towns—Portland, East Portland, and Albina—each sported its own government, police department, and laws concerning prostitution and liquor. With no bridges to connect the three, Nancy could operate in relative peace without having to obey the ordinances from any of them. In times of trouble, she could simply head her barge into the middle of the river. Thus, during her time on the water, Nancy paid neither liquor fees nor fines.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.