About 600 people mushed in over the ice during the winter of 1897, and Dawson police estimated the population at from 1,500 to 2,000, with about 5,000 in the region by the following January. In March, 7,000 would-be prospectors were camped near Lake Bennett waiting for the ice to go out,²² and by the end of 1898 an estimated 60,000 had started for Dawson.²³ That year Dawson became the largest city in Canada west of Winnipeg.

By the time the average citizen heard about the bonanza, the best ground in the Klondike had already been staked, but determined late arrivals found good diggings nearby, in areas ignored by seasoned miners because conventional wisdom held that gold would not be found there. New discoveries—especially those by former shipping clerks, lumberjacks, and other amateurs—only fueled more Klondike dreams and enticed more newcomers.

Thomas C. Riggs, a Princeton-educated civil engineer who would later become a governor of Alaska, arrived in Dawson broke and found the town promising. "Dawson was crowded. Even at midnight the streets were hurried. The street along the waterfront was one mass of mire through which four-horse teams had been dragging their loads. . . . The wooden sidewalks were lively with men in flannel shirts. Stetsoned southerners just sitting and spitting," he recalled. "The dance halls and saloons were crowded and all we could do was look on. We had no money. Drinks were fifty cents each. Eddie [a gambling casino man from Skagway whom Riggs had fallen in with] had already gone to work for Jack Cavanaugh at the Monte Carlo. We watched him deftly dealing faro. He stood us a drink on the house.

"Mannie [Riggs's partner] found a five-dollar bill on the floor near one of the tables. We spent it on a grand meal. In the dance halls the miners were having a real time. A dance of about three minutes cost $1 here, that entitled you to a drink. . . .

"In the boxes were the Berry brothers in shirtsleeves bound with garters buying champagne at $25 per bottle. Swiftwater Bill was showing off. Charley Anderson was making up to all the women and giving them nuggets. The usual currency was gold dust at $16 to the ounce. All purchases were weighed out in the store or bar. A girl on the stage who sang a popular song was so pelted with nuggets that she had to run injured off the stage. Money meant nothing to the man who had become rich overnight. He had money and he meant to spend it in the only way he knew how.

"In the morning the streets were deserted. The men of last night were either sleeping it off or had gone back to the creeks."²⁴

Nevill Armstrong, whose boat was one of the first into the "golden Mecca of the North" in 1898, painted a grimmer picture. "At first it was but a bundle of white dots on the side of a hill, but as we grew closer I began to make out myriads of cabins, huts, boats, rafts and warehouses, and then at long last we fussed up to the landing stage, there must have been a full thousand men and women of every nationality assembled there.

"All these people had spent a long and bitterly cold arctic winter in the town and the surrounding districts and were thirsting for news of the 'Outside World'; also for a chance of obtaining fresh food of some sort, as provisions became seriously short when the Yukon River froze up early in October the previous year. . . . All sorts of signs and notices were to be seen as one walked down the main muddy street or on the rickety wooden sidewalks. One sign in particular caught my eye—it was painted on a strip of white canvas stretched across the road on poles, and read as follows:

"'Charlie Brimstone—Undertaker—Bodies embalmed and shipped to the Outside.' This was not a very encouraging notice for the tenderfoot. Moreover, I found it alarmingly true that typhoid fever was rampant, the death rate being about 120 per week."²⁵

Armstrong's estimate of the death rate was too high, but he was right about the threat of disease. Along the waterfront for half a mile were tiers of boats, scows, and rafts on which many people camped. Others pitched tents in ever-widening circles around the town with no regard for sanitation. Arthur Walden, a seasoned prospector visiting from Circle, won a bet with a friend by traversing the filthy main street by jumping from the carcass of one dead horse to the next. However, living conditions improved in time. The Canadian Northwest Mounted Police soon laid down strict sanitation regulations, and new arrivals included several good doctors.²⁶

Overall, Nevill Armstrong's memories of the frontier settlement were bittersweet. "Wild excitements, misery, riches, debauchery, broken hearts, scurvy, frostbite, suicide; the midnight sun, the Arctic night, the Aurora Borealis, the land of gold and paradoxes—that was Dawson in '98," he wrote breathlessly.

