Gold Diggers

by Charlotte Gray

  Prostitutes plied their trade openly in Dawson, and looked after each other in the rough-and-tumble town.

  Bill may have ignored the hookers, but he was friendly enough with the dance hall girls, whom he described as “young and pretty.” After all, he was a young man who had just spent a bleak, lonely winter on the creeks with a grumpy partner. He yearned for a girl, and a glimpse of a satin slipper or a silk petticoat was intoxicating to him. But there were so many men and so few girls—with nine men to every woman—that he quickly found himself elbowed off the dance floor. Toward morning, fights often erupted in a dance hall, but as far as Bill was concerned, it was most likely the result of a squabble between two men “to win the hand of some woman for the succeeding dance.” A romantic at heart, Bill simply didn’t want to believe tales of drunks getting rolled by dance hall girls, and “respectable” women who offered laundry or meal services earning money on the side with sexual favors.

  If Bill Haskell turned a blind eye to the seedier side of Dawson, it was because he had a naive view of Dawson as “less vicious and more orderly” than mining camps elsewhere. He clung to his belief that the ordeals of the Chilkoot Pass and northern prospecting kept out desperadoes. The men, he insisted, were “sober and provident” because of “the awful hardships one endures to get rich up there, the dangers that must be braved, and the privations suffered in getting to the new gold fields.” He was even more impressed by the wives who made it over the mountains because they showed none of the physical and emotional fragility glorified by the Victorian model of femininity. Women like Ethel Berry, wife of Klondike King Clarence Berry, or Catherine Spencer, whose husband ran a saloon, were good humored, tough, and strong. To a Vermont farm boy, this was “a revelation, almost a mystery.” Bill watched these women hitch up their petticoats, discard their corsets, and enjoy themselves, and gradually realized that the North offered all women, not just “loose” ones, “a freedom which is in a way exhilarating.” He even shed some of his own chauvinism as he explained how such a woman “has thrown off the fetters which civilized society imposes, and while retaining her womanliness becomes something more than a mere woman . . . She steps out of her dress into trousers in a region where nobody cares.”

  While Bill slowly adjusted his views of what constituted “proper” behavior for women, the women themselves threw aside conventional expectations. In the macho world of mining camps, the rigors of pregnancy, childbirth, childrearing, or violence pulled them together, whether they were wives, dance hall girls, or prostitutes. Everyone knew and liked Esther Duffie, for instance, a motherly, good-humored woman in her forties who had already spent a couple of years in the North and who had survived on her wits. She had a share of a claim on one of Eldorado Creek’s tributaries, but she was also not above turning a trick when necessary, to keep the wolf from the door. “One of the best old hearts God ever put on the face of the earth!” one friend commented. “She was friendly with all the women. They were all her pals.”

  Bill Haskell’s chivalry and wide-eyed enthusiasms made him a favorite of women who had wintered with their husbands on the creeks, or who had established themselves as bakers, dressmakers, and cooks in town. They mothered him, baking an extra batch of bread for him when he made a trip into town from Bonanza. Their attentions reinforced his loneliness and made him ache for decent female company. “A good woman is at a high premium,” he reflected. “So long as mines are rich, and millionaires are turned out every season, women who have the courage to brave such hardships as a journey to Alaska entails, and are not too particular about the culture of the eligible men, may marry a fortune.” But Bill’s cautious nature and $25,000 purse weren’t enough to attract the handful of women he tried to court. “The fact is,” he regretfully wrote, “that most good women are particular about the men they marry.”

  On trips to Dawson City, Bill would often stroll down to the wharf to watch the jerry-built boats steering toward the riverbank and their unshaven and half-starved passengers jumping ashore. He thought about the sort of girl he wished he had on his arm—not the whiskey-voiced, tough-skinned type he met in Dawson but the kind he had known back home, with soft skin and coy smiles. But he was back on his claim by June 15, when, as the midnight sun was setting, a short, stocky woman stepped onto the riverbank. This was Belinda Mulrooney, who knew all about throwing off the fetters society imposed. She had come to the Klondike to get rich, and she wasn’t going to let anybody get in her way. She shook out her skirts, cast a measured glance at the raucous mining camp, then turned and tossed her last quarter into the river’s surging current.

  CHAPTER 7

  Belinda Mulrooney Stakes Her Claim, June 1897

  TWENTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD Belinda Mulrooney must have wondered what she had come to as she gazed around her. She had been in some pretty dismal camps during her ten-week journey, and could tolerate any degree of discomfort. But as she crawled on hands and knees over the mountain pass or huddled in the bow of a boat, hiding from the Yukon’s stinging spray, she had been buoyed by the hope that her destination—the famed Dawson City—would be a little more settled than this muddy hodgepodge of flapping canvas and ramshackle lean-tos. “After looking around,” she would recall, “I saw there was nothing in Dawson I could buy for a quarter. So I threw my last coin into the Yukon and said, ‘We’ll start clean.’”

