Sex Work in the Klondike Gold Rush

Why on earth would anyone make a perilous journey across wilderness and snow covered mountains, all because of a bit of gold? This isn't Lord of the Rings, it's the Klondike Gold Rush, when an estimated hundred thousand people made the journey across Alaska to goldfields in the Klondike region, Canada. Among them, women. But why did women make this journey? How much of their work was sex work? Kate is joined by Brian Castner for this episode about life in the Alaskan Gold Rush. Brian is the author of ‘Stampede: Gold Fever and Disaster in the Klondike’. This episode was edited by Hannah Feodorov. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

  Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:35Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely betwixters! It's me, Cade Lester. You are back once again, listening to The Renegade Master. No, you know, you know, you know, it's betwixt the sheets. Don't worry, you're in the right place. Hello! But before we can go any further, I do have to tell you that this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults, other adults, about adulty things and an adulty way of going around adult subjects, you've been adult too. And we have to do that, just to keep you nice and safe. Because one day, one day, you might be offended by something we say, and in that case, tough tits, ha, it's on you. Right, on with the show.

• 1:10Kate Lister?

  Welcome, dear betwixters, to the Betwixt Saloon. You've journeyed many hundreds of miles to get here, to Alaska, of all places, perhaps across perilous ice and dicey, snow-topped, rocky mountains. It's so dangerous, in fact, that many have succumbed to disease, malnutrition, hypothermia, and polar bears. I don't know if that last one's true. Do they have polar bears in Alaska? I don't know, I don't know, that's right. But they've got wildlife, haven't they? And some people have probably been eaten by it. I would think that that's probably right. And when you're not dodging the cold and wildlife, you've got avalanches, and, well, you know, murder and crime as well. It's a rough old ride out to Alaska. But you made it here, weary traveller, and soon, perhaps, you'll find the reason that

• 1:53Kate Lister?

  you came in the first place: gold. That's why we're all here. So put your feet up, let's get a drink, and maybe while you're resting, I can introduce you to some of these lovely women. You can talk to them, and you can dance with them, but you'll have to pay for it. Fact or dance costs a dollar? And where this fine Alaska night takes you after that? Well, as they say here, what happens in Klondike stays in Klondike. Let's find out more.

• 2:46Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheet, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. If the news hit right now that gold had been found in some far-flung place across dangerous landscapes and inaccessible by regular transport, would you go? Would you do it? Would you pack up your belongings in a spotted handkerchief and head out to find it? Well, then you're fucking mad I wouldn't do it. But a lot of people did exactly that in the 19th century, when hundreds of thousands of people jumped at the chance to go and find gold in America. And off they went to places like California and Alaska. Alaska? Are you completely mad? At least in California, they've got the sun. But it wasn't just gold crazy men that were going. There were women going too.

• 3:30Kate Lister?

  And what were they going there for? Were they going to try and pan for gold? Ha, ha, ha. No, they were panning for something else entirely different. But what role did they play in this society? Well, we're going to find out today with author Brian Castner. And this subject was actually requested by one of you lovely Betwixters. Claire, hello Claire. She visited Alaska last year and wanted to hear more about the innovative women who went along to this very cold and chilly frontier. Claire, my darling, this one is for you. Let's get our big coats on, Betwixters, and head out.

• 4:10Kate Lister?

  Well, hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Brian Castner. How are you doing?

• 4:17Speaker 01

  I am doing great and I am very happy to be here.

• 4:20Kate Lister?

  I'm thrilled that you are here. Now, normally the first question that I ask people is, "How did you get into your particular area of historical research?" But I have a note here saying that you are a former explosive ordnance disposal officer. So Brian,

• 4:36Speaker 01

  That is correct.

• 4:36Kate Lister?

  How the hell did you get into... What's happened here?

