Good Time Girls of the Alaska-Yukon Gold Rush

by Lael Morgan

Overview

History has long ignored many of the earliest female pioneers of the Klondike Gold Rush of North America-the prostitutes and other "disreputable" women who joined the mass pilgrimage to the booming gold camps at the turn of the century. Leaving behind hometowns in North America and Europe and most constraints of the post-Victorian era, the "good time girls" crossed both geographic and social frontiers, finding freedom, independence, hardship, heartbreak, and sometimes astonishing wealth.

These women possessed the courage and perseverance to brave a dangerous journey into a harsh wilderness where men sometimes outnumbered them more than ten to one. Many later became successful entrepreneurs, wealthy property owners, or the wives of prominent citizens. Their influence changed life in America's Far North forever.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780945397762
Publisher:	Epicenter Press (WA)
Publication date:	08/30/2018
Edition description:	2nd ed.
Pages:	354
Product dimensions:	5.84(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.82(d)
Age Range:	14 Years

About the Author

Lael Morgan teaches web-based writing and journalism classes for the University of Texas from her home in Saco, Maine. A former associate professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where she taught journalism through most of the 1990s, Morgan has been researching the history of the Far North for more than thirty years. She was named Alaska's Historian of the Year in 1988 for her research on this book. Her work has been published in the "Los Angeles Times "and "National Geographic," and she is the author of numerous other nonfiction titles, including "Art and Eskimo Power: The Life and Times of Howard Rock "and "Eskimo Star: From Tundra to Tinseltown: The Ray Mala Story."

Read an Excerpt

Throughout my research, I've looked for patterns and found surprisingly few.  Perhaps because so many of these ladies of the evening were "amateurs," their backgrounds and dreams mirrored those of respectable women of that post-Victorian era.  However, one thing that the pioneering good time girls of the Far North did have in common was that all of them had to have vast courage and stamina.  They often labored harder, under more unpleasant circumstance, than their respectable sisters to help carve a civilized niche into unforgiving wilderness.  And most were extraordinarily independent women, not only for their time but by today's standards as well.

Moralists tend to think of prostitutes as parasites on society, but that sterotype falls away in situations where men heavily outnumber women and are forced to share them, and where conditions are so difficult that all must fight to survive.  Thus the pioneering whores of yore of the Far North were accorded unusual license and respect.  And whatever their motives in entering the trade, they definitely earned both.

Editorial Reviews

"GOOD TIME GIRLS is an important and entertaining addition to gold rush literature. These women are as important a part of the Klondike story as Big Alex and Swiftwater Bill. After all, they too were gold diggers." ----Klondike historian Pierre Berton

One of the 10 best non-fiction books of 1998. ----LA Times

"...Fascinating reading...the abundant, luscious photographs of these amazing women, the 'cribs' from which they worked, their customers, their lovers, and the frontier towns they helped to pioneer are themselves worth the price of the book." ----Linda Jaivin, Los Angeles Times See all Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher