Good Time Girls of the Alaska-Yukon Gold Rush de Lael Morgan

Good Time Girls of the Alaska-Yukon Gold Rush: Secret History of the Far North

Lael Morgan

en Limba Engleză Paperback – 31 iul 1999 – vârsta de la 14 ani

In the boomtowns of the Alaska-Yukon stampedes, where gold dust was common currency, the rarest commodity was an attractive woman, and her company could be costly. Author Lael Morgan takes you into the heart of the gold rush demimonde, that "half world" of prostitutes, dance hall girls, and entertainers who lived on the outskirts of polite society. Meet "Dutch Kate" Wilson, who pioneered many areas long before the "respectable" women who received credit for getting there first ... ruthless heartbreakers Cad Wilson and Rose Blumkin ... "French" Marie Larose, who auctioned herself off as a wife to the highest bidder, Georgia Lee, who invested her earnings wisely and became one of the richest women in the North, and Edith Neile, called "the Oregon Mare," famous for both her outlandish behavior and her softhearted generosity.

Citește tot Restrânge

Textul de pe ultima copertă

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.

Notă biografică

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.