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by Lael Morgan (Author)
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.
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History has long ignored many of the earliest female pioneers of the Far North - the prostitutes and other "disreputable" women who joined the mass pilgrimage to the booming gold camps of Alaska and the Yukon at the turn of the century. Leaving behind their hometowns and most constraints of the post-Victorian era, the "good time girls" crossed both geographic and social frontiers, finding freedom, independence, hardship, heartbreak, adn sometimes astonishing wealth. These women posessed teh courage and perseverance to brave a dangerous journey of more than a thousand miles, into a harsh wilderness where men sometimes outnumbered them more than ten to one. Many of these women later became successful entrepreneurs, wealthy property owners, or the wives of prominent citizens; one former prostitute married the mayor of Fairbanks and hosted a visit from President Warren G. Harding. Their influence changed life in the Far North forever. Lael Morgan offers an authentic, sympathetic, poignant, and often deliciously humorous account of women wh were extraordinarily independent even by today's standards.
Author Biography
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."
