Columbus, New Mexico's soiled doves - By James Hurst

Columbus, New Mexico's soiled doves - By James Hurst

From the Ringo Kid's girlfriend Claire in Stagecoach, through Miss Kitty in television's Gunsmoke, to the waif-like Diane Lane in Lonesome Dove the prostitute has been among the more enduring images of the literary and cinematic West. She was called "soiled dove", "shady lady", "fallen woman,” "lost sister", "saloon belle", and a host of other appellations. She was quite simply the ubiquitous whore, and her portrait has been painted on many different canvases and in a generous and imaginative assortment of colors.

She was the fallen woman with a heart of gold, selfless to a fault and ready at a moment's notice to do good for those in need. She was the woman with a heart of ice, ready to deceive, cheat, steal and murder for her lover, her husband or her pimp (often one and the same). She was the innocent waif forced into a degraded life by circumstances beyond her control and ultimately rescued from her degradation by a passing cowboy, lawman, miner, or prospector who fell in love with her and selflessly ignored her past.

She was the successful madam who ran a string of whores in a magnificent Victorian mansion on the edge of town and catered to the community's well-to-do and "respectable" men. Or, conversely, she put her "girls" in a wagon and dragged them from mining camp to mining camp and often became wealthy in the bargain. She was, though not too often, a woman who found a vocation she liked and pursued it with gusto, enjoying both the hours and the remuneration. She was, in point of fact, what our mixture of fact and fantasy made of her. She was an almost perfect blend of myth, legend and history.

As the nineteenth century waned and the frontier passed, prostitution came under closer scrutiny from reform-minded individuals and institutions. In 1913 the American Federation for Sex Hygiene and the National Vigilance Association merged to form the American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA), a blend of reformers and regulationists (the noun "activism" entered the English language shortly thereafter, in 1915). The essential division within the new organization was between the abolitionists who demanded eradication of what they considered to be a great social evil and the sanitarians who wanted to regulate the health of prostitutes in order to curb the spread of venereal disease.

The arguments within ASHA over prostitution soon made their way into the discourse of the general public, and on the eve of World War I the United States Army was faced with the question of what to do about the presence of prostitutes near Army installations. Officers within the Army itself were divided over the issue. Some insisted that hard work and regular exercise would curb the sexual appetites of the soldiers; others believed that men needed access to women if high morale was to be achieved and maintained. In the pre-World War I military action along the Mexican border triggered by Francisco Villa's 1916 raid on Columbus, New Mexico, General John "Black Jack" Pershing came down on the side of regulation.

In Columbus, Pershing decided to permit regulated prostitution near Camp Furlong as long as the Army and representatives of the town cooperated to control the business. Troop morale and curbing the spread of VD were paramount in Pershing's view, and by the end of July 1916 a district of several blocks had been established. The district was strictly segregated into white and black sections, and alcohol and firearms were forbidden. Existing whorehouses outside the district were closed, and owners were required to relocate within the district or get out of town. Prostitutes were to be inspected by civilian doctors, and those who were infected were forced to leave.

The mayor of Columbus, T.H. Dabney, (who was also a doctor) worked with a member of the Army Medical Corps to inspect the women once a week. The inspection fee of two dollars was split evenly between Dabney and the corpsman, providing a weekly income of about fifty dollars for each of the two men (a not insignificant sum in those days). The VD rate fell, but occasionally spiked when infected women freelanced in the local saloons before being discovered and expelled. Infected men coming from the countryside were another problem, and in time the base commander decided that infected men were to be treated the same as infected women: they were run out of town by the city marshal.

The women worked either in a house or in a "crib" next to or near a house. In a house each girl greeted her customer in a parlor or "sitting room", and had either her own room or a shared room in which to entertain her clients. A crib was simply a hut, a shack or a lean-to providing a bit of shelter and privacy. Furniture in the crib was kept to a minimum: a cot, a straw-filled mat or a bedroll was the basic necessity along with a chair and a table to hold a lamp or candle. From detailed Army records we have a rather clear and certainly interesting picture of the "soiled doves" of Columbus. There were fifty recorded prostitutes, thirty-seven white and thirteen black, working in eight houses and a number of assorted cribs. The girls almost always went under a "sporting name" ("Mickey Doyle", "Dixie Lee", "Lovie Brown", "Bobbie White", "Babe Mularkey"), but willingly gave army inspectors their real names and backgrounds. Some had been "in the trade" or "on the line" for years before coming to Columbus, and others asserted that Columbus was their first experience with prostitution.

