For years the queen of Denver's tenderloin, Mattie Silks, was ... - Blogs

The Scarlet Lady: Mattie Sils made over a half million dollars from the world’s oldest
profession, but a good-for-nothing broke her heart
By Forbes Parkhill
The Denver Post’s Empire Magazine
June 10, 1951
For years the queen of Denver’s tenderloin, Mattie Silks, was the fastest woman
in all the west. Her knight in tarnished armor, Corteze D. Thomson (cq), guerrilla, footracer,
gambler and ranchman, tried hard to be the fastest man.
Mattie was one of the principals in the only known formal pistol duel fought
between women. It was fought on the night of Aug. 25, 1877, in the Olympic Gardens, on
the west bank of the South Platte river near the spot where today’s Colfax-Larimer
viaduct ends.
Her opponent was Katie Fulton, another madam from Denver’s old redlight
district on Holladay street, the most wicked street in the wild, wild west. Femininemarksmanship
being what it is, Mattie missed Katie and Katie missed Mattie, but Cort
was shot in the neck.
Twenty-nine years old at the time of the duel, blond Mattie looked like a vestpocket
edition of lovely Lily Langtry. Her full underlip protruded just enough to give an
impression of petulance and impudence and daring. At her throat she wore a cross of
blazing diamonds, and in a pocket of her gorgeous de Medici frock she carried a pistol
with an ivory grip.
A Proud Man
She claimed Wild Bill Hickok had taught her marksmanship when he was marshal
of Abilene in ’71 and she was operating the principal sporting house in that rip roaring
frontier town.
Cort was a year younger than Mattie, and not much taller. He claimed to have
been a member of Quantrell’s guerrillas during the closing months of the Civil war (sic),
and he carried two guns in special holsters sewed into his hip pockets.
A Texan, he was a proud man, too proud to work, and maintained the workless
status of a southern gentleman by living on Mattie’s earnings.
He was a foot-racer of note, and the day before the duel won a 125-yard race from
the celebrated Sam Doherty at the old Denver fairgrounds. Mattie won $2,000 on the race
and celebrated by inviting all the leaders of Denver’s underworld to a champagne party at
the Olympic gardens. She never drank anything but champagne, says her former maid,
who still lives in Denver.

Mattie’s bitter resentment at the efforts of Katie to win the attention of the
handsome Cort resulted in the duel, which led next day’s newspapers to demand an end
to such disgraceful revels.
Cort survived his wound to become, with Mattie, a principal in a years-long
tempestuous love affair that put to shame the fabled amours of Frankie and Johnny.
At the close of the Civil war Mattie, only 19 years old, was operating a sporting
house at Springfield, Ill. Later she operated parlor houses at Olathe, Abilene, Hays and
Dodge City.
During this period she met Cort at Chicago, where he won a footrace and she won
so much cash betting on him that “the only way she could carry it was by lifting her skirt
as if it were an apron and letting the stakeholders pour it in.” Cort promptly deserted his
wife and infant daughter to join the lovely little sporting lady.
In 1869, Mattie abandoned the oldest profession temporarily to go into the
freighting business, taking a wagon-train of merchandise from St. Joseph to Denver. At
about that time Denver’s area of commercial boudoirs was on the west side of Cherry
creek (sic) below Larimer street.
She Bailed Him Out
In 1875 she shook the alkali dust of Dodge City from her dainty slippers and
moved to Georgetown, Colo. The only dust in this mining camp was gold dust, which
was all right with Mattie. Cort became a trainer for the racing team of one of
Georgetown’s volunteer fire departments.
At Georgetown she met tall, dark, magnetic George W. Silks, a professional
gambler. In 1876, when she moved to Denver, both Cort and Silks moved to Denver, too.
Later Silks joined the Leadville rush and became cashier of the famous Board of Trade
saloon and gambling resort. Then he passed out of the life of Mattie Silks forever.
Were the two ever man and wife? The preponderance of evidence indicates the
contrary. Friends say Mattie was known as “Madam Silks” years before she met George
Silks.
Newspaper files show that Cort was taking part in foot races throughout the west.
Many of these races were “rigged,” but when Cort landed in jail, as he did frequently,
Mattie always bailed him out.
When he was short of cash, he would ride his horse up the steps and through the
door of Mattie’s sporting house, demanding money under the threat of ruining the dance
floor. Mattie always gave him money. He was her man.

