Table of Contents
Frontispiece Map i
Table of Contents ii
List of Figures viii
List of Tables ix
Preface and Acknowledgements x
A short discussion of the long-term use of the color red (as in curtains, lights, clothing, and letters) in describing prostitutes. Why were prostitutes and politics intertwined in the first two decades of the twentieth century? Who helped me with this study?
Introduction 1
A light introduction with touches of humor spells out what little Skagways’ citizens and visitors know about prostitution in the town and perhaps why (except when they visit Madam Jan’s fanciful bordello museum at the Red Onion Saloon). I suggest it had to do with the suppression of a story by the men – mayors and business leaders – and women – historian “Ma” Pullen, temperance leaders and museum sponsors – who brought about the demise of the institution. The legend that has taken its place would shock and dismay the good women that fought to eradicate the institution from their town. The object of this study is to set the record straight with a story that is much more interesting than the silly fantasy that has taken its place.
1. "Little Better Than Hell on Earth." 7
This chapter explores a brief history of the Klondike Gold Rush and Skagway’s role in it; the legends of Soapy Smith and the damage he and his gang did to the community’s long term growth and business reputation; the legends and romance surrounding Dawson’s prostitutes and other fancy women, and the famous entertainers such as Little Egypt, Mattie Silks and Klondike Kate, who frequented Skagway.
2. Dancehalls and Saloons 19
Skagway had its share of scandalous women during the gold rush, but they appeared to differ in character from those in
Dawson. This chapter explores the difference, attributing much of it to those people who described them. They are followed by a description of the principle places the prostitute could be found, the dance halls and the saloons, with a detailed history of one such place, Clancy’s Music Hall, Club Rooms, and Theatre. Documentary evidence from a 1902 trial in
Juneau is used to describe the activities within the dance hall, on nights other than “family nights.” This chapter also explores some of the individual women known to habituate the dance halls and upstairs rooms of
Skagway’s saloons during the gold rush days, women who didn’t appear in the popular accounts of Stroller White and later story teller, Pierre Berton.
3. The Cribs 49
The small, one-room, single women businesses rented at usurious rates from greedy landlords formed the base of Skagway’s early economy in sex, even when the women worked the dance halls. Spread behind the saloons, dance halls, gambling dens and cigar stores on Fifth, Sixth and Seventh avenues, women displayed their wares and begged men for a quick turn-around for four to six bits so they could pay their five dollar weekly rents. Paradise, French and Jap alleys betrayed the ethnic composition of the women who operated
Skagway’s cribs.
Frank Keeler, who called himself
Alaska’s money king, sat on the city council and had multiple connections with the Japanese community. When the “temperance women” tried to move Jap Alley away from the public school, Frank used all of his bluster to stop them. He was unsuccessful, and the city council created the Seventh Avenue Red Light District.
4. A Place of Her Own 75
This chapter profiles three prostitutes who operated one-woman businesses in
Skagway during the 1898 – 1902 period, before the city obtained the right to prosecute and fine the prostitutes. Maggie Marshall, also known as “Popcorn Kate” was scorned by the newspaper editor and in the court documents. Old timer Dixie Anzer raved about her in his memoirs. “Dutch Rosie” Wagner had a macque, a lover who accommodated her occupation and who, as a bartender, probably facilitated her liaisons. She married him and the couple eventually became recognized as
Skagway pioneers. The mature Belle Schooler,
Skagway’s first true madam, owned a good deal of property around town and used her influence to bribe court officials.
5. The Madams 97
The madams emerged in
Skagway with the establishment of the red light district and began to replace the usurious landlords as business owners. They also brought peace and order to the district. This chapter explores the function of the madam, describing how she taught the prostitutes about birth and disease control, and kept the women from bringing unwanted attention to the district as a whole.
The chapter profiles two early
Skagway madams. Frankie Belmont owned “The Cottage,”
Skagway’s flashiest and most posh setting from 1898 to 1904. An arrogant Frankie got too cocky ran up against city hall, so, the newspaper editor (John Troy, later
Alaska governor) worked to drive her from town. Ida Freidinger, much more conservative, thrived with her two small brothels, living to be 68 and being eulogized as a long-time
Skagway pioneer. Freidingers’ probate provides a fascinating glimpse into the inside of two brothels in 1912.
