Dora DuFran
Dora Bolshaw was born in the English city of Liverpool and came to the United States following the American Civil War, probably in 1869. By 1877 she and her parents were living in Lincoln, Nebraska, some accounts have them arriving in 1876. She began working as a prostitute to soldiers around the age of 14, working both in a brothel and independently as a dance hall girl.
When the Deadwood Gold Rush hit, Dora followed the wave of miners and prospectors to the new mining camp in the Black Hills, declaring herself to be at the age of fifteen a madam, and opening a brothel which originally was little more than a mining tent.
Despite her youth, Dora was insistent that the women who worked for her, most of whom were older and more hardened members of their profession, practice good hygiene and dress. Calamity Jane worked for her on an occasional basis, but her refusal to bathe and her habit of wearing men’s clothes served to limit her appeal to Dora and to the men who Dora solicited. Towards the end of Jane’s period in Deadwood Dora employed her as a dishwasher and cook. Dora enjoyed the company of cats as pets and after Charlie Utter delivered several to her brothel in Deadwood, she began referring to it as the “cathouse” adding a new word to the American lexicon.
Dora’s enterprise grew to include several brothels in nearby communities such as Lead, Belle Fourche, Miles City, and Sturgis. She married Joseph DuFran, one of the many professional gamblers who made mining camps and boomtowns their places of business, and DuFran helped her scout locations and grow the brothels as he made money at the poker and faro tables.
Dora DuFran wrote a twelve-page pamphlet on Calamity Jane later in life, and after the death of her husband relocated to Rapid City, where she opened yet another brothel. She died in 1934 and is buried in Deadwood’s Mount Mariah Cemetery, along with Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, Seth Bullock, her husband and her pet parrot.