• 4:40Speaker 01

  I'm just really lucky that I, yes, I was in the US military. I was bomb disposal. I did a couple of tours in Iraq. Became a contractor afterwards, did a whole bunch of things and wrote a war memoir about that. And I was really fortunate that that first book was successful. And when you write a successful book, sometimes your editor lets you write about other things that you would like to write about. And I have always loved the North and the outdoors and the Arctic and Alaska. And so I, yes, I'm really lucky that I then got to take some of those investigative skills and writing skills and apply it to other things. And in this case, the Klondike Gold Rush.

• 5:22Kate Lister?

  Well, yeah. And what a subject. I'll have to restrain myself now. I don't want to go on a side question, just ask you about bomb disposal, but I really want to, but I'm not allowed. Right, let's talk Alaska. How did you become interested in, because we're talking about the Alaskan Gold Rush, and in particular, the women who were part of that Gold Rush. But how did you become interested in that?

• 5:43Speaker 01

  I mean, that's a reasonable question. It's not always clear where some of these book ideas come from. I think I had the word Klondike written down in like a notebook somewhere. And I would just like look at it every so often as I was thinking of book ideas. It's the kind of place where I feel like people have heard of it, at least Americans and Canadians have heard of it, but they don't really know why and they don't know what happened. And I felt like if I was curious to know more, maybe other people would too. And so, once I got into it and started to look, I mean, a popular history of the Klondike Gold Rush. Rush had not been written in fifty or sixty years, not not that tried to tell the whole story. And so a lot of historical research had been done by historians, lots of of which I'm not.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  A lot of memoirs had been found and published by families per se.

• 6:32Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  Or, for example, and so we had a lot of first person information, letters, journals, such that people didn't have historians didn't have fifty, seventy years ago. And so I really could stand on the shoulder of giants and really delve into a lot of first person accounts of what happened there. And so, yeah, in the book, I tried to tell the story from several, you know, people's perspectives in a in a granular way that you don't get when you're just reading government reports or kind of the broad history.

• 7:07Kate Lister?

  As a Brit, when I think about the American gold rush, I guess I'm I'm just thinking of movies. I'm thinking of like, like old timey miners singing about Omadalin Clementine and and panning for gold in the rivers and that's that's what I'm thinking of. I don't know how much that is true, but can you tell us a bit about what was the gold rush?

• 7:28Speaker 01

  So this is eighteen ninety seven is when the main gold rush was, which you could say is either the very, very end of the Victorian period. And there are some Victorian morals and culture in part of this because it wasn't just Americans and Canadians, it was people from all over the world, including Brits and others that were that were doing this gold rush.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  What you say about when you think of the American gold rush, you have you have this picture in your mind. I think what's funny about the Alaskan one is people on the gold rush themselves to Alaska had that picture in mind. The California gold rush, which was not the first, but is the first big famous one, was eighteen forty nine. And then you had a whole number of other gold rushes to Arizona and Colorado and Montana. And so we have these movies about tombstone and shootouts and people stealing silver off a train and all this.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  Kind of stuff. This mythology of the old West, of the American West, was really present in the minds of the people that went to Alaska. And a lot of people called it the last West or the last frontier. In some ways, people were play acting. There's all these stories and photos we have of the people that went on the stampede, bought costumes, they called them. And on the ship, they're changing out of their suits and ties and leather shoes. And they're putting on their quote miners costume.

• 9:02Kate Lister?

  That's wild.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  And they're like playing a role even as as they're going into this very, very dangerous place where many of them would be killed or just not make it at all.

• 9:13Kate Lister?

