For the new millionaires of the Klondike, money had ceased to be a worry. In two hours Jim Tweed panned $4,284 worth of gold from his claim on Eldorado. Frank Dinsmore took out $24,489 in one day from Bonanza Creek. Albert Lancaster averaged $2,000 per day for eight weeks at his Gold Hill diggings. Clarence Berry netted $140,000 in his first Klondike cleanup and soon would be worth millions.¹ These men suddenly had more wealth than they'd ever dreamed of spending, with no end in sight. If a Klondike King ran out, he simply returned to his claim and dug up more gold.

Yet even for those who struck it rich, it was hard duty on the subarctic tundra, fighting isolation and loneliness in one of the coldest, darkest, and most unforgiving environments on earth. A central heating system that could cope with the bitter climate had yet to be invented. And mining was mind-numbing work, even when the end product was pay dirt.

For those with limited resources, the deprivation was even more excruciating. "The sourdoughs lay on their bunks until noon—and noon might just as well be any other time—moving painfully about only to stoke the stove or break off a chunk of rye bread, more from sheer boredom than hunger. Many were ill with dysentery and scurvy, and worst of all, the sickening depression of futility," wrote Ellis Lucia in a telling description of winter in the gold country. "At times the men ventured into the awful bleakness to claw at the frozen ground of their claims. They returned to the drafty warmth of their cabins, holding stiffened fingers above the stove, to ask themselves aloud just why they were trapped here in this Godforsaken wilderness. . . .

"Half-crazed with cabin fever, the sourdoughs could stand it no longer. Climbing into bulky mackinaws, mukluks and fur caps, they stuffed fat buckskin pokes into their coats and headed for Dawson City. . . . It was a gay, frolicsome world, filled with fun in contrast with the awful silence of the outer wilderness. . . . Thousands in yellow gold changed hands in the gambling halls, to be lost and won again, and then to be lost once more to a pretty bit of fluff who called you honey, gave you a nice smile and a peck on the cheek, and would be your very own for the evening if you kept the champagne flowing her way. But you didn't mind, for there was plenty more of this yellow stuff where that came from. . . ."²

The good time girls provided welcome diversion to these lonely men, and thereby found their surest way to wealth. The two most successful legal means of acquiring a fortune in the Far North—staking claims and operating a saloon—were not open to women. Bar ownership by a female was illegal, while staking claims was not considered women's work. So many Klondike women turned to prospecting for gold in a less direct manner, noted academic researcher Bay Ryley.³ Mining the miners became an art.

La Belle Brooks-Vincent wrote a detailed account of the techniques dance hall girls routinely used to separate men from their wealth, mainly by getting them drunk in the private boxes that surrounded every dance floor.

"She is all nerve as she enters a room and surveys the waiting crowd. . . . The dance hall girl is industrious. She is never vacillating or undecided; she is persevering. She does not flit about the room bestowing a smile here, a caress there and again a pouting neglect. When she selects her victim she stays with him. The more marked her favor, the greater his triumph. . . . He needs her to complete a spectacle of himself as a favored beau. . . ."⁴

These women could not have worked without the cooperation of their "victims" and the tolerance of their society. Most of the Klondike Kings had spent their lives prospecting alone in the wilds. Few had wives or even girlfriends back home, for never before had they been considered good marriage material. Past their prime, most eagerly sought attention if not love.

"Diamond Tooth" Gertie Lovejoy, one of Dawson's most successful and outspoken showgirls, best summed up the rationale of her sister prospectors in dealing with men. "The poor ginks just gotta spend it," she observed. "They're scared they'll die before they get it out of the ground."⁵

A good case in point was Charlie "Lucky Swede" Anderson, who was duped while drunk into buying a supposedly useless claim "staked for sucker bait" that produced between $1.2 and $1.5 million. According to legend, forty-year-old Charlie became so anxious to marry a showgirl, and competition for the short, shy, balding, blue-eyed miner was so stiff, that beauteous contenders finally put him up as stakes in a poker game. The winner was actress Grace Drummond, age twenty-nine, who was living with Edgar Mizner, former manager of the Alaska Commercial Company turned gambler.⁶ "Gracie," then the toast of the Monte Carlo music hall, was described as "a sophisticated and beguiling young woman with the gift of beauty and . . . the manners of a kitten and the morals of a cat." She readily agreed to dump her lover and marry the Swede if he would deposit $50,000 into her account. Charlie happily complied.

Following a big wedding officiated by Bishop Bompas of the Anglican Church on June 6, 1899, Charlie also gave his bride a tour of Europe and Mexico, $6,000 in diamonds, gold nuggets worth $1,000, a thousand pounds of gold worth $16,000, horses worth $1,500, and a home and servants in San Francisco. Then Charlie trustingly tucked $4,000 in bonds and $12,000 in gold coins into a safe deposit box for their joint use, left Gracie in California with the key, and went back to the gold fields to make more money.