6. Gentlemen of Standing and Property 133
Reformed madam Josie Washburn, in 1919, believed the “Man Landlady” to be at the root of all evil in the institution of prostitution in early twentieth century
America, the man who took rents from prostitutes but provided no services or comforts in return, as did the madam. This chapter profiles the two major landlords on
Seventh Avenue, one already having been discussed (Frank Keelar). Both Lee Guthrie and Phil Snyder became city council members and remained influential in the
Skagway power structure long after their terms in office expired. I discuss how intricately their political decisions intermeshed with their interests in the red light district.
7. The Social Evil 164
Chapter 7 begins to step away from the biographical material and into the social and analytical context of prostitution in the early twentieth century of
America. It discusses how the newspaper editor and columnists such as Canadian Stroller White, whom Pierre Berton relied upon for many of his Skagway gold rush stories, denigrated the
Skagway prostitutes to uplift the “reputation” of middle class ladies. The class structure of the community becomes important to understand. Stories of rape and adultery were treated differently, depending on the social class of the principles involved, as shown by two case studies. I discuss how the Victorians and Edwardians firmly believed that women were morally superior to men, therefore could control their lust; whereas men had no such control, thus justifying a double sexual standard. By hiding the uncomfortable problem of “the social necessity,” it could be ignored, and men could indulge their uncontrollable lusts.
With the large male to female ratio in
Skagway, and large number of working class, bachelor men, middle class women feared for themselves and their daughters. They were sure the Rapacious Stranger would attack them on the streets if they did not have the red light district in which to vent their base lusts. The social evil was indeed necessary for the safety of good, reputable, middle class women. Although I touched on the subject earlier, I now go into some depth discussing the rise of the middle class women’s movement in Skagway, their effort to move the Japanese prostitutes from behind the public school, and their success in creating the
Seventh Avenue red light district.
8. Judicial Christianity 194
After the creation of the Seventh Avenue red light district in 1901, a series of judicial decisions in the First District court in Juneau had repercussions on the how
Skagway’s citizens would interact with her own prostitutes. After reviewing the way the government worked in the military district of Alaska and her penal codes, I outline specifically the response of First District Judge Melville Brown to pressure from the reform community to clean-up of the southeast
Alaska. In particular, four spectacular cases in Juneau and Douglas set precedence for handling prostitution crime, not only in the Southeast, but in
Alaska as a whole. Two of the cases went all the way to the Supreme Court on appeal. There is some evidence that these cases contributed to
Alaska’s ultimate success in getting Territorial status.
In
Skagway, having finally been able to incorporate, the city began to prosecute the prostitutes under its ordinances. In a battle with the federal authorities, the prostitutes were fined almost into bankruptcy, seriously threatening the institution, and causing panic among the employers of working class men and those depending on the transient miners during the spring and fall travel seasons. A deal was finally reached with the district attorney in Juneau to stop the federal prosecutions and Skagway began a quarterly fining of the prostitutes, instituting a defacto sin tax on them and the men who operated gambling in the saloons. These taxes provided almost three fourths of the court revenues of the city.
9. The Politics of Prostitution 213
After discussing how women had traditionally operated (or failed to participated in) politics by influencing their husbands, I introduce Sarah Shorthill, the founder of
Skagway’s chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in 1900. An early case with the WCTU involved their protest of four liquor licenses. They successfully closed down one saloon. Two others closed their doors the following year, due to the protest filed by the WCTU. Their efforts to move the women on Jap Alley succeeded. Then they abruptly quit their activities when Mrs. Shorthill became the president of the
Alaska organization.
I introduce John Troy at greater length here, as he was instrumental in the dissolution of the WCTU. He actively criticized the efforts of this politically active women’s organization to reform the community from his position as newspaper editor.
Troy also held considerable power as chairman of the nominating community for the Citizen’s political party, which had run City Hall since 1898. After the city gained the power to tax the prostitutes, he stopped reporting their activities except in cases where council and police authorities wanted to run certain individuals out of town.