  Well, see, that's the thing is most of America in the 19th century is pretty dangerous. This idea of like, well, we'll hitch up the wagons and just we'll see what what's out there. We'll just see what we find. We may as well be going to Mars. But Alaska, I mean, even today, Alaska is quite an inhospitable environment. I mean, you know, it's a lovely place. We have amenities. But if you were just going there with no hotels, no electricity and no nothing, but just just your mining outfit and something to try and find gold, you might be in trouble quite quick.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  And they were. I mean, it's worth saying too, if you're going to California on the gold rush and you may take your family, you probably, in many cases, they took their family. Because even if you don't find gold, well, you're in California and that's pretty nice. And you get a farm or you do something else. If you go to Alaska, there's nothing else to do. And in the Yukon Territory, it's worth saying that you enter in Alaska and then the actual goldfields of the Klondike were in Canada, in the Yukon Territory. You have to cross a border. And in fact, where that border was, was established by the stampede. It was it was part of it. It was very, it was very amorphous until 100,000 people actually tried to go over the pass and get into Canada.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  But once you're up there, you can't farm, you can't raise animals, you're not going to settle. There's really no other reason to be there than to dig for gold. And that really changed really the the scope and the arc of the whole story.

• 10:43Kate Lister?

  How cold could it get in Alaska?

• 10:45Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm going to do this by Fahrenheit, I guess.

• 10:48Kate Lister?

  Right, fine.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  But but minus 40, minus 50, the thermometers would burst. Yes, very. But like, I mean, killing you cold, unless you had the fire going the whole time. Yes, absolutely.

• 11:00Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  And some people froze to death, of course, certainly on the way in. So maybe the the timeline is worth saying just for a second here. You know, gold was discovered in 1896 by people that were already up there. There had been a couple hundred or a couple thousand, like a small number of people that were up there. They found gold. They came out in 1897. And so the news reports of all of this gold that was discovered is what starts the stampede. And so people really don't start to leave until July, August, September 1897. And by the time October rolls around, there's already snow in the

• 11:42Speaker 01

  pass and they're getting stuck. And so they essentially went right into the teeth of winter, which was another reason that there was this massive, essentially manmade disaster.

• 11:53Kate Lister?

  That's a bad idea.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  Yes, but but it was it was a I mean, they called it gold fever for a reason. It was like a medical condition.

• 12:04Kate Lister?

  I was just about to say, like, what on earth is the motivation? Because if you said to me, right, Kate, there's there's a chance, maybe, possibly, that you could find some gold somewhere in Alaska, but there's no off you go just to try and survive in the wilderness by yourself. I would go, do you know, I'm fine for that. So what? Try and explain to me what like gold fever is. What would make somebody go, I'm going to get all of my families and we're going to go and live up on an ice block and try and find some gold?

• 12:31Speaker 01

  Right. I think the historical context is interesting. So the Great Panic of 1893 was the worst economic depression that the United States had experienced to that time. And it's going to sound a lot like the Great Recession, you know, banks went under, people lost their homes, everybody's underwater with their mortgage. At the time, it was the railroads that were overbuilt instead of, say, the dot com bust. But there is this massive economic depression.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  And over years, people just, they can't get out of it. And there's labor unrest, labor unions are forming, there's strikes at the mines, people can't keep a job, wages are extremely low. And then all of a sudden, on the front page of every newspaper, is the solution to everyone's problem, which is gold is discovered in the Kollandike. And these stories, this is a time of what in the United States is called yellow journalism. There wasn't necessarily great adherence to the truth. And some of the news reports said that there was like, you know, a billion dollars in gold just laying everywhere like Easter eggs upon the ground.

• 13:40Kate Lister?

  See, that'd do it, actually, wouldn't it? If that's what you thought there was.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  And so the people that tended to go on this particular gold rush, like I said, there was about 100,000, we think, which for reference is the combined population of LA and Seattle. That's about how many people were in that part of the country at the time. But the 100,000 people that went, it's not like these were experienced miners mostly. It's not like they were people that knew anything about anything. They described that there were a lot of police officers and streetcar drivers and urban professionals. And these are people that worked in a city, had electricity, in most cases, were used to urban living,

• 14:24Speaker 01

  didn't know how to hitch a horse, didn't know how to dig in the ground, didn't have survival skills at all.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  Yes, which is why so many died. And I mean, in the grand scheme of things, like I said, about 100,000 went. And we think about three quarters of those either never made it or died on the way.

• 14:44Kate Lister?