The happy union did not last. When Charlie returned to his wife, she tried foisting him off on her younger sister, Maud, then locked him out of the house, according to newspaper accounts that generally favored Charlie. However, Gracie claimed that Charlie had threatened to kill her. She also complained that his idea of a good time was dropping ice-cold gold nuggets down the blouses of unsuspecting barmaids. He countered with the accusation that she had taken $63,000 from his safe deposit box—but then he moved back in with her before the divorce was final.

ST. ANDREW’S DAY BALL IN DAWSON
By 1900 Dawson was a world-class city with first-class accommodations, where expensive ball gowns and tuxedos were a “must” for the social set, despite its isolated location near the Arctic Circle. Although this photo was taken at 4 a.m., the party was still in full swing.
UAF, Bassoc Glass Plate Collection, #64-92-641.

"A very ill-suited couple," observed the Rev. George Pringle, in probably the understatement of that year. "Anderson wanted a home and children and the woman was not that kind." The court awarded Gracie $3,000 per month alimony, although it found that Anderson, who spoke broken English, did not understand the term at first.⁷ Gracie moved to Los Angeles and bought a wine garden, but her alimony ceased shortly thereafter when Charlie's claim played out. She disappeared from the news, apparently returning to her hometown back east, but Charlie moved on with the stampede to Nome, where he made another fortune.

This time Charlie spent his money not on dance hall girls but on a beautiful mansion on Nob Hill, hotels, and rental property, only to lose it all in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake when his insurance company went under. Left with only five cents in his pocket, Charlie alternated between odd jobs and unsuccessful attempts at prospecting, finally ending his life as a chicken farmer. His estate totaled $1,731. Considering the downturn in his career after leaving the Far North, Charlie might well have considered Gracie one of his better investments.⁸

Grace Drummond's sister Myrtle enjoyed even more spectacular success mining miners, with less adverse publicity. The Skagway Alaskan, which described her as "bewitching," generously attributed her success to her dancing skills and her marriages to "Jim Hall and other noted men of sudden wealth in rapid succession."⁹ Although the men in Myrtle Drummond's life were slightly more sophisticated than Charlie Anderson, most seem to have had the same desire for a "trophy" wife or mistress.

Myrtle was a trapeze performer and contortionist with a four-ring circus when she heard about the gold discoveries and headed north with the early pioneers. "She soon found that dancing in a Circle City saloon was more profitable than flying through the air and twisting herself into peculiar shapes for the amusement of young Americans," a Skagway reporter observed, "and in a short time found herself the owner of some of the best claims in the district with the entire male population and wealth at her command."

Jim Hall, a.k.a. "Arkansas Jim," struck it rich on #17 Eldorado in the first wave of Dawson millionaires, invested in the Palace Grand Theater where Myrtle performed, and gave her a $40,000 claim on Bonanza Creek as a wedding present. Following their divorce shortly thereafter, Jim remarried immediately. When his second wife died in the winter of 1899, he made headlines with his "frantic efforts" to marry yet another dance hall girl.¹⁰ Well-meaning friends, concerned for his mental health and his future finances, briefly had Jim jailed on grounds of insanity, "forlorn and forsaken, protected by the barracks' barriers from the designing marriage offers of poke-hunting soubrettes."

At the time of this intervention, Jim was ready to exchange marriage vows with Grace "Gussie" Anderson (not Grace Drummond Anderson but the former Gussie Green, another opportunist), who also performed at his theater. "She with the trilby feet and enlarged spleen for marriage vows, it would be hard to express the depth of her chagrin and the loudness of her lamentation since others had defeated her pet plans for a profitable matrimonial alliance," the Dawson Daily News reported. "Her devoted Jim had done the 'grand' by not only seeking hymen at the marriage license desk, but by also making out a $10,000 check on one of the banks, drawn in her favor."

A court-appointed doctor found Jim "wanting in the virility and strength of his gray matter, and not capable of resisting the attractions of the fair sex by reason of the weakening influence caused by a protracted spree."¹¹ But two days later Jim was released and Gussie reclaimed him. As friends had suspected it would be, their marriage was marred by general unhappiness and hard drinking. Jim eventually committed suicide.¹²

In contrast, Myrtle Drummond, who owed her original stake to Jim Hall, was hailed by journalists in 1901 as the richest woman in the Klondike, "divorced and married many times, always getting mixed up with men of wealth." She started that year by mushing her own dog team from Whitehorse to Dawson for another stage appearance there, and it was predicted she would marry again soon.¹³

Instead of feeling preyed upon by fortune hunters like Myrtle Drummond, most Klondike Kings viewed "poke hunting" as acceptable behavior. Since they had been driven north by the desire for wealth, they were not surprised that their female counterparts were motivated by the same goal. These men expected to pay generously for the attention of pretty women in high demand. Some bragged at great lengths about how much wealth they lavished on Klondike charmers, simply because it was one of the few ways to purchase prestige in the Far North.

