Wisconsin magazine of history: Volume 81, number 1, autumn, 1997

              "This Naughty, Naughty City":
Prostitution in Eau Claire
from the Frontier to the Progressive Era^
By Bonnie Ripp-Shucha
IN her own day, during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Ollie O'Dell was described in a newspaper article as "a little woman with an immense quantity of rouge, musk, and flashy jewelry on her person, also a red sailor hat tilted to the don't-care- a-damn angle on her head . . . ."^ Ollie was not the kind of person who ordinarily makes it into the history books. She was a prostitute, and past historians would not have deemed her worthy of study.
But times and historiography have changed. The history of sexuality has gained respectability in recent years, per¬ haps because sexuality is now widely ac¬ knowledged as being shaped not only by nature but also by culture. Historians have come to realize that women did not enter prostitution simply because they were nat¬ urally depraved, but because society of¬ fered prostitutes few attractive alternatives.
' The title's qtiote is from the Eau Claire Weekly Free Press, April 1, 1878, cited in Orry C. Walz, Eau Claire, Wisconsin, 1850-1880: A Case Study in Commu¬ nity Organization and Social Deviance, Research Notes (Eau Claire, Wisconsin, privately printed, 1986).
2 Eau Claire Daily Leader, October 19, 1877, col¬ lected in Dale Peterson, "Research Notes on Prosti¬ tution in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, 1864-1900," in the manuscript collections of the Chippewa Valley Mu¬ seum, Eati Cjlaire.
With this new emphasis on cultural influ¬ ence, the study of prostitution and sexual¬ ity falls within the legitimate purview of so¬ cial history. Windows are being opened, and light shed, on a shadowy corner of American history. One such glimmer of light may be discerned by investigating the city of Eau Claire, which was organized in 1856 from a cluster of villages at the con¬ fluence of the Chippewa and Eau Claire rivers in west-central Wisconsin.
The site was attractive to settlers and en¬ trepreneurs, lying as it did in close proxim¬ ity to a seemingly inexhaustible supply of timber and a ready means of transporting it to mill and market By the 1860's, lum¬ bering was firmly established as the foun¬ dation of the community's wealth and progress, and for more than a generation Eau Claire exemplified the heyday of mid- western lumbering. The industry ex¬ panded dramatically after the Civil War and dominated the regional economy until well into the 1880's. Five hundred men were employed in lumber camps on the Eau Claire River in 1867; by the 1880's, the number of loggers in the valley of the Chippewa had swelled to 7,000. In 1870, there were twenty-two lumber mills in the region, employing 1,200 men; some were so big that the companies built boarding-
copyright © 1997 by the State Histcirieal Society of Wi.scoiisin All riglits of reproduction in anv form reserved.
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