Between 1903 and 1953 the city of Ketchikan, Alaska was virtually funded by prostitution. There were women who owned some twenty two houses in a small area on a estuary called Creek Street. The lore is that these women controlled their own business. They paid off the police and the city officials to be able to stay in business for themselves. Several of the women owned big houses with six to ten “employees” that sold sex, drugs and bootleg whiskey. They were said to have boyfriends and bouncers in their employ in order to keep the peace and act as security. Most of the small houses had one or two women who would sometimes have sex with strangers passing through: salesmen or sailors, or itinerant tramp loggers. But many of the women on the creek had a relatively small clientele of some twenty or so local professionals, doctors, lawyers and bankers who kept the women in work on a year round basis. Again the lore was that there were no pimps, perhaps to keep the story of their exploitation by men to a minimum. This was the romantic version of the sex trade that at least pretended to be of a feminist nature… women of limited means and a certain temperament, pulling themselves into the upper classes by trading in sex, booze and drugs. These proto capitalists women were said to be genuine multi ethnic, multiracial badassses.

The famous artist of Ketchikan has been researching the women of Creek Street for years and for almost as long he has been pestering me to write about them. Now he has enlisted a whole team. Our son Finn met us in Ketchikan last week to research this scene for a writing project we have been working on for more than a year, we spoke to people who knew the women and people who knew their customers and we toured the village that sheltered the whore houses of Ketchikan.

Ketchikan has always held its arms out wide to commerce of all kinds enthusiastically. Whether it was cutting trees, trapping fish, tourism or sex trade the cultural attitude has always been summed up by the expression, “Bring It On”. Sitka talks about limiting numbers of criuse ship passengers while K. Town says, “Bring it. No matter what we’ll handle it..”

What could have been the crib of an independent sole operator.

But the whores of Ketchikan today appear to be a sad and exploited lot. I’m sure there are top end whores in Ketchikan at any given time but I suspect they are flown in for special occasions. But today’s resident women who trade sex for money appear to me found in the homeless community of drug addicts. Recently the city took out all the benches in the downtown near the shelters in an aattempt to keep men and women vertical. Tweakers used to be the term for people who use methamphetamine but from my looking around, I suspect the desparately poor people of Ketchikan are users of the drugs classified under the term painkillers or downers: oxycontin, or heroin laced with fentanyl. This is the problem they have staying vertical. They are drugged and snoozy, crouched anywhere they can to stay out of the rain. Women will do anything to get another hit. This is not the romantic optimisim of the proto typical capitalist that has been immortalized on the historical placcards around the old red light district. We talked to someone who ran an old house of an independent whore who claimed in the fifty’s and sixties that she earned seven to ten thousand dollars a month in adjusted wages. Her house is open to the public on Creek Street during the summer cruise ship season. Dolly’s house is a monument to the garrish taste of the romantic sex worker.

The tweakers of today have no such luck. They suck dick only enough to feed their addiction. The old whores of Ketchikan are said to provide genuine comfort to the working men of the region. It was wet and cold when Finn and I visited Dolly’s House. The current owner had drained the pipes just the week before and the power was sketchy at best. The wet and cold of Ketchikan makes a financial opportunity just to get warm for the evening. Men brought Dolly felt pennants from their army base or their home city. Dolly herself was said to have enough vigor to promise young boys a good time when “they got old enough".

The old whores of Ketchikan are all gone now, they are only remembered by the decendents of their customers and what ever contemporanious statements they made in their old age. But what ever you may think of their oldest profession it should be said that their lives were primal. They sold much needed comforts no matter how you looked at it. But were they in the end victims of their own circumstances? I’m still not certain. But I’m sure their stories are worth uncovering.