Molly B Dam: A Review

Written by Gail Powell

As I was visiting the Cour D'Alene area of Idaho this past summer, I made the acquaintance of a little town there named Wallace. At the general store/city museum, I discovered the story of a prostitute with a heart of gold named Molly B Dam, or Maggie Hall.

This wonderful woman of ill repute was considered the Florence Nightingale of her town. She never turned away a person in need of help. This brought home to me how judgmental people can be over others-when the ultimate judge is always God.

Soiled Doves

I discovered Molly's story in the book Soiled Doves: Prostitution in the Early West, which I found at the Idaho museum where her brothel bed and fine furniture were featured as part of the story of the little town. Wallace's cemetery is also the home to her simple gravesite, which has on her gravestone her original name of Maggie Hall.

In Soiled Doves, Anne Seagraves examines prostitution from a historical western perspective. In other words, as the West was being built and big gold and silver strikes occurred, women naturally gravitated to the area to perform their "services."  Lacking skills that they otherwise might use in the big city, these "soiled doves" turned to the sex trade for lack of better opportunities.

But also it must be noted that these women, as looked down upon as they were, also enjoyed a certain amount of freedom. For in this time, women were conscripted to mostly a subservient role to the male figures in their lives. Here in the Old West, a lot of the more well-off prostitutes actually had their choice of lovers and grew quite rich. Eventually, some of these women amasses enough money and property to buy and run their own brothels or hurdy-gurdy clubs. Quite a few became town leaders and opened up churches, hospital, and schools.

Devoted to Help

I was overcome with emotion when I paid a visit to Molly's burial plot and found growing nearby a beautiful patch of dandelion flowers in yellow bloom. I thought that it was so apropos to pick these "weeds" which are actually beautiful, nutritious flowers of nature, and place them there with a heartfelt prayer of thanks to her spirit of devotion and her proving that God makes many different kinds of women, but it's your heart and your inner beauty that counts in the long run. Who are we to judge what she did for a living?

The JC's Girls of the Rock Church are certainly not the only group out there trying to reclaim lives lost to lust and depravity. Prostitution and its various offshoots such as strip-teasing, escort services, and massage parlors, have been around forever. It's not for nothing that this "service" is termed "the oldest profession."

Thank goodness for devoted women who are there to step up and try to help these misguided workers of the flesh. God touches a female heart with compassion towards these other women and emboldens them to seek the flesh peddlers out for a special kind of ministry.