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Miss Otter...ENTERTAINMENT DIRECTOR
A saloon or dancehall girl’s job was to brighten the evenings of the many lonely men of the western towns. In the Old West, men usually outnumbered women by at least three to one – sometimes more, as was the case in California in1850, where 90% of the population was male. Starved for female companionship, the saloon girl would sing for the men, dance with them, and talk to them – inducing them to remain in the bar, buying drinks and patronizing the games.
Not all saloons employed saloon girls, such as in Dodge City’s north side of Front Street, which was the “respectable” side, where both saloon girls and gambling were barred and featured music and billiards as the chief amusements to accompany drinking.
Most saloon girls were refugees from farms or mills, lured by posters and handbills advertising high wages, easy work, and fine clothing. Many were widows or needy women of good morals, forced to earn a living in an era that offered few means for women to do so.
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Surprisingly, saloons and dance halls in the Old West offered a rather sophisticated variety of spirits, freighted in from back east and even from abroad. Fine Bourbons and French wines could be had in the bars of towns of almost any size — any place where a gambler or cowboy or drummer with some coin in his pockets might turn up. Ice was also freighted in so that the saloons could serve cold beer.
Men of the Old West might not have cared much what a bar looked like, but they wanted the finest liquor they could afford in their glasses.