Antone Stander, an Austrian who had arrived in New York City at age twenty in 1877 with just $1.75 in his pocket, paid big money to have his rags-to-riches story printed in an elegant souvenir newspaper published by "Arizona" Charlie Meadows.¹⁴ Antone confessed frankly that actress Violet Raymond, with whom he had long been infatuated, had paid little attention to him when he was "in rough garb of the country and with few dollars in his pockets."

Violet Raymond, a prepossessing blonde, jovial in nature, with a graceful and well-developed figure,¹⁵ had broken all attendance records at the Juneau Opera House as the "Queen of Burlesque" at age sixteen, and was paid an enormous salary to play in Dawson two years later. She was, in Antone's words, "the undisputed belle of the camp and could number her admirers by the score"¹⁶—and she was regarded as the personal property of Max Endleman, the aging proprietor of the Gold Hill Hotel, who had brought her and her sister into the country.

ILL-FATED LOVERS
Gold king Antone Stander was so smitten with his fiancée, Miss Violet Raymond, that he commissioned “Arizona” Charlie Meadows to announce their engagement as the very first feature in the souvenir edition of the Klondike News, April 1, 1898. It was a real love match, but Antone was violently jealous of his beautiful ex-burlesque queen, and his drinking and fits of temper drove them apart. He gave most of his wealth to Violet, dying broke while she survived in luxury to relatively old age.
Klondike News, April 1, 1898, courtesy of Earl Beistline.

Antone, however, had youth and good looks on his side, as well as money. After the wash-up that made him rich in the summer of 1897, he bought up all the diamonds in Dawson and presented them to Violet in a flashing necklace that reached nearly to her knees. He followed up with $20,000 in gold dust, a lard bucket full of odd-shaped nuggets, and $1,000 a month in spending money.

"They will join hearts and hands in July and spend their honeymoon in the Orient, visiting Japan and China, and will return to the little brown cot on the hill before making a trip to Paris to the Exposition," concluded the vanity newspaper piece, published on April 1, 1898.

It turned out to be a love match, but Antone's possessiveness soon drove them apart. As pocket money for their honeymoon trip, he stored one thousand pounds of gold in their stateroom of the Humbolt, but then he was afraid to leave his treasure to tour the ports with his new wife. "It would be hard to tell which [he] guards more jealously—his bride or his gold," a reporter for the Examiner wrote.¹⁷

Antone's solution seemed to be to give the gold to Violet bit by bit, until it was all gone, observed writer Pierre Berton, whose family knew most of the Klondike old-timers. "Antone Stander drank part of his fortune away; his wife deserted him and took the rest, including the Stander Hotel, which he had built in Seattle with profits from his claim," Berton recounted. "One cannot entirely blame her, for when Stander was drinking he was subject to crazy fits of jealousy; on one occasion he tried to cut her to pieces with a knife."

Antone Stander headed north again in search of another Klondike, working his passage by peeling potatoes, but got no farther than Southeastern Alaska. There he survived on the charity of the government Pioneer Home before being evicted for drunkenness. For Antone it was all downhill from there,¹⁸ while Violet hung on to their money, spending her final days in luxury and comfort.

Two gold-mining ship captains, Sid and Hill Barrington, also became smitten with gold camp beauties. Their father, Edward J. Barrington, had pioneered shipping in the Pacific Northwest in the mid-nineteenth century, but died leaving his widow slim resources to provide for their seven youngsters. Sid, then eleven, began working on boats on Puget Sound, earning his unlimited captain's papers at age twenty-one.¹⁹ Three years later, in 1896, he left for the Klondike, where he became the first man to take a riverboat through Miles Canyon near Whitehorse²⁰ and the first to bring a steamer into the trading post of Dawson.²¹

Sid soon was joined by his older brother, Eddie, who piloted the steamer Willie Irving on the upper Yukon, and his younger brother, Hill, who eventually became captain of La France. Together the Barrington brothers joined the Dawson stampede of 1898, staking a claim that produced $70,000 in just one week.²² Their triumph was marred, however, by a typhoid fever epidemic that hit both Hill and Eddie that summer. Hill managed to recover, but Eddie died in August after a lingering illness.²³

A FAMILY OF FIRST CLASS CAPTAINS
Hill, Side, and Harry Barrington, sons of a famous sea captain from Oak Harbor, Washington, stampeded to Dawson and made a fortune, first at gold-mining and then in the riverboat trade. Their brother Eddie, who came with them, did not survive a typhoid epidemic, but they survived to provide several colorful chapters in Alaska/Yukon history.
Courtesy of Bill Barrington.

After escorting Eddie's body home to Oak Harbor, Washington, Hill and Sid returned to Dawson determined to sample life to the fullest, and in 1900 they both married beautiful women of shady repute. Sid, always flamboyant, chose "Dirty Maude" Delisle, a circus performer from Cincinnati whose nickname apparently had nothing to do with personal cleanliness. She danced at the Palace, where she was known as the only woman in the Far North who could stand flat-footed and spit over her head; she was considered an entertaining catch. But it was young Hill, the "tag-along" as his family called him, who captured the real beauty. He wed Babe Wallace, a much-sought-after prostitute of considerable notoriety, who had made enough money to own a piano, an incredible luxury in Dawson.²⁴

THE DELISLE SISTERS
“Dirty Maude” Delisle (top) and her sister Hazel, formerly circus performers, made good in Dawson in song-and-dance variety shows. Each had a photo series made showing her range expressions, required for a vaudeville resume in that era. Early on, Maude wed Sid Barrington, a popular riverboat captain, but they soon parted in an amicable divorce. Later he wed her sister, Hazel, a union that would last almost half a century.
Courtesy of Bill Barrington.

