Of all those who plied the trade in the Far North, one woman best typified their pioneering gold rush spirit. She was called the "Oregon Mare," often outrageous, always an enigma. She began her career in Yukon Territory at the turn of the century and endured to the very end of the era, becoming Alaska's most famous and admired good time girl.
Nevill Armstrong, shanghaied to a party in the hotel room of a Northwest Mounted Police inspector who was celebrating his son's birth in Dawson, described his first astonishing encounter with her.
"... I was greeted by 'The Oregon Mare,' a nickname applied to a very handsome woman who was a well-known Dawson demimondaine. 'The Oregon' was wearing a pink silk nightdress over which she had on the scarlet tunic of my friend, his Stetson hat, gauntlet gloves and she held his riding whip in her hand," the gold stampeder later recalled. "She was standing up in the middle of the bed and I must say presented a very striking picture."1
The Mare, a.k.a. Edith Radford Neile, lived for the moment and had little if any concern for social conventions. The deep-voiced, magnificently proportioned brunette—close to six feet tall and age twenty at the height of the Klondike rush—left a trail of outlandish legends.
"This woman, when working in the Monte Carlo, had for a bet made in the dance hall before all present, undertaken to accommodate a certain number of men during one evening, hence her name," miner E. C. Trelawney-Ansell recollected.2 His account is suspect because he confused the Mare's given name with that of Belinda Mulrooney, who owned the Fairview Hotel out of which Edith often worked, but similar reports are given of Edith's stamina as a sexual athlete and her pride in her prowess.
"The most printable explanation of the Oregon Mare's nickname was that she whistled and squealed like a horse when she was dancing, but it was said that she had other equine talents as well. She was one of the best-known girls in town—a big, handsome woman who made men get off the sidewalk when she walked by," recalled Klondike writer Pierre Berton, drawing on stories he'd heard from old-timers. "Seldom short of funds, she would, when in an expansive mood, stand up at the bar and cry: 'Here, boys—there's my poke. Have a drink with me all of you.'"3
C. S. Hamlin began his Dawson reminiscences of Edith with a whinny.
"Up jumps a fellow from the gambling table near the rear of the saloon. . . . 'Hell, do they allow them to ride horses into the saloons?'
"'You darn fool, that isn't a horse. Why, that's the whinny of the Oregon Mare.'"
According to Hamlin's account, the Mare told a miner she expected a Christmas present the next day and maybe she'd go with him the day after. He presented her with a pair of garters, "one with a bangle with a nugget as large as a sugar cube." Edith was pleased, but as she donned the garter with the nugget, five boys came in carrying a huge bale of hay from Mac's Livery Stable.
"We hope you will appreciate our little gift," they told her. New cuss words "coined purposely for them" were her angry reaction.4
Ex-senator from California Jeremiah Lynch reported watching Edith spend $1,000 in one hour at the roulette table. It is also legend that the Mare kicked customers who refused to dance with her, that she had been an Oregon cowgirl, that she drank as wildly as she gambled, and that she was estranged from her kin.
Edith's family, from whom she was definitely not estranged, found many of these legends painful, for they never knew her to drink, gamble, swear, or become physically violent. Edith was raised on a small chicken ranch on the San Francisco Peninsula, not in Oregon, they pointed out, and she had little to do with horses.5
Edith herself did nothing to separate fact from fiction. Unlike her close friend, the self-promoting "Klondike Kate" Rockwell, who delighted in holding press conferences and cooperating with biographers, Edith was not known to have given a single interview in her eighty-three years.
FAMILY MEANT A LOT
According to rumor, Edith Neile had little to do with her family, but in fact she adored her younger sister, Edna, and worked hard to give her mother a good life. Here, Edith (left) vacations in style with Edna (center) and a stepsister from the Denny clan.
Courtesy of Joseph Sterling.
Nor was she prone to discussing her private life, not even with lovers, close friends, or family.
Only two legends about the famed dance hall girl are indisputable. Edith Neile, no matter how high-spirited and outrageous, was as well-liked as she was well-loved. And she was openhanded to a fault.
She was born in Yreka, California, in 1878, the first child of Marie and William Radford. Her Spanish-born mother, a schoolteacher and better educated than most women of her day, had come from the East Coast via covered wagon at the age of three, landing in Oklahoma. Marie had married a prominent man named Denny, who left her widowed with four children. Her second marriage, to Englishman William Radford, was a happy one. They welcomed Edith's birth and that of their second daughter, Edna, ten years later.