  Oh, my God.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  And then of the 25,000 or 30,000 that did make it all the way to Dawson City, almost nobody staked a claim, almost nobody found gold. It was about, it was about 1% that, that found enough gold to say they were rich. And if you think about it just logically, is it going to be all the people that come afterwards that make the money? Or is it going to be the miners that were already up there and already, you know, staked their claim?

• 15:11Kate Lister?

  Especially if the miners up there are just like, you know, the guy who was working down the cash and carry, who, you know, read some Westerns and thought that he could be a miner. This is, this is crazy.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:22Kate Lister?

  What would they?

• 15:24Speaker 01

  So they were, and the path to go up there, there were several paths. Some people tried to walk all the way through British Columbia or Edmonton. All, I mean, the vast majority of those people died or didn't make it. And then the main route, though, was taking a, was taking a ship from Seattle, San Francisco, Portland, getting off at, in Alaska, at a little towns called Dai and Skagway. And then you would go up, go up over the pass. And then, once you were on the other side of the mountains and were descending into Canada, you got to the lakes that were at the headwaters of the Yukon River.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  And you had to build a boat. And like, how many people know how to use a saw and build a boat? And so they would build a boat and then they would float through the rapids, like whitewater rapids, all the way down to Dawson City,

• 16:25Speaker 01

  which, you know, grew from a thousand people to 30,000 people essentially in a few months.

• 16:29Kate Lister?

  This is insane. Brian, you are a military man with considerable military experience. Do you think you could have done this?

• 16:37Speaker 01

  I think I would have got into building the boat and then being like, where's my saw? And what am I going to do here? I should say, I have hiked, it's the Chilkot Trail, it's called. I have hiked the Chilkot Trail, which is now a national park. And, and it is the best backpacking I've ever done in my life. But I've, but I've also, I mean, it's absolutely gorgeous. It is, it was just an amazing several days of doing that. But I wasn't doing it in winter and I wasn't trying to do it with a thousand pounds of flour and butter and mining equipment and everything else that people were trying to bring.

• 17:29Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Brian after this short break.

• 17:37Kate Lister?

  Hello Betwixters, I am jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there and the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.

• 18:19Kate Lister?

  Did they actually find gold? Like, was there actually gold there or was this just a wild rumour?

• 18:26Speaker 01

  No, there was gold. There was billions and billions of dollars in today's dollars of gold.

• 18:32Kate Lister?

  So that wasn't a lie?

• 18:33Speaker 01

  That wasn't a lie and some people truly did get rich. I think a great example of this is Clarence and Ethel Berry, who were a husband and wife team, which is kind of interesting. There weren't a lot of husband and wife teams up there, but they were a husband and wife team that worked together. He mined all day, she, I mean, a lot of the tasks were gendered. They were gender segregated, but she did more than, you know, just make food and do the laundry. She also kept the accounting books. She also was like the businesswoman. She ended up keeping the accounting books for all the other miners kind of in their area.

• 19:08Kate Lister?

  Go Ethel.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, go Ethel. Well, because they could work together, you know, when Clarence got back from mining.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  He didn't, you know, a lot of miners just fell down and fell asleep and weren't washing and weren't eating properly and weren't doing a number of other things, you know. Having two of them, that partnership really worked. They became extraordinarily successful, bought other mining claims nearby, bought other mining claims throughout Alaska, bought oil futures in California.

• 19:44Kate Lister?

  Oh, that's smart.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  Bought other oil fields in California, owned the Los Angeles Angels baseball team, and Barry Petroleum, their family's petroleum company, sold in 2013 for like four and a half billion dollars.

• 20:01Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  So some people did have that experience, and many more were like the writer Jack London, who made about five dollars in gold and then left.

• 20:12Kate Lister?

  Oh, you'd be so mad, wouldn't you? It's like you'd made it and you'd built your boat and you'd carried your flour and your butter all the way over the hills and there's polar bears and it's just, that's what you came back with?

• 20:24Speaker 01

  Some people got up there and didn't even try to mine. They said, "I've had an incredible adventure and now it's time to leave."

