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

A Fairbanks prostitute, 1906.
Michael Carey Collection

In 1965 I spent many hours going through the late Judge James Wickersham's collection of photos, now at the Rasmuson Library in Fairbanks, but then in his home in Juneau, Alaska, which he'd left to his niece, Ruth Coffin Allman. What I liked best was Scrapbook #1 (of more than a dozen), which contained wonderful portraits of Klondike dance hall girls and prostitutes. At the time it didn't occur to me to wonder why Wickershama scholar with a Renaissance mindhad collected them. The judge knew he was making history and he collected everything.

Only in researching this book did I realize how important it was that the images were pasted into Scrapbook #1. Judge Wickersham arrived in the Far North early, when dance hall girls and prostitutes were still a major part of the female population. The women of the demimonde were in his first scrapbook because they were pioneers!

"A little later, to be sure, the canvas-covered wagons brought the wives and children of the permanent settlers, but the early rush was the unencumbered, adventurous, strong-bodied youth of the East," historian Howard B. Woolston noted in Prostitution in the United States. "The characteristics of the mining camps and the towns were those universally found under such circumstances in South Africa, in Australia, and later in Alaska. The women who followed the miners were not their wives and mothers and daughters, but those women who everywhere are drawn to the lure of money easily found and easily spent."

Another glimpse into the lives of these women came from the portraits taken in the Fairbanks red light district in 1906, probably the best collection of its kind in the United States, saved from oblivion by the late Fabian Carey. Some of the subjects were young and clear-eyed, staring straight at the camera with an oddly innocent candor. Most were beautiful, all elegantly coiffed and gowned, yet they were living in some of the wildest country on the globe, under ruggedly primitive circumstances. What were their stories? Why had they come to this harsh land at a time when women were encouraged to stay home? And why had they worked as prostitutes when they could easily have found husbandsespecially in the North, where the population is still predominantly male?

Then I learned that the Fairbanks red light district, started by an Episcopal archdeacon and one of the town's leading businessmen, was considered the best in the West, and I became intrigued. But while voluminous accounts had been written about respectable women pioneers in the North, nothing of any depth and scope had been written on the good time girls who generally preceded them. Most women of the demimonde avoided the limelight. The few who could write letters and keep diaries found it prudent not to do so. Many old-timers who had known them, especially those who had enjoyed their services or were related to them, were reluctant to admit it. And researching the topic in my home state, where many "pros" married in, was a delicate task at best.

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 circumstances, 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 stereotype 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.