An excerpt from
City and Prairie Bones

by Billie Thornburg

Editor's note: the following is a chapter from Billie Snyder Thornburg's latest book about North Platte.
by Billie Lee Snyder Thornburg

Attempts were made through the years to clean up the town, one of the earliest being that of the town’s fourth mayor, R. J. Wyman, who campaigned on a “get-rid-of-vice platform.”

Mayor Wyman and his council passed laws to stop the carrying of dangerous firearms within city limits, to end indiscriminate shooting in town, to forbid selling of alcoholic beverages, etc. It didn't work.

The laws being loosely enforced, the cowboys kept on shooting. The girls kept on dancing and the saloon owners merely labeled their liquor “buttermilk.”
This quote from The Evening Telegraph, March 26, 1919, makes it sound as though North Platte was in pretty bad shape in 1919.

"Our reputation from Cheyenne to Omaha has placed us on the black list and we will stagnate until we clean up." A.F. Streitz, candidate for mayor, Streitz platform. “If I am elected mayor, I will do my utmost to suppress bootlegging, social vice, gambling, and to promote everything progressive and clean."

The next try at stopping all of this was a statewide effort. Two years before the eighteenth amendment created nationwide prohibition (1920) Nebraska had its own constitutional prohibition amendment. It, like the national amendment, proved to be a bureaucratic fumble. Instead of reducing crime, it promoted crime.

Gambling, prostitution, murder, and illegal whiskey grew into gigantic enterprises, and North Platte was no exception. North Platte was a wide-open, hell-raising place and earned itself the name of "Little Chicago.”
In 1929, the Nebraska State Attorney General ordered North Platte’s mayor to close up the houses of prostitution, and several of the ladies were arrested on vagrancy charges. The houses, however, were not closed and the mayor was re-elected in a near landslide vote.
By this time, of course, the ladies were not plying their trade in old frontier tents. Most worked out of "rooming houses," which were upstairs of legitimate downtown business establishments. They had names like Como, Lotus, Star, Glendale, Rex, and the Broadmore. The Oxford, over on the North side of the tracks, is remembered as being one of the longest running establishments in town. The Flattop, which was a rooming house east of Dewey Street, was one of the best remembered.
The next try at "cleaning up” the town came in the late thirties when Sam Diedrichs was elected County Attorney. He began an almost single-handed effort to rid the city of its criminal elements and had partial success: he was able to close the gambling establishments.
The ladies grew prosperous during World War II by offering the soldiers more than just the goodies they got at the Canteen. Six million service men stopped in North Platte during the war years, and a fair number of them must have seen the ladies.
There was an attempt to curtail the rooming houses during the war but the ladies resorted to knock-before-you-enter devices and turned off their outside lights.
The rooming houses finally came to an end in the early 1950s, during the administration of Mayor Kurt Mendenhall. There were those who mourned their passing and those who cheered.

Be sure and pick up your copy of Billie’s newest book “Prairie and City Bones” today! Order online at www.theold101press.com