• 20:30Kate Lister?

  See, I like that attitude. Sure, that is, that's a very American attitude because you are very positive people. I've noticed that, like the Brits have this real cynicism about them. We would just be like, I can't, we'd whinge the whole way and we would just hate it. The Americans are like, "Well, it's an adventure." I kind of like that attitude.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  Well, and they got up there and they saw what they were hoping, which was this, you know, frontier mining boomtown full of, you know, saloons and whiskey and dancing girls and everything else. You know, they're in this incredible scene and then they, they take a steamer out and go home and they have stories and, you know, they're broke.

• 21:11Kate Lister?

  I bet they do.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  But by the time they get back, you know, America's really changing. We're fighting a war with Spain. Teddy Roosevelt becomes president. Like, the modern world starts almost immediately after they get back. And so it really, in some ways, they were right. It is the last great American frontier adventure.

• 21:34Kate Lister?

  The last one. Let's talk about the women because we've mentioned Ethel, but one of the most astonishing things about all this like pushing west, or in this case, up, I suppose, is that it wasn't just rugged men. Also, women turn up as well. Women are part of this. So, do we have any idea of numbers and percentages? Who is making this journey?

• 22:01Speaker 01

  We don't have great numbers. It's probably somewhere between 5 and 10% of the people that went were women. So it's 90 or 95% male. Women were really discouraged to go. I mean, Ethel herself, once she got out, discouraged women from going. And the idea was like a very Victorian weaker sex. There's no way women are going to make it. And so that was part of it. But that led to, again, when jobs and roles are gendered, it meant there weren't nurses, for example, for the hospital where people were dying of cholera and other diseases.

• 22:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was just a real, I guess, shortage of labor, if you want to say in some ways, because of all the things that a woman would be expected to do as opposed to a man. But having said that, of the, however many women went, the estimate is that about half of them were involved in the sex worker trade in some way. And it was a continuum of how much they were involved. But the reason was explicitly economic. If you were a maid, or if you were doing laundry for someone, you would make about $50 a month. And if you were a sex worker, you could make $50 in about 15 minutes as the going rate.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  And so many, many women, it chose to at least in some amount of time, in some way, be involved in the trade.

• 23:38Kate Lister?

  Well, that it's always been about economic forces, hasn't it? Is these are the situations that are set up and you've got a mass market of men who've got money and there aren't many women around and the most valuable thing that you've got to sell is sex. So that that is what is going to happen, right?

• 23:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. And there was also a sense and and women were treated, it won't surprise you, were treat many women were treated very badly in this time, that there was a lot of violence against women. And it was for exactly the reason you said, gold was plentiful and women were not. And so there was a lot of jealousy. There's a lot of stories of women being killed by a client because she took other clients, for instance. I mean, the the whole situation was, I don't know if you want to say tragic, or it was at least, you know, the the power differentials and the and the way women were treated were were truly awful in many cases.

• 24:36Kate Lister?

  We've had other historians on before to tell us about brothels in various mining towns in 19th century America. And there seems to be this kind of idea that that within these time periods and within these communities, that sex work was just accepted. It's just part of the the culture. It's just and so and initially attempts to abolish it were resisted because it's like, where are we going to go to have a good time? And and also they they pay into the economy. What was it like in Alaska? What were the attitudes? Because you've mentioned already that, you know, there were some Victorian attitudes still kicking around and famously, they were very worried about the great social evil. But what was it like in Alaska during the gold rush?

• 25:19Speaker 01

  It was like other historians have told you in that Colonel Samuel Steele, who was the commander of the Northwest Mounted Police and in charge of security in Dawson City, he called it a necessary evil.

• 25:31Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  And they had a system where he arrested 150 women a month and charged them a $50 fine. And that $50 fine out of the 150 women paid for the hospital. And then they would also charge women $5 to get a letter from a doctor saying that they were healthy and it was like a health clearance. So I would say it was definitely, it was more than tolerated. It was integrated into, in somewhat, if you want to say like the government funding system. Like the, the women knew when they were being arrested, they weren't, they weren't properly being charged with the crime. This was a way to fund other government services.