Cort was a generous soul, and always spent part of his money on Mattie. He is
said to have replaced the original cross she wore at her throat with the glittering diamond
cross she subsequently wore – with her money, of course.
On the morning of July 2, 1884, he received a telegram notifying him of the death
of his wife. Now he and Mattie were free to become man and wife, legally and with
benefit of clergy. On July 5, they were married at Peru, Ind., by the Rev. H. W. Daniel.
Less than two years later the lives of Cort and Mattie, now Mr. and Mrs. C.D.
Thomson, were changed by another telegram, telling of the death of his daughter in
childbirth. There were no kinfolk to care for Cort’s infant granddaughter. Certainly she
could not be reared in the atmosphere of Denver’s Street of The Sinners. So Mattie told
Cort to go buy a ranch, for which she would pay, to provide the suitable environment for
the child she had never seen, child of Cort’s child by another woman.
Touring the Temples of Sin
Incidentally, she needed the ranch for her stable of twenty-two race horses, many
of which placed as winners at Denver’s old Overland Park race track. Her favorite was a
valuable horse called Jim Blaine.
Their marriage had failed to draw them closer together. The underworld grapevine
brought rumors about an affair between Cort and a henna haired young Holladay street
wench, Lillie Dab. He was drinking prodigiously. Perhaps she felt that a ranch
environment would lessen his drinking and would separate him from Lillie.
Cort bought a ranch near Laird, in eastern Colorado, paying for it with Mattie’s
money, as usual, but recording the title in his own name. The original foreman, Dirty-face
Murphy, presently was succeeded by John Dillon (“Handsome Jack”) Ready, alias Jack
Kelly, a huge Nova Scotian with red hair who was destined later to play a leading part in
the life of Mattie.
In the middle ‘eighties Denver was angling for a new railroad. Nothing was too
good for the railroad president who came in his private car to look over the ground.
Imbued with civic pride and the good old Chamber of Commerce booster spirit, the
reception committee, as was customary with visiting notables, took him for a free tour of
the leading Holladay street temples of sin.
The plump, lovely and impudent Mattie Silks held a strange attraction for him,
and he spent so much time at her sporting house that he had none left to hear the
Chamber of Commerce committee explain Denver’s manifold railroad advantages.
Presently, he proposed that Mattie accompany him in his private car for a thirty-day frolic
in California.
The $5,000 Gamble

At first she declined on the ground that she must pay attention to business, for it
was necessary to meet a $5,000 note at the first of the month. When the Chamber of
Commerce committee learned of the situation they paid off her $5,000 note on condition
that she use her charms while on the holiday to win the railroad for dear old Denver.
Everywhere the rail president introduced the lovely blond as his wife, and
showered gifts upon her. The sentimental journey was extended for an additional thirty
days, spent as house guests at the palatial ranch near Laramie, Wyo., of the multimillionaire
Chicago and Newport social leaders, the Potter Palmers, who of course were
unaware that the charming woman introduced as the rail tycoon’s wife actually was the
madam of one of Denver’s leading sporting houses. For years Mattie loved to boast that
she mingled on equal terms at the Palmer ranch with the nation’s foremost social leaders.
No one knows what brought the sentimental journey to an end. In all likelihood,
Mattie feared to leave Cort too long near her rival, Lillie Dab.
A fitting ending to the story would relate the successful conclusion of Mattie’s
efforts as a civic benefactor. The actual conclusion is anti-climax, for she failed to win
the new railroad and the Chamber of Commerce committee was left holding the sack.
One wonders how the committee accounted for the $5,000 disbursement. Was it charged
to entertainment? Good will? Sleeping accommodations?
Had success crowned her efforts, perhaps the name of Mattie Silks could be found
today among the names of those who have made notable contributions to the city’s
progress, in letters of bronze on the wall of the Court of Civic Benefactors in Denver’s
civic center.
On the night of March 13, 1891, Mattie cleaned and loaded her pistol and took out
after her rival. Surprising Lillie in Cort’s arms, her first shot snipped of a hennaed curl.
Lillie barely beat the second shot through the door and took off in the direction of
Cheyenne. She was seen no more in Denver.
Wrenching the pistol from her fingers, Cort beat Mattie unmercifully. The next
morning she filed suit for divorce, naming Lillie as co-respondent and stating that she,
Mattie, had given Cort from $45,000 to $50,000 of her earnings. She gained a court order
restraining him from selling the ranch property near Laird.
Faced with the loss of his meal ticket, the knight in tarnished armor was filled
with remorse. He agreed to transfer the ranch to Mattie’s name and forswore further
carryings on with Lillie Dab. Eleven days later, Mattie dismissed the suit.
Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee, June 27, 1897, brought to London one and one
half million visitors, including Cort and Mattie. London newspapers published stories of
a swaggering character called Diamond Jim of Colorado. There is no evidence that this
was Cort, but there is no record of other Coloradans visiting the jubilee, and it was quite

