Entry tags:
book review of sorts
My current reading material is a book called Red Lights on The Prairies. I picked it up - along with it's companion book, Booze - when I was in Moose Jaw, SK.
It's all factual material, which makes it all the more hilarious. The history classes one gets in school all give one the impression that the immigrants who settled our country were all sober industrious Christian types. Well, most of the railway was laid by single men in their 20s. Christian maybe. Industrious definitely. Sober, well about as much as modern single men in their 20s.
The result was the Wild Wild West. Most western towns in the early 1900s featured downtown areas where women, children and "respectable" men couldn't walk the streets on weekends due to the constant fighting and carousing. Prostitution on the prairies was ubiquitous and mostly tolerated.
There is one passage in the book that had me howling on the bus in the morning. The author reprinted a newspaper report from the Calgary Herald from June 1907.
Pure. Gold.
It's all factual material, which makes it all the more hilarious. The history classes one gets in school all give one the impression that the immigrants who settled our country were all sober industrious Christian types. Well, most of the railway was laid by single men in their 20s. Christian maybe. Industrious definitely. Sober, well about as much as modern single men in their 20s.
The result was the Wild Wild West. Most western towns in the early 1900s featured downtown areas where women, children and "respectable" men couldn't walk the streets on weekends due to the constant fighting and carousing. Prostitution on the prairies was ubiquitous and mostly tolerated.
There is one passage in the book that had me howling on the bus in the morning. The author reprinted a newspaper report from the Calgary Herald from June 1907.
Hattie Rodgers and Maud Copeland, two languid ladies of the red glim variety were fined $25 and costs for keeping a disreputable house. Four ladyettes, Eva Hall, Blanche Palmer, Martha Saunders and C. Thomas paid $15. They were unable to appear themselves because the hour of 10:30 was very, very early and they were very, very tired. So they sent Lawyer Ballachey to plead guilty for them.
Pure. Gold.