  Belinda’s gesture caught the attention of the usual crowd that hung around the wharves. They stared at this arresting figure in her calf-length serge skirt, leather boots, and long-sleeved man’s shirt. Under a jaunty fedora, her thick brown hair was tied back in a knot, and her square face bore a tight-lipped expression of belligerence. From her self-assured gestures and the deference with which her fellow passengers treated her, onlookers could tell that this was no hooker or dance hall girl. Her voice was deep and gruff, which made her seem even less feminine, although she had a delightful chuckle when chatting with friends. But she didn’t have a husband, father, or brother in tow to guarantee her respectability. What was she doing here?

  Irish-born Belinda had come to the Klondike, like everybody else she could see, to make her fortune. The gesture of tossing away her last quarter was theatrical and, at the same time, duplicitous. She may have pitched her last remaining piece of legal tender into the river, but she was quite right—coins were not the currency of Dawson. In her baggage were goods that would be much more useful as she took the first steps toward building a commercial empire in this remote northern community that ran on gold dust. First, however, she had to find somewhere to live. The men with whom she had been traveling were eager to get to the creeks, so she asked them if they would sell her the boat they’d been traveling in. What for? asked one of the men. And how would she pay them?

  “You wait awhile, and I’ll pay you later,” Belinda countered. “You have to see the mines and the country. I’ll store your provisions if you will give me your help for three days.” Then she explained that she needed their skills to take the vessel apart and build a frame out of the lumber. “We used the old tarpaulin from my tent as a roof,” she recalled in later years. “There was no floor. There I kept the goods I’d brought in to sell and their outfits.” It was a deal that suited everybody. The men tramped off to stake their claims (cheechakos like them were now working their way up a new set of creeks, named Last Chance, Dominion, and Gold Bottom) secure in the knowledge that their goods were safe. Belinda had shelter and breathing space to find her bearings in Dawson City.

  Belinda recalled her Yukon experiences in an unpublished memoir she dictated when she was in her late fifties. She minimized the hardships of the Klondike, exaggerated her own successes, and skated over some of the less savory details of her adventures. Her voice comes through loud and clear—blunt, humorous, ruthless, with no trace of sickly-sweet Victorian femininity. Nevertheless, she understood the importance of appearances. That gesture of bravado with her last quarter (which she recalled for several newspaper reporters in later life) set the tone
for her Dawson career.

  Belinda Mulrooney rarely dressed in frills and lace, but she knew their market value.

  Belinda’s assessment of the town where she planned to do business was quite different from Bill Haskell’s. Each time Bill trudged down from the creeks, he was thrilled to see how Dawson prospered. A new bar, restaurant, or saloon opened every few days. Maybe they were all barnlike buildings with dirt floors and little natural light, but for Bill, they offered some welcome company. In Belinda’s eyes, Dawson City’s commercial potential was seriously underexploited. She wandered around that first day, avoiding the mud holes, dog excrement, and tobacco wrappings, and noticing the scarcity of stores and animals other than dogs. The waterfront was a tight maze of weather-beaten canvas tents, with hundreds of small boats tied to the shore and banging against each other. Idle men were everywhere—some staring curiously at her, others slumped on the boats, snoring loudly and oblivious to their surroundings. She gave a cursory nod to the gawkers and a curt brush-off to anybody who wanted to talk. She noticed that the shabby shelters advertising themselves as “restaurants,” with three or four tables, all offered the same badly cooked fare. The cabins where people lived were no better than hovels. There were few women around, and they were clad in garments hardly fit for a tramp. Belinda had little interest in the drinking and gaming establishments because they were men’s business. But everything else interested her. Despite her relative youth, Belinda was already a seasoned businesswoman who knew that there were unmet needs in a place like Dawson.

  Belinda Mulrooney’s own story was that of a female Horatio Alger. Born in Ireland in 1872, she had spent her early years in a threadbare County Sligo village, cared for by an extended family of grandparents and uncles. Her own parents had emigrated to the United States to escape poverty soon after her birth. She was thirteen before she laid eyes on them again. Meanwhile, she did her share of chores on the small family farm, milking cows, collecting eggs, slaughtering chickens for the dinner table, collecting wood for the stove. Her uncles taught her never to expect any favors and, as she put it, “to know that a woman around men who couldn’t do her share was a nuisance and was left behind.” Belinda grew up fearless and determined to lead.

  On the other side of the Atlantic, Belinda’s father, John Mulrooney, was working in the Archbald coal mines near Scranton, Pennsylvania, and he and his wife, Maria, had two more children. They needed a nursemaid, so they sent for Belinda. Their eldest child did not want to leave the green hills of rural Ireland. But her account of her transatlantic voyage is vintage Belinda, all about her appetite for drama. “I loved the sea . . . I loved the wind blowing and the spray . . . A flying fish came up once and knocked me silly. There was something in my blood, something [about] the storm [that] appealed to me.”

  After that adventure, her new home, in the Lackawanna River’s steep, dark valley that stank of anthracite, was a hideous disappointment: “The dirtiest hole in the world . . . I didn’t like . . . my family or the dirt and coal dust.” She was expected to take responsibility for the housework and look after the younger children, including two more sisters who arrived soon after she joined the household. At school, the other children laughed at the chunky little girl’s thick brogue until she was so “boiling mad” that she rammed her fist into a schoolmate’s face. “I had only one set idea from the first, to find enough money to get out of there.” She realized that her parents had only sent for her to exploit her, and she vowed she would never allow anyone else to take advantage of her.

