The vast majority of women in mining towns of the West were not prostitutes. In Virginia City, for example, there were roughly 4,000 adult women in 1870 with fewer than 200 being prostitutes. Because many Irish women, in particular, arrived unmarried, there were plenty of "eligible" women available. And this was the norm for the West, rather than the exception.

I dealt with this in the first chapter of a collection of articles I edited and published in 1998: Comstock Women: The Making of a Mining Community.