FlamingText

Molly B Dam Pt II

   It was the winter of 1884, and the gold-rush town of Murray, Idaho was already abuzz with talk of Molly Burdan before she had even set foot there. Travelers from Thompson Falls told of how they had been caught in a blizzard while crossing Thompson’s pass and a woman and her child had fallen behind the pack train. A seemingly well-to-do lady traveling alone had refused to leave them, sending the others on their way while she turned her horse around and went back to help the stragglers weather the storm. They’d spent the night up there and the speculation in town was that they'd probably frozen to death out on the trail, so when the three of them arrived the next day they were greeted by a cheering crowd.

   In that crowd of well-wishers and looky-lous was one Phil O’Rourke, who stepped forward and asked the striking newcomer her name. Whether it was a genuine misinterpretation of her Irish brogue or the result of his own native mischievous wit, O’Rourke heard “Molly Burdan” as “Molly B’Dam” and that was the name that stuck, just as the friendship between the two of them would throughout the rest of their lives. Of course, one reason that the name seemed so apropos to the residents of Murray was that no sooner had Molly arrived to find herself unanimously declared an Angel of Mercy for her heroic rescue of a helpless mother and child (and subsequent insistence on paying for their food and lodging) than she made her purpose in town clear by demanding to be shown to “Cabin Number One,” which in frontier parlance meant the whorehouse. She intended to be the madam at the finest brothel in Murray.

   Molly B’Dam was a woman of many such contradictions: Refined and educated, she could on occasion be heard quoting freely from Shakespeare and Milton, but she was far more widely known for her habit of entertaining paying customers by having them fill up a bathtub with coins before she disrobed and stepped into the tub, from which location she would regale the assembled crowd with ribald stories and salacious jokes for hours on end. A canny businesswoman who had learned the tricks of the high-end trade in the seven years that had passed since leaving her good-for-nothing husband in New York, Molly had set out for Murray from San Francisco after hearing of the gold strike there, reasoning like many other savvy entrepreneurs that the real money in any gold rush wasn't to be found in the ground but in the pockets of the miners who dug the gold out of the ground. She had no compunctions about charging the exorbitant prices commanded by the top-shelf fancy-houses, and yet unlike most of her contemporaries was known to treat her employees fairly and, it must be said, with a felicity bordering on the maternal. This impression was solidified by her attitude towards her clientele; For though she was more than willing to relieve a newly-flush miner of his last dollar for a single night of pleasure in Molly B’Dam’s, she had also been known to drop everything in order to take care of one of “her boys” who had fallen ill, and was reputed on more than one occasion to have hiked through winter snow just to bring soup to some poor unfortunate who had taken sick.

   But it was her actions in the face of a smallpox epidemic in 1886 that cemented her Angel of Mercy reputation, for while a frightened populace reacted by trying to shutter themselves indoors as far as possible from the afflicted, Molly B’Dam took the opposite tack in characteristic fashion, excoriating the townsfolk to show some backbone in the face of adversity and successfully rallying the town’s women to care for the sick.* Converting her place of business to an impromptu infirmary, she oversaw treatment and recovery efforts for the whole town, and by the time the epidemic had run its course her role as Murray’s patron saint was all but secure. Her heroism passed into the realm of history and legend two years later with her death from complications from tuberculosis.

*.

Here it was my intention to include a songfile of a song that I wrote in Miss B'Dam's honor for this show, but Movable Type won't let me do it and I'm currently locked out of Flamingbanjo.com, so I guess if you want to hear it, you'll have to come hear it live. I'll try to post an MP3 later. Damn technology!

Posted by flamingbanjo at August 28, 2006 07:59 AM