Martha Ready ~ "Mattie Silks"

Martha A. Ready, later known as Mattie Silks, was born about 1846 in Fayette County, Pennsylvania and raised in Indiana. She began her working career in Springfield, Illinois and became the best known madams in the West, with brothels in Dodge City, Kansas and Denver, Colorado where demand for women was high during the Colorado Gold Rush.

She was described as a very good looking woman, with spirit and a competitive nature.

From 1877 to 1897 her brothel was the most successful in Denver. She started her first brothel on Holladay Street (now Market Street) and suffered from stiff competition from other brothels. In 1881, she and another Denver madam, Kate Fulton, had the first recorded pistol duel between two women. But the fight was over love, not money ... both were involved romantically with the same man, Cortese Thomson, a local gambler and con man. The two women stood a few feet apart on the west Bank of the South Platte River and fired at each other. But only Thomson fell, due to Mattie's terrible aim. She married Cortese three years later.

 In 1898, Madam Jennie Rogers opened the House of Mirrors in Denver, and quickly became more successful than any of her competition. Jennie Rogers died in 1909, after which Silks purchased the House of Mirrors for $14,000. She continued to work as a madam, traveled and invested in real estate, making her a very wealthy woman.

Thomson lived off Mattie's money until he died in Wray, where Mattie owned a ranch in 1900. It's unknown why Mattie didn't buy him a headstone for the plot where she joined him 29 years later.

Two weeks after she fell and broke her hip on Christmas Day, she was finally taken to Denver General Hospital, where she died of complications two days later on 7 January 1929. She was buried next to Thomson under the name Martha Ready in the Fairmount Cemetery (block 12/lot 31). At the time of her death, she was married to rancher and gambler, Jack Ready, who died 2 years later in Wray. Her heir was Theresa Thomson, Cortese's daughter from an earlier marriage.