The most entrepreneurial of the housekeepers was Myrtle Mitchell. Myrtle, who claimed she was no longer on the line, ran six cribs and a house she leased from Jessie Van Cleave. Jessie had recently arrived from Tucumcari, New Mexico where she had worked as a waitress at the Glenrock Cafe and invested her savings in the house. She was described in the army records as "a large woman 5 ft. 6 in; 178 lbs; 30 years old; fat mushy face; fair complexion [sic] light brown hair; married to a soldier but quit him about 4 years ago, has a boy by first husband who died." In addition to Myrtle and Jessie, the house was staffed by Katie Stone, AKA Katie Paterson and Jewell Woods, AKA Ruby Russell.

Nell Bowers, who claimed she was never a sporting woman before coming to Columbus from El Paso, ran a house with ten girls. The youngest, Anne Shelton, was twenty-two and had seven years "sporting". She came to Columbus with her soldier husband who had married her out of a house in Galveston and continued "sporting" while living with him. The oldest, Nellie McCamant AKA Bessie, was thirty-five, and "was on line formerly for about 4 years, but married and quit the business, though she did some hustling while she was married, with knowledge of husband." The others were in their twenties, and if the Army reports are correct they were experienced in the trade.

In what the Army called the "Negro District", Mamie Williams managed a house with twelve prostitutes who ranged in age from twenty-two to thirty-two. In contrast to the white prostitutes, the black women apparently used no sporting names (if the Army records are correct). Only one, Audrey Taussig, claimed to have had no time in the sporting trade prior to coming to Columbus. Audrey's husband was with Pershing's troops in Mexico, and she decided that the "sporting life" was the best way to earn a living while he was gone. Most of the girls came from Texas, and there was one each from Pocatello, Idaho, Cincinnati, Ohio and New Orleans, Louisiana.

Even when controlled as it was in Columbus, the presence of prostitution presented a number of problems, not the least of which was the widespread use of alcohol and other drugs. The Army's concern with prostitution was disease, which if not controlled could seriously hamper military efficiency. Liquor, on the other had, had the potential to create an environment unfavorable to good discipline. In the War Department's Annual Report, 1916, the Surgeon General stated that "Alcohol and military efficiency have nothing in common." With that thought in mind the Army first persuaded the Trustees of Columbus to limit the sale of alcohol to "near beer", and then persuaded the village authorities to endorse a policy of total prohibition.

Prohibition in turn gave rise to illicit distillation and smuggling, and the Army and civil authorities were hard-pressed to control the problem. The border was patrolled and vehicles and trains were searched, but alcohol and drugs (opium and cocaine for the most part) still found their way to the whorehouses and cribs. The prostitutes found that alcohol enlivened their often-dreary lives and drugs made having sex with any man off the street bearable. Despite all the efforts of the Army and civil authority, prostitution, alcohol, and drugs formed a triad that was for all practical purposes unbreakable.

Prostitution for troops stationed in Columbus and for those encamped in Mexico was, in Pershing's view, a necessary service in order to maintain an acceptable level of good morale. The great enemy of military discipline and morale is idleness among the troops, and it was the idleness of both garrison life along the border and encampment in Mexico that led men into alcohol and drug abuse. Prostitution as regulated in Columbus and in the encampments of the Punitive Expedition in Mexico provided no great challenge to the order and discipline so necessary to military units. Alcohol and drugs, however, continued to be a problem, as they both proved difficult to control.

With the return of the Punitive Expedition from Mexico in 1917 and the departure of National Guard troops as they were released from active duty, Columbus returned to a semblance of the normalcy it had enjoyed prior to Villa's raid. Today it attracts snowbirds in the winter and tourists throughout the year, and the days of the Soiled Doves are gone. All that remains are the records in Army archives, the reminiscences of antiquarians, and the narratives of historians.