Saloons, Brothels, and Loggers
The first thing a logger did after arriving in town after a long winter in the woods, was rig himself out in a new suit of clothes and sports a cheap watch and ring, and possibly a pair of patent leather shoes. He then meets a chum, and together they make for the low boarding houses. The hard-earned dollars roll away, till in ten days or two weeks at the most all the boy’s money is gone. His watch and ring are gone. The side is out of his new shoe. His coat is torn down the back...watching for some acquaintance to pass from whom he may borrow enough money to get him back to camp. Men working the log drives were mostly in their late teens or early twenties. The work was very physical and dangerous, and they had to be in peak physical condition to jump from log-to-log as they steered them downriver. For every logger killed by falling limbs, even more died on the spring log drive. Saloons were tolerated because loggers came to Muskegon with a winter’s pay burning a hole in their pockets. “There was no written law for the place then, and if a man deserved a thrashing, he got it, and that was the end of that.” After a few weeks of drinking, fighting and whoring, the town got a significant cash infusion that trickled through the economy. “My earliest recollection of Muskegon dates back to 1857.... I came from Grand Haven and the stage consisted of a lumber wagon with boards across for seats and without any springs. The road lay through the swamp between here and Grand Haven. We went into a water hole some two or three feet deep, which was too much for iron and wood to stand and we broke our axle. We went down into the water, and from there we walked into Muskegon. “It was Saturday night.... and after getting up and looking around a little I discovered there was considerable excitement on the street. It turned out that the big drive had just got down. There were perhaps about a hundred drunken men within the space of a single block, in all stages of drunkenness from silly drunk, roaring drunk, fighting drunk, to dead drunk scattered along the street. That continued for three or four days before things quieted down again.
“I expected that the next day the justices' offices would be full of complaints, but not a single complaint was made. The big drive, though somewhat unruly when it got down here for the first few days, was really a necessary institution to Muskegon. We had sawmills down here and the sawmills must have logs, logs must have drivers, and when the drivers got done, they must have drink, and no one complained."
Some of the loggers said they could smell “Muskegon rot-gut” fifty miles away, and the perfume worn by the ugly but friendly “waiter girls” in the saloons. Among the more colorful characters was the proprietor of a Muskegon whorehouse named Big Delia, who at 6’2”, tipped the scales at over 250 pounds, chewed Hiawatha tobacco and had a permanent sneer on her ugly face. When a logger refused to remove his muddy boots before entering her run-down dive she slugged him with a powerful roundhouse that broke his jaw. The Dynamite Saloon in “sawdust flats” was a different type of place, and catered to booming company workers that were underachievers, malcontents or older men that never grew up. They used dozens of tricks to fleece their clientele, from crooked card games to cheap liquor and prostitutes that had to kick-back as much as 80% of their earnings to the owner. The Canterbury House, which was on the outskirts of the village, was run by Mollie Garde and Jennie Morgan, a couple of tough old whores. They had gambling tables, a dance hall, stage for burlesque shows with an orchestra pit, bar room, and 36 rooms on the second floor they rented to working girls. The only rule was that the “mark” never left with a nickel in his pocket. During the 1860s Chicago had more than two hundred brothels, and that didn’t count the hundreds more of streetwalkers. If a young girl ruled-out honest labor this was her only option of surviving and the saloons and brothels did a booming business. Around 1857 an Englishman named Roger Plant arrived in Chicago, and he became the King of Vice with a couple of poorly constructed buildings that became a prostitution hub during in Chicago the Civil War years. He stood at just over five feet and weighed about a hundred pounds, but was reputedly deadly with a knife and a vicious brawler. The only person who could kick his ass was his 250 pound wife who resembled a woman but fought like a man. He made a good living as a fence for stolen merchandise and a bail bondman, while his wife ran a brothel with eighty girls working in shifts around the clock. She did a capacity business with soldiers but her brothel was a dangerous place even for a person with combat experience. Many of them were robbed, knifed, and left for dead in alleys because these women were skilled shoplifters, thieves, and pickpockets. The Plant’s amassed a fortune, and retired to a beautiful mansion where they became model upper class citizens. One of the meanest Madame’s was “Gentle Anne Stafford...the fattest brothel keeper in Chicago”who was anything but gentle and cleared out the Prairie Queen when one of her girls went there to work. Her nickname was a joke because she had a reputation for beating the hell out of people. The Prairie Queen was several notches above Stafford’s place, and Anne’s girl left for better pay and a new dress. This caused several Madame’s and their pimps to wage a surprise attack on the Prairie Queen, breaking down the front door, busting up the furniture, chasing away the customers, beating up the prostitutes and Madame Herrick receiving a severe beating. Gentle Anne returned to her brothel with
her wayward harlot, driving the rest of her girls back to her place through the streets like a herd of cattle.