The very air was electric, and the people were electric too, one hundred percent alive, whatever else ailed them. What if they had run away from wives and husbands, conventions and restrictions?" challenged Maud Parrish, who had abandoned a wealthy husband and respectable parents to become a dance hall girl during the Klondike stampede. "The call of adventure, the call of the wild, was in most of them, no matter what they were doing."¹

The discovery that touched off this frantic excitement was made in the Klondike River valley by George Washington Carmack, a California-born ex-Marine, and his Athabascan Indian partners, brother-in-law "Skookum" Jim Mason and Jim's nephew "Tagish" Charlie. The men had prospected in Yukon Territory for nearly a decade, living off the land and earning their grubstakes by packing for miners traveling over Chilkoot Pass. Their spring cleanup in 1897 netted over $150,000, some of which they invested in other mining properties.² Then they went on to make a million or so more as other miners began flocking to the area.

On July 15, 1897, twenty-five prospectors arrived in San Francisco from Dawson on the steamship Excelsior with more than $189,000 in gold. Two days later, the SS Portland docked in Seattle with sixty-eight miners carrying in excess of $1.5 million.

"A Ton of Gold!" screamed the headlines worldwide. The Seattle Post Intelligencer sent 212,000 copies of a special Klondike edition to other newspapers all over the country, 70,000 copies to postmasters, 6,000 to public libraries, 4,000 to city mayors, and 15,000 to the transcontinental railroads—just the beginning of publicity campaigns mounted by businessmen and politicians with a vested interest in promoting the stampede.³

Even better publicity resulted from the accounts of successful miners. Clarence Berry, returning on one of the first boats in, was quoted around the world as saying, "Two million dollars taken from the Klondike region in less than five months, and a hundred times that amount waiting for those who can handle a pick and shovel."⁴

In response, thousands of frenzied gold-seekers headed north. At least 200,000 people became involved, either by coming to the Klondike themselves or by backing someone else who did.⁵

Following the death of her two-month-old baby, Maud Parrish left for the Klondike without telling a soul where she was going, packing little more than a banjo. Arriving in the new boomtown of Dawson with just ten dollars, she landed a job playing in a variety show but quickly moved to the dance hall across the street, which featured "a few rooms for the amorous ones."

In her autobiography, Nine Pounds of Luggage, Maud Parrish proudly reported outwitting the first customer who tried to seduce her, but she obviously flirted with vice, sharing quarters with a beautiful prostitute and reveling in her newfound freedom.

"The husky, happy-go-lucky men with their gold dust gathered there, and the beautiful girls from all over the world flitted about like exotic butterflies," she wrote in later years. "Even now, I feel thezip boom hurrah bang of the dance hall and the 'what do we care' spirit in the air. . . . Oh, it was grand to be free and think up your own line. And up there I wasn't thought wild and headstrong and naughty."

Although Maud acknowledged the roughness of the frontier lifestyle, she found it exciting. "Toward the wee small hours, as the liquor began to take its toll of brains, usually a fight would start and likewise finish. Disputes over mining claims and the jumping of claims were often settled in bars and dance halls where most of the people spent most of their time while in Dawson," she recounted.

THE GYPSY QUEEN
In real life this variety show entertainer was Mrs. Curly Monroe, the wife of a well-liked Dawson bar owner. Specialties, according to reviews, were singing and dancing.
Wickersham Collection, 1-9, courtesy of Ruth Allman.

"I saw two men killed over a mining dispute the first week I was there. One was at the bar, with murder in his heart by the expression on his face. The other came in to kill him, and both shot each other. One died instantly, the other a few hours later."

“ACTRESSES” FORDING THE DYEA RIVER EN ROUTE TO THE KLONDIKE
Photographer Frank LaRouche encountered many women of the demimonde following the gold stampede to Dawson. Most pretty young women traveling the route without husbands were suspect, and “across” was probably a polite cover for these determined young hikers.
UW, Photo by Frank LaRouche, #2014.

And she found even the legitimate money was good. "It was two dollars a dance for a dance of a minute, dancing all night, and we got half, plus fifty cents on every drink we drank with patrons—weighed over the bar in gold dust. What a bonanza!"⁶

Grace Robinson, another entertainer, gleefully agreed. "I have worked, and worked hard, for sixteen years in the States, and it was a hand-to-mouth struggle at best, while at Dear Old Dawson, in a little over two years, I have made my fortune," she told a reporter in 1900. "The people there may be a little rough, but their hearts are in the right place, and they know how to appreciate and help a friend."