Neither marriage lasted long. Babe Wallace died of tuberculosis, and Hill later married a ship captain's daughter and, following her death, the social-climbing daughter of a respectable railroad man.²⁵ Dirty Maude amicably split with Sid and next made print in 1902 by briefly marrying a well-heeled prospector/bootlegger, Ulysses "Old Joe" Crocker, in Coldfoot, the site of a new gold stampede. Later Maude followed the miners to Nome and Cordova, finally marrying a railroad man. Then Sid Barrington—who twice made and lost a million after his Dawson gold strike—happily wed Maude's sister, Hazel Delisle, who had teamed with her as a dancer at the Palace. Sid named the boats in his large fleet after Hazel and stayed with the match until her death nearly fifty years later.²⁶

Of all the Klondike millionaires, the most celebrated fool for women was "Swiftwater" Bill Gates. He made and lost at least three fortunes, and officially married and divorced or deserted at least five beautiful girls. Not on this list is Gussie Lamore, a close friend of Myrtle Drummond, who "mined" Bill Gates in Dawson as soon as he made his first million.

Bill had grown up poor and had prospected unsuccessfully in remote regions most of his life. After discovering that his claim, Eldorado #13, was virtually knee-deep in gold, he built the grandest gambling den and dance hall in Dawson, the Monte Carlo. On opening night he announced that he was "going to have a lady and the swellest in the country."²⁷

Variety actress Gussie Lamore, age twenty-two, a petite, plump, blue-eyed, flaxen-haired beauty who had just come to work for him from a stint at the Juneau Opera House, was waltzing with a big French-Canadian when she caught Bill's eye. Without approaching her, he hurried back to his hotel, filled his pockets with pokes of gold, and returned for an introduction. His approach was swift and direct: "I'll give you your weight in gold tomorrow morning if you will marry me—and I guess you'll weigh about $30,000."²⁸

Although Bill was fairly handsome, he was only five-feet-five, looked a decade older than his twenty-seven years, and—despite his trademark black Prince Albert coat and black silk top hat—he lacked polish. He'd been washing dishes in Circle when Gussie was a headliner there, and even if she hadn't been quietly married to Emile Leglice,²⁹ she had good reason to stall. It only made the new millionaire more determined.

"I should think a man could do anything with gold! And for my part, I used to always figure that money could buy anything, even the most beautiful woman in the world for your wife," he later would tell Iola Bebee, one of his many mothers-in-law.

SWIFTWATER BILL AND GRACE LAMORE
Surprisingly, no pictures are known to exist of Gussie Lamore, although she was a popular entertainer in both Circle City and Dawson.
San Francisco Chronicle, courtesy of Terrence Cole.

Throughout the winter of '97, Bill lavished money and attention on Gussie. Following a quarrel with her, Bill bought up all the eggs in Dawson at outrageous prices, because he knew she loved them and would have to deal with him if she wanted any. Gussie played along, finally leading Bill to believe she would marry him in California at the end of the summer. Instead she deserted him, and within a month she began an unrelenting series of interviews venting her contempt for the diminutive millionaire.

"He's as stupid as an owl . . . and as rich as anything," she told Alice Rix of the San Francisco Examiner. Bill was expected to earn $1 million that winter, "but independence is a good deal too," Gussie insisted.³⁰

Bill quickly recovered his self-esteem by eloping with Gussie's lovely older sister, Grace Lamore, following a six-day courtship. When Grace grew tired of their luxurious San Francisco flat, he bought her a $25,000 home in Oakland, spent thousands on furnishings, and presented her with diamonds and sapphires. Nevertheless, Grace sued for divorce after seven weeks. "I would have loved him more had he loved me less," she said. "I lost all love for him after we had been married a few days. He squeezed and hugged me from morning until night."

Love-starved Bill still didn't get it. "I don't intend to chase her," he told the Seattle Times. "I have the money and she should come to me. I can shower all manner of attention on her, but I'll not run after her footsteps. I'm worth, in round figures, $1,800,000 . . . and if I don't agree to it, she can't get a cent. . . . "³¹

Bill went on to take Nell, the youngest Lamore sister, as his mistress. Although she was just eighteen, she was already a successful actress with many resources and soon she too deserted him. Then he turned his attention to girls barely into their teens who needed him more.

