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Best Little Whorehouse in Ketchikan Buddy Mays
The Best Little Whorehouse in Ketchikan
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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
Arthur, (attaching her middle name to Arthur -- possibly for writer Arthur Conan Doyle). With money saved from a year-long stint at a local bordello, she had made a down payment on a cozy two-story house on Ketchikan’s infamous Creek Street, a quarter mile-long strip of dance halls and “cat houses” built on pilings along both banks of Ketchikan Creek in the middle of town. Creek Street was known throughout the region as the place “where men and salmon came upstream to spawn.” The women who worked there openly sold sex and booze and had no shortage of customers. Prohibition was in full swing, but no one paid much attention, and prostitution was legal in Alaska. The town roared day and night, packed to the gills with salmon fishermen, gold miners, and loggers, all with money in their pockets, a healthy thirst, and a need for female companionship.
Probably because of Dolly’s charm, good looks, and experience at what she did, her new establishment—which she named The House of Pleasure—quickly became one of the most popular businesses on Creek Street. Three minutes with Dolly cost $3, a sum equal to about three day’s wages for most local working men. To the sex-starved male population Ketchikan, however, price was no object. Dolly had so many customers and made so much money that she was able to pay off her mortgage of $800 in just two weeks.
According to old photographs and to those who knew her personally, Dolly was a large, handsome, heavily made-up woman who stood 5’10” or 5”11” and weighed 200 pounds plus on her more substantial days. She was well-liked by her neighbors and local townspeople and adored by most of the men who frequented her House of Pleasure on a regular basis. She always denied being a “whore”, describing herself instead as a “Sporting Lady”. She considered whores to be tasteless and crude, though she never made clear exactly how she determined who did, and did not, fall into that despicable category.
As the years went by Dolly’s fame and fortune grew, even though she was getting older and losing some of her good looks. Ketchikan’s red-light district along Creek Street flourished until the early 1950s, but even after it was finally shut down in 1954, Dolly remained in her house, still entertaining men in the parlor and possibly the bedroom (she claimed proudly that she turned her final trick at age 70). Finally, in 1973, she became so frail that she moved to a local nursing home, there to remain until her death in 1975 at age 87.
Today, Creek Street Historic Boardwalk is on the register of historic places and is one of Ketchikan’s principal visitor attractions. Dolly’s House, as it is now known, has become a locally owned museum and is almost exactly as she left it, filled with six decades of Sporting Lady memorabilia and visited by thousands of cruise ship tourists every summer.
