Hornswogglers, Fourflushers & Snake-Oil Salesmen (25 page)

“Have I ever asked you for anything? Hmm? Have I?” The man's thick-fingered hand lashed out as if it were held back by a spring-loaded mechanism. It struck the crying woman's puffed, bruised cheek high, his diamond ring gouged a furrow across her cheek, stopping just beneath her eye.

Her head whipped backward and she lost her balance, fell into a squat chest of drawers that caught her in the lower back. She spun around once and landed on her face on the floor at the man's feet. She lay there, stunned, sucking in stuttering breaths through split lips and a new bloody gap where minutes before there had been a tooth.

“I don't ever ask anything of any of you filthy cows, do I? No, and do you know why? Because you have nothing I want or need, at least nothing that can't be easily replaced. Why in hell don't you just up and die so I can work on getting my money's worth out of some other sow in my stable?”

“But . . . but Al, what did I do? You didn't tell me what I did?”

Swearengen swigged from a nearly empty bottle of Cutter's Rye on the bedside table. The fiery liquid stung his throat, the warmth spread in him. Maybe he should have knocked back a few swallows before letting the woman speak. Lord knows he shouldn't keep on belting them . . . bad for business.

He sighed. “Listen, Tina. . . .”

“I'm Tessa,” she said in a small voice, barley a squeaking whisper. He glanced at her, saw her eyelids flutter, her bleeding mouth go slack as she passed out.

He saw red, could only think of the wages this mouthy little hussy lost him the night before. He tamped down the anger, breathed deep once more. Had to hand it to the girl, she was tougher than most. Most of the girls in his employ wouldn't dare talk back to him. Some did, but he let them get away with it—to a point. They were the ones who still had a little something to offer him. The ones who hadn't let the opium or the morphine get to them . . . yet. But it would happen eventually. Always did.

This one, she still had spirit, even though she had no right to.

Three months later, Swearengen stood inside a dingy little room staring down at the dead woman, an empty laudanum bottle on the bed beside her. The drugs had leeched from her anything of promise she once had to offer. Which one was she? Tina? Yes, maybe that was it. Close enough, he thought. Not like it matters now. He looked at her face again, thought he could see what she had been.

A soft knock on the door pulled him back to the present. Here we go, he thought. Time for the waterworks.

Two girls filed in, hesitantly. Others hovered outside the open door, peering in through dark-ringed eyes.

“What was her name?” whispered a new girl.

“Tina,” said Swearengen, turning from the room.

Beatrice, the girl with the least to lose, said, “Tessa. Her name was Tessa.”

Swearengen stopped in the doorway, felt that fire tighten his neck muscles, bunch his cheeks. Through gritted teeth he said, “Tina. And that's final.” He headed downstairs to the bar for a drink. He'd rather listen to the foolish blather of his barkeeps and the miners who did more drinking than digging. At least they weren't women.

As he stomped down the last few steps, he tugged on his braces and finished buttoning his fly. He paused on the last landing, surveyed the smoky, dark room below. What light shafted in through the few front windows floated with dust motes.

His heavy-lidded gaze came to rest on a tall, thin figure in a high-crown fawn hat standing at the bar, one elbow propped on the stained surface, a small coffee cup tweezered between two fingers. The cup was halfway to the man's mouth when he spied Swearengen looking at him.

“Why, good morning to you, Al,” said the tall man, smiling.

Swearengen groaned audibly. He continued his way down the steps. “Bullock. I might've known only someone as depressingly happy as you would show up on a morning like this. What's a marshal doing here this time of day? Too early for complaints of bar fights.”

The lawman lost his smile. “I've heard tell another of your girls has passed over to the other side, as they say.”

“Not that anything that happens here is any of your business, but what's it to you if nature claims back her own now and again, Bullock?”

“I take it from your response that it's true. And I haven't got a thing against nature's ways—if they are caused naturally, that is. What I do have a problem with is the fact that so many of your . . . employees seem to be women of a poorly constitution. They don't start out that way, mind you. But most of 'em end up poorly not long after they arrive, and that's something you can't much argue.”

Swearengen rapped knuckles on the bar, stood ten feet down the bar from Bullock. “Pete, give me a cup of coffee. Don't bother freshening the marshal's here. He was just leaving.”

“You're right on that score, Swearengen. Tell me, what was her name?”

The proprietor of the Gem Variety Theater sipped his coffee, stared at himself in the mirror-backed bar. “I don't recall.”

Al Swearengen was a rascal of the highest order and a man deserving little more than scorn. As seen through the long lens of historical observation, the rapacious rapscallion, the thieving brute, the lying huckster epitomized the worst traits of the frontier opportunist. He chose pimp as one of several means of moneymaking, capitalizing on the misfortunes of others. While prostitution was a perfectly legal way to make money back in the Old West, the manner in which he procured his employees was not only illegal but immoral.

