The Best Little Whorehouse in Ketchikan As the years went by Dolly’s fame and fortune grew . . . By Buddy Mays
When thirteen-year-old Thelma Dolly Copeland ran away from her rural home in the small mining community of McCall, Idaho in 1901, she probably had no inkling that one day she would be arguably the most famous, and most adored, prostitute in Alaska. Thelma probably ran away because she was being abused, but no one knows anything for sure except that her childhood was “unhappy.” From Idaho she went to Montana, working, when she could, at whatever low-end jobs were available for someone her age. Next came Seattle, Spokane, and then British Columbia, where
she waitressed in a Vancouver eatery. Thelma was not shy, and by the time she turned nineteen in Vancouver, she had discovered that she could make far more money from “the attention of men,” as she called it, than from waiting tables. Smart, pleasant to look at, and ambitious, Thelma just needed the right opportunity. She found it in Alaska. By 1919, Thelma was living in the rough and tumble fishing and mining town of Ketchikan, where men outnumbered women 100 to one. She was now 31 and had changed her name to Dolly
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