Thelma Copeland ~ "Queen Madam of Ketchikan"

Thelma Copeland was born in Idaho in 1888. After a troubled childhood, she left home at age thirteen and moved to Montana. She eventually ended up in Vancouver, B.C. where she worked as a waitress and was soon admired by her male customers.

"By the time I was 18 or 19, I realized that I could make a lot more money from the attention of men than I could waiting on tables." ~Dolly Arthur

Her next move was to Ketchikan, where she changed her name to Dolly Arthur. In 1919 she bought a house on 24 Creek Street and set up her business. Miners, fishermen, loggers and townspeople gathered to carouse, drink and visit the clapboard bordellos built along the boardwalk. Though drinking was against the law (a law few folks took seriously) prostitution was legal, and the "sporting women" of the red light area of Creek Street, registered their businesses with the city police.

In her book Dolly's House, June Allen  provides a look into Dolly's persona ... revealed during several interviews in the early 1970s. Allen mentions that while still in her early twenties Dolly had an unhappy love affair in Vancouver. Perhaps a poignant reminder of that ill-fated romance was the words to a 1915 song found among her mementos: 

"I want you when I'm bright and cheery, need you when I'm sad and weary, Always to be near me dearie, for I want you all the while." 

The last man in her life was "Lefty," a longshoreman who lived with her sporadically over a period of 26 years. He was a charming rake who flitted about town surrounded by a coterie of admiring women. "He fooled around," Dolly is reputed to have said, "but he always came back." She bailed him out of financial scrapes on several occasions, not out of blind infatuation, but because she genuinely liked him and considered him a good friend.

Dolly continued to live in her house on Creek Street after the brothels were closed down in the late 1950s and the area assumed a mantle of respectability. She grew increasingly frail as she aged and spent the last year and a half of her life in a nursing home. When she died in July 1975 at the age of 87, all the major newspapers on the West Coast carried her obituary, paying tribute to a woman whose indomitable spirit exemplified the tough, roistering years of Ketchikan's early history. She is buried in the Bayview Cemetery (plot 4949).