Pleasant Alley and the Copper Block

By editor

Butte, Silver Bow County, Montana

"First came the miners to work the mine, then came the ladies who lived on the line." That old prospector’s tune, sung with a slur and a grin in the bawdy houses of mining towns like Butte, Montana, captures the blunt sequence of events in this city’s wild youth. The miners came chasing silver and copper deep in the earth, and the ladies came to make their own fortunes above it, often by means that made the law wink and turn its head. By the 1890s, prostitution was no back-alley curiosity. It was a big business in Butte, swelling alongside the city’s booming copper mines and the railroads that brought in men hungry for work and diversion alike.

Mercury Street was the jewel of this commerce, a stretch lined with parlor houses where women in silk and lace opened doors to gentlemen who paid handsomely for companionship. Not everyone could afford those prices, so moderately priced brothels and hundreds of one-room "cribs" filled every nook and cranny of the district, crammed along narrow alleys and terraces. Charlie Chaplin, who once played Butte on the vaudeville circuit, reportedly said the city had "the prettiest women of any red-light district in the West." Chaplin, with his typical mix of admiration and realism, added a month later that there "were some tough lookin' blisters too." A fair assessment, since danger lurked in shadows where pickpockets and thieves made a living off the distracted or the drunk.

Butte’s growth was rapid and raw. The Anaconda Copper Mining Company had its grip on the hills, pumping wealth into the town and attracting thousands of workers from all over the world. The railroads, including the Northern Pacific and the Milwaukee Road, delivered men eager to spend their paychecks before the whistle blew again. The city’s population swelled past 30,000 by the turn of the century, and with it, the demand for the services that the women of Mercury Street and its alleys provided.

Lawmakers and reformers, naturally, found this state of affairs distasteful. In 1903, pressured by temperance advocates and moral crusaders, Butte’s city government forced the women out of their Galena and Mercury Street cribs. The move was less about shutting down prostitution than pushing it out of sight. The women migrated to less conspicuous places--Pleasure Alley, Old Fashioned Terrace, Model Terrace. These narrow lanes, tucked behind the facades of respectable buildings, became the new red-light districts. Landlords collected two dollars a night for the tiny cribs--barely bigger than a coffin, these rooms smelled of disinfectant mingling poorly with cheap perfume, a faint attempt to mask the realities within.

The women continued to ply their trade with the same old tricks, tapping on windows with thimbles, rings, and chopsticks to catch the attention of prospective clients. Their solicitations--lewd gestures and honeyed words--were no less bold, though the city’s attempt to bury the trade underground made the work grimmer. At its height, the terraces hosted as many as a thousand women of all ages, races, and backgrounds. Some were Irish immigrants fleeing famine and poverty, others Chinese women caught in the grim nets of trafficking, and many were local girls who saw no other option to survive in a town where mining was the only game in town.

The Copper Block, a sturdy brick building at a corner of Pleasant Alley, served as a kind of headquarters and home base for many of these women. Its back doors opened directly onto the multi-storied cribs of Copper Terrace and Pleasant Alley itself. The Block was a hub of whispered deals, stolen goods, and the occasional fistfight. It was also a place where women found fleeting camaraderie amid the hardships.

Saturday nights and paydays drew thousands of men to these terraces, wooden sidewalks creaking beneath their boots. The mines paid out in cash, and the money flowed freely into the pockets of the women who worked the alleys. It was a rough economy, but a lively one. The women had to be shrewd, and sometimes ruthless, to survive the competition, which was fierce. The prices ranged from a few dollars for a quick visit in a crib to twenty or thirty for a parlor house evening. Adjusted for inflation, that was a significant sum--enough to make the work tempting despite the risks.

The tensions between reformers and the red-light district came to a head in 1910 when Carrie Nation, the famously militant temperance crusader, made a dramatic entrance into Pleasant Alley. Nation, known for wielding a hatchet against saloons, elbowed her way through the crowd of women and onlookers, bonnet askew and determination blazing. The crowd cheered as she stormed the alley, but she came away with a wrenched elbow and no converts. Nation’s visit was a spectacle more than a turning point, illustrating the city’s uneasy relationship with its own underbelly.

Despite the city’s efforts, the district persisted until national forces intervened. The advent of Prohibition in 1917, combined with the United States’ entry into World War I, pushed prostitution further underground. The mining industry slowed, and soldiers and workers were subject to stricter moral oversight. The terraces closed temporarily but reopened in the 1930s under the less subtle moniker of "Venus Alley," a nod to the enduring trade.

The cribs themselves finally shuttered in 1943, but bordellos held on. The Dumas, one of the last operating houses, closed in 1982, marking the end of an era that had spanned nearly a century. The park now occupying this corner bears witness to the thousands of women who lived, labored, and sometimes died in the shadows of Butte’s copper empire.

In the words of an early 20th-century Butte newspaper, The Butte Miner, "The alley girls make their living on the fringes of respectability, but they are as much a part of Butte as the mines and the mountains." That statement, stripped of sentiment, points to a hard truth about this city and its history: the miners and the ladies who served them formed a complex economy, born of necessity, greed, and survival. The fortunes dug from the earth were spent as quickly as they were made, and the women of Pleasant Alley and the Copper Block were there to take their share.

See also

• Pleasant Alley and the Copper Block at Butte, Silver Bow County
• Butte at Butte, Silver Bow County
• Butte Mining Through the Years at Butte, Silver Bow County