Collects photographs and accounts of the adventures of women on the trails to the Klondike gold fields.

Here are the stories of those fascinatingly diverse women -- entrepreneurs, domestics, nuns, doctors, nurses, and journalists -- who played a critical role in the Klondike gold rush at the turn of the century.

Tells the story of a New York socialite and her friend who braved the Yukon in 1898 in search of gold. In diary form, Hitchcock describes in detail the people they met and her impressions of rural Alaska and Dawson City.

She may have been holding a gun, or an axe, or her hiked-up skirts, but she was there, in the Klondike of the Gold Rush. And her decision to venture everything on the dream of northern gold was in every way bolder and riskier than any man’s. In Frontier Spirit, Jennifer Duncan celebrates the lives of women who, in defiance of traditional expectations, left their homes, their families, and their professions, to make the arduous journey through a punishing climate and unfamiliar wilderness to seek their fortunes in the Klondike. The story of women in the Klondike begins with the strong and knowledgeable women who were there before the race for riches began -- First Nations women like Shaaw Tláa, whose experience and traditional skills were critical to the survival of her white prospector husband, and ultimately, to the discovery that sparked the Gold Rush. The white women who joined the Klondike Stampede came from all walks of life: rich and poor, educated and illiterate, single and married. Wealthy socialite Martha Black left her world of comfort to pursue a career as a miner, mill manager, and politician on the northern frontier. Belinda Mulrooney, an Irish farm girl, arrived in Dawson with a quarter to her name but used her business acumen and canny resourcefulness to turn the shantytown into a city and herself into its richest woman. And then there’s Kate Rockwell, a working-class girl from Kansas City, whose thirst for fame and adulation led her over the treacherous waters of the Whitehorse rapids and fired her ascent to the title of Queen of the Klondike. Duncan has spent the last five years experiencing Dawson City in all its seasons and, like the women who came before her, she has fallen under the spell of the North, coming to love its wilderness, its challenges, and its rugged glory. With remarkable empathy, imagination and personal insight, Duncan creates an engrossing portrait of the splendour of the Yukon, breathing life into the stories of the daring and diverse women of the Klondike and the grandeur of the adventurers who gambled everything to find their fortunes there.

With the first headlines that screamed "Gold! Gold! Gold!" the rush to the Klondike quickly became the stuff of legend. It was the Wild West all over again, the cowboy hero recast as prospector. Four key figures are linked to the gold that set off the stampede: George Carmack, his Tagish wife Kate Carmack (born Shaaw Tlaa), her brother Skookum Jim, and their nephew Dawson Charlie. Of these, Kate has received the least recognition, even though she played a pivotal role in the events that led to the Klondike stampede. In this recovery of a key historical figure, Vanasse explores the early life of Kate, the years she spent with George before the Klondike discovery, her meeting of almost every key figure in gold rush history, and the experiences in Washington and California that brought her into a world she could scarcely have imagined. Four years after he set off the rush, Carmack abandoned his wife at a California ranch. Illiterate and thousands of miles from her home, Kate fought for her wealth, her family, and her reputation. Through a fortuitous combination of correspondence, legal proceedings, ethnographic study, and the generosity of Kate's Tagish-Tlingit relatives, the story of Kate Carmack can finally be told. The first popular rendering of the Klondike Gold Rush from the perspective of those who were there first-, her biography gives voice to a survivor who, against all odds, ultimately reclaimed her true wealth. Vanasse brings a novelist's skill to a multifaceted and deeply researched story. Here is a complex portrait of an important historical figure overshadowed by the rush to Klondike gold.

With the building of the railroad and the settlement of the plains, the North West was opening up. The Klondike stampede was a wild interlude in the epic story of western development, and here are its dramatic tales of hardship, heroism, and villainy. We meet Soapy Smith, dictator of Skagway; Swiftwater Bill Gates, who bathed in champagne; Silent Sam Bonnifield, who lost and won back a hotel in a poker game; and Roddy Connors, who danced away a fortune at a dollar a dance. We meet dance-hall queens, paupers turned millionaires, missionaries and entrepreneurs, and legendary Mounties such as Sam Steele, the Lion of the Yukon. Pierre Berton's riveting account reveals to us the spectacle of the Chilkoot Pass, and the terrors of lesser-known trails through the swamps of British Columbia, across the glaciers of souther Alaska, and up the icy streams of the Mackenzie Mountains. It contrasts the lawless frontier life on the American side of the border to the relative safety of Dawson City. Winner of the Governor General's award for non-fiction, Klondike is authentic history and grand entertainment, and a must-read for anyone interested in the Canadian frontier.

Life and legend of Kitty Rockwell, dance-hall girl of the Yukon.