They never said Miss Kitty ran a whore house inside the Longbranch but everyone knew she did.
Back in 1982, I stayed at a hotel in Cedar Rapids, Iowa called the Longbranch.
Sorry - didn’t see your reply before I posted...I’m never going to vow again not to reply before I read all the postings.
Early on, Miss Kitty didn't own or run the Longbranch - she was just one of the girls that went up and down the stairs.
What a lot of people don’t know today is that there was a difference between whores and “saloon girls”, at least in towns like Dodge and Abilene. Saloons were located in the main part of town, and the girls who worked there acted as hostesses. They talked to cowboys who had just got paid and got them to stay and drink and buy them (usually fake) drinks. There was no “upstairs”. The whore houses were located away from the “decent” part of town, on the “wrong side of the tracks”, literally. Railroad workers stopping over would hang their red lanterns outside so they could be found if needed, and that’s where “red light district” comes from. It’s Hollywood, especially movies made since the 1970s that conflated to two; in reality Miss Kitty’s girls wouldn’t have been whores.