"Entirely isolated, beyond the pale of civilization, it was entirely without one restraining influence. Vice and drunkenness became rampant. None but the staunchest characters trod the narrow path. The saloons were the only meeting places of incoming miners with their bags of gold dust; nearly everyone gathered in one or the other of the gambling saloons or dance halls by day and night—their doors were never closed.

"The saloons were always well-lighted with oil lamps. Large stoves, made out of oil drums, heated the buildings. It was the warmth, the drink and the scantily clad women that contributed to the downfall of many men."²⁷

Dawson was an expensive town. The cost of living at the beginning of the Klondike rush was six dollars per day. Minimum wages for a male common laborer were eight dollars per day, but an honest, unskilled female had no chance to keep up. The average salary for housekeepers was only twelve dollars per week, plus board and room.²⁸ A dressmaker who put in long hours could earn about $100 a month. Cooks made about the same amount, but miners preferred to hire men for that job because they were better at cutting firewood and hauling water.²⁹ Clerking jobs were also generally reserved for men. Trained nurses earned only twenty-five dollars a month on a two-year contract,³⁰ and that profession was still looked down on as not quite respectable. Unskilled women might work in laundries at five dollars per day with board and room, or wash dishes for twenty-five dollars a week.³¹

On the other hand, a dance hall girl who did nothing more exotic than lure men to trip the light fantastic could earn forty dollars a week plus 25 percent of every drink she could hustle (at one dollar per drink). Musicians made twenty dollars a day, and girls who worked the "grand balls" after each night's vaudeville performance were paid fifty dollars per week plus commissions. Actresses, even bad ones, earned $150 a week plus 25 percent on all the drinks they could cajole customers into buying after the show. And a determined prostitute could easily make double that.³²

Facing these economic realities, some formerly respectable women were tempted or driven into the demimonde when they reached the Klondike. Numerous accounts tell of good girls gone bad, including a dramatic letter written by the Rev. John Alexander Sinclair about his rescue from "scoundrels" of two innocent but not too bright Seattle "dining room girls" lured to Skagway with the promise of respectable jobs dancing.³³

In his biography, The Trail Led North, Mont Hawthorne anguished for an honest girl from his hometown of Astoria, Oregon, who took up the trade after traveling to Dawson with her lover.

"His folks always ran him; he'd have married her before they came up there if they had let him. But she done housework, and they were uppity and made him promise not to marry her. So he sneaked her into the boat with no wedding. . . . ³⁴

"That was a hard winter, with the sickness and cold and running out of things. I'd lost track of them. It was just by chance I heard he was dead. . . . We [he and his friend Mac] was the only men there! But all the fancy women in town had turned out for that funeral; they seemed to be taking a real motherly interest in the girl. . . .

"I hated to see her with that crowd. But she said he'd got sick; they was out of money, and she went to work the only way she could to take care of him. The worst of it was she went into debt three thousand dollars to have him embalmed, so his worthless, pickled carcass could be sent out to his folks who was too good for her in the first place. . . . I never talked to her again, but I heard she stayed there and paid her debt."³⁵

Even more heartbreaking is one report by a Dawson newspaperman. He should have been hardened by having heard a never-ending string of hard luck stories, but was moved to write sympathetically about the fall from virtue of a young German-American girl.

"Milley Lane started from Seattle last spring—we will call her Milley Lane because . . . we cannot advertise these people. She is a pretty-faced girl of German antecedents and of good reputation," he began in an account for the Klondike Nugget.

"The party she came in with was well fixed and had several ladies among their number. Milley was quite popular and proved herself to be adaptable and industrious. All went well as a marriage bell until Thirty Mile River was reached. A rock—a wreck—outfits all lost—a wet, shivering crowd on the bank with no provisions and hardly enough clothes on their backs to protect them from mosquitoes. Pitying passers-by bring this girl of eighteen summers to Dawson. With clothes all draggled and shabby and without a change of raiment, she sought work for three long days.

