A you beaut Butte bordello

Butte is beaut in the way that Newcastle and Broken Hill are beaut. It is an historic mining town which has gained a special beauty through the passage of economic demise.

Butte is in Montana. The old business district historic town sweeps graciously down an impressive hillside, looking over a valley of housing and modern commerce. It is all set in a giant basin rimmed with mighty mountains - for it is part of the Rockies. It is a part of the Rockies where copper was a rich and accessible resource. The result was massive open-cut mines and a thriving 1800s boom town. So densely did it swarm with miners and magnates and all the supporting players of a remote mining bonanza, that it bragged one of the great red light districts of the world. It had a whole bordello quarter. Then.

Now, amid buildings that are crumbling, boarded up or simply gone, one bordello remains - The Historic Dumas Brothel.

Operating from 1890 to 1982 it was America’s longest running brothel.

Now ta-da — it is a Brothel Museum.

One doesn’t see too many brothel museums around the world, so the Dumas hit my “must” list like a wild west bullet. Butte also brags the more famous Butte Museum of Mining and a truly fascinating Mai Wah museum of Chinese pioneering history.

But, no, it was the bordello of Butte for me.

It has to be one of the strangest, and most poignant places on this earth.

The building, purpose built by French Dumas brothers, now stands crumbling

and isolated in old Mercury Street.

It’s easy to find because it is just so crumbling and lonely. Ironically, there’s an antique pram in the street by its curve of entrance steps.

A women calls as we walk into entrance hall. She could be part of a display, there behind the counter with its ostrich feather pens and surrounding clutter of bric a brac. She has a gravelly smoker’s voice. She’s sinewy and of indeterminate age with tousle of blond hair tied up untidily on her head. She’s babysitting the grandies just now. The grandson politely proffers Brothel brochures before he and his little sister are steered off behind a door. Our welcomer is Camille. She gratefully accepts the $8 entrance charge, “cash only, darlings”. She talks with machine-gun rapidity.

A quick run-through. There are three floors. This is main one and you can see some cribs made up.

The working girls came in all ages and some worked into their 60s. The old ones tended to have the basement cribs. The brothel operated 24 hours, the girls sometimes working in shifts. There were lots of tunnels underneath Butte and many of them led to the Dumas Brothel. You can see the relic of one. Most have caved in now.

The most famous and the last madame was Ruby Garrett. The madame received 60 per cent of the takings, the girls the remaining 40. Not that prostitution was ever legal. A lot of bribes went down over the years. Nonetheless, Ruby ended up in jail for tax evasion.

Anything else you want to know, just call out.

And there they are, the “cribs”, furnished with all the things they ever had and then some. This is a museum and some collecting has been done over the years. There’s a lot of stuff.

There’s a lot of crimson, a lot of drapes, a lot of fans and mirrors, shawls and bowls.

It could be a movie set, except that it is so very, very old and tired.

Loved. There is no doubt that it is tended with great care. But one sees a piece of social history dying of poverty - like the rest of Butte.

Areas are sectioned off as “construction sites”. Damp has eaten through walls and peeled away wallpaper and rotted wood. Plaster has flaked or gone. The stairs, as we mount them, creak dangerously underfoot. Upstairs is open in the centre with a passage leading around to all the rooms. The floorboards are a worry. I warn Bruce to step lightly, if he can.

There’s a smart madam’s room with a wonderful old green rotary phone with the biggest numbers I’ve ever seen. There are quite a few assorted antique phones in the place, come to think of it. Booking sex probably came with the invention of the phone.

Sinks and washbowls are prolific - but stories of the brothel’s history pinned to the wall tell of the blight of venereal diseases and the terrible frequency of pregnancy. Butte was abortion central in its heyday. Lacking contraception, the girls had pregnancy after pregnancy, hideous backstreet abortions by unqualified midwives and terrible bleeding and infection. Baby bones found years later in prospector holes around the region.

Some prostitutes went full term and raised children in the brothel.

Others farmed them out.

Depression was an epidemic and so was addiction to the legal drugs so easily available - laudanum, cocaine, opium, and alcohol. Suicides were common.

Ah yes, this place feels spooky for many reasons.

It is notoriously haunted. Ghostly figures and strange lights turn up in photos. Not in mine, I note, with disappointment.

The basement is the saddest area. The corridor is dark and dank, the rooms smaller and less flashy than upstairs. They seem entirely grey and ghostly, weighted down with a weariness one does not feel on the other floors. Bruce feels uncomfortable.

That’s not like him.

We return to the modern world.