Watch a video of Missoula madam Mary GleimIn the Feb. 23, 1914, newspaper, editor Arthur L. Stone attempted to recap the colorful, mysterious life of Missoula's foremost mistress of prostitution, without once mentioning the word.
She was “of the underworld,” Stone asserted.
She was believed to be connected with the trafficking of Chinamen and “a great deal of opium” through the “old underground railway which had its outlet at Thompson Falls years ago.”
Well, Mary has returned, and she's hell-bent on revenge.
“The Missoulian always gets it wrong. I was a legitimate businesswoman, a real estate agent and a capitalist,” she says, fairly stomping her high heel at the foot of Gleim's mammoth headstone in the Missoula Cemetery.
She isn't really Madam Mary, but Kim Kaufman of 21st century Lolo. On Sunday, Kaufman will set up her props for the cemetery's annual Stories and Stones historical tour in a ground-length Watteau dress, hand-sewn from a period American dress pattern catalog.
She'll hang a railroader's red lantern near the fascinating photo of Missoula's Front Street in the 1890s, Mary's “business district.”
Then she'll say, “I'll go get Mary” - and return with the wildly flower-and-feather bedecked hat and the persona of a rough-and-tumble, take-no-guff frontier madam.
“Perhaps there are some persons who know the history of this strange woman's life, but it is not likely that it will ever be told,” Stone wrote.
Wrong again, Art.
Nearly a century later, Kaufman has methodically and enthusiastically pieced together Gleim's life. She can't help herself. She has four loose-leaf binders stuffed with microfilmed clippings, court records, blueprints and pictures relating to Gleim's strange history, though she's still looking for a photo of Gleim herself.
“I know more about Mary than anybody,” Kaufman said confidently.
Her “story” this year will be different than at last year's Stories and Stones. There's so much to tell, and so little time.
It'll also be different Sunday than the one she'll tell a group of fourth- and fifth-graders later in the week. “I do have my youth-anisms,” Kaufman said.
At the cemetery, Gleim will have her sidekick, niece Elizabeth Gibson, who is buried next to Gleim and will be portrayed by Dana Hartman.
If Kaufman-as-Gleim spots someone in the Montana Rail Link yard across the street, she'll shout a full-throated halloo to the railroader, who'll probably have no idea she's only hailing what were Mary Gleim's best clients a century and more ago.
It's all in good fun, and good history. If past years are indications, Kaufman will draw one of the biggest clusters of visitors throughout the afternoon.
But there'll be more distractions than ever. Some 40 storytellers and more than 1,000 visitors are expected, up from seven and about 50 when Kaufman first started in 2004.
Mary Gleim and Missoula co-founder Christopher Higgins, played by Dr. Robert Brown, director of the Historic Museum at Fort Missoula, are perhaps the cornerstone acts.
Among the nine new stories in 2008 are those of Sarah Woody and Golden Bibee. Woody was the wife of another Missoula co-founder, Frank Woody. Bibee wrote half a dozen books of poetry about early 20th century western Montana.
Cemetery sexton Mary Ellen Stubb and her staff have compiled information on more than 40 other potential subjects. Sarah Woody and Bibee were both on that list. When Jennie Pak of Missoula came to the cemetery looking for someone to portray, she selected Woody.
“We had a really hard time finding a poet,” said Stubb, who has overseen the burgeoning Stories and Stones program. “We called all over town. We started off with Fact and Fiction (bookstore), and went to the university and the creative writing areas.”
She learned there are surprisingly few organized writing groups or societies in Missoula, but Stubb finally got hold of a representative at one of them.
“She tapped me into an old Vietnam War vet who loves poetry and has this booming voice, just this big Western-type of guy,” said Stubb.
Philip Burgess had “no idea who we were or what we do,” she added. “But when I told him about it and mentioned the whole poetry issue, he was here within a matter of hours. And the minute he looked at some of the poems, he was just taken with them. He was on board.”
This will be Kaufman's fifth Stories and Stones as Gleim.
She was a spectator at the 2003 version, where local historian Allan Mathews portrayed Frank Woody, a judge and, as such, a familiar nemesis of Gleim's. In the course of his tale, Mathews ushered his listeners over to Gleim's grave and told the story of their relationship - from Woody's standpoint.
Kaufman was taken with Gleim and turned to a couple of friends.
“You know, this should be told from a woman's point of view. Mary should be out here doing this,'” she told them. “And as we were walking away, I said, ‘Oh, she'd be so much fun. Just imagine. She must have been very flamboyant and wild. And, oh, a red velvet dress and a big black hat with lots of feathers Š
“That's where Mary was kind of reborn.”
Marcia Porter was already way into Gleim and other historic Missoula characters through her work in the records management office at the courthouse.
She had the court records that documented many of Gleim's comings and goings, and her few above-board transactions. To this day, the two women share whatever new information they unearth. Porter has in mind writing books on, among other things, Missoula's madam. But she'll have to put them off “until I retire,” she said. “And I don't know if I will, because I'm having too much fun doing this.”
Porter is a fixture at Stories and Stones herself. She tells the story of Josephine Dukes, the first woman to stop and stay in Missoula. Dukes, who died in 1903, is a fascinating and fertile subject for a courthouse record keeper. One of Dukes' three husbands was George P. White, who held various offices in the county and can be traced through a number of records.
George and Josephine were the first white couple married within the present boundaries of Montana. In the early 1860s, when what's now western Montana went through three names changes, they famously gave birth to three boys in three territories, all in the same house that still stands near Mullan Road.
“It's a fascinating story, but it's probably typical of a frontier pioneer woman who came out here and dealt with what she had to deal with,” said Porter.
Unlike Kaufman-as-Gleim, Porter dresses in black - fitting, she thinks, for a three-time widow - and she doesn't try to assume Dukes' persona.
“I can tell Josephine third person. I can't tell Josephine first person. I have trouble with that,” she said.
Indeed, storytelling approaches vary widely at Stories and Stones, Stubb said. Some dress in appropriate garb, some come dressed as themselves. A few stories are handled by relatives. District Judge Dusty Deschamps tells the tale of his prominent pioneer family of ranchers and politicians. Lois Haaglund of Clinton will be talking Sunday about her father, Jim Flansburg, a central figure in Haaglund's book, “Tough, Willing and Able: Tales of a Montana Family.”
Porter, Paulette Parpart at the Missoula Public Library, and Donna McRae at the University of Montana's Mansfield Library are invaluable resources to researchers for Stories and Stones.
“There's no way we can do this without them,” Stubb said.
Kaufman isn't a one-character woman. She played Stena the Swedish Cook during Daly Days at the Daly Mansion in Hamilton; Lolo pioneer rancher Clara Hughes Maclay, and she portrays the wife of a St. Louis doctor in a play she co-wrote and co-produced, “Tea at Madame Chouteau's.”
But she always comes back to Mary. She has even visited the Gleim homestead near St. Louis, where Mary's husband John grew up.
Kaufman has done 28 programs as the old gal, including a couple with Porter as Dukes in “Following Old Trails,” based on an account in a series written for the Missoulian in 1911 and 1912 by none other than Arthur L. Stone.
“Hers was a strange life,” Stone concluded in Gleim's 1914 obituary. “Its chapters would make a wonderful book. But it is not likely that they will ever be written. Some of her adventures she had related herself, but as a whole the story of her career was a sealed volume.”
Reporter Kim Briggeman can be reached at 523-5266 or at kbriggeman@missoulian.com.
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