"Pocketbook and stomach empty, and employment refused, on the evening of the third day Milley found herself on the bank of the river with two courses open to her. She could either jump into the river or go to board with one of the madams in Dawson's White Chapel. Long was the matter debated in her mind, but at last the youthful love of life triumphed. Within an hour the girl was seen bathed and dressed in satins and laces, her beauty enhanced by handsome apparel and the hairdresser's art. Trail acquaintances were shocked, and when spoken to, the girl broke completely down and dissolved in tears. This is all true, happened last week and hardly forms an incident of one chapter of Dawson's history."³⁶

Motherly Anna DeGraf, who sewed for theater performers, noted many innocents among them. "Hundreds of dance hall and variety show girls came in to Dawson, some for adventures, others without any idea of the temptations and hardships of that raw frontier life," she recalled. "There were among them some of the most beautiful girls I have ever seen—girls in their teens, very attractive and pleasing in their ways. In working with them, I got well acquainted with many of them and pitied and liked a number of them for they had some good qualities mixed with the bad."³⁷

"Women beset the camps in the spring of '98. They were not the ordinary type of harlot but real adventuresses," recalled civil engineer Thomas Riggs. "They were strong, healthy, good-looking women. They had to be to stand the rigors of climate and trail. They were after money and they got it. There were vaudeville actresses of talent, acrobats, vocalists and just plain grafters, living in tents and advertising their wares with big posters, none of which can be quoted."³⁸

Mostly, however, the country was being settled by young men, the majority of them in their prime. Lawyer John Clark remembered them as impressive. "When I first came to this camp seventeen years ago what amazed me the most was to visit the dance halls, where the people congregated, they being practically the only places where they could go to gather, and to see the great number of men, from eighteen to twenty-five years of age, physically perfect and many of them considerably in excess of six feet . . . " he recounted. "They were strong and energetic, not afraid to work and hardships meant nothing to them."³⁹

Klondike newsman Elmer John "Stroller" White initially viewed this horde as less than eligible. "The majority of the single men of marriageable age—ninety years and younger—who invaded the North prior to 1900 were then and had for years been drifters," he declared.

"Many were of eastern origin and they had drifted west on attaining manhood and had then worked at many jobs and trades as they wandered from one place to another. Very few of them had much more than a spare pair of socks to show in the way of inventory at the end of any given year. With the discovery of gold in the Klondike, the farmhands, loggers, cow-punchers, clerks and others who were not permanently anchored and were able to round up the price of a ticket and a mackinaw suit headed north. Many of them did not do any better in the Klondike than they had done elsewhere, but others struck six bits to the pan in one way or another,⁴⁰ although not necessarily at mining. And as soon as they [could, they] began to shave on Saturdays and pare their corns preparatory to engaging in the long, juicy waltz at Nigger Jim's, the Monte Carlo or another of the dance halls, these places constituting the most likely pay streak in the country when matrimony was the object."⁴¹

Many of these men ultimately gambled on the women who shared their Klondike adventure, and were amply rewarded, despite dire predictions from those in polite society.

"A goodly number of these women yielded to the persuasions of their favorite male customers, quit the life of the dance hall or bawdy house, and calmly settled down to a quiet home life with their husbands," Judge James Wickersham noted. "It quite frequently became my duty as judge to perform marriages for persons of that class and more often than not such marriages were successful."⁴²

One such match was made by the man who started it all, George Washington Carmack. The Klondike discoverer had been one of very few white men with the strength and determination to pack for hire with the Indians over Chilkoot Pass. A well-read Californian who wrote poetry for pleasure, he met his Athabascan prospecting partners while hauling 150-pound packs over the summit for his grubstake in 1885. Soon thereafter he fell in love with "Skookum" Jim Mason's older sister, who became his common-law wife. Following her death, George Carmack took up with Kate, Jim's handsome younger sister, but according to local legend it was a match more of convenience than love. Kate was given to temper-tantrums and apparently let George know when he failed to muster to the standards of her people, who were extremely well conditioned to the rugged land. They had one daughter, Graphie, born in January 1893, but their union was an uneasy one.⁴³

