Soiled Doves: Prostitution in the Early West
- Nov 25, 2018
- 2 min read
Updated: Jun 11
★★★☆☆
This was another of the random books on the shelf at the Mountain View, Arkansas cabin we escaped to for Thanksgiving this year. I’d already set aside my current book, Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back) to read Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, and was intrigued enough by the title of this small volume to again put Jeff Tweedy’s new autobiography on the back burner.
I don’t know anything about Anne Seagraves, and the book’s jacket offers only that she lives in northern Idaho, that she’s working on her seventh book, and has previously authored, among others, High-Spirited Women of the West, Women Who Charmed the West, and Women of the Sierra going back to the mid-eighties. There is also a black-and-white photo of her, and she appears to be a grandmotherly woman. The book’s publisher, Wesanne Publications, is also located in Idaho, and because there is no cell service or internet at our cabin (precisely the point) I can’t know for certain, but I suspect these books are self-published.
That Soiled Doves is probably self-published is a pretty solid clue as to the quality to be expected within its pages. Seagraves isn’t a great writer, and the book would have benefited both from an editor, who could have helped shape what’s here into something more compelling, and a copyeditor, who would have made what is here more readable. What works in the book’s favor is its length (only 173 pages), ample photographs of the characters and places involved (many rare), and, of course, the subject matter itself, about which I knew little to nothing. The women—referred to throughout as fair but frail girls, ladies of easy virtue, ladies of the evening, ladies of the night, painted ladies, prostitutes, but, above all, soiled doves—are, of course, the heart of this book.
Covering the gamut, from high-profile madams and their lavish parlor houses to end-of-the-line hog ranches and, saddest of all, the Chinese slave girls, Seagraves tells their stories with a minimum of flourish, a welcome bent of affection, and nary a whiff of judgement. Think of Soiled Doves less a definitive text on its subject and as more an eager telling of an interesting story—the free taste the dealer gives you so you’ll come back hooked for more. And maybe that was Seagraves’s intent all along, to give readers just enough to wet their whistle. It worked for me, and will, no doubt, work for you, too.
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