Entrepreneurs set up shops and businesses to cater to the miners. The most famous were the houses of prostitution found in every mining camp worldwide. 

Prostitution was a growth industry attracting sex workers from around the globe to America, pulled in by the money, despite the harsh and dangerous working conditions and low prestige. 

Chinese women were frequently sold by their families and taken to the camps as prostitutes; they had to send their earnings back to the family in China. 

In Virginia City, Nevada, a prostitute, Julia Bulette, was one of the few who achieved “respectable” status. She nursed victims of an influenza epidemic; this gave her acceptance in the community and the support of the sheriff. 

The townspeople were shocked when she was murdered in 1867; they gave her a lavish funeral and speedily tried and hung her assailant. 

Until the 1890s, madams predominately ran the businesses, after which male pimps took over, and the treatment of the women generally declined. 

The openness of bordellos in western towns depicted in films was somewhat realistic, allowing for the factor of Hollywood starlets. Gambling and prostitution were central to life in these western towns, and only later―as the female population increased, reformers moved in, and other civilizing influences arrived―did prostitution become less blatant and less common. 

After a decade or so the mining towns attracted respectable women who ran boarding houses, organized church societies, worked as laundresses and seamstresses, and strove for independent status and a better lifestyle for women..

More article to read: