Good Time Girls: Of the Alaska-Yukon Gold Rush

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.