Wealth only made things worse because George wanted to establish himself in the Seattle business community where Kate, although exceedingly handsome, was miserably uncomfortable. In her unhappiness, she developed an unfortunate fondness for alcohol, which she could not handle, and the resulting publicity proved an embarrassment. Typical is a Seattle Times news brief that was picked up by the Yukon papers:

DAWSON’S POLITE SOCIETY
Parties were popular entertainment and this birthday celebration for Mrs. Tozier and Miss O’Brien in 1900 was lavish, with properly clad waiters, luxurious table service, and a year’s supply of canned food displated as part of the décor. Seated next to an empty chair, left, wearing a striped tie, is George Washington Carmack, discoverer of the Klondike lode, who was appearing in polite society for the first time without his Native wife. Shortly thereafter, at a similar gathering, he met Marguerite Saftig, a.k.a. Biddy McCarthy, a member of the demimonde who would become his wife.
ASL, Wickersham Collection, PCA 277-1-199.

"Mrs. George W. Carmack, the Indian wife of the discoverer of the Klondike, who is probably the richest Indian woman in the world, was fined $3.60 by Judge Cann this morning for drunkenness. Mrs. Carmack loaded up on champagne last night, and in company with some Indian friends, made Rome howl in the Hotel Seattle. Officer Grant gathered her in, and prosecuted her this morning. She refused to tell who furnished her with champagne."⁴⁴

In desperation, George installed Kate and their daughter at his sister's ranch in rustic Cambria, California, and traveled alone to Dawson in the spring of 1900 to dispose of his Klondike interests. Without Kate for the first time, the handsome millionaire found himself sought out for dinner parties by Dawson's elite. This group included an odd mixture of quasi-respectable women from the upper levels of the demimonde, who were well-heeled as well as "round-heeled" but not engaged in out-and-out prostitution. Among the most interesting and determined was Marguerite Saftig.

The daughter of a respectable family gone broke, Marguerite had been attracted to men early on and had married at age fourteen, but soon divorced. Under her married name of Marguerite Laimee, she had worked the mining town of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, as an "entertainer" and then toured the camps of South Africa and Australia, where she was known as Marguerite LeGrand. She had come to Dawson under the alias of Biddy McCarthy with $2,000 in savings, hoping to win a Klondike millionaire. There Marguerite invested in a cigar store strategically located on the first floor of the Green Tree Saloon and Hotel on Dawson's main street, over which operated one of the most active whorehouses in town. Running the store positioned her to work as a madam or hustle herself on the side, as did most cigar store owners, while still keeping up a respectable front.⁴⁵

At the time she met George Carmack, Marguerite owned prime real estate in the heart of Dawson and had accumulated far more money than could have been earned by simply selling cigars. (Later she would testify that she made $60,000 in her two years in Dawson, though that claim was probably exaggerated.) She also had been closely associated with Joseph LeGrand, a man of the underworld who made his wealth from prostitution and had followed her to Dawson.⁴⁶

Marguerite met George in June of 1900 at a dinner party given by her respectable friends, Mr. and Mrs. Joe Collins. Then twenty-six years old, she had big brown eyes, a pretty face, an hourglass figure, and a magnificent bosom—described by one awed customer as looking like a pair of ostrich eggs under her blouse. She was dressed in high fashion, enjoyed talking business, and made herself utterly charming. If anything, Marguerite's colorful background and professional romantic skills only made her more attractive to forty-year-old George Carmack.

When he proposed that night, Marguerite knew she had found the millionaire she was looking for. She accepted without hesitation. They married four months after their first meeting—even before the settlement of a divorce suit thrown at him by his common-law wife, Kate, whose legal claims were not recognized in the States. George and Marguerite had, by all accounts, a happy and lasting union.⁴⁷