• 26:18Kate Lister?

  That's wild, isn't it? The hospital was built by arrested sex workers.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 26:24Kate Lister?

  That's crazy. Do we, um, do we have names of any brothels or brothel madams or names that survived to us of these women?

• 26:34Speaker 01

  We do have some. Um, they are, they are pretty colorful, uh, as you might imagine. The, I mean, it's worth saying that most hotels and most saloons had what they called cribs, either upstairs or in the next street behind. So Front Street was the main street on the river and then, um, the second avenue, like immediately behind, which is where a lot of the sex workers, uh, had what they called cribs. Um, and so, I mean, it was just extremely common. It wasn't like it was kept in one part of town, not, not until later. So some of these women, uh, we know about, uh, a woman named the Virgin and she

• 27:16Speaker 01

  was called the Virgin because she might've met one once. Um, there was, there was a woman named the Grizzly Bear who reportedly only had one eye.

• 27:25Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  There was a woman named the Oregon Mayor, Edith Neal. Um, and, uh, I don't know if I should let you use your imagination or not, uh, but that was because of the number of men that could ride her at a single time.

• 27:39Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  So we have some of those names, but we also, the names that we have more of are like Diamond Tooth Gertie, who reportedly had a diamond.

• 27:48Kate Lister?

  That's a belter.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  Yes. She is a great example of where she was a performer on stage. I mean, and these girls went by various names and I hate to keep calling Girls, but they're but that's because they're referred to as working girls or sporting girls or, you know, names like that. But, you know, she was a singer. She was a performer. There was a show every night. And, you know, she would find clients, people would throw gold at her at the end of the performance. And then if somebody had enough money, you know, they could take Diamond Tooth Gertie, you know, on some limited basis somewhere else and have their have their encounter. And that was that. But that's a good example of how many women were dancers, but they were dancing the waltz. And so it was like a dollar a dance.

• 28:34Kate Lister?

  Oh, I see.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  So they would just dance over and over again. And the dollar a dance, they would make 25 cents. The house would make 75 cents. And this was really like a marathon. This was an endurance thing. The num- the saloons never closed. So they would work all day and all night and dance continuously, essentially for a dollar a dance. And if you were dancing the waltz and doing well enough, whatever, you know, the first step was, well, maybe you can get one of those men to go up into the boxes where they'll order champagne. And then you get a percentage of the champagne that they're ordering. And then if you can get them good and drunk, then you can just steal the gold that they have on them and let them pass out.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  If that doesn't work, then maybe you go to one of the cribs and, you know, you have a client that way. But then you get back dancing. It is just absolutely exhausting. Just constant, you know, developing clients or, you know, just constant work.

• 29:36Kate Lister?

  Is that what a percentage girl was?

• 29:38Speaker 01

  That's right. Exactly. So a percentage of the whiskey sold, a percentage of the dance. And the more whiskeys, the more dancing, the more money you made.

• 29:55Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Brian after this short break.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  In a world where swords were sharp.

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  And hygiene was actually probably better than you think it is. Two fearless historians.

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  Me, Matt Lewis.

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  So for plagues, crusades and Viking raids and plenty of other things that don't rhyme. Subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts.

• 30:45Kate Lister?

  Do we know the names of any saloons or brothels that they may have been working in? Have they survived? I'm trying to get a picture of like what they might have looked like. And is it like the, the Western that I've got in my head with some guy playing the piano in the corner?

