Book recommendation: “Selling Sex in the Silver Valley”

Back in 2017, Chuck traveled to Wallace, Idaho to tour the Oasis Bordello Museum, and visit with Dr. Heather Branstetter, author of “Selling Sex in the Silver Valley”, a book on sex workers in Wallace.

Watch the King's Guide interview with Heather on the King's Guide YouTube Channel here: King's Guide with Heather Branstetter.

An excerpt from an article on “Selling Sex in the Silver Valley” by Heather Branstetter:

"I thought all towns had whorehouses,” Kristi Gnaedinger told me in 2010 when I interviewed her for my book on the history of prostitution in the area. She grew up in the small silver mining community of Wallace, where her father was one of the doctors who examined the women who worked in the houses. Gnaedinger herself worked as a maid in a brothel called the U&I Rooms during the mid-1970s. “I didn’t know [Wallace] was different until I got to be a teenager. I just thought that was the way it was,” she told me. 

Located in northern Idaho along Interstate 90 midway between Missoula, Montana, and Spokane, Washington, the Silver Valley once produced more silver than anywhere on earth, but as of this writing, only two mines remain in production. Tourists who are curious about the long-lived sex industry can tour one of the town’s historic brothels at the Oasis Bordello Museum. This journey into the not-so-distant past begins at the base of a long, narrow staircase, winds past an old jukebox where men paid for drinks to sneak around liquor licenses, continues down a narrow hallway and enables a peek into tiny rooms preserved since the last women to work there abandoned the establishment in early 1988. As the story goes, several women who used to work in the Oasis have even returned to take the tour themselves, pausing to grab cash hidden beneath the base of a statue on the bedside stand."