I had been to the Yukon twice and hiked the Chilkoot
Trail in 1997, the hundredth anniversary of the Klondike Gold Rush, so I knew
some history of the area before I started my research for my novel Romancing
the Klondike. But I didn’t know anything about the north prior to gold being
discovered on Rabbit Creek. When I began my reading I learned that there were
good sized towns such as Circle City in Alaska and Fortymile in the Northwest
Territories (the Yukon Territory was not formed until 1898) with theatres, libraries, schools, stores, and medical doctors. One little
known fact, though, was that while most of the residents in the north before the gold
rush era were men, there were also many women who lived there with their
prospector husbands or who came as nurses, teachers, cooks, dance hall girls, and
ladies of the evening.
One such
woman was Ethel Berry who made the trek from California as a newlywed with her
husband, Clarence, in 1896. When they heard about gold being found on Rabbit
Creek (later named Bonanza Creek) Clarence staked a claim
on Eldorado Creek, a tributary, and the couple set up camp in a 12X16 foot long
cabin. There was only a dirt floor and a window that was covered with a flour
sack. The winter was cold and Ethel spent her time keeping the wood stove going
and cooking and cleaning. Clarence’s claim proved to be one of the richest
claims in the Klondike and when they returned to Seattle with two hundred
thousand dollar’s worth of gold in the summer of 1897, Ethel was dubbed the
Bride of the Klondike by the newspapers. In 1898, they crossed over the Chilkoot Pass with
thousands of hopeful millionaires and went back to their claim again.
Another
woman who struck it rich in the Klondike was Belinda Mulrooney. She was raised
in Pennsylvania and left home at twenty-one. She worked in Chicago and then San
Francisco before heading to Juneau, Alaska, in 1896. When she heard about the
gold strike in the Klondike she decided to go there. She bought the necessities
she would need but she also thought ahead and purchased silk underwear, bolts
of cotton cloth, and hot water bottles. These she carried with her over the
Chilkoot Pass in the winter of 1896.
When
the ice melted on the Lindeman and Bennett lakes and Yukon River she floated
down the river to the new town of Dawson City, reaching in it June of 1987. According
to Belinda Mulrooney herself, when she finally reached Dawson and the gold
fields after many months of hardship, she tossed a 25-cent piece, her very last
coin, into the Yukon River for luck. She was 26 years old and full of confidence.
And rightly so for she sold her silk underwear, bolts of cloth, and hot water
bottles for six times what she had paid for them.
With
this success, Belinda turned her attention to the prospectors in gold fields.
She set up a lunch counter to feed the single men and then added a bunkhouse
for those who didn’t have a cabin to stay in. Eventually she built the two
story Grand Forks Hotel and Restaurant, with multiple bunk beds on the second
floor, at the junction of the Eldorado and Bonanza creeks. The hotel also acted
as a trading post, a gold storage, and sometimes as a church. In the back were
kennels for the husky dogs used to pull the sleds which were the main
transportation in the winter.
Being
the smart woman that she was, Belinda had the floor swept every evening and
those sweepings run through a sluice box. This earned her as much as $100 a day
from the gold dust that fell from miner’s pockets and clothing. And she began
to delve into the gold claims themselves, owning or co-owning fiving mining
claims by the end of 1897.
Belinda
turned her entrepreneurial skills to Dawson and bought a lot on the corner of
Princess Street and First Avenue. She sold Grand Forks for $24,000 and used her
profits to construct the three-story high Fair View Hotel which opened to
enthusiastic and impressive reviews on July 27, 1898. This was the most
impressive building in Dawson and held thirty guest rooms and a restaurant.
Impressed
by her strong business sense, a local bank asked Belinda to pull the Gold Run
Mining Company out of the red. She had the company in the black in 18 months.
Belinda
married and divorced and eventually moved to eastern Washington State and built
herself a castle. She and her siblings lived there until her fortune ran out
and she began to rent out the castle. She died in Seattle in 1967 at the age of
95.
These
are just two examples of the many women who lived in the north, who took part
in the Klondike gold rush, and who are not included in most of the books written.