According to Grace Robinson, she "sang" her way from New York to Seattle. Her name did appear on at least one respectable Klondike theater bill, but the reporter noted that "the pretty little actress" had set out for Dawson in the summer of 1898 with Jim Donaldson, "a well-known sporting man," which would indicate broader career goals and higher earnings.

On leaving Seattle, Grace had purchased an extraordinarily fine hat, and she was determined to get that hat to Dawson or die in the attempt. She carried it strapped on her back and, when repeatedly advised to cast it aside, she would only smile and shake her head.

"The trail was so bad that it would have been impossible for me to have reached Dawson had I not received help from the outside. It was Mr. Donaldson that I owed my life to, but that is getting ahead of my story. More than once I was compelled to walk in mud and water up to my knees. Little Ruby [a sister actress who also made the trip], who has married one of the richest miners at Dawson, was the pluckiest little mortal I ever saw. No matter how hard the trail or how many difficulties we had to overcome, she never murmured or complained."

And it got worse. The party attempted to cross Lake Bennett in a thirty-two-foot boat Jim Donaldson had hammered together, and soon they were beset by a storm.

"I can remember hearing Jim say: 'It's all up, Gracie,' and then I fainted. He tied a rope around my body and subsequent events proved that my life was saved by that one act. The boat was drifting on what seemed to be a straight bluff of rocks. Just before it grounded, Jim jumped, and fortunately there was a little ledge running along at the foot of the bluff and he secured a footing upon that and pulled me through the water to him. Ruby was saved in the same manner by another gentleman of the party. The boat broke in two and sank."

While stranded on an island, Grace was overjoyed to find that her trunk with all her stage clothes, "her stock in trade," had drifted ashore. Rescue arrived three days later and she went on (with her precious Seattle-bought hat intact) to make her fortune.⁷

Basic training for the theater and saloon trade generally proved inadequate for the rigors of the overland trip to Dawson, and most pimps were less well-equipped than Jim Donaldson. The Canadian government insisted that anyone crossing its borders be equipped with 2,000 pounds of provisions, requiring many back trips if one could not afford to hire local packers. It took more than thirty miles of rugged hiking to cross the mountains from Southeastern Alaska port towns into Yukon Territory, including one brutal ascent of 1,000 feet. The steep, narrow trails over the passes were often treacherous with mud or snow and ice. Lillian Oliver, one of the few happily married women to brave the trip, described the ordeal to her ailing husband in Chicago:

"I must plead guilty of being a bit nervous, and was afraid to look back for fear I would fall to the bottom. Imagine a mountain near 4,000 feet high at an angle of 45 degrees, covered with snow to a depth of about forty feet, and which during the day gets soft, making climbing easier— but at night freezes over, making walking not only hard but fearfully dangerous. I could not get a foothold. My rubber boots caused me to slip backwards. The guide went ahead and dug holes with his heels in the ice for me to put my feet into; I took hold of his hand and with my other carried a stick, which I drove down into the snow and held onto. Every now and then I got so nervous that I had to sit down on the snow. In this way, after hard work, I finally reached the top, and though it was intensely cold, I was in a profuse perspiration. . . . "⁸

Mont Hawthorne, a former lumberjack who packed in from Dyea in 1898, recalled a dismal scene in Dead Horse Gulch. "I could see a big crowd up ahead on the trail. There must have been about seventy-five men in a bunch, all clustered around a woman and a man, oh, man was she cursing. . . . She was a saloon woman from Astoria named Tex. The fellow with her was from down there, too. He was called Jim. He was a yellow, cigarette-looking fellow," Hawthorne observed. "There he set, along the trail, puffing away on one of them six-inch holders while she cussed him out. She said he'd got her to come with him for the fun of the trip, and here she was, stuck on this mountain and he didn't care what happened to her. 'Peared like he didn't neither. He was plumb beat out and just sitting there, looking at that mountain pass, clear beyond caring about her or anything she could say to him. The freighters shoved right on through the bunch and I kept following their trails."⁹

Snowslides killed more than forty unwary travelers during the first year of the rush. Mae McKamish Melbourne Meadows, another showgirl, narrowly missed drowning in a flood and mudslide caused by the breakup of a glacial lake, despite the fact that her protector, rodeo showman "Arizona" Charlie Meadows, was six-foot-six and in terrific shape. Mae, who had a peach-like complexion and a marvelous figure, was dressing at 6:30 one morning when Charlie ran into their tent, ordering her to high ground.