The WCTU rose from the ashes only after Troy left Skagway in 1907 and the Labor party of working class men that rousted his middle class Citizen’s party was defeated by a new and Progressive middle class Taxpayer’s Party. The new newspaper editor, Sam Wall respected the WCTU, who took on the domestic duties of the city, such as providing drinking fountains for dogs and horses, restrooms for tourists, reading rooms for bachelor men, non-alcoholic parties on holidays and during elections, and entertaining religious lectures.
One leader of the WCTU is profiled: Anna Stinebaugh. She had been active during the saloon and alley protests in 1900 and 1901, and been pinpointed as the wife of the owner of a landlord on
Seventh Avenue. She helped form the reincarnation of the WCTU and led the successful efforts that followed.
10. The Landladies 254
A landowning madam always referred to herself as a landlady, not a madam, who generally just owned the business.
Skagway had several important landladies. A few were absentee landladies, who never participated in their businesses. Two important active
Skagway landladies, Kitty Faith and Ida Freidinger are profiled in this chapter. They exemplify the astute businesswoman of the time.
11. To Move a District 265
The turning point for prostitution as an institution occurred in 1909, shortly after the defeat of Christopher Shea’s working class Labor Party at the city election in April. Shea had wrought important Progressive political reforms for the working men in
Skagway and was on his way to courting the businessmen as well. However, as a former saloon owner, he failed to appeal to the wives of the middle class men in town. Although he stayed on the city council, his party had only two of the seven members and could not muster enough strength to outvote the more conservative Citizen’s Party that returned to power in 1909. In response to a petition from the reform community, the
Seventh Avenue red light district was closed and removed to a more remote part of town.
12. Bootlegging, Unfortunates and the Higher-Ups 288
The women of
Alaska, largely through the efforts of the WCTU, gained the franchise in 1913. In the
Skagway city election of 1914, they overthrew the existing Citizen’s party, ousting longtime legislator, magistrate and lawman, Marshal Josiah M “Si” Tanner, a man who rounded up the Soapy Smith gang in 1898 and was much beloved of the male community. Si had supported Shea in his Progressive Era reforms, and continued those reforms, but apparently had not done enough to satisfy the women of the moral reform community. Newspaper editor Sam Wall attributed his 1914 defeat specifically to the women’s vote. An organizer of the women’s vote was temperance leader Harriett Pullen, owner of the Pullen House Hotel, who drove women to the polls in her hotel carriage.
In 1916, fifty year old Kitty Faith, the majority owner of the Alaska Street red light district, married a simple carpenter from
San Francisco and left with him to live in his mortgaged house. They begin to sell off her Alaska Streetproperties. Essie Miller, Ida Freidinger’s heir, and a long time Skagway prostitute, became the last landlady in
Skagway.
I profile Essie Miller as an example of a woman who rises within the ranks of the demimonde, learning her trade from a mentor and moving from a trouble-maker to an astute businesswoman. She also moved into a relationship with long-time saloon owner F. C. “Tuck” Flaharty, a favorite saloon owner in
Skagway. He epitomized the man who came with the gold rush, worked for the railroad, tended bar, bought his own business, and successfully fought off the reformers who tried to close his business three times and failed. In 1916, he was forced to close up his business when the women of
Skagway succeed in instituting local prohibition. He went to
Juneau to open another saloon.
In 1917, the reform community lodged a complaint that the Alaska Street red light district was funneling illicit booze into
Skagway. In a sting operation, the
U. S. Marshal arrested all five madams for selling liquor without a license. The
U. S. Commissioner gave them heavy fines and closed down the district. The marshal arrested Tuck Flaharty two days later for bootlegging. Tuck’s lawyer got him off on a technicality. A month after the sale of all liquor in Alaska become illegal, Tuck and Essie married and moved to
Seattle, where they opened a speakeasy on First and Yesler Street in the heart of that city’s tenderloin.