  The combination of natural aggression and a drive to escape made Belinda a terrier. In her oral memoir, she bragged about the way, as a youngster, she had faced fears and smashed taboos as she scraped together a Running Away fund. When the Archbald miners’ kids went berry picking for eight cents a quart, she would venture alone into areas infested with rattlesnakes because the best berries were there. If she met a rattler, she killed it. “The rest were afraid of the snake district, so I got two pails to their one.” She also persuaded the owner of a coal wagon to try her as a driver for his mule team, although girls were specifically forbidden by law to do such jobs. With her deep voice and the tell-tale long hair stuffed inside a cap, she passed easily for a boy and proved so adept that the coal man employed her on the sly. She hid her earnings in a coffee can buried in the backyard. “I knew the family wouldn’t stand for it.”

  After four years of scrimping, fighting, and brooding, Belinda bolted. She persuaded her mother to send her to Philadelphia to visit an aunt, and as soon as she got there she looked around to see how she could earn her livelihood. Soon she was living in the well-to-do neighborhood of Chestnut Hill, working as a nursemaid in the household of a prosperous industrialist called George King Cummings. She also found a mentor in the person of George’s wife, Belle Brown Cummings, mother of her young charge, Jack. Mrs. Cummings admired the verve and ambition of this cheerful, energetic young Irish girl. She taught her how to use a bank, encouraged her to read any book in the extensive Cummings library, and discussed her future with her. “It was the happiest life,” Belinda would recall. But it came to a sad and premature end when the economic depression caused George Cummings’s business to fail.

  Aged twenty, Belinda decided she would be her own boss. The fact that she was uneducated and penniless did not dampen her ambitions. She traveled to Chicago, where she built and ran a restaurant conveniently close to the gates of the spectacular Columbian Exposition held there in 1893. By the time the fair closed and she sold the business, she had accumulated $8,000. Many of the entrepreneurs she had met in Chicago were moving west because the California Midwinter International Exposition was going to be held in San Francisco the following year. Belinda went with them, and built a restaurant and rooming house. But this time she was felled by bad luck: her buildings burned down and she lost all her money.

  This must have been a dreadful blow to a young woman with no home or family. But according to her own account, Belinda barely paused for breath. Her successes so far had given her confidence in her ability to survive on her own wits rather than to rely on a man—a confidence that few young women in her period had the chance to develop. In fact, Belinda seems to have convinced herself that she could manage better on her own than most men her age could. She looked around to see where a competent young woman might be employed, and decided to get involved in the shipping business. She planted herself in the office of the San Francisco port steward and told him, “I want to work on one of the ships. I want to work on one going to Alaska.” She had seen a poster for Alaska on the dock, and “it seemed far away and new to me.” Eventually she wangled a job as stewardess on the City of Topeka, which sailed up the North Pacific coast to supply the little towns and villages perched along southeast Alaska’s rugged coast.

  “There’s nothing like being a stewardess to develop your wits when you’re just a bit too independent for the job,” she later remarked. “I remember an old Englishman who expected me to black his boots. I told him I wouldn’t, and I told him if he put ’em outside his door again I’d be thinkin’ he was wantin’ ice-water and turn a pitcherful into ’em.” When she wasn’t putting passengers in their place, she was developing a side business as a purchasing agent for Alaska residents. They would give her orders for goods from Seattle, and she would bring them north on her next trip. A particular dry goods store in Seattle “used to look forward to the docking of the City of Topeka . . . They allowed me a good stiff commission, but I would not let them charge the Alaskans more than Seattle prices.” She quickly learned that despite the harsh climate and rough living conditions, women in the North, both native and non-native, yearned for a few luxuries in their lives—pretty blouses, soft nightgowns. There were also rumors that Belinda peddled whiskey as well as dry goods even though alcohol was illegal in Alaska.

  By now, Belinda Mulrooney had learned a great deal. In the Cummings household, she had seen how rich folk lived and how the business world worked. From her Chica
go and San Francisco ventures, she had learned how to grasp commercial opportunities, how to read a balance sheet, how to assert her authority over male employees. Most important, she had developed a sixth sense for underlying shifts in the American economy. She could see that America was still in the grip of the grinding depression that had bankrupted George Cummings’s factories and sent Bill Haskell north. But she had also felt, particularly at the Columbian Exposition, a renewed entrepreneurial energy. Twenty-two million Americans had been drawn to Chicago to see an incredible phenomenon that would revolutionize modern life: electricity. Belinda had marveled at the exposition’s spectacular displays based on this newly harnessed power source: illuminated fountains, an elevated railway, a Ferris wheel with 1,340 colored lights, General Electric’s seventy-foot Tower of Light, a movable sidewalk, speedboats, ovens, and vacuum cleaners. It was impossible to ignore the optimistic buzz in the air. Electricity was going to kickstart the next wave of innovations and a new boom in the economy.