By Anne Foster

Sometimes, local legends are actually true.  Proving it, however, can be quite another story.  Just like the childhood game of "Gossip," where a whispered sentence is slowly transformed from one end of the line to other, the original tale is slowly lost in the retelling.  The essence of the story is there, but it takes some creative thinking and a great deal of research to find the truth behind the legend.

One of Prescott's many tales concerns "Ladies' Night" on Whiskey Row.  Long before such a concept was a standard Thursday night promotion-even before "respectable" women ventured into saloons, it is whispered that Prescott's notorious Whiskey Row not only allowed women through the doors but actually encouraged them with a special night all their own.  Shocking!  But what can one expect from a saloon-filled, Wild West town? 
 

Except that the Wild West often wasn't.  At least, not to the extent that Hollywood would like us to believe.  And while Prescott certainly had a rough side, as the denizens of Granite Street would have attested, it was also appropriately proud of its "civilized" and "cultured" aspects.  After all hadn't Prescott been the Territorial capitol?  Didn't the Plaza also feature an opera house, a theatre, and many churches?  Weren't the ladies of the Monday Club organizing a library and purchasing artwork for the local schools? 
 

What then, I wondered when I first heard the tale, was "Ladies Night" all about?  Either Victorian women were much less prudish than we think, Whiskey Row was a whole lot more respectable, or the story was untrue.  As is often the case, the truth was somewhere in between. 
 

I first traced the story to Sharlot Hall Museum's Territorial Women's Memorial Rose Garden.  The Museum keeps several books of biographies of the women commemorated in the Garden, which is also on the Museum's website www.sharlothallmuseum.org.  Through sheer luck, while browsing through one of the books, I happened upon the biography of Virgie Hite Robbins.  Robbins, a long-time local schoolteacher, is noted as having failed her first teacher's test because of being up late the night before at Whiskey Row's ladies night. 
 

There it was in print! It must be true, right?  Well, not quite.  This short biography, written many years earlier, had been composed after Virgie's death.  There were neither sources listed nor any author.  Was the story a family tall tale or had the unknown author used primary documents? 
 

Fortunately, I had worked with the Rose Garden biographies enough to know that many of them were based on solid research in the Museum's Archives.  Not finding any diaries or memoirs written by Virgie in the manuscript collections, I turned to the Museum's special library.  After much reading, I found it!  Virgie's story, "A Teacher of 1906," had been featured in Volume 1 of Echoes of the Past: Tales of Old Yavapai, published by The Yavapai Cow Belles of Arizona in 1955.  This was where the current story started. 
 

Virgie recounted her memory: "Now it was most unfortunate that the time selected by Mr. Jolly for holding the teachers' examinations in that year of 1906, fell upon the day following the night of Open House!  Many of us, for whom nine o'clock p.m. was bedtime the year around-had hardly a wink of sleep; and those who were wakeful enough to concentrate were hardly able to dispel from their minds the glamorous and unusual experiences of the night before . . .   It is my recollection that no one passed and the examination had to be given over for the group of seven or more who returned for the second trial." 
 

"For one night each year," she explained, "the saloons on Whiskey Row held Open House, and all the gentlemen in the area were invited to bring the proper ladies of their household or acquaintance to be entertained."  The story goes on to say that "the proper ladies wearing masquerade costumes, or at least a mask, as neither housewife nor social leader wished to have her face seen in such a place-however much she might be urged by a desire to peek into forbidden places . . . [were] well chaperoned, of course, if unmarried, and, in any event, accompanied by a gentleman escort." 
 

So, it was not "Ladies Night" but an "Open House."  But this story was told in 1955, nearly fifty years after the fact.  How reliable was Virgie's memory after all this time? 
 

Nothing turned up in the indexes for "Open House," so I decided to follow up on the teacher's exam.  The Museum Archives has the original teacher's examination book so it was relatively simple to scan the book for 1906, until I found Virgie Hite.  Sure enough, in September 1906, Virgie failed the teacher's exam.  Not everyone did, however, despite her recollection.  How did this bode for the rest of the story? 
 

Knowing the date of the exam, I turned to the microfilmed reels of the Prescott Journal-Miner.  On September 1, 1906, I found an ad for a "Labor Day Celebration at Prescott, Arizona."  The celebration included a baseball game, a parade, a miner's drilling contest, an exhibition run and water test by the fire department, children's and cowboy sports, and a 100-yard foot race.  The final event was to be a "Grand Masked Carnival, at night, in which the city will be wide open to all who care to visit the many resorts.  The best of order will be maintained." 
 

The paper reported the results of the festivities in a two-page spread on September 4th: "One of the pleasant features of the celebration was the fact that the business houses of Montezuma street were thrown open last night to all, revealing to the minds of many the mystery that surrounds the business of the row." 
 

"Almost all of the ladies and gentlemen of the city took advantage of the occasion to see the city when the electric light shines . . .not an untoward incident happened to mar the pleasure of the crowd, all mingling together as members of one happy family closing the labor day festivities in the early hours of the morning with good will towards all." 
 

The event does not appear to have been repeated in any subsequent Labor Day celebrations.  Once is enough, however, to start a legend. 

Anne Foster is a Former Archivist at the Sharlot Hall Museum. She now works for the Huntley Project in Montana.