in character for him to bedeck himself with diamonds – Mattie’s diamonds – and to strut
about posing as a Colorado bonanza king.
It is known, however, that generous Cort bought Mattie – with her money – the
finest mink cloak in England. Back in Denver she wore it to the horse shows where her
prize high school horse, entered under the name of a local liveryman, won many blue
ribbons.
Upon their return from London, Cort and Mattie found Denver’s tenderloin
almost depopulated as the result of the discovery of gold in the Klondike. With a group of
“young lady boarders” they joined the gold rush early in ’98. At Dawson City she rented
a frame building on Second street for $350 a month. Later she told Denver friends she
paid $50 a day protection money to the Canadian Northwest Mounted Police. Cort spent
much of his time playing faro at Joe Cooper’s Dominion saloon.
Late in the summer he developed a heavy cold and Mattie, fearing he could not
survive an Arctic winter, returned to Denver. She told friends that in spite of huge
expenses, including the payment of Cort’s gambling debts, she returned to Denver after
ninety days with a net profit of $38,000.
Cort returned to the ranch at Laird, where the dry atmosphere speedily cured his
cold. In April of 1900, in Denver, he demanded that Mattie give him $5,000 “to buy
cattle.” When she gave him only $1,500, he threatened to return to the ranch and sell her
favorite racehorse, Jim Blaine, valued at $2,000. Learning that he had spent her money on
a wild spree and had started for the ranch, she telegraphed the sheriff of Yuma county to
take him into custody until her arrival.
She found him at Wray, ill in a room at the old Commercial hotel, since destroyed
by fire. He told her he was suffering from ptomaine poisoning, the result of eating spoiled
oysters. A doctor gave her a bottle of laudanum and whisky with which to dose him.
Before daylight the following morning, convinced she was attempting to poison
him, Cort groaned, “Damn you, Mattie, if I had a gun I’d kill you!”
Drawing the pistol from her de Medici skirt, she handed it to him. “If that’s the
way you feel about it, darling, go ahead and kill me. If you’re going to die, I don’t want
to live.” An hour later he was dead.
What wonderful emotions struggled for mastery of Mattie Silks during the long
hours she sat by his side and plied him with laudanum and whiskey?
He Was Her Man
Few women had endured more from a man. For years Cort had bled her from
money; he had been unfaithful to her; he had condoned her affair with the railroad
president; he had beaten her and had never done an honest day’s work. And yet…

