Dark Days for a Reminder of the Wild, Wild West in Montana (Prostitution Museum)

New York Times ^ | 5/30/05 | KIRK JOHNSON

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BUTTE, Mont., May 26 - Rudy Giecek found the mummified body of a canary some years back. It had been wrapped in newspapers, he said, then placed in a tin can, and finally enclosed in a small purse before being sealed - probably around 1910, he guessed, by the can's markings - behind the bricks of a chimney in one of Butte's oldest houses of prostitution, the Dumas.

"A lot of the girls kept canaries," Mr. Giecek said.

The canary in the frayed blue purse, with its freight of long-ago private grief, went into the display case of the Dumas Brothel Museum. Other artifacts of Butte's days as one of the West's wildest vice capitals piled up as well: a derringer that Mr. Giecek believes one of the madams wore around her neck, opium bottles, calendars, decades-old ashtrays full of lipstick-stained cigarette butts.

This week the canary was gone, taken in a nighttime burglary along with much of the rest of the museum's eclectic and - Mr. Giecek freely admits - not-all-that-valuable collection, especially to the thieves.

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But Mr. Giecek also admits he has made a few mistakes along the way that have not helped his cause. In the late 1990's, he became partners with a group called the International Sex Worker Foundation for Art, Culture and Education, which announced plans for an annual sex-worker festival in Butte called Whore Camp. That frightened some local residents into thinking that prostitution might make a comeback.

I can't imagine why!