William Radford had first appeared in Siskiou, the county seat for Yreka, as a miner about 1872, but he soon found work as a lawman, earning a good reputation. In 1895, when a lynch mob of 250 men invaded the jail where he was guarding four accused murderers, William refused to hand over the keys. He kept the angry men at bay until they adjourned to a neighboring blacksmith shop and hammered out a tool with which to pick the locks.6
Two years later William was killed, reportedly while attempting to arrest stagecoach robber William Harrall. "He was never known to flinch from duty, no matter what the risks were in store for him," the official report noted.7 The family account is that William Radford had previously hung an Indian and that the dead man's brother went to the lawman's home and shot him as he was returning from the creek, balancing a yoke with two full buckets of water. Widowed, Marie was left to support Edna, who was then only eight.8
Edith came home for her father's funeral, apparently already married to a man named Neile in Tacoma, about whom little is known except that his relationship with Edith failed. Given Edith's nature, she undoubtedly felt obliged to help support her mother and sister, and about a year later she was en route to the Klondike as a well-paid performer for a legitimate vaudeville company.
The real origin of her nickname, "The Mare," is made clear by an enthusiastic review of Edith's stagecraft, written by Ed Lung. Then a young miner, he met her when she was traveling with a theatrical troupe from the Palace Grand Theater to Hunker Creek, a rugged mining camp about eighteen miles from Dawson.
"And there was the handsome 'Oregon Mare,' the fourth girl in the troupe. She's the talk of Dawson and wherever she goes," he wrote. "Some say she's a cowgirl from Oregon, others say Montana. Anyway, she surely knows horses. And she must be a ventriloquist, too, the way she throws her voice.
"Sometimes she wears a horse mask. She hoofs it, kicks, cavorts and horseplays all over the stage. Sometimes even gallops like mad around the audience. Her imitations of a pony are a rollicking scream!
"Often, she stops in her wild antics to give those long, drawn-out horse laughs which you would swear are real. Then, back to the stage she gallops. There are imaginary horse-races, horse-fights and silly, moon-eyed lovemaking accompanied by lots of significant whinnying, neighing and kicking.
"Well, to tell about it seems nothing at all, but to see her is something special! Anyway, she surely makes a hit with the fellows. Just seems to tickle their funny bones!
"They throw nuggets at the 'Oregon Mare.' And as she romps off the stage they slap their sides and exclaim between fits of laughter, 'By George! She's earned 'em! By George! Haven't had so much fun in a coon's age!'"9
Obviously Edith had a future in the theater, and why she tossed it away to pursue prostitution will probably never be known. The money a popular girl could make selling love was spectacular, but Edith would later prove that money itself meant very little to her.
In 1903 Edith Neile took her little sister on a vacation in Mexico, perhaps at their mother's urging. The girls were unusually close, and Edna—who was, if anything, more willful than Edith—was becoming too much for Marie to manage. Edith did prove an inspiring role model for the fun-loving fourteen-year-old, but not in the way their mother had hoped. When Edith returned to the dance halls, Mrs. Radford grew even more concerned about her wild younger daughter and committed her to a convent in Spokane.
Edna soon climbed the convent wall and ran away, finding work as a nurse's aid in Spokane's Sacred Heart Hospital at age fifteen.10 Shortly thereafter she made her way to Dawson, where Edith tried to help her break into the dance hall trade—without ringing success. The "Colt" or the "Little Filly," as Edna was called, was almost as tall as her sister, with thick black hair and a pretty, fresh face, but she wasn't cut out for the job. Her gracious manners got in the way, and she soon departed for points south where she embarked on a string of unsuccessful marriages.11
When gold was discovered in Nome and Fairbanks, Dawson became a virtual ghost town and the Oregon Mare followed the stampedes to Alaska. Nome was not to her liking but Fairbanks offered many amenities and rich pickings, so she settled in, importing the first record player the town had ever seen and a radio, a $3,000 Stromberg Carlson, which attracted as much business as her personal charms.12
Edith did so well she invited her friend Klondike Kate Rockwell to join her, and Kate, who had just been publicly jilted by her lover, Alexander Pantages, came north from Seattle hoping for a change of luck.
