Mattie Silks and the Duel That Did Not Happen

This is where Mattie Silks ran her empire. She was born Martha, her birth surname recorded differently across sources, in eighteen forty six in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, and made her way west through the rough trade in Abilene, Dodge City, Springfield, and Georgetown before arriving in Denver in the mid eighteen seventies. She paid thirteen thousand dollars cash to a madam named Nellie French for the parlor house at five oh one Holladay, and ran it from eighteen seventy seven until eighteen ninety seven as the most successful house in the district, the Queen of Denver's Red Light.

She was small, about four feet ten, blonde, and she got the name Silks for the wardrobe she paraded through this neighborhood. Her weakness was a man named Cort Thomson, a foot race promoter she had met in Georgetown. He had abandoned a wife and daughter in Texas to follow her.

She wagered two thousand dollars on one of his races, won it, and married him on July sixth, eighteen eighty four, four days after his first wife died. She would later say in divorce court that she had given him forty five to fifty thousand dollars beyond living expenses, and that he had beaten her at least twice. She sued for divorce in March of eighteen ninety one.

They reconciled. He died in April of nineteen hundred. She chose to be buried beside him at Fairmount Cemetery when she died in nineteen twenty nine.

In eighteen ninety eight, when the Klondike gold rush hit Skagway, Alaska, Mattie went north to do business. She brought eight prostitutes with her. While she was there, she publicly accused Soapy Smith, the con man who controlled Skagway as he had once controlled Denver, of being responsible for the death of Ella Wilson, a Black prostitute who had worked in Skagway.

After Jennie Rogers died in nineteen oh nine, Mattie paid fourteen thousand dollars for the House of Mirrors at nineteen forty two Market and ran it until federal anti vice laws shut Denver's brothels down in nineteen fifteen. Now about that famous duel. The story goes that two madams in petticoats fired pistols at each other on an August night in eighteen seventy seven, with Cort Thomson standing in the middle and taking a bullet in the neck meant for the other woman.

It did not happen. The contemporary papers, the Denver Times and the Rocky Mountain News, both reported a drunken brawl at Denver Park. Cort punched the rival madam Katie Fulton in the face, broke her nose, and a pistol fell loose from his belt into the dirt.

No shots were fired between the women. The romance was invented by a journalist named Forbes Parkhill in the nineteen forties. The historian Clark Secrest publishes a correction every year.

Every year the Rocky Mountain News runs the legend again.