Boomtown: How Music, Noise, and Vice Made the Mining West

Abstract

This dissertation advocates for an entirely new understanding of how sex work functioned in the mining West, one that places sound at the heart of sex workers’ struggles for power. My project uncovers how sex workers’ performances in 19th-century boomtowns were not just entertainment but acts of power that shaped legal, racial, and social orders in the American West. I argue that vice districts were sonic battlegrounds where music functioned dually as a tool of settler-colonial control and a mode of resistance. By foregrounding the cultural labor of sex workers, my project seeks to do two things: 1) challenge dominant narratives of Western history that sideline sex workers’ cultural contributions and 2) assert that the soundscapes of rural boomtowns were foundational to the construction of American identity. The archival record of sex workers’ musical practice, however, is scarce. Throughout my archival research, I analyze non-musical sources for sonic interruptions. From court records to business licenses to legislative proceedings, I identify moments of archival music and noisemaking that transgress expected boundaries in three mining towns across the West: Virginia City, NV (1864–77), Deadwood, Dakota Territory (1877–80), and Helena, MT (1880-1893). In Virginia City (Chapter 1), I examine how sex workers’ sonic disruptions, particularly those recorded as “disturbances of the peace” in criminal records, can be reinterpreted as acts of resilience and community-building. Following four sex workers, I show how race and gender shaped the ways Black, white, Chinese, and Mexican women’s musical practices were differently policed, ultimately focusing on how these four women used their “disorderly” sound as a tool to build interracial community amongst their profession. The city of Deadwood (Chapter 2) highlights how theaters aided in the transition of Deadwood from mining camp to boomtown. I argue that these venues functioned as contact zones: spaces where entertainment, violence, governance, and diplomacy were brought into sustained relation, shaping how settlers and Indigenous peoples encountered one another and how Deadwood’s residents came to imagine themselves as a public. In Helena (Chapter 3), my focus shifts to music as a legal device, demonstrating how noise ordinances and performance bans were used to sanitize urban space in the lead-up to Montana achieving statehood. Examining the responses of the proprietors of the London (a queer-run dance hall), the Bucket of Blood (one of Helena’s Black saloons), and the Coliseum (owned by the city’s wealthiest madam), I argue that vice-motivated sonic legislation was central to shaping Montana's transition to statehood.