Unfortunately, Kate was in the middle of a losing streak. Although she had departed Dawson with thousands of dollars only three years earlier, little was left. That she invested in a Fairbanks hotel which burned to the ground in 1906, and she was reduced to dancing at the Floradora for return fare to Seattle.13
Edith, meanwhile, accumulated enough cash for a real vacation. Since Edna was between marriages, the sisters decided to visit their mother, who had moved to San Francisco. Their timing could not have been worse; they were caught in the Great San Francisco Earthquake. Somehow, in the chaos, Marie managed to hire a rowboat for two dollars and they rowed to safety in Oakland. Much later, in 1918, the sisters would transfer from the Princess Sophia to another boat just before the Sophia sank off Juneau, taking 353 lives.
Returning to Fairbanks still flush, Edith purchased a small house in the center of the new red light district. Things continued to go well until she tried to work out of the Senate Saloon, where she was arrested for keeping a bawdy house along with the building's owners, H. C. Kelly and Ronnie Hoyt, and two other prostitutes, Runy Vernon and Myrtle Clark. Both Runy and Myrtle told the arresting officer their last names were "Doe." Edith, straightforward as usual, made sure "Neile" was spelled correctly. Some of her customers were subpoenaed to testify, which discouraged business from those who demanded discretion.14 So after paying her fine, the Mare rented out her Fairbanks house and moved to Circle City about 160 miles north. In 1910 she stampeded to Flat, with about 400 miners, and then on to Iditarod.15
Edna, meanwhile, having divorced her first and second husbands, married a doctor named Palmer in San Francisco. When that match also ended in disaster, she turned once again to Edith, who suggested they pioneer Nenana, a three-hour boat trip from Fairbanks on the Tanana River. The village had a population of less than 200 until about 1915, when the government made it a major construction site for the Alaska Railroad. Both Edith and Edna successfully set up shop in its new red light district.
Sometime in 1917, Edna Radford Palmer went to a movie and found herself sitting next to Margaret Young Sterling, about her own age, whose husband, Hawley, headed the Nenana construction camp. Margaret was pregnant with her first child and Edna, who seldom met pregnant women on the fast track she'd been traveling, was intrigued.
THE MAN WHO WON EDITH NEILE’S HEART
She refused to wed but was tempted when Hawley Sterling proposed that she help him raise his young son, Joey, whom she adored.
Courtesy of Joseph Sterling.
When the baby began to kick, Margaret let her feel the motion. Edna thought enough of the incident to mention it to Edith, although she didn't know how it would change both their lives.16
In October of the following year, Margaret Sterling left her newborn son, Joe, in Nenana to travel to Fairbanks to visit her father, whom she thought to be dying. The fastest transport was the Hungry Kid's Launch, owned by George Vernon. Except for the windshield, it was wrapped in heavy canvas to protect passengers from the wintry weather. Later that day, the launch was found mostly submerged near the Tanana turn-off to Fairbanks. All eight passengers and George Vernon were declared dead, but Margaret's body was not found. A champion swimmer, she had escaped the wreck, but there was no hope that she had survived the cold waters.17
Margaret's father recovered nicely, but her widower nearly went mad with grief, and he would not rest until he reclaimed his wife's body from the silt-laden Tanana. It did not appear before freezeup, so the next spring he again patrolled the river, finally locating her just two and a half miles from their home in Nenana. The body was still buttoned into a heavy fur coat, which explained why Margaret never made it to shore. She had been just twenty-three.18
YOUNG HAWLEY STERLING (left)
Defying family tradition, Hawley Sterling turned his back on politics and Ivy League colleges, graduating as an engineer from the University of Denver. After working on the Los Angeles sewer system, he came north to become one of Alaska’s most successful road and railroad builders.
Courtesy of Joseph Sterling.
Bitterly unhappy, Hawley frequented Nenana's red light district, for few other single women were available. Eventually he decided he was in love with Edith Neile and asked her to marry him. His son, Joe, then almost two years old, was boarding with Margaret's parents in Fairbanks, and Hawley was anxious to establish a home for him.
Hawley, the black sheep of a prominent Pennsylvania family, had been slated to follow in his father's footsteps by going to Stanford and becoming a lawyer. Instead he had majored in civil engineering at the University of Denver and taken a job working on the Los Angeles sewer system before becoming a guard at a coal mine. Finally, in 1910, he landed a good engineering assignment with the Treadwell mine in Juneau, and then became a construction engineer for the Alaska Railroad. In 1913 he had led a party of climbers up Mount St. Elias, and he had displayed similar physical prowess on the Alaska-Canadian Boundary survey crew.