Later, Gussie Lamore told the press she had no regrets. "Pooh! I wouldn't have had him for a million. . . . I thought I'd get his money when he came out and then let him go. He was too easy—the easiest thing you ever saw," she said. "Why in there, all you had to do was touch him for $400 and get it. But I wouldn't have married him if he owned the Klondike."³²

Surprisingly, Bill bore the Lamore sisters no ill will and gamely attended several of Gussie's later stage performances, where the former lovers vied to buy each other drinks to the delight of newspaper reporters.³³

One of the most unusual of early Dawson matches was that of hard-partying "Diamond Tooth" Gertie Lovejoy to C. W. C. Tabor, the well-respected dean of Dawson's attorneys, and Gertie's subsequent attempt to enter Dawson's polite society.

The exquisite blond entertainer boasted a showy diamond strategically wedged between her two front teeth, contrasting with her elegant, fine-featured beauty. A formidable performer with a gift for off-color ad-libs, Gertie was a headliner at the Palace and a favorite of dozens of powerful men, including supposedly happily married dance hall owner "Arizona" Charlie Meadows and U.S. Consul James McCook. She and the fun-loving consul made headlines during a barroom spree which ended with his distributing gold nuggets and his watch to the bar girls and attaching an American flag to the seat of his trousers, inviting a good, swift kick.³⁴ At an afternoon baseball game, Gertie raised eyebrows by appearing resplendent in a satin ball gown.³⁵

On stage Gertie would flaunt her lush figure, asking her lusting audience coyly, "Hey there, boys! Ain't it pretty? This diamond, I mean. Why, it's like real money in the bank, the family jewels!" The audience would pelt her with loose nuggets, little sacks of gold dust, and, attached to them, notes requesting after-the-show trysts that soon made her a wealthy woman.³⁶

In early 1900 Gertie barely escaped a Dawson hotel fire with her life and lost $2,000 worth of personal property—an extraordinary figure for that era. But Gertie quickly recouped her finances,³⁷ continuing to party in style. Just why she chose to marry C. W. C. Tabor has never been explained. Competent lawyers were averaging $2,000 a month in Dawson, and he was at the very top of his field and undoubtedly earning much more. Yet Gertie had close ties with men of even greater wealth and power, so her union with the thirty-five-year-old barrister may have been a love match. She married him quietly and stayed in Dawson long after the dance halls closed, despite the "respectable" wives openly snubbing her.

Gertie was invited to a tea at Government House by Martha Black, the wife of Tabor's colleague George Black, who had been elected to head the territorial parliament. "Gertie was a demure little woman, quite pretty and very self-effacing," observed Laura Berton, who attended the event. "She had little to say but when she did speak the famous diamond could be seen glittering between her two front teeth. Tongues wagged furiously the next day."³⁸

Although her husband continued as Dawson's leading lawyer, Gertie— fed up, perhaps, with the role of demure and self-effacing little woman— moved to the high rent district in San Francisco, never to return. When Tabor died in the Yukon Hotel fire in 1917, she simply sent a spray of hyacinths to the funeral.³⁹ Comfortable with her extraordinary memories, she lived into her nineties.⁴⁰

Also bucking Dawson's polite society was Lulu Mae Eads, a seductive dance hall queen who, according to one legend, was the model for the vamp in Robert Service's famous poem, "The Shooting of Dan McGrew."⁴¹ Lulu had arrived late in Dawson, coming in 1900 with a trumpet player named Lopez, and shortly thereafter married their boss, Murray Eads, the town's longest-tenured hotel and dance hall owner.⁴²

Murray Eads was so well liked that in late 1901 the town and his employees gave him the largest benefit performance ever staged in Dawson. Newspapers noted that he had on his payroll "no less than sixty-eight people whose aggregate salaries amount to $2,769 a week, each of whom will contribute both his or her services and a nightly salary."⁴³

Lulu apparently played a large part in managing her husband's Floradora Dance Hall. It was a marvel of opulence, hung with seven-foot-high oil paintings of nudes in tremendous gilt frames, which had been packed on men's backs over the trail in the early days. "That hotel lobby, with its enamel spittoons, its painted nudes, its black-leather Edwardian chairs and its endless poker games glimpsed through the doors in the rear, never changed in any single detail," marveled Laura Berton when it was the town's prized hostelry.⁴⁴

The Eads managed to keep it open even after dance halls and gambling dens were outlawed, changing its name to The Alexander and courting acceptance of the citizens. But in 1907 Lulu, not Murray, was charged with allowing on the premises "women of lose, idle or suspicious character and having no honorable occupation or calling, for the purpose of keeping company with men,"⁴⁵ and Dawson society ostracized her.

Shrewdly, Mr. and Mrs. Eads diversified, investing in a brewing company and a Seattle bank, while continuing to be enthusiastic civic boosters.⁴⁶ Finally, wealthy beyond their dreams in 1918, they decided to travel to the States to visit family and friends they had not seen in two decades, despite an unnerving and well-documented premonition that the trip would cost them their lives. It did. Both drowned during the sinking of the elegant steamship, the Princess Sophia.

