Read your favourite ebook here.
Women of the West: Prostitutes and Madams
Emma R. Marek
Introduction
America has never been, as a nation, stationary. The settlement of the American West in
the 19th century was inevitable with American belief in “Manifest Destiny” and past patterns of
movement and expansion. In the 1890s, as concluded by Frederick Jackson Turner, “for nearly
three centuries the dominant fact in American life has been expansion.”1 This inherent American
drive for expansion led the way for the settlement of the west and new possession of California,
Texas, New Mexico, and the Oregon Country under President Polk gave the means. The
attraction of the American West lay in its enterprise that seemed to be bursting naturally from its
seams. The discovery of gold in California only served to validate that wealth could be extracted
from the rich, beautiful land. The western industries that functioned for this purpose
consequently brought overwhelmingly male populations of settlers, as workers were needed to
complete laborious and strenuous physical tasks. Lumbering, mining, freighting, and cattledriving
were the main industries.