Swearengen knew the real money in such an establishment as the Gem Variety Theater came in the form of whiskey, gambling, and women. And not in that order. So he devised elaborate and alluring fantasies, promising young girls back East that they would become famous performers. They would practice their craft, he told them, on the stage of a famous theater in the heart of one of the most promising and bustling burgs in all of the frontier. And at its prime the Gem truly was an impressive establishment—twice rebuilt following fires, the last time in 1879, it lasted for the next twenty years as a three-story theater, gambling den, bordello, drinking and dining establishment, and more.

But to fill out his “stable of girls,” Swearengen intentionally duped dewy-eyed young women, lied to them, lured them to his domain under false pretenses, then made their lives hell. He forced them into indebtedness and servitude, and worst of all, he plied them with addictive drugs that sapped them of their strength, their health, and, when they were little more than diseased wastrels, their lives. If they displeased him, Swearengen and his thugs beat the women, sometimes to death, then covered up the crimes.

But evil, as the old saying goes, will out. And in Swearengen's case, this Deadwood pioneer ended his days himself the victim of a murder. He was found dead, having been clubbed in the head, on a Denver street on November 15, 1904. (A popular but erroneous account of his death has him missing his mark as he tried to hop a freight train.)

Another similarly slimy character who seemed to have studied the Swearengen playbook was Charles “Big Time Charlie” Allen, who breezed into Denver in 1916 and commenced operation of the biggest prostitution ring in the city's history. Big Time Charlie was a larger-than-life character who liked to hear himself talk, and puffed up his past with tales of big strikes in Alaska and battles alongside Pancho Villa way down in old Mexico.

If you were a woman in his employ, however, life was anything but a funfilled adventure. Charlie got his painted ladies, who numbered in the hundreds, addicted to opium and heroin, then kept them in his employ by taking all their wages and paying them in dope. This tactic made him a millionaire, and the kickbacks and hush money he paid to city officials kept the shady business running for years.

But greed got Charlie in the end. The prostitution biz wasn't enough for Big Time, so he began selling drugs to the citizenry. Raids followed, his various businesses were closed down, and Big Time Charlie Allen headed to Leavenworth for five years to think up new lies and schemes.

In the gold rush days of the Old West, venues of accommodation were often rather funky affairs, more suitable digs for the high numbers of rats that lived in them than the miners themselves. They could be built of brick, timber, or stone, but more often than not they were hastily erected affairs of canvas, sometimes with dirt floors, and occasionally they were caves dug out of crumbling hillsides.

Such temporary abodes also became home to spiders, scorpions, lizards, and snakes, and these uninvited interlopers could be surly at times about who they shared their newfound spot with. Stories abound of miners being bitten by such critters, though there were far more reports of hardworking rock hounds becoming infested with lice, chiggers, and fleas when they bedded down in frontier hotels.

But such critters were hardly the sort to operate out of any malicious intent. Not so with the numerous nefarious hoteliers who set up shop either with the intent to roll their boozy guests or who developed a taste for such lowdown thievery as opportunities presented themselves.

There were numerous ways conniving innkeepers hustled their customers: cramming them into large rooms with nothing but chalk outlines on the floor delineating one's rented sleeping space, and bunk beds many layers tall that allowed for little room between berths. Those men lucky enough to garner the top spot in such flimsily constructed affairs were able to avoid the showers of chaw spittle that rained down on their lower-level fellows. The floors of such places ran thick with brown drool from the tobacco habits of scores of rough, unwashed, drunken men crowded, spitting, and getting little sleep in such tight quarters.

Consider the person of one Clifton Hotchkiss, a man who took to the hotel trade late in life. He'd spent a good deal of his gravy years as a magician's assistant and had little luck as a prospector himself. As proprietor of a boarding house located near Sonora, New Mexico, he was finding that inn-keeping was not much more lucrative than grubbing in the desert for sign of gold. But he did have a cat for company. And rumor has it that during his days as a lackey for the circus magician, Hotchkiss learned a thing or two about hypnotic suggestion.

One day while looking into his cat's eyes and relating his various miseries to the only creature in the world who seemed willing to listen, Hotchkiss allegedly became mesmerized by the creature's mysterious, trance-inducing eyes. When he snapped out of his brief reverie, the buddings of a new business came to him.

He figured he could fall back on his old circus skills and induce hypnotic trances in his guests. Only those with the fattest pokes would be the lucky recipients of the squirrelly landlord's odd attentions. And it worked! He was able, over several years, to hypnotize a number of his lodgers and relieve them of their hard-won dust, nuggets, and various other valuables.

Eventually his beloved cat was eaten by a mountain lion, and not long after, Hotchkiss was thrown from a horse. Paralyzed and unable to care for himself, he spent what remained of his days as a patient in a San Francisco hospital.