Exceedingly handsome and strong, the young widower was easy to love, and Edith adored his son, Joey. But Edith had entertained many offers of marriage. She knew she would not be a suitable wife for Hawley (or anyone else), and she told him so. When Edith would not change her mind, Hawley began an affair with Edna which turned into a real love match. The "Colt" was as anxious to retire from the red light district as Hawley was to have her. She'd been intrigued with little Joe since she first felt him kicking in his mother's belly, and was thrilled by the idea of helping raise him.
Pleased with the match, Edith discreetly returned to Fairbanks where she reestablished herself, making no further attempts to bend the rules by working outside the restricted district. Actually, there was no need to. Railroad construction had given the Fairbanks economy a real boost, and the girls on the Line had all the business they could handle.
Edith enjoyed being back in Fairbanks after nearly a decade of camping in frontier boomtowns. Many Fairbanks old-timers had first met her in Dawson and other frontier outposts, and she quietly helped them out if they ran low on luck. In fact, she spent every extra dime she made contributing to the pioneer fund or buying meal tickets on the sly for those who needed them. Openhandedness was a tradition of the gold camps she'd come up in, and why not? Another strike would always be somewhere down the road.19
In early 1920 Fairbanks received a desperate call for help from Nenana. The "Spanish Grippe," a violent flu virus that had been epidemic around the world a year earlier, had finally caught up with the small railroad town and paralyzed it. Several residents were dead, few were left on their feet, and volunteers were needed. The lack of immunization made it a dangerous assignment, but Edith Neile was among the first of twenty volunteers who stepped forward. Her sister and Hawley were not among the victims, but she knew most of the families in Nenana and they had been kind to her.
Those who went described it as a pest hole. ". . . Fifty percent of those who were taken in, were taken out dead," reported one newspaper. "Edith worked all the time, without taking her clothes off for twenty-four hours."20
"There's one fine woman. . . . She was right in there with her sleeves rolled up nursing the sick," wrote Ernest Patty, later president of the University of Alaska. "The doctor told her she was the best damn nurse he'd had and she'd better get some rest before she took sick too.
"'Don't worry about me, Doc,' she told him. 'I'm not afraid of any flu bug.'
"Sporting girl, hell. She was an angel during that nightmare."21
The death toll was forty-six, about one third of Nenana's population. When her help was no longer needed, Edith herself nearly succumbed to the virus. She recovered to receive grateful thanks from dozens of people who owed her their lives, but the sickness permanently destroyed her hearing, shutting her off in a silent world at age forty-two.22
On September 26, 1920, Edna Radford Palmer and Hawley Sterling said their vows before R. S. McDonald, the U.S. Commissioner in Nenana, embarking on a highly successful lifelong marriage. The only problem was that Hawley's former in-laws, Frank Young Sr. and his wife, refused him custody of his son on the grounds that Edna would be an unfit mother. The Sterlings went to court, a brave move because it made their private lives public. But Edna wanted little Joe as much as Hawley did, and they waged an unflinching campaign to win him.
The Youngs spared them no pain. Hawley testified that the Youngs already had so turned his son against him that the four-year-old was afraid to go for a walk with his father. The Youngs argued that the child should remain in their custody because "the home provided, and the surroundings created by the said re-marriage of said Hawley Sterling are altogether unfit for the bringing up of a child under tender and impressionable years."23
The Youngs maintained that Edna had been a prostitute right up to the very day of her marriage. She had been intoxicated, used profane language, and continued to associate with women of ill-repute, they said. Also, they charged Hawley with intemperate and immoral habits. Their daughter had wanted them to have her boy because she was concerned about Hawley's lifestyle, they added. And they claimed Hawley had not paid them adequate child support.
It was widely known that Margaret Young Sterling had adored her husband, and Hawley quietly said so. He proved to the court's satisfaction that he had attempted to pay child support but that the Youngs often refused it. Then, surprisingly, he dealt head-on with the issue of his past and that of his wife. He conceded that Edna had at one time been a prostitute in Nenana and Fairbanks and that his own past was not unblemished, but he insisted that "for a considerable period of time prior to the marriage of the petitioner and his said wife, she had ceased to live an immoral life, and since the marriage . . . [she] has led an absolutely clean and moral life, and has severed all associations with other residents of the restricted district," except for one woman who had cared for her when she was ill.
Hawley also had the foresight to investigate the Youngs, and countered their charges by pointing out that one of their most frequent former callers was in the government penitentiary on charges of incest, while another was doing time for burglary. Hawley concluded his testimony by reminding the court that he was the superintendent of the Alaska Road Commission at Fairbanks, and able and willing to provide a fit and proper home for his child. The judge agreed,24 and the Sterlings proved him right.