"Well I wanted to stop to see the water and try to button my clothes, but Charlie kept saying to go farther up, so I had to keep on running," Mae reported in a letter to the Santa Cruz Daily Sentinel.¹⁰

TROUSER-CLAD WOMEN DEFYING THE LAW
Yukon officials had outlawed the wearing of bloomers, and no lady wore trousers during the gold rush era. Photographer Frank LaRouche charitably labeled this shot “Actresses on the way to Happy Camp,” for few of these Klondike-bound good time girls were destined for the stage.
UW, Photo by Frank LaRouche, #2049.

"If we had not got out at that moment, we would have been drowned. It was terrible. Charlie said if he had a Kadac [photograph] of me as I was running from the Sheep's Camp flood, there would not be any use of going to the Klondike, as that would be a gold mine in itself."

The flood killed three, including a cousin. The Meadowses, who were hoping to make big money with a portable bar, a restaurant, and gambling equipment, lost most of their investment but gamely started over in Dawson, where Mae (who kept her business ventures separate) was soon worth $100,000 in mining claims and Charlie made a fortune as a theater promoter.

Although Mae was an adventuress whose marriage to Charlie Meadows has never been documented, both of them came from well-heeled, respectable California families, which set them apart from many of their Chilkoot companions. J. H. E. Secretan, traveling the trail during that period, was shocked to find himself surrounded by "contraband whisky peddlers, gamblers, . . . and ladies whose briefness of skirt barely equaled the briefness of their characters."¹¹

Andrew Nerland, a supplier of paint and wallpaper, while on his second trip to Dawson noted in his journal that at Lake Lindeman, "all the French women who came up from Seattle stopped there, too, and they raised regular hell."¹² Freda Maloof, an exotic dancer sometimes billed as "The Turkish Whirlwind Danseuse," was being helped over Chilkoot Pass by bartender Billie Thomas when fellow stampeders asked her to perform for them. According to the recollections of James R. Little, "Archie Burns provided performance space in his large log house at Sheep Camp. Men gathered, James Little played the fiddle, and Freda danced the hula-hula. Billie Thomas took up a collection in a gold pan that brought Freda $60 [more than double a month's salary for an ordinary working man]."¹³

The Rev. John Alexander Sinclair, who was building a Presbyterian church at Lake Bennett, often wrote to his wife about the temptations of the trail. Hungry and exhausted after a long day's portage on a trip over the pass, he stopped at the first establishment he could find, a dingy-looking barroom where the cook was off duty.

"Two fellows who had just joined us had a drink of whisky and were still leaning on the bar when in walked a brazen prostitute—rather nice-looking apart from her brass and she would get us something to eat and drink. The serpent in the woman, tempting men when we were hungry enough to be cannibals almost!"

The two men at the bar went off with the prostitute, but Rev. Sinclair stoically mushed on to the next hotel (for cold pork and beans), where he unwittingly slept with a strange woman. Waking the next morning in the stuffy loft he'd shared with twenty other men, the minister discovered that the hotel cook had discreetly placed her soft bedding in with theirs.¹⁴

Mrs. H. Hartshorn, traveling alone to meet her husband, found her fear of the rough, loud men on the trail compounded by the fact that she was denied lodging when hotel owners assumed she was a whore.¹⁵ She had money and could prove she was respectable—and often money without respectability would open doors. The options of a prostitute without much cash or a male protector were decidedly more limited.

A supposedly easier alternative to the overland route was the 1,600-mile all-water route along the Pacific Coast to St. Michael, Alaska, then up the Yukon River to Dawson. Yet many vessels commissioned for the rush were unsafe, overcrowded, and vermin-infested, with rotten food. Too often they were wrecked or frozen in the river ice, but life aboard was never dull. Stampeder E. C. Trelawney-Ansell described the Islander, on which he embarked from Vancouver, as a floating brothel where all sorts of wild, weird, and bestial doings took place twenty-four hours a day.

"The boat was packed, jammed tight; there were Northwest Mounted Police and the crooks and riffraff of the West; there were whores, dance hall girls and gamblers; pimps, thugs and would-be gold miners; on the two decks were mules, horses, oxen, and dogs and dogs and dogs . . . " he wrote.

"The dining saloon and the so-called social hall stank of rye whisky and the cheap perfumes so favored by the 'ladies' and their awful pimps. From the cabins occupied by these prostitutes could be heard all kinds of cries from them and their men, interspersed with the clinking of glasses and popping of corks.

