| Arrival
Dad, who was Troy L. Parker, had
first come to the Black Hills in 1909, when he visited some college
friends by the name of Trask, who lived in Deadwood. (1) They were
a lovely family, with a whole flock of young and eligible daughters.
The first day Dad got to Deadwood, he decided to walk around the
town and hunt up those spots that he had read about in the dime
novels and in the newspapers, back east, and when he got back to
Trask's for dinner that evening Mrs. Trask, to make conversation.
asked him what he had been doing all afternoon, and Dad, full of
Eastern innocence, said that he "had been looking for the Green
Front," a place that he had read about as far east as Chicago.
Upon this admission on Dad's part a silence,
not to say coldness, fell upon the Trask family table, for they
all knew--as Dad did not--that the Green Front was the lowest, sinfulest,
abominablest dive in all of Deadwood. Good old Mrs. Trask was filled
with confusion and dismay as she tried to figure out how in the
world she was to going to protect her innocent daughters from this
viper from the East who openly admitted that he had spent his first
afternoon in Deadwood looking for the town's most famous whorehouse.
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