The Wickedest Town in the West
Near Jerome, Arizona
Jerome had a reputation problem long before Prohibition made things interesting. The New York Sun, visiting in nineteen oh three, declared it the wickedest town in the West. The label stuck, and Jerome wore it with something approaching pride.
The numbers explain why. At its peak, the population was overwhelmingly male, mostly miners who worked brutal shifts underground and spent their wages on whatever entertainment the town could provide. Jerome supported a long row of saloons, along with an extensive red-light district where sex work was openly tolerated. Opium dens operated alongside gambling halls and dance halls.
When Prohibition arrived in nineteen twenty, it slowed almost nothing. Jerome's remote mountain location, reachable only by switchback road, made it easy terrain for bootleggers. Illegal stills appeared in the surrounding hills, and the speakeasies that replaced the saloons operated with only minimal interference. The isolated geography that had always made Jerome a challenging place to supply also made it a difficult place to police.
The mining companies, which tolerated much of the vice, were less interested in reforming their workers' habits than in keeping them from leaving for easier places to live. Vice was, in a grim economic sense, a retention strategy. Jerome kept its wickedest-town reputation well into the nineteen thirties.