Jewelry found in a chamois bag strung around Lulu Eads's neck provides a poignant glimpse of a dance hall girl's dream come true. Inside were a lovely topaz ring with diamonds, a diamond sunburst brooch valued at $300, a $650 diamond ring, a nine-diamond pendant and chain worth $700, and the wedding ring Murray had given Lulu at the start of it all, valued at a mere three dollars but obviously worth a lot more.⁴⁷

Marriage was not on the agenda of all high-profile Dawson showgirls. Some felt it would limit both their fun and their earnings, and instead dexterously romanced Klondike Kings who were willing to share. A surprising number of wealthy miners, perhaps restrained by marital commitments back home or simply prizing their own freedom, formed fan clubs for the most desirable of the gold-diggers. In such clubs, the men joined forces to present the women with expensive gifts and hold receptions in their honor, while competing for sexual favors.

"Gussie Lamore was the heroine of an enjoyable pink crushed high tea party given by a number of eligible bachelors at a private rendezvous last Saturday evening," the Dawson Daily Nugget reported without a blush on March 13, 1900. "During the height of the festivities, with the popping of champagne corks she was presented with a gold wishbone, the insignia of the club. Her health was then drunk in goblets adopted by the club, consisting of uniquely designed Cinderella glass slippers, ornamented with nuggets."

Honora Ornstein, known as "Diamond Tooth Lil" for the diamond fillings she displayed proudly in her front and eye teeth, left the territory with thousands of dollars earned not by playing favorites but by playing the field. Her dancing and singing were marginal at best. One reviewer noted she was "better at pretending to be a fleshy statue than a serpentine dancer."⁴⁸ But Lil's smile was marvelous, and her well-upholstered figure truly voluptuous. From one plump, bare shoulder to her wrist she wore a fascinating white gold snake bracelet studded with 125 real diamonds, which hypnotized some of her audience and caused the rest to howl like a pack of malamutes.⁴⁹

A headliner for Alexander Pantages, Lil retired in the 1920s to Seattle, where she invested well in apartment houses. She briefly married a man named George Miller, whom she divorced in 1923 just one week before receiving word that she had inherited $150,000 from her mother in Los Angeles. Lil announced she would use that capital to start a dramatic stock company, but her mind began to fail. In 1935 friends committed her to the state hospital in Yakima, where she remained until 1960 when she was moved to a rest home on welfare. Her money had run out in the late '50s, after her fabulous jewelry collection and the diamonds in her teeth were sold with some difficulty because, guardians noted, some didn't want to buy jewels worn by "that woman."⁵⁰

The most spectacularly mercenary of the good time girls was Cad Wilson, who arrived in Dawson in the fall of 1898 fresh from San Francisco. Billed as the highest-paid visiting performing artist on the Pacific Coast, Cad was no beauty. Her figure was not outstanding and she didn't have much of a voice, but the diminutive, brown-eyed redhead affected a delightful air of innocence which contrasted neatly with her risque repertoire.

ENTERTAINING
“Diamond Tooth” Gertie Lovejoy, left, and Cad Wilson entertain Eddite Doland, a popular comic and stage manager of the Tivoli Theater, far right, and an unidentified man, perhaps Eddie’s brother, Tommy. The waiter, known as “The Black Prince,” was a Dawson boxing champ. This photo is thought to have been taken in Cad’s apartment over the Monte Carlo Theater sometime in 1898. Gertie later married C. W. C. Tabor, one of Dawson’s most respected lawyers. Cad left the Yukon with more than $50,000 from one season’s earnings, reappeared during the Nome rush, and then disappeared from history.
ASL, Wickersham Collection, PCA 227-1-190.

She drew just one bad review, shortly after she arrived, from an Elks benefit where there were "at least 100 ladies present," who "hung their heads" at the "ginger" in Cad's suggestive act.⁵¹ What shocked them was apparently innuendo, for the naughtiest verse of her theme song, "Such a Nice Girl, Too," seems laughably innocuous by today's standards:

She told me that she was a "Miss"
And scarcely had turned twenty
She said she never cared to wed
Tho' offers she had plenty.
Last week, they took her up to court,
She said, "Judge do be forgiving"
He answered, "Yes, if you can prove
You' ve not three husbands living."⁵²

Cad's audacity only served to endear her to the enthusiastic male fans who were her only concern. She claimed to be about sixteen, from a convent near Sacramento. Her manager, comedian Eddie Doland, introduced her on stage by saying, "Her mother told her to pick nice clean friends, and I leave it to you boys if she can't pick 'em nice and clean."

Actually Cad was probably about twenty-six, but her manager was right about her picking 'em clean.⁵³ "She danced on the stage and she sang real pretty, but she took her time making up her mind, and she played one man against the other to get them showing off," recalled Mont Hawthorne, a young prospector from Astoria where Cad was a well-known vaudeville player. "Next thing we heard was that the fellows who called themselves Eldorado Kings were saving their biggest nuggets and having a belt made out of them for her. It was a Fourth of July present. . . .

