The absence of women was an obvious and troublesome feature of mining communities. The men´s concerns and interactions were reduced to the issues of labor, subsistence, and leisure. Everything revolved around making money as quickly as possible, and hardly anyone planned to stay in California. The overwhelmingly male population made prostitution prosper in mining towns. Letters of miners sometimes indicate that it was hard for them to constrain their sexual appetites even when they tried to stay faithful to their wives or fiancées.
The restlessness and search for quich profits which shaped the mining communities also characterized the brothels. Thus, prostitutes did not form any kind of close-knit community but sold sex as a commodity to the rootless and mobile miners. Prostitutes usally worked on the streets, in brothels, or in gambling halls. In some areas, women ran the brothels and owned the buildings in which they worked. Some managed to accumulate wealth and property, thus occupying a powerful position in the Demimonde. But soon, men started to take over the profitable business, and pimps, violence, suicide, and accidental death became prominent factors in the red light districts.