Gone For Gold -- Tales Of Women Who Traveled North To The Klondike And Alaska

One hundred years ago this month, tens of thousands of men began streaming north from Seattle to the Klondike, gripped by Gold Rush fever.

The men traveled in abysmal conditions, crammed into ships and struggling along rugged trails and icy rivers on the 1,500-mile journey from Seattle through Alaska to the Klondike gold fields, in Canada's Yukon.

Their journeys are remembered in books, films and museum exhibits, especially during this summer's celebrations of the centennial of the 1897 Klondike Gold Rush in towns throughout Alaska, the Yukon and in Seattle. Yet the women who traveled north to the gold fields often are lost in history's shadows.

Now a newly published book, "Gold Rush Women" (Alaska Northwest Books, $16.95) is shedding some light on these women. Its Alaskan authors, Claire Rudolf Murphy and Jane Haigh, will be in Seattle next weekend as part of the city's centennial celebrations, reading from their book and talking about the women of the Gold Rush.

Of the hordes of Klondike gold-seekers one in 10 was female, the authors estimate.

Like the men, the women went north to find their fortunes or begin new lives. Like the men, they endured the unforgiving wilderness and the mind-numbing cold. Some, like Lucille Hunter, even gave birth on their way to the Klondike; she pressed on with her newborn child through the Yukon's minus-60-degree winter.

The women traveled north with their husbands or alone. Some stayed a few months, others a lifetime. Some staked their own mining claims; some kept the home fires burning. Others worked as teachers and nurses, madams and merchants, cooks and seamstresses and, yes, dance-hall girls, the dominant image of Gold Rush women.

They went north in an era when such a journey cut them off completely from their familiar world. There were, of course, no phones, no faxes, no TV to keep them in touch with the family, friends and communities they left behind.

"Gold Rush Women" brings two dozen of these pioneering women back to life through well-written three- or four-page profiles on each plus historic photographs.

The book begins with tales of women who traveled to the Klondike in the 1890s and ends with the women who sought their fortunes in the Nome and Fairbanks gold rushes of the early 1900s. It also profiles several native women who bridged two cultures as white prospectors and merchants swept into their remote homelands.

Here's a look at four gold-rush women, drawn from the book's profiles:

ETHEL BERRY

Twenty-three-year-old Ethel Berry stood in her ragged clothes on the deck of the SS Portland as it steamed into Seattle from Alaska in July 1897. She had $100,000 in gold that she'd found in the Klondike tucked into her bedroll; news of her fortune helped touch off the Klondike stampede.

Ethel and her husband, Clarence, struggling farmers from California who had gone north to find their fortune, struck it rich at their claims on Eldorado Creek in the Klondike after months of huddling in icy wooden shacks, sinking shafts to bedrock and sifting for gold.

They invested their money wisely and were among the very few Klondike miners who managed to become - and stay - rich.

"They were the luckiest people on the face of the earth in those days," said descendant William Berry, who lives in California but still mines north of Fairbanks.

"She could have said to him: `You're a farmer, stay a farmer.' But she let him chase his dream," said Berry (whose grandfather was Clarence Berry's brother).

Ethel was a big part of that dream, and she continued to work in the mines, shuttling between the Yukon, Alaska and the Lower 48, even after the couple struck it rich. She later loaned $70,000 of gold nuggets she'd found for display in the Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition held in Seattle in 1909.

KLONDIKE KATE

Klondike Kate is one Gold Rush woman who's well-known. Dubbed the "Belle of the Yukon," her sultry dances in Dawson City dance halls mesmerized the miners who threw gold nuggets at her in appreciation. (Tamer versions of Klondike Kate's dances abound these days in the shows for tourists in Yukon's Dawson City.)

Called Kate Rockwell during her childhood in Spokane, she traveled to Dawson City in 1899, when she was about 26, seeking her fortune in the north after failing to become a showgirl in New York.

She was determined to make it. When one of the Canadian Mounties refused to let women ride the rapids on the Yukon River, Kate reportedly disguised herself as a boy and hopped aboard one of the crude boats that miners used.

In Dawson City, Kate worked as a "percentage girl," too, dancing with miners after her show and earning a commission on the liquor she sold them. "Gold Rush Women" quotes her on some of her ruses.

"`My best night I earned $750, mostly just for talking to a lonesome miner," she said. She plied miners with drinks, got them drunk, then sold them bottles refilled with watered-down liquor.

She was ultimately unlucky in love and money, though, betrayed by her lover and robbed of her fortune. She ended up in Oregon, keeping the glory days of the Klondike alive through public talks, interviews and postcards she published of herself until her death in 1957.

ANNA DE GRAF

Anna De Graf's life was one of hardship; she endured a revolution in her native Germany, the death there of her firstborn child, then the death of her husband a few years after they came to the United States. Gold Rush pioneer

She ended up in Seattle, working as a dressmaker to support her five children.

With such a tough life behind her, she was tough enough at age 54 to travel alone to the Yukon and Alaska in search of her youngest son, a miner who had gone missing.

On her 1894 trip, she hiked for days across the icy Chilkoot Trail, her sore feet wrapped in rags and a crutch supporting her. She traveled 800 miles along the Yukon River, searching for her son, and waited out the winter in the northern Alaskan mining community of Circle City, sewing clothes for miners and dance-hall girls.

De Graf eventually abandoned her search and went to San Francisco to be with a daughter. But still yearning for news of her son, she headed back north a few years later. As quoted in "Gold Rush Women:"

"When the news of the strike on the Klondike fired my brain, I joined the stampede - not for the gold in the ground but because I wanted my son, and I knew I must earn my way on my travels."

She took a sewing machine and dress-making supplies and trekked north again - but never did discover the fate of her son.

LUCILLE HUNTER

Lucille Hunter was as obscure as Klondike Kate was famous - until the "Gold Rush Women" authors resurrected her history.

Lucille and her husband, Charles, headed to the Klondike in 1897 when she was just 19 years old - and pregnant. They were among the few African Americans who journeyed to the gold fields.

The couple traveled by foot, raft and dog sled to Dawson City in the depth of winter, pausing only briefly along the way for Lucille to give birth to a daughter.

Although little is known of the couple's background, Charles must have had experience as a trapper or miner for the two of them and their newborn to travel alone and survive the minus-60-degree temperatures, the drifting snow and hundreds of miles of empty wilderness.

Lucille and Charles staked their claims and made a living, but never made a fortune. Lucille operated the mines by herself for a decade after her husband died, then ended up in the Yukon town of Whitehorse during World War II where she ran a laundry, lived amid her Gold Rush memorabilia and died in 1972 at age 94.