"When Cad came out on stage that night, she was wearing that gold belt that the Eldorado Kings had ordered made special for her. They'd been arguing for months about who had found the biggest nugget. Cad ended up that night with all the big ones. That belt went clean around her once and a half and there wasn't even a medium-sized nugget in the bunch." ⁵⁴

The belt, which the proud miners allowed to be displayed to the general public by the manufacturer, L. Pound and Company, was so ornate as to be barbaric, with a miniature golden windlass and bucket, a golden brooch nearly six inches long from which were suspended intricate gold charms, and a gold pan bearing the inscription "Dawson" raised in colored letters.⁵⁵

"That night she sure acted happy. Why, she danced so light her feet hardly touched the floor at all. The fellows went mad when she was singing 'There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.' That's when they really began throwing nuggets on the stage. Cad had a little laugh that was different. She'd sing a while and then she'd look around and laugh. She used her dress for holding nuggets just like it was sort of an apron and she held it right high in front of her. Cad was smart. She'd gone up there like all the rest of us because she wanted to get all the gold she could. She done all right for herself, too."⁵⁶

One admirer was so smitten with Cad that he paid a waiter to fill a bathtub with wine, purchased at twenty dollars a bottle, for her to bathe in. Yukon writer Pierre Berton guesses Cad did not allow him to watch or scrub her back, but probably had the stuff rebottled.⁵⁷

In the fall of 1899, Cad focused on one fellow who spent more than $75,000 on her, but she still couldn't resist an easy mark. Too typical is her fleecing of a low-paid workman known only as The Sawdust King" because he made his living changing the sawdust used to insulate the floors of Dawson gambling houses. He routinely lost most of his meager earnings at the gaming tables. Finally he moved up to packing water for a bar, and in an uncharacteristic streak of luck at cards parlayed his first day's wages into something over $1,800 by 3 p.m. the next day.

Ignoring former friends, the King" went to the Tivoli Theatre and Dance Hall where Cad helped him dispose of several bottles of liquor to celebrate his luck. Then she led him to her dressing room and later installed him in a prominent theater box, tickling his vanity by addressing remarks to him personally and throwing him countless kisses."

At two o'clock the next morning, a card dealer dropped by the dance hall expecting to find Cad with Spitzy," her regular sugar daddy, or another sporty admirer. He was astonished to find her in the lap of the Sawdust King, who was still dirty and ragged."

She had one arm around his neck and caressingly stroked his unkempt hair. Each was sipping wine from the other's glass. The 'king' every now and then would look down disdainfully on the dancers below," according to a newspaper account. Wine was flowing fast and furiously. About four hours later, the Tivoli porter had to turn the Sawdust King out of the house. He had spent $800 in cash and had signed $940 worth of checks. He still wanted to buy, but Cad mercifully refused to drink any more and left him with $60 credit in his bank."

On his departure, the Sawdust King kicked the porter, who retaliated by throwing him into the street so hard he fell and fractured his leg and didn't fully recover until summer.⁵⁸ Cad never had a better night than the one on which the King went broke," the local paper reported.

A LEGITIMATE ACTRESS
American Lucy Lowell came to Dawson from London stage, and her talent so impressed local reviewers that they focused on it instead of the usual personal gossip. Although Lucy garnered plenty of press during her lengthy stay in 1902, her name was not linked in print with any gold kings as was common with other actresses, so we know little of her personal life. Unfortunately she contracted consumption during her Far North tour and died shortly thereafter in Arizona.
ASL, Wickersham Collection, PCA 227-1-187.

When Cad's contract expired in the fall of 1899, locals guessed that she left the territory with about $26,000 in cash. They revisited their estimate when news of an interview she had given her hometown newspaper, the Chicago Chronicle, got back to Dawson. "The erstwhile vaudeville star of the Klondike, who fooled the Eldorado kings about her age and palmed herself off as young and kittenish, 'such a nice girl, too,' is up to her tricks again and filled a Chronicle reporter in Chicago with a lot of fairy tales," the Dawson Daily News warned readers.⁵⁹

According to the Chicago feature, Miss Cad Wilson, having conquered the frozen north, melted the Pole with her warm ragtime song and sustained a variety of injuries through the carelessness of rugged miners in storming her with gold nuggets instead of bouquets, arrived in Chicago today, after a year in the Klondike. Miss Wilson comes home with something besides stories and cheerful thoughts of what might have been. She has a drayload of rough gold trinkets, drafts to the amount of $40,000 and diamonds of sufficient variety and number to light the entire Great Northern hotel, where she is stopping. She had just a brief twelve months among the Dawsonites, and sang so well and danced so prettily, suggestively and gracefully, that if her shower of gold nuggets nightly did not reach $500 in value she left the theater in a pout."

Even more interesting is the Dawson reporter's use of the words erstwhile vaudeville star" for, despite all her newspaper hype and the fact that she was obviously a veteran performer, historians have long puzzled over who Cad Wilson really was.

