and stated the existence of a regular trade in young and innocent girls for purposes of prostitution between Chicago, Duluth and other cities with the mining and lumber districts south of Lake Superior. As he said that the horrors of the camps into which these girls were lured beggared description, several newspapers, among them the "Chicago Herald" and "The New York World," dispatched representatives, disguised as woodmen, to those regions to investigate the truth of these statements. They found that almost without exception the girls, kept in these camps, had been secured under promise of respectable employment. The houses, in which they were imprisoned, were surrounded by stockades twenty or thirty feet in height, the one door guarded night and day by a man with a rifle, while within were a number of bulldogs to prevent the girls from escaping. In the largest of such lumber camps dens from twenty to seventy-five girls were found.
On January 24, 1887, the "New York World" published the story of an unfortunate girl, who had been lured by an advertisement to work in a lumberman's hotel in the North. Believing the position to be respectable, she went there, but after her arrival at the place she was taken to a rough two-story building surrounded by a slab fence twenty feet high, within which was a cordon of bulldogs, thirteen in number, chained to iron stakes driven into the ground. In this place she was compelled, like all the other girls, of which there were always from eleven to thirty, to drink and dance with the men of the mining and lumber camps. They were not permitted to refuse any request of those visitors. A complaint of any kind, even of sickness, meant a whipping, frequently with a rawhide upon the naked body, sometimes with the butt of a revolver. When the log drives were going on, there would be hundreds of men there night and day, not human beings, but fiends.
"Oh, it was awful, awful!" cried the girl after her release. "I would rather stay in prison until I die than go back there for one day. I tried to escape three times and was caught. They unchained the dogs and let them get so near me that I cried out in terror and begged them to take the dogs away and I would go back. Then, of course, I was beaten. I tried, too, to smuggle out notes to the Sheriff through visitors, but they would take them to the proprietor instead, and he would pay for them. Once I did get a note to the Deputy Sheriff at Florence, Wisconsin, and he came and inquired. But the proprietor gave him $50, and he went away. I was awfully beaten then. While I lived this life, from March until September, two inmates died, both from brutal treatment. They were as good as murdered. Nearly all the girls came without knowing the character of the house, and first implored to get
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