There were only about 3 ways that a good-time girl's story went in the Alaska-Yukon mining camps, which is interesting at first but quickly turns predictable. I made it to page 230, and then felt like that was all I wanted to know about the subject. ( )

Since I’ve already reviewed books on the demimonde of London, New York, and Chicago, and since I’m sadly lacking in Canadian Content, I thought it might be appropriate to move north by northwest. Good Time Girls of the Alaska-Yukon Gold Rush: Secret History of the Far North is not, obviously, a scholarly study; author Lael Morgan was a journalism professor at the University of Alaska and the book is anecdotal and thus kind of fun.


While many photographs of ladies of joy from the Western mining towns look like the subjects would be more comfortable in a mud wallow than a house of assignation, these ladies are often quite beautiful, or at least not coyote ugly. Is this because my personal objectification of women tends more toward the Gibson Girl than the 1860s type? Is it because photographic technology had improved enough by turn of the century such that the ladies could be portrayed in naturalistic poses rather than staring right into the camera? More research is necessary.


I once heard a lecture by Patricia Limerick, University of Colorado historian, on prostitution in Colorado. Ms. Limerick took the stance that there wasn’t much a woman could do if she wanted to be independent – options were pretty much limited to schoolmarm or courtesan. I find I tend to agree with that. She also claimed that many of the great families in Colorado – she didn’t name names – that had ancestral traditions of tough silver miners or rugged ranchers as the family founders, were actual started by women on their backs rather than men on horseback, and finally that the standard American narrative of good-girl-gone-gone-bad, with an initial visit to an ice-cream parlor leading to the dance hall leading to cigarettes leading drink leading to a house of ill-repute leading to the grave, was just as likely to go in the other direction.


Alaska and the Yukon seem to be similar, except Alaskans and Yukoners are not generally shy about their family background; a number of the ladies were highly honored by both contemporaries and descendants. There are the traditional heart-of-gold stories, which usually turn out to be mythical elsewhere but are well documented here: Edith Neile, lost her hearing nursing smallpox victims; Zula Swanson was reputed to be the richest woman in Alaska and was elected to the Daughters of the Elks and the Northern Lights Civic and Social Club based on her charity work (she also founded the Anchorage chapter of the NAACP); Iowa Allman married the mayor of Fairbanks and was hostess to President Warren Harding when he visited Alaska.


A lady had to be pretty tough just to get to Dawson and the Klondike; the Mounties wouldn’t let anybody into Canada unless they had a least a ton of provisions. The usual route involved getting off a ship in Skagway or Haines, Alaska, then crossing Chilkoot or White Pass to get to Lake Lebarge (see The Cremation of Sam McGee) and a river route to Dawson. The catch was the only way across the passes was on foot – thus you had to make repeated pack trips to build up your one-ton stash. I suppose proven endurance is an asset in the business.


The amount of money taken out of the Klondike diggings was fantastic – it was the richest North American gold camp. Some of the claims paid $100k a year – in 1898 dollars – for several years in a row; that’s even more impressive if you consider these were all placer diggings and could only be worked when the ground was thawed – maybe four months a year. Morgan’s stories about girls being paid their weight in gold are thus a little credible; the tale of a lady auctioning herself to the highest bidder for a six-month contract is well documented (the winner paid $30k and the couple married and lived happily ever after). The other side, of course, is that the gold money pushed up the prices for everything else, and it became not only profitable to be a prostitute but impossible for an unmarried woman in Dawson to be anything else – you just couldn’t clothe, house and feed yourself on the money you could make at any other profession; further the exigencies of Arctic transportation made it almost as difficult to get out of Dawson as to get into it. Morgan has a number of sad stories of ladies who made it up to Dawson as wives, got dumped or widowed by their husbands, and found themselves having to choose between suicide and harlotry.


Ms. Morgan, however, is usually sympathetic to men involved in mining, which is refreshing. The Mounties and various Alaskan city police departments tolerated prostitution as a “necessary evil” but tended to be really hard on pimps. Prostitutes generally didn’t have to pay “protection” to operate, and in Fairbanks were allowed to own their own houses as long as they stayed in a restricted district (Nome was an exception and was so violent and corrupt it made Wyatt Earp nervous when he operated a saloon there). Some of the men became famous as well – Richard Geoghegan was sort of a “reverse pimp” – he was badly crippled and spent every cent he made as a court clerk on ladies, apparently not as business transactions but just as gestures. The ladies, in turn, cooked, cleaned and took care of him in his old age (Geoghegan married one but she died young of TB). Geoghegan was an extremely skilled linguist* and became fluent in Russian, Tibetan, Swahili, Korean, Japanese, Esperanto, and many Alaskan native languages; years after his death his translations were influential in implementing the Alaskan Native Claims legislation. Robert Stroud of Juneau was jailed after murdering a man who either raped his girlfriend or failed to pay her; when he killed another inmate he was sentenced to 38 years solitary confinement in Alcatraz and used the time to become an expert on avian diseases (the “Birdman of Alcatraz”).


Nome, Dawson, and many of the smaller towns didn’t last out the rush and miners and their ladies moved on to new diggings; Fairbanks, however, got a new lease on life when a corporation large enough to finance and operate dredges moved in, followed by the Alaska Railroad, followed by the military. The Fairbanks red light district lasted until the 1950s before finally being shut down and bulldozed to make way for a Safeway. I hope there’s a plaque – “Diamond Tooth Gertie Slept Here**” or something.


*Don’t go there.

**There was a “Squirrel Tooth Alice” operating in Denver about the same time. She did not have the squirrels actually implanted in her teeth, however. At least I hope not. ( )

An amazing account of those who invariably are poorly documented, illustrating their adventurous, hearty, generous, and enterprising nature and their contributions to the Alaskan-Yukon frontier. The numerous pictures add immensely to the story. ( )

Lael Morgan has written an account of the women who worked as prostitutes and dance hall girls during the gold rushes in Alaska and the Yukon territory. Each chapter tells the story of a different woman's experiences in the north. She sets the context by also telling about the local laws and some of the prominent citizens and miners of the era.

There is no moralizing in this account, and just the tiniest dabs of sociology and philosophy. This is a very readable account of a number of strong-willed, indepdendent women who helped to build North America's northern frontier. ( )