The caption on her photo in Judge James Wickersham's collection claims that she was actually the East Coast stage actress Esther Lyons, who came to Alaska with her husband, theatrical producer Eugene Robinson, on vacation with photographer Veazie Wilson in 1895. The Veazie party climbed Chilkoot Pass and traveled much of Yukon Territory and Alaska before cruising down the Yukon to the Pacific Coast. Esther authored a book featuring Veazie's photos, then made a lucrative speaking tour of the United States, which may have included a private performance for President McKinley and his family and an appearance at Carnegie Hall.

Cad Wilson did look like Esther Lyons, but Esther's husband subsequently become a multimillionaire and built her a mansion at Sixth Avenue and 47th Street in New York. Nor does it seem likely that Esther would have come north to mine miners under an alias when she'd starred with the greats—Maurice Barrymore, Edwin Booth, Joseph Jefferson, and John L. Sullivan—and her own stage name had greater drawing power.⁶⁰

Judge Wickersham may have confused Esther Lyons with one of two other East Coast actresses: Esther Lyon, who played many of the same East Coast companies as Esther Lyons, or Essie Lyons, a popular musical comedy star in New York.⁶¹ Both these women resembled Esther Lyons and Cad Wilson, but they were reportedly happily married, legitimate actresses.

Whoever she was, Cad Wilson returned to the Klondike for another run in the spring of 1899, still receiving good reviews but less hype and ardor from the Klondike Kings, who were fast moving out of Dawson. In the summer of 1900, Cad joined the stampede to Nome. After appearing there for several months, she quietly disappeared from the headlines and theater billings, perhaps sacrificing her Klondike notoriety for a new life as a wealthy woman under another name.

Even more curious is the story of Rose Blumkin who, although not an entertainer, won the hearts of the Klondike Kings and made them pay. Unfashionably slim and a bit beetle-browed, she compensated with a winsome, impish smile and outgoing personality. She may have come to Dawson to escape an unhappy marriage, and she was refined enough to seek a respectable cover when she turned to prostitution for her living. Unable to act or sing, Rose signed on at the Monte Carlo as a dance hall girl. Later she became a ticket-taker, so good at the job that one newspaper favorably reviewed her performance at the ticket window along with the show.

There is no question, however, that prostitution was Rose's main line of work. She was often referred to as a "fairy," the Dawson euphemism for a woman of the night, and she made astonishing amounts of money. Caught in the Dawson fire that destroyed the Monte Carlo in January of 1900, Rose declared the loss of $3,500 in personal property, at least $1,000 more than any of the stage stars wiped out by the blaze.⁶²

When Rose saved enough to vacation in Cincinnati in 1899, one of her admirers expressed doubts she would return, so she wagered him a wine supper that she'd be back by October 20. Delayed by the wreck of the SS Stratton on which she had been traveling, Rose lost the bet but gamely commandeered a dog team to mush home and settle the account. "The bet will be paid off Thursday," noted Dawson columnist Stroller White, "but an ardent admirer of the comely Rose will insist on settling the tab."⁶³

THE BEST TICKET-SELLER IN THE FAR NORTH
Rose Blumkin couldn’t sing or dance, but made her fame selling tickets at theaters in Dawson and Nome. She also made a considerable fortune, which must have come from after-hours activities, as ordinary ticket-sellers could not afford to deck themselves in the lavish hall gowns and diamonds that she favored.
ASL, Wickersham Collection, PCA 277-1-185.

Later the Dawson Daily News reported that, on her return to the Orpheum Theatre, Rose had been honored with a case of champagne and a souvenir gold ring. Just as they'd feted Cad Wilson, the miners joined forces to give the little ticket-taker a gaudy belt of gold nuggets, but she left them all behind for a married man.⁶⁴

In 1900 she ran off with Edward Holden to Nome, where she got a job as ticket-taker for the Stander Theater and again captured the attention of local reporters. The newcomer made every purchaser feel especially favored when he receives one of her winsome smiles," the Nome News reported.⁶⁵ Later she won first prize as the best-dressed lady at the Elks annual masquerade ball,⁶⁶ but did not make headlines again until Stroller White followed up on her career as a home-wrecker.

Ed Holden, the husband she had stolen, lost some of his Klondike-won wealth in a failed Nome theater venture, then squired Rose to Seattle where he entered the saloon business, White reported. Here, in addition to her nugget belt, Rose flaunted diamonds that were the envy of the half-caste world."

But one day the diamonds turned up missing and Edward was quick to note their absence. When questioned, Rose at first looked embarrassed and refused to tell the truth," the article continued. Then, woman-like, she threw herself on the Holden breast and Holden mercy and told all. She had been in urgent need of money and had 'soaked' her flashers for $1,000. She was sorry, oh, so sorry for what she had done and now everybody who saw her sneered at her because she had no diamonds."

This was more than Edward's tender heart could stand, so he redeemed the diamonds, paying $1,200 for their recovery. Now," he said, dress up in the very best you have and we'll take a walk and show people that you can still wear the most elegant diamonds of any woman in Seattle. I will call for you in an hour." But in an hour Rose had left Seattle for Salt Lake City, White reported,⁶⁷ and his readers were not surprised.