American entrepreneur. Also known as the "Queen of the Tenderloin" & "Queen of Denver's Red Light District," she was one of the most successful prostitutes, madams & brothel owners in the 19th-century American West. Though born on a small farm in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, she was raised in Indiana. She began her prostitution career by working in towns across Kansas & Texas before becoming the madam of a brothel in Springfield, Illinois at 19 years old. Not long afterward, she took ownership of two separate brothels in Dodge City, Kansas & Georgetown, Colorado, where prostitution was in high demand following the Gold Rush. After meeting her future first-husband Cortège Thompson in 1876, the two moved to Denver, where she bought her most-notable, three-story Holladay Street location from Nellie French for $13,000 (nearly $370,000 in 2022), which became the most successful & lavish brothel in the city for over twenty years. As she & her lover's extravagant lifestyles grew, so did his gambling addiction & affairs with other women, which included Madams Lillie Dabb, Jennie Rogers & Silks' biggest rival, Kate Fulton. As Silks & Thompson held their engagement party at the city's Olympic Gardens on August 24, 1877, Fulton loudly claimed that Silks was "stealing her man," which led to Denver's first-ever gun duel between two women. The following day, the two met at Colfax Avenue, & with paces made & guns fired, neither woman struck the other, but Fulton had accidentally wounded Thompson. She was quickly arrested while Silks took him to the hospital, where he quickly recovered. Seven years after the incident, Silks & Thompson finally married, despite the fact that he was already married, yet his first wife had passed away earlier that year. Even after her first husband's death, Silks would later obtain three more brothels in the city, including her fellow rival Roger's "House of Mirrors" when she died in 1909. However, it wasn't long afterward when Silks was forced to shut down all of her brothels & retire from her own work following the city's crackdown & ban on parlor houses. Six years after marrying her security guard John "Handsome Jack" Ready, Silks passed away.