The DU Lounge

Wallace is an old-time mining community. The four biggest mines in the Silver Valley are the Lucky Friday, the Galena, the Sunshine and the Bunker Hill. Of the four, only the Bunker Hill Mine, which is in Kellogg, is not close enough to Wallace that you'd live in Wallace if you worked there. Lucky Friday is east of Wallace in Mullan, and the other two are west of Wallace. Before the Hunt Brothers tried cornering the silver market, Wallace was a busy place. (Wallace is also the reason the Idaho High School Activities Association banned high school sports recruiting in the public schools...the mine companies would scout other schools' athletic teams for quality players, and if they found one they'd make their family an offer they can't refuse - we'll buy your house at fair market value, sell you one in Wallace at a good price and give the father a job that pays twice what the one you now have (not out of line - Idaho mines have paid really well for a long time) if you enroll your children in the Wallace school system. Now it's only the religious schools that can do that.)

Where mining goes prostitution is soon to follow. The city tried to get rid of it a lot of times, only to see the houses turned into "rooms." You know, supposedly hotels but you couldn't stay there long. There were five of these businesses before Reagan became president, and one of the things he did that few talk about was send the US Marshals to Wallace to raid the houses.

The one that's now a museum was the Oasis Rooms. Apparently this was the house you wanted to work at because the proprietor paid really well (most houses did a 50-50 split between the woman and the proprietor; the Oasis gave 60 percent to the woman) and protected them against bad actors. When the Marshals kicked in the door, the women working there fled out the back door without any of their stuff. You go in there and, except for the perishables in the grocery sacks they abandoned, everything is just as it was the morning of the raid. All their clothes are where they were, their dressing tables are still laid out, anything you'd need if you were in that line of work is ready for you to get right back to it. In St. Maries we used to joke that their sports teams were so hard to beat because all the sex they got at the houses bulked the players up.