Ever since I saw Moulin Rouge I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. And at the same time I have been thinking about the Klondike Gold Rush too. And it turns out they were not all that different- they even had their heydeys at roughly the same time- the late 1890s.
Dawson City spawned an entire industry devoted to separating the hard-working gold-miners from their gold. And the easiest way of accomplishing this was through dancehalls, and the courtesans who worked there. You have probably heard of Diamond-tooth Gertie. How about the sisters Vaseline and Glycerine? There was even a girl named The Grizzly Bear, who was, in Pierre Berton's words, " a gargantuan woman who weighed one hundred and seventy pounds, [and] had an eye missing: it had been torn from her head, so it was whispered, in a fight with another dance-hall girl."
And despite (or perhaps because of) the inherent shadiness, the miners were only too happy to play along, and they even upheld a certain morality about the whole business. When the rigours and hardships of such a life caught up to a dancehall girl named Myrtle Brocee, and she tragically shot herself, her admirers all came to the defence of her honor: "The coroner's inquest into her death was marked by an odd gallantry: half a dozen men took the stand to testify that they had been sleeping with Miss Brocee, but each blandly swore under oath that, though he had shared her bed, she remained virtuous to the end. She had been living with Harry Woolrich, one of the most famous of the Klondike gamblers, and it was, indeed, in his room that she took her life, but Woolrich testified with a straight face that his bed companion was a virgin. The remarkable instance of mass chivalry . . . inspired the entire community, and when Myrtle Brocee , her honour preserved, went to her rest, it was in a coffin with silver-plated handles and a silken interior of blue and white, and with half of Dawson weeping quietly at the graveside."
(Once again, the source for these quotes is Pierre Berton's Klondike: the Last Great Gold Rush.)