It’s not called the oldest profession for nothing. The sex workers in Boise’s history were powerful women and original members of the community interacting and shopping and living among everyone else. They gave back to society and their neighbors and stood up for themselves and each other, according to many newspaper articles and personal interviews of the time. They were tough and fair and knew how to drink and wield a pistol. They were entrepreneurs and savvy business people and landlords and leaders. And tied up in all of it are stories of women’s rights, prohibition, LGBTQ history, the story of the Wild West, legal history and so much more.
I honestly don’t even know where to start sharing these stories because head and my heart are just so full with so many amazing things about sex worker history in Idaho and I’m trying to gather and organize it and figure out how to share it. Not only to I want to tell you the stories of some of the most intriguing women in Boise’s sex worker history, I want to also share with you some of the amazing women who have researched and written about them already and whose work has become invaluable to me. And, speaking of that, I’m going to share with you a bit about HOW you do historic research along the way.
Starting with Cora Gaskell, whose story you heard me tell in the video above. I was fascinated to read about her being appointed as a special policewoman on the Boise Police Department force in 1917 specifically to help keep girls from being anywhere near “immoral women,” which was another name for prostitutes (as they were called then).
It seems Cora was only on the police force one year, and I have to wonder why they removed her. I don’t know if it was because she was caught running a significant bootlegging operation out of her kitchen or if she hated the work of ratting out fellow badass babes or both? Or maybe they determined that a special officer just for this reason wasn’t working or wasn’t necessary? It was a time in Boise history when the local and national government were trying hard to eradicate sex work, and it wasn’t working. (It kept happening and keeps happening. It just gets pushed deeper underground the more we legislate and fight it.)
I hadn’t heard Cora’s story anywhere in my research yet until I read it in writer Janelle Scheffelmaier’s book Wicked Boise, which came out in 2022 and I found in the Boise Public Library about a month ago when I was doing preliminary research on Boise brothel history. It’s an absolutely fast and entertaining read with so many great interwoven stories of murders, moonshine, morality and some of Boise’s darkest moments. I’ve been devouring it while tanning topless in my backyard and, of course, I had to look Janelle up. She grew up in Northern Idaho and lived in Boise for many years (when she wrote this book) with her young daughter. I see she has a masters degree in history and also wrote a book about Butte, Montana, and the 1918 Influenza pandemic. I found her on Facebook, as I wanted to take her out for coffee and talk about all these things, but I see she recently married and moved to California. I did send her a private message, though, thanking her for her important work.
To learn more about Cora, I paid attention to Janelle’s little numbers at the end of her sentences about Cora, which indicates there are end notes at the back of the book. Sure enough, she cited her sources as the Idaho Statesman, our daily newspaper still today, and exact dates and articles about Cora’s scandal.
I use the Idaho Statesman online digital archives allllll the time, as it’s a great primary source (an original artifact or resource or data created during the time period under study) and newspapers back in the day were soooo descriptive. I mean, they’d give you all sorts of personal details about people, including their addresses and the names of their kids and the gruesome details of their death or arrest, and what the reporter actually thought about them as a person. (They don’t even include the cause of death in obituaries these days and I hate it. Big fan of the gossip rags of years past!) You can easily access the newspaper records via your library card and while the search tools can be a bit tricky to navigate as a newby once you’re inside, if you go into the library, a librarian will really help you navigate the online portal and give you good tips. Using my skills, I immediately found the newspaper articles Janelle cited in her notes.
But I’m jumping way ahead on the stories here. In a few weeks I’ll go back a bit with a story from the beginning days of Boise - 1863.
p.s. follow me on Instagram for more sneak peeks and behind the scenes of all the fun I’m having as a nerdy academic
