The Wickedest City

The Wickedest City. . , Buried beneath busy Interstate 90 in the valley below are the bones of what the Chicago Tribune in 1909 named “the wickedest city in America”., This “den of iniquity” sprouted up when the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad began building the 1.7-mile long St. Paul Pass (Taft) Tunnel. Between 1907 and 1909 the town consisted of twenty-seven saloons, two theaters/dance halls/saloons, a butcher shop, a general store, a drug store, a hospital, and a hotel. Railroad construction facilities scattered along the south side of the tracks, included a material yard, shops, offices, barns, warehouses and powerhouse. No one ever took an accurate census of the town, but one source said “Women of the underworld, gamblers, etc., flocked to the “mushroom” railroad town, and it was soon a place of about 1,000 inhabitants”., The town survived near riots, panics, floods, a fire in 1908 that destroyed half the businesses and the great 1910 fire which burned everything down except the tough old Taft Hotel. Sixty years later, bulldozers finally flattened it to make way for the new interstate., (sidebar) , “Prostitutes, popularly known as “canaries,” were a diverse collection. One named Dago Red, was famous for taking on thirty-eight Montenegrans one night, while another was a young woman who spent the summer in a Taft salon and the winter back east teaching school. Then, there was Pee Wee Jack, who weighed 250 pounds and had a parrot that she had taught to say, “Do you want to go to bed?” Montana Magazine