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They announced plans to restore the building and to operate some of the rooms as a hostel. More: Scarlet stories: Prostitution is an often overlooked side of Great Falls history. French-Canadian brothers Arthur and Joseph Nadeau opened the brothel in , and it's celebrated as a vanishingly rare example of "Victorian brothel architecture," which apparently is a genuine architectural style.
Many women took to drugs or drank to cope with their profession. Suicide was also common Even if the family of the dead could be found, they often refused to claim the body," Jan Macken wrote in "Red Light Women of the Rocky Mountains. In with another war on, the federal government shut down houses of ill repute even those of the best reputation. What that meant for the Dumas was that the passages connecting it with the rest of Butte's underground were closed.
The cribs in the basement were sealed and remain time capsules of misery. The Dumas Brothel became the Dumas Hotel, though its operation was otherwise unchanged. That's also the year the Berkeley Pit shut down, on Earth Day. She let the brothel go, selling the building to Rudy Giecek, who spent 22 years trying to restore the brothel. He created a museum and raised money for the building, which is on the national register of historic places. But the sailing wasn't smooth. He suffered a burglary of Dumas artifacts in Strokes and diabetes derailed his efforts.