In the days of her youth she had risked her life for Cort in her duel with Katie
Fulton. Later, faced with the opportunity to rid herself of him, she had dismissed her
divorce suit. Why? Because she still loved him?
When the dying Cort had accused her of poisoning him, why had she pressed her
pistol into his hand, inviting him to kill her? Was she simply bluffing, secure in the
knowledge that at heart he was a four-flusher, a characterless weakling who loved to
bluster but who could not muster the courage to carry out his threat?
Or…
Did she really feel that life was no longer worth living without the man she loved?
He had “done her wrong,” but, after all, he was her man. Though all the rest of the world
could see nothing but the tarnish, perhaps in her eyes he was still her knight in shining
armor, the handsome footracer she was fated to love, not till the parting of death, but
through time and eternity. Some women are like that.
She Hires Handsome Jack
It was taken for granted that spoiled oysters had killed Cort. He died April 12,
1900, as he had lived; at Mattie’s expense. She paid for his funeral and for his burial at
Fairmount cemetery, Denver.
Cort’s death left her facing another problem. What was to become of his
granddaughter? The girl was a child in her ‘teens, without a living person she could call
blood kin.
So, Mattie went into court and legally adopted the girl. She operated the ranch
under the management of foreman “Handsome Jack” Ready until Cort’s granddaughter
married, then sold it and brought Handsome Jack to Denver as her bookkeeper and
bouncer.
Denver’s boulevard of the bagnios had been named after Ben Holladay, operator
of the Central Overland, California and Pike’s Peak Express stagecoach lines. Because of
the unsavory reputation the street had acquired, the heirs of upright Ben Holladay
petitioned the board of aldermen to change its name, so since 1889 it has been known as
Market street.
In 1915, just before the Colorado prohibition amendment became effective, the
authorities clamped a chastity belt on Denver’s tenderloin. The red lights of Denver’s
street of wine, women and wrong were dimmed forever.
Having experienced numerous reform waves Mattie, confident of the return of the
“good old days,” permitted her famous House of Mirrors at 1942 Market street to stand

vacant. For a time she operated the Silks hotel at 1916 Market, and then a hotel on
Broadway near Thirteenth avenue; both failures.
The value of her Market street property depreciated tremendously. Finally, in her
seventies, she removed part of the gorgeous furnishings of her House of a Thousand
Scandals to her home at 2635 Lawrence street and sold the rest at auction. Among the
auctioned property was a coffin found in the basement wineroom.
The Fatal Champagne Toast
A Japanese, T. Ono, bought the premises in 1919, and ten years later sold them to
the Buddhist church, which used the old house as a place of worship for many years. In
1948 an imposing new Buddhist church was built on Lawrence street and the Market
street house was sold and remodeled into a warehouse.
When Mattie was 77 years old she married Handsome Jack so she might have
someone to care for her in her declining years. In 1926 she suffered a broken hip, and
thereafter spent most of her time in a wheel chair. At a Christmas party in 1928 she rose
from her chair to drink a champagne toast, fell again and once more incurred a fracture of
the same hip.
At the Denver General hospital the following day she made out a holographic will
on a hospital letterhead. She died Jan. 7, 1929, at the age of 83.
Funeral services were held without benefit of clergy. The pallbearers were
informed it was a Quaker service. At Fairmount cemetery, without prayers, Mattie was
buried beside the unmarked grave of Cort Thompson. He was her man.
The name on her modest stone is Martha A. Ready.
Beautiful and Bad
At one time worth a half a million dollars, Mattie left an estate of $4,000 in real
estate and $2,500 in jewels. The estate was divided equally between her second husband,
Handsome Jack, and her adopted daughter, then married and living in a distant state.
Ready died, penniless, May 23, 1931. His burial expenses were paid through a
collection taken up in the barrooms of Larimer street. He is buried at Fairmount cemetery
in an unmarked grave far from the stone bearing the name “Martha A. Ready.”
The jewelry Mattie kept until her death consisted of her diamond cross and two
diamond rings. Of all her jewels, why had she retained to the last only the cross and the
rings? Had Cort given her one ring, and Handsome Jack the other? Was the cross a
symbol of something life had withheld from the scarlet lady?

Mattie Silks was beautiful and bad. She sinned prodigiously. She lived
dangerously. She loved extravagantly but unwisely. Her love for a man who was
unworthy of any woman’s love brought her little but misery. She reared and educated the
daughter of his child by another woman, which not all women who hold themselves her
betters would have done. A bad woman, but not altogether bad.