Lethbridge's Red Lights, Part 3

"The first Lethbridge brothels were the teepees the Indians pitched on the Belly River Flats 300 feet below the flatland on which the city itself was eventually located.  However, as the Galt mansion and the rather elaborate houses of the mine manager and the foremen were also built on the flats, the Mounties tended to run the Indians off into adjacent coulees and away from the settlement.  The first permanent brothels were built in the coulees on the west side of the river by women who came in from Medicine Hat and Great Falls with the railway.  As employment in the mines expanded, Lethbridge, except for the prostitutes, grew almost as a town without women.  While a few of the European miners brought wives and children with them, most of the first settlers were single.  The result, according to legend, was that the river-bottom brothels did a roaring business until the coal company began opening up its pits on the area above the river valley...When the coal company built a huge bunkhouse on the flats above the river to serve its single miners, the other miners gradually moved into lodgings close to the upper pit heads.  As their clients moved away, the madams also moved to the top of the hill and established an enclave of brothels on a triangular spit of land on the extreme west side of the settlement.  It was flanked on the north by a huge coulee that extended from the river clear up to the back door of the Lethbridge Hotel on Round Street, which later became 5th Street South.  On the south another deep coulee extended from the river almost to 4th Street.  The widest point pf this triangle was at 2nd Street between 3rd and 4th avenues...By 1890 there were six brothels and the coal company dormitory within the triangle which was famous throughout southern Alberta as "The Point".

Lethbridge's Red Lights, Part 2

"As a long-retired cow hand recalled it: 'When I was a boy growing up in Lethbridge, this was the cattle shipping point for the last great open range that extended from Macleod to Maple Creek.  The spring round-ups would extend for hundreds of miles.  When the round-up was over the cowboys would be paid off and they went looking for entertainment with pockets full of money.  Cow hands are not like miners.  If you have ever been in a mining town on pay day you've seen miners rushing for the whorehouses like an army on the attack.  You could often see them lined up outside the front door waiting their turns and they'd be in and out of the joint in a matter of minutes.  The cowboys were different.  After weeks or months of nothing but cows, horses and other riders for company, they wanted to enjoy the pleasure of female companionship, to sit and relax and have a drink and listen to talk.  Most of all they wanted to take their time doing everything, to string out the enjoyment of whatever they were doing.  Because they were never tight with their money the cow hands were given special treatment, and the Lethbridge places that catered to them seemed to be able to attract higher class girls than those at Macleod, or in the Crowsnest Pass, for example." (from Red Lights on the Prairies by James H. Gray)

Lethbridge's Red Lights

     "Isolated as Lethbridge and Drumheller were in remote corners of the Alberta boondocks, it was inevitable that their brothels would develop lifestyles of their own, in legend if not in fact.  What other community, for example, could claim that its gaggle of whorehouses doubled as cultural centres, as Lethbridge's did during the expiring years of Victoria's reign?  There, after savouring the primary pleasures of the joints, a young cow hand ... could relax with a good book and, if necessary, be taught to read by a former schoolteacher turned prostitute.  Or he could lean back and enjoy a piano solo by one of the talented bawds, or learn the latest dance steps from a new girl from Wichita via Great Falls, Montana.  He might even be instructed in how to spot a crooked card dealer in a poker game, by a girl who had been a faro dealer in Fort Benton.  And after a cowboy had blown what was left of his wad in a Round [5th] Street gambling joint he might seek shelter from the weather in a bagnio on "The Point" and not be turned away."  (from Red Lights on the Prairies by James H. Gray)