Ladies of the Lamplight

Ladies of the Lamplight collects short stories of the women of Colorado's mining era who made their living outside the accepted rules. Kay Reynolds Blair writes about dance-hall girls, prostitutes and madams, along with a few women who turned to gambling, robbery and rustling.

The description opens with the bind these women faced. Respectable society in nineteenth century Colorado gave women little room to support themselves, and a woman who strayed from the norm could find herself an outcast, pushed toward the bars and brothels of the West. The book follows what happened next for some of the best known of them.

The names promised include Silver Heels, Poker Alice, Cattle Kate, Etta Place, Mattie Silks and Mollie May. This is a revised edition, expanded to take in more women than the earlier printing. A bookseller's listing of the 2000 edition adds Red Stockings, Pearl DeVere, Madame Vestal and Baby Doe Tabor to the roll, and notes illustrations, an index and a bibliography.

Ladies of the Lamplight is for readers of Colorado mining history who want the women's side of it, and for anyone drawn to the outlaw West through its people rather than its battles. It is a collection of short life stories, so you can dip in for one name or read straight through. Libraries and local historical collections will find an index and a bibliography in the edition a bookseller describes. It is nonfiction biography, not a novel.

Kay Reynolds Blair is the author, and this is her only book in our catalogue. A bookseller's listing and our own record show her as the writer of this revised edition. We could not find a biography of her that we could read, so we say nothing about her life. Her author page carries what the record supports.

More about Kay Reynolds Blair →

Two of the women the book names have well documented lives. Poker Alice was born Alice Ivers, and Wikipedia's account says her family moved to Leadville, Colorado, when she was a young woman. There she married Frank Duffield, a mining engineer who played poker in his spare time. He was killed in a mine accident while resetting a dynamite charge.

After his death she started to play poker seriously, in a tough financial position and after failing at a few other jobs, including teaching. She worked as a gambler and a dealer, and the nickname Poker Alice followed her wins.

Mattie Silks worked on the other side of the cards. According to the same encyclopedia, she became one of the best-known madams in the West, with brothels in Dodge City, Georgetown and Denver. She moved to Denver around 1876 or 1877 and bought her first brothel on Holladay Street. In August 1877 she took part in a famous duel with another madam, Katie Fulton, the first recorded duel between two women in Denver.

Source: Wikipedia, Mattie Silks