Of course such a villainous trade would not be possible without the silent protection of corrupt officials and political machines, who share in its enormous profits. Inside information on this subject was received through the disclosures, made during the latter parts of the last century about conditions in the mining and lumber regions of Michigan and Wisconsin. In January, 1887, Representative Breen appeared before the House Judiciary Committee of the legislature of Michigan and stated the existence of a regular trade in young and innocent girls for purposes of prostitution between Chicago, Duluth and other cities with the mining and lumber districts south of Lake Superior. As he said that the horrors of the camps into which these girls were lured beggared description, several newspapers, among them the “Chicago Herald” and “The New York World,” dispatched representatives, disguised as woodmen, to those regions to investigate the truth of these statements. They found that almost without exception the girls, kept in these camps, had been secured under promise of respectable employment. The houses, in which they were imprisoned, were surrounded by stockades twenty or thirty feet in height, the one door guarded night and day by a man with a rifle, while within were a number of bulldogs to prevent the girls from escaping. In the largest of such lumber camps dens from twenty to seventy-five girls were found. On January 24, 1887, the “New York World” published the story of an unfortunate girl, who had been lured by an advertisement to work in a lumberman’s hotel in the North. Believing the position to be respectable, she went there, but after her arrival at the place she was taken to a rough two-story building surrounded by a slab fence twenty feet high, within which was a cordon of bulldogs, thirteen in number, chained to iron stakes driven into the ground. In this place she was compelled, like all the other girls, of which there were always from eleven to thirty, to drink and dance with the men of the mining and lumber camps. They were not permitted to refuse any request of those visitors. A complaint of any kind, even of sickness, meant a whipping, frequently with a rawhide upon the naked body, sometimes with the butt of a revolver. When the log drives were going on, there would be hundreds of men there night and day, not human beings, but fiends.