Years later Joe Sterling would recall his childhood as a normal and happy one. He loved Edna, and he also loved his Aunt Edith, who was delighted to have a bright young nephew. She had cared about Joe even before Edna met Hawley, and her look of joy holding him in an early baby photo says it all.
Little Joey was the bright spot in Edith Neile's life at a time when she didn't have many.25 She continued to make good money in her trade, teaming with Edna and Hawley to buy Marie Radford a nice house on 66th Avenue in Oakland, where they all enjoyed family reunions. "Grandma Radford" was still going strong at seventy, once astonishing her family by playing football with neighborhood youngsters. But there was too little time with family for Edith, who spent most of hers working in Fairbanks.
In 1928 the Sterlings moved to South America, where Hawley was a chief engineer for South American Gulf Oil. Edna took over Joe's schooling for a year and was pleased when he skipped from fifth to seventh grade under her tutorship. Bigger and better engineering jobs came Hawley's way and Edna, with her perfect manners and easy charm, proved as fine a hostess as she was a mother.
But while the Sterlings were moving up, Edith Neile began a painful decline. Hampered by deafness and age, she finally quit the Line to purchase a bathhouse, still a good business in Fairbanks because even in the early 1940s few homes had running water. However, Edith continued to give away most of her earnings. After she sold the bathhouse sometime in the mid-'40s, she worked a discouraging series of low-paying menial jobs because she had no retirement savings. The cost of living was high in Alaska, and eventually she moved to Seattle, which was more reasonable. Edna, who was widowed in 1948, purchased a nice apartment hoping Edith would share it with her, but Edith stayed less than a week. The willful Mare was used to living on her own and the very thought of taking charity angered her.
When Edna died of cancer in 1953, Joe Sterling, then doing well in the lumber business, tried to help Edith, but he was rebuffed as his mother had been. In the end, Edith moved to a dreary rest home after refusing to accept any help, including a sizable inheritance left by a former lover.
But her friends in Fairbanks had not forgotten her. They made her an honorary member of Alaska's Pioneer Auxiliary 8, and were taking up a collection to bring her home to Alaska when she died quietly of heart disease in February of 1962.26
Edith Radford Neile had given away about $300,000 in her lifetime, "mostly to old guys with dreams of mining in Alaska who never made it," her nephew recalled. The whore with a heart of gold is a cliche, of course, but Edith Neile actually was one, and she was not alone. She was a prostitute without pretensions and she was not alone there, either, for her generation of good time girls had no need to misrepresent themselves in the Far North.
"I personally hate the words 'whore' and 'prostitute,'" her nephew Joe Sterling wrote in considering this book. "Mainly because in today's world and to this generation they bring to mind a young girl in short-shorts standing and soliciting sex on Sunset Blvd., Hollywood, CA, mainly for drug money, etc. These are not the 'sporting girls' as I knew them. I believe that most of the pioneers in Alaska will or would have agreed with me. . . . They were a breed unto themselves."27
The tribute that the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner paid Edith Neile on her death echoed this thought, and held true as well for many of Edith's working sisters who contributed so much to the Last Frontier. It was not the usual brief but instead a heart-felt eulogy, published not with the obituaries but on the editorial page, written by an editor who understood the code of the Far North:
" . . . Once in a while along comes a person who has stood far above the crowd in acts of kindness and charity for her fellow person. One such was Edith Neile, an eighty-three-year-old woman who died Thursday in a rest home in Seattle, and who was cremated today.
"Miss Neile, who wouldn't be classed as one of our 'Blue Bloods' in the sense of the word as it is used today, left her mark on Alaska—and for that matter, was responsible for many an Alaskan being here today.
"It was Edith Neile who nursed untold families and individuals back to health during the great flu epidemic after World War I in Nenana. She put in hundreds of hours at this chore and no one will probably ever know how many lives she actually saved.
"Then there were the acts of kindness she performed anonymously for down-and-out old-timers in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
"One restaurant owner said she couldn't count the times that Miss Neile walked into her restaurant, laid down twenty dollars for a meal ticket for some old-timer who was down on his luck, and left orders, 'just call me when that money is gone, but don't tell anyone where it came from. . . . '
"Possibly as a parting but belated tribute, her ashes could be scattered over the Tanana Valley where she is remembered fondly by so many people, or at least returned to Alaska for burial as this is where her heart has always been.
"You can pay tributes to people in hundreds of different ways but of Edith Neile you can always say, 'There walked a woman!'"28