• 31:00Speaker 01

  It is a bit of that. The Criterion, the Pavilion, they kind of had some of these grand names. One woman who was not involved in sex work at all was named Belinda Mulrooney. And she owned one of these hotels. She owned the Grand Forks and the Fairview. And, I mean, women worked in her hotel as well, but she was, I mean, the, the saying at the time was that you mine the miners. Right? Like instead of betting on a single mine yourself, if you try to mine all the miners, you know, you're far more likely to be successful. And that's what Belinda Mulrooney did as well. I mean, two names that we haven't mentioned yet that are very famous that have survived are Klondike Kate.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  Klondike Kate, her name was Kate Rockwell and the Red Onion Saloon. And these have kind of survived because, I mean, some of it is tourism now, but some of it was nostalgia and tourism at the time. So the Red Onion Saloon. Saloon is in Skagway, which is on the Alaskan coast. And so if you take an Alaskan cruise, you're likely to to stop in there. Klondike Kate didn't arrive in Dawson City until after the Gold Rush. But what's funny about it, it goes back to, again, this idea of the Last West. There were tourists coming to the Gold Rush a year or two after the rush was done.

• 32:25Kate Lister?

  That's wild, isn't it?

• 32:26Speaker 01

  People wanted to go up and see it. And so Kate was successful and married a man who got involved in the movie industry and she eventually became involved in movies, whatever else. She was famous, you know, for tourists essentially coming later. It wasn't really minors at the time because, yeah, the Gold Rush was done. She didn't arrive there until later.

• 32:48Kate Lister?

  Did she own the Red Onion Saloon? What was that, the Red Onion Saloon?

• 32:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, so she didn't own it. She was a she was a performer in Dawson City, which is in the Yukon Territory. And yeah, the Red Onion is in Skagway, which was on the coast. So in in different places. It's worth saying that Dawson City burned down in like immediately at the end of the Gold Rush in 1899.

• 33:14Kate Lister?

  How? Why? What happened?

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Well, there's what really happened. And then there's what the later inquiry stated. And I think that we I think we don't know what happened necessarily. I mean, there was a fire in a particular hotel. And because they're all made of wood and they're all right next to each other, it just spread from one to the next. And it was really engulfed all of Front Street. Later, the fire was blamed on a woman named Helen Holden, who was one of the sex workers and dancers who had a crib there. She I mean, she had to appear in front of a legal panel and like, you know, did you used to heat your hair curlers? You

• 33:56Speaker 01

  know, did you leave the stove on? Like, they were looking for someone to blame. I mean, did she have a stove on? Did she leave her clothes too near a lamp? I mean, who knows? Fire was a was a very common thing.

• 34:08Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  But but the city fathers did use the opportunity to then remove all the sex workers from Dawson City and move them to a place across the river called Laustown.

• 34:20Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  So whether she was a scapegoat or actually careless is hard to know.

• 34:25Kate Lister?

  So that sounds like this is an effort at what we'd call zoning when it comes to regulating the sex work and one of the many options available zoning seems to be quite a popular one throughout history is well, you can do it, but you can only do it over there.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  Right, right. And so that is eventually what happened with Dawson City is just not how, not how it started.

• 34:47Kate Lister?

  Okay, so is that kind of how this thing wraps up? Because it sounds like it has like as in many of these mining towns is, is it's like a little ecosystem all of its own whilst they're in the gold rush and like normal social rules seem not to apply within these little communities because they're just left to their own devices. So they, you know, sex work is very tolerated, but then as industrialization expands and more and more people come into the area, then you start getting external pressure to moderate things, particularly like sex work. Is that what happened in Dawson City in Alaska?

• 35:20Speaker 01

  That is exactly right. So Dawson City doesn't exist in 1895. In 1896, as people start to set down claims, there's a couple hundred people max. In 1897 and 1898, it grows to 30,000 people.

• 35:39Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 35:39Speaker 01

  The, the place burns down in 1899 and by 1900 or 1902, it's back to a couple thousand people again.

• 35:48Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  It's just, and it still exists now. I mean, again, a thousand, 2000 people live up there. It's a tourist spot and there's a place, or at least there used to be a place called Diamond Tooth Gertie's up there. Again, it's like a nostalgia thing and you can see the dancing and pull your RV in and walk down a recreation of Front Street and because all the original stuff burned down, it's all, you know, what's been rebuilt since.

