Up until the nineteen eighties, when the FBI swept Idaho in a vice crackdown that lasted all of three months, most of the small towns and cities in Idaho ran wide open. It wasn't publicized, I certainly never knew about it, but yeah, most of the older population here grew up in towns where there were locally acknowledged cathouses dotted around. Nothing sly or sneaky about it.
Now it was absolutely not legal in any way. It's just that in Idaho, all the towns were very small towns, separated by lots of howling nothingness,
... far, far away from federal authority. These tiny, isolated towns made up their own rules, and what they wanted was a way to pay for new cop cars and the high schools' band uniforms (true.*) If you have a surplus of transient single men running around, which Idaho definitely did, working the harvests, the mines, timber, cattle, it was felt that the way to keep them in line was to channel them toward an established red light district and make sure they spent well while they were there.
Of course, the businesswomen in that industry paid hefty licensing fees, various taxes, fines and so on, the frequency and amounts varying according to the towns need for police cars and band uniforms.
There is a subtle but important difference in the mindset involved. Where I grew up, everybody knew there were such things, and did a lot of wailing and gnashing and condemning. Here, everybody knows about it - and butter wouldn't melt. It's kind of like how nobody says a word about the Japanese internment camp that used to be down the road.
Anyway, here are a couple of cribs left over from about WWI. They open on the alley behind my building (which, as in all good pioneer towns, was known as 'The Line.')
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* book 'Selling Sex In The Silver Valley - A Business Doing Pleasure' by Dr. Heather Branstetter.
NOTE: All the towns in Idaho are very small towns, except for Boise, which is a town the size of Bellingham WA, only with taller buildings and more railroad tracks. Each day I live here I am newly amazed by the Old West culture that still survives. I mean I have the living memory of my hometown in Oregon back when it was still farms, tractors on the roadways, and kids riding horses around - but it grew and changed. This place did not. They just got cars. Some got indoor plumbing. Most moved to Oregon.
