Box houses provided drinks, theater and more private pursuits.
A “box house” of 19th-century frontier repute was not a house at all. Nor was it a place for pugilistic endeavors. The box house (aka “concert saloon” or “variety theater”) was a type of saloon compartmentalized into private boxes in which a patron could drink, gamble, watch the stage show or entertain one of the box rustlers, female employees who provided drinks as well as more intimate pleasures. In short, a man with money could thoroughly enjoy himself in a box house.
Saloons, of course, were big business in the Wild West. Box houses could provide even greater revenue for enterprising businessmen. Pushing booze and entertaining were a box rustler’s primary duties, but they also sold their favors. Most boxes were affixed with privacy curtains, while cots provided comfort and ease for horizontal activities, recalled Henry Broderick, a late-19th-century box-house patron from Seattle. Owners realized how good these good-time girls were for business and did not always seek a cut of their extracurricular wages.
In Skid Row, author Murray Morgan cited a Coast Magazine article that described box rustlers: “Women with dresses [reaching] nearly to the point above their knees, with stained and sweaty tights, with bare arms and necks uncovered over halfway to their waists, with blondined hair and some with powdered wigs, with faces roughed and powdered, eyebrows with winkers smutted up and blackened, there stood the female contingency at the doors and in the boxes.”
The owners of such joints did not advertise their establishments as “box houses” (a term that essentially described the interior layout), though it was implied a patron would find more inside than a mere variety show. The business thrived in districts known as “below the deadline” or the “tenderloin,” where men went to drink, gamble, fight and seek the friendship of fellow sporting types and the companionship of depraved women. The box house was a cornucopia of sin, a tapestry of iniquity.
Entertainment was an important aspect of frontier life, and theater could be legitimate or ribald and obscene. Box houses were unlikely to feature Shakespearean players or such stage luminaries as Lotta Crabtree. Their productions ran the gamut from outrageous to simply subpar dancing and singing. Occasionally one would host a decent band or troubadour. But many of the entertainers were struggling actors and denizens of the tenderloin, including the box rustlers themselves. Drunken fights periodically broke out between performers and patrons.
Among respectable citizens of a community, a box house was a seedy place they would never visit. Yet during their heyday—from the mid-1870s to about 1900—a few notable box houses could hardly be called dives. In fact, some were downright lavish. Deadwood, Dakota Territory, boasted two well-known box houses—the Gem and the Bella Union— while Tombstone, Arizona Territory, featured the popular Bird Cage and the Crystal Palace. Washington state also had its share of box houses, including the People’s, the Butte and the Comique in Spokane and the People’s and the Standard in Seattle.
The Gem opened in Deadwood in the summer of 1876, across the street and just east of Saloon No. 10, where Jack McCall fatally shot Wild Bill Hickok on August 2, 1876. Al Swearengen, who earned notoriety as a character on the HBO series Deadwood, owned the place. He launched it as a dance hall and saloon, but in April 1877 he expanded the business, offering nightly variety acts. The front room held the bar, chairs and tables, arrayed on a timber floor, while in back were small rooms in which the girls entertained. The building suffered fire damage in early summer 1879 and was destroyed that September by a blaze that ravaged about 300 structures in town. The Gem Variety Theatre reopened in December, attracting even more Deadwood miners. Swearengen hauled in an average $5,000 —though sometimes $10,000—a night in business. Another fire damaged the building in 1894, while an 1899 conflagration marked the final curtain call for the Gem.
Tom Miller opened the Bella Union Variety Theatre in Deadwood in September 1876, a few months after the Gem. An article in the Black Hills Pioneer that month said Miller’s place offered a show “of a vaudeville type, and in addition a little naughty.” Private boxes at the Bella Union were reportedly arranged so men and women could entertain themselves away from prying eyes.
The hall that would earn a sordid reputation as the Bird Cage Variety Theatre opened in Tombstone in December 1881, two months after the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. A saloon, gambling hall, theater and brothel, it was not a place for respectable women. In fact, the Bird Cage was closer to being a full-fledged soiled dove house than a mixed-entertainment box house. It closed its doors in 1889, reopening years later as a tourist attraction.
Tombstone’s Crystal Palace, formerly the Golden Eagle Brewery, most likely served as a box house in 1883. Across the street from the Oriental, where Wyatt Earp dealt faro, it provided private upstairs boxes with a door and curtains, behind which girls served liquor and more to patrons.
Up in Seattle in the late 19th century, box houses, bordellos and other places of ill repute occupied the tenderloin district south of Yesler Way. John Considine, self-styled “King of the Box House,” managed the People’s Theatre—first in Seattle, then in Spokane and finally back in Seattle —repeatedly dodging laws that sought to legislate morality. When prospectors struck gold in Alaska, Seattle became the jumping-off point for the goldfields, and Considine was back in the sin business.
Another notable figure in Seattle in the 1880s was actor-turned-manager John Cort. Early in the decade, he transformed the Standard Theatre into one of the city’s most popular box houses. Many a lonely lumberman, among countless others, patronized the Standard. In 1888 Cort built a new Standard, which provided 19 private boxes in the upper balcony. He leased the notorious old Standard to the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.
One of the primary legal methods of discouraging box-house prostitution was to threaten business closure unless the owner made certain alterations to the décor, such as removal of privacy curtains around the boxes—a surefire mood killer. The August 4, 1897, Spokane Daily Chronicle reported on a newly passed concert hall and variety theater ordinance that outlawed private boxes and the use of females except as stage performers. Further, the places must close at midnight. Lawmakers passed similar ordinances in Texas to curtail the activities of those variety theaters deemed “disorderly houses.”
Such laws pressured some box houses to offer higher brow entertainment, in turn attracting a classier clientele and enabling owners to charge higher admission. Sure enough, as box rustlers quit offering private sideshows, and actual variety and vaudeville acts or troupes took the stage, patrons became more discerning. A box-house owner had two choices if he wanted to stay in business—become a legitimate theater or a straight-forward saloon.
Originally published in the August 2009 issue of Wild West. To subscribe, click here.