• 36:18Kate Lister?

  So a question that I always ask people when they, when they are the historians and they've, they've looked into sex work is, do we know anything about what happened to these women after? Because so rarely you do, they tend to just vanish from the records. Just, just you have these moments of like Diamond Tooth Gertie and, you know, the, the Red Onion Saloon and Klondike Kate and these amazing names. Then suddenly they just, they're just, they're gone. But do we have any idea what happened to these women?

• 36:44Speaker 01

  We have very little idea, and it is really, it's unfortunate and a shame. And like I said, when I, when I started to try to write this book, I was looking for first person accounts to be able to bring people to life. And I could not find a single intact journal of any of the sex workers themselves.

• 37:04Kate Lister?

  If you did, that is like, that would be like gold dust. That would be like such a valuable document. You so rarely get the first hand accounts of these people.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  The, the closest that I got and the perspective that I wrote from was a woman named Anna De Graff. She was older and she didn't go to the Klondike looking for gold. She went because she was looking for her son. Her son went up there and disappeared. And so she was looking for him afterwards. And she essentially became a mother to a lot of these women. She made their clothing. She was a seamstress. She brought her, her sewing machine with her. So she interacted with a lot of these women, tried to take care of them, tried to get them to stop drinking, tried to get them to stop working, uh, you know, try to provide some of that mothering. And so we do have her perspective because her family later published her memoir, but

• 37:58Speaker 01

  we don't have anything unfortunately from, from the women directly, which is a real, it's a real hole in it, in the, in the historical record.

• 38:06Kate Lister?

  So as a final question then, if you can have a time machine and if you can go back to Dawson City, it is absolute heyday. What are you doing for the, for the day? What would you like to see? Where would you like to go? Who'd you like to talk to?

• 38:17Speaker 01

  I, this, this may sound funny. I would want to go to the goldfields themselves in winter. And the, the reason is because this mining, it, it actually happened over the winter. It's kind of funny. The gold was not, it wasn't in the ground in the, as you might think about it. It was through the permafrost. So they didn't dig, they burned into the ground with fire and they melted their way down to the bedrock and then the gold settled in the bedrock. And so if you walk these goldfields in the middle of winter, it's snow and you have these like chimneys essentially of black smoke everywhere. And then you have this maze, they would burn 30, 50, a hundred feet down to the bedrock.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  And then build these like tunnel systems, essentially trying to chase what they thought was the gold. And then you don't even know what you have until the next spring, when you can wash it all out in what's what was called cleanup. And so, I don't know, we have some photos. I mean, there are incredible photos of the Klondike Gold Rush, because there were some people that took glass plate photography up there. And these are absolutely just incredible photos. And the ones from inside the mines are like these dripping stalactite of like mud and it's frozen and it's just absolutely bizarre. It looks otherworldly. So, I don't know, I'm an outdoor guy, so I would want to go and see the the outdoor stuff.

• 39:45Kate Lister?

  So you're much smarter than me. You would have actually gone digging for gold if you got a day.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  I mean, you could go and get oysters and champagne for $100 a bottle. I mean, that you could live it up.

• 39:58Kate Lister?

  Pora, in fact, that's what I would have done.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you would not be, you would not be the only one. A lot of people went up there and partied, yes, and got on the boat home.

• 40:06Kate Lister?

  That's the one. Oh, Brian, you have been wonderful to talk to. Thank you so much. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

• 40:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's been great to talk to you. My website is brian castner dot com, real easy, my name, and all my books are there. And I'm on various social media, so you can, you can find me there. And I'd love it when readers to reach out and and love to chat.

• 40:29Kate Lister?

  Well, thank you so much. You have been marvelous.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 40:36Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Brian for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along, whatever it is you get your podcasts. Coming up, we are heading back to Hollywood to meet the fabulous, the very, very horny Marlena Dietrich. And if you want us to explore a subject, or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixt at historyhit dot com. This podcast was edited by Hannah Theodorov and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Join me again, Betwixt's Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.