Hell's Belles: Prostitution, Vice, and Crime in Early Denver, with a Biography of Sam Howe, Frontier Lawman/Prostitution, Polygamy, and Power: Salt Lake City, 1847-1918

Western Folklore, Fall 2003 by Parent, Robin

Hell's Belles: Prostitution, Vice, and Crime in Early Denver, with a Biography of Sam Howe, Frontier Lawman. Rev. ed. By Clark secrest. (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2002. Pp. xxiv 353, preface, acknowledgments, illustrations, photographs, appendices, bibliography, index. $34.95 paper); Prostitution, Polygamy, and Power: Salt Lake City, 1847-1918. By Jeffrey Nichols. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Pp. viii 247, preface, introduction, illustrations, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95 cloth)

Denver historian Clark secrest has based Hell's Belles on the scrapbook collections of Sam Howe, a police officer who dedicated fifty years of his life to law enforcement in one of the roughest cities in the West. Using Howe's collection of police reports and newspaper clippings, secrest has constructed an engaging historical account of relations between crime and power in early Denver. Sam Howe's police reports are both detailed and extensive, including not merely all expected general information for such documents, but also the arresting officer's remarks written out in Howe's minuscule hand. When it came to the newspaper clippings, though, Howe was not always rigorous to a fault. According to secrest, Howe saved "an account of every crime down to the tiniest suicide, every missing person, every thief or rascal or gambler or prostitute, every suspicious incident as the squalling city grew up. (Well, almost every incident: Sam is known to have omitted a few stories that were unflattering to himself, but he did not exclude those that were unflattering to the police department)" (4).

Using Howe's documents and his own extensive research, secrest draws connections among government, police, commerce, and vice in early Denver. We see into the lives of poor and pimped prostitutes, madams, corrupt local police, business owners-many of whom gained wealth through gambling-and high society that plied the ruling hand of government.

Though primarily a history, this work has multiple uses to the folklorist. For instance, in a graduate course on regional folklore, the information surrounding a passage such as the following can help foster student understanding of power dynamics in the creation of a sense of place: "As with any western frontier community, a quartet of indulgences soon surfaced in early Denver City and Auraria: overimbibing (which frequently led to the other three), homicide, gambling, and-tentatively at first-prostitution. Those four inevitably led to a fifth: local government corruption" (59). The book also incorporates voices of the folk in sketches of many of Denver's colorful characters of the day. In addition, the reader is offered a glimpse into the occupational lore of prostitutes through a physician's account of means by which, at the turn of the twentieth century, these women tried to cope with outbreaks of gonorrhea and syphilis-"being burned" was a folk term used by prostitutes for having contracted a disease-and to prevent pregnancy. "Douching between clients with potassium permanganate, carbolic acid, or bichloride of mercury was necessary. None of these treatments was very effective . . ., but the carbolic acid had another usage: when ingested, it was an effective means to commit an agonizing suicide" (107). Personal narratives of the prostitutes themselves add to a rich body of belief and legend about the "whore with the golden heart" (107).

Secrest mentions early on that he had no desire to delve into the "psycho-social analysis of prostitution in the American West" (xi) and prefers to leave that to others. I imagine that there are many folklorists out there who are up to this "daunting task" (xi) and could use discussion in their classes as one medium for this investigation.

After reading Hell's Belles I went west, as it were, to a second volume, Jeffrey Nichols' Prostitution, Polygamy, and Power: Salt Lake City, 1847-1918, whose attractively alliterated title opens the way to an accessible historical account of the power struggle between Saints and Gentiles in early Salt Lake City, specifically as this struggle was played out over polygamy and prostitution-or, more simply put, over the women of early Salt Lake City. Beyond providing a chronicle of the internal fight between the two powers, Nichols wonderfully portrays certain patriarchs of early Salt Lake whose early wielding of power shaped the city of Salt Lake and the state of Utah that we see today.

Prostitution, Polygamy, and Power sets out to give a very accurate and lineal historical account of events in early Salt Lake and in outlying communities. We expect such an approach of a work of history, and we are duly given dates and names along with descriptions of how events are connected and why. However, this book, unlike Hell's Belles, does not lend itself to the application of folklore paradigms. It is nonetheless a well-written and well-researched work and I envision it as perhaps required reading in a western history course but as supplemental reading in a western folklore course.