Good Time Girls: Of the Alaska-Yukon Gold Rush - Softcover

Morgan, Lael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1551109948 ISBN 13: 9781551109947

Publisher: Whitecap Books Ltd, 1999

Synopsis

"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." - Pierre Berton

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 booking gold camps of the Alaska and Yukon at the turn of the century. Leaving behind their hometowns and most constraints of the 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 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 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.

About this title

From the Back Cover

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.

About the Author

Lael Morgan edits the Casco Bay Weekly in Portland, 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. 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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Whitecap Books Ltd
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1551109948
• ISBN 13: 9781551109947
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 351