"Half-dressed—and often completely naked—women reeled about the passages, looking for lost cabins or for lavatories; laughing, screaming and talking in a drunken babble. Others would dance obscene dances on the dining room tables, while their bullies and pimps took the hat around for subscriptions. Heaven help the fool who watched and thought he could do so without paying."¹⁶

To avoid similar discomfort, the skipper of the northbound steamer Amur—crowded to the gunnels with fifty prostitutes among 500 passengers—put out the edict that no whore was allowed to ply her trade, much to the disgust of "Big Annie," who complained loudly.

"Indeed it's shameful, the conditions aboard this ship. But try to bear it," sympathized a fellow passenger who happened to be a preacher. "We'll be in Skagway in a little more than a week, and once there you'll see that things will be a lot better for you and the other girls."¹⁷

Another problem was social stigmas. Many prostitutes and actresses had the money and foresight to book staterooms early, forcing their more virtuous sisters to share accommodations or stay home. Chicago socialite Martha Black found herself quartered with a hooker and her pimp on the Utopia, because the captain could find no other arrangement on his crowded vessel.¹⁸ Mont Hawthorne, traveling out of Portland on the George W. Elder in 1898, was fascinated by this unusual social interaction.

"When the sun came out and they got on deck you could sure tell the women had been sizing each other up. The dance hall girls was dressed real fancy; I knowed a couple of them who got on with a bunch at Astoria. They were traveling with a no-account gambler from down there. It's a hard life for any girl; no matter how bold she acts you can see she ain't too comfortable around church folks. But what got me was the way them married women acted when the dance hall girls came to their end of the boat. They'd just gather their husbands up by the arm, and they'd move down to the other end of the boat, and they'd walk real straight. They were terrible skittish," Hawthorne observed.

"Only way we could have any real fun with the whole crowd together was to start running. We'd line up behind each other, and each fellow would put his hands on the shoulders of the one ahead of him. Then we'd run around and around the deck like that. . . . Even the married women that wouldn't have nothing to do with the dance hall girls when they were walking around on deck would find themselves drug into the line and all running in the same directions. Pretty soon they was laughing, too. It's a good thing for folks to learn that it takes all kinds to make a world."¹⁹

For those arriving by ship, the first glimpse of the brutal deprivation involved in striking it rich in the North sometimes came at St. Michael, the Pacific port on the mouth of the Yukon River. It was there that incoming stampeders on the SS St. Paul got a sobering view of a group of "lucky" surviving Dawson prospectors headed for the States in July of 1898 aboard the riverboat May West.

"Up the gangway came men in heavy winter clothes, unshaven, unwashed, with long hair and ravenous-looking faces. Then a man staggering under what looked like a huge Bologna sausage on his shoulder . . . it was gold," reported Nevill A. D. Armstrong, who was waiting to head north for the first time. "Next I saw a man without feet being carried up on another man's back. We were told that the sufferer had been on a wild gold stampede to Swede Creek, near Dawson, without taking adequate footwear. . . . Two men followed, staggering along with a square box heavily bound with strip iron; it was all they could do to carry it. This was all gold dust, over $100,000 worth.

"All the horrors of filth and physical hurt could not prevent the thrill which the sight of that gold brought me," Armstrong admitted. "And there was human damage and filth aplenty aboard that tiny steamer.

THE ALL-WATER ROUTE WAS POPULAR
Thousands of passengers, would-be passengers, and well-wishers crowded Seattle docks at the start of the great Klondike strike.
UW, Wilse 531, Collection 285.

All the food she carried had disappeared entirely three days before. The dogs howled from hunger and the passengers were almost as primitively savage in their cravings for something to eat. There had been no opportunity for washing; the men were as dirty as the small decks—hence the atrocious odor that had spread ahead to warn us and now engulfed us suffocatingly."²⁰

The last leg of the stampeder's journey was a voyage on the Yukon River, either downriver from the east or upriver from the west. Those who were strong, or persevering, or lucky, finally reached their destination: Dawson.

The town had been founded by Joe Ladue, a trader from the earliest days of Fortymile. He staked a 160-acre patch of moose pasture as a town site near the Klondike discovery on the Yukon, imported a sawmill, and finally made his fortune. William Ogilvie, representing the Canadian government, named the town Dawson after George Dawson, a geologist who had explored the region in 1887 and predicted gold would be found there.²¹