13. The Red Curtain 312
I review the events that lead to the closing of the red light district, including the lowering of the gender ratio, Skagway’s declining economy, the exodus of vested economic interests, the decline of the railroad, the re-emergence of the WCTU and subsequent rise in political power of middle-class women, the change in leadership at The Daily Alaskan, the coming of Prohibition, and the inter-relationship of prostitution and gender politics, specifically the cause of moral reforms during the Progressive Era.
14. In the End 343
This final short chapter provides ending with a few anecdotal stories about later events worth telling. It concludes with a quote from John Troy in which he suggests that the women who married or died after living a life of sin should be “forgiven, and then forgotten.” I disagree with much of what John Troy did during his life in
Skagway. I disagree with much of this sentiment as well. These women, both the prostitutes and the reformers, deserve much more and especially not to be forgotten. Their story provides a rare glimpse of Alaskan women and working class men so often overlooked in the gold rush and Progressive era literature.
Epilogue: What Happened to Them 348
A follow-up on each of the primary individuals in the book: prostitutes, reformers, politicians and newspaper men.
Appendix: Names of All
Skagway Prostitutes Found in Records 356
Index (not yet compiled) 375
References Cited 376
Skagway, Alaska
In late July 1897, the far North came to the attention of the world. Gold, discovered on Bonanza Creek, a tributary of the Klondike River in Yukon Territory, one year earlier, had finally found its way to the port cities of Seattle, Washington and San Francisco, California. The resulting gold rush brought tens of thousands of men, about ten for every woman, clamoring for riches. Most of them turned around and went home when they discovered all of the claims had been staked. A good many stayed and kept trying. The mining industry, employing 21.2% of the population, generated ____% of the income in Alaska in 1900. At that time, non-Native Alaskan men outnumbered women two to one, even accounting for the older, well-established communities, such as Sitka and Juneau, where families even out the gender ratio.[1]
Skagway, Alaska, was one of three principle entrepots to the Klondike in late 1897, and remained the main embarkation point for most men headed into the interior of Alaska well into the 1920s when the Alaska Railroad was built from Anchorage to Fairbanks. During the Klondike gold rush of 1897-1899, it boomed like the gold mining towns it served. Blessed with a railroad into Whitehorse, Yukon, at the navigable headwaters of the Yukon River, Skagway became a solid working class community. Its citizenry worked for the White Pass and Yukon Route Railroad, the wharves and docks, and the businesses who catered to its workers and their families.
Much has been made of Skagway’s gold rush history, which, without a doubt, is of national importance. Very little attention has been paid to what came afterwards. But Skagway’s early promoters held a deep sense of pride in their city’s history and its heritage. Early citizens, among them lawman Josias M. “Si” Tanner, journalist and territorial governor John W. Troy, and city historian and temperance leader Harriet Pullen, worked hard to save their city records, resulting in a wealth of historic documentation about the city’s history: not just the gold rush years, but through its Progressive era, prohibition, the Depression, World War II, and the years beyond. Skagway’s greatest wealth is in the Historical Records of the City of Skagway, now stored on more than a hundred rolls of microfilm at the Alaska State Archives in Juneau, Alaska. In addition, almost every issue of The Daily Alaskan from February 1898 to July 1924 has been microfilmed by the Alaska Newspaper Project.
Once the historian cuts below a rich folklore of the gold rush period, she finds herself in even richer material, something totally unexpected.
It is a story of sin, political greed, reform, and power struggles between men and women, between the businessmen and the working class men, and between the middle class women and the men who worked for the railroad. It started with the gold rush. It ended with National Prohibition. It is a story that repeated itself all over the nation, but very few cities thought to preserve their records so carefully, because very few cities took so much pride in those first few years of their lives. It is an extraordinary story, if only for the extent of its documentation.
Red Curtains
While the term “red light district” is a well-established part of the American lexicon, it rarely appeared in any of the newspapers or primary historical documents in Skagway, Alaska during its first twenty years. Funny, that. Skagway’s a railroad town. The use of a red light to mark a brothel or prostitute’s place of business is said to have started with a railroad man leaving his signal light outside as he enjoyed the pleasures therein.[2] True or not, the color red in Western society has long been associated with sinful women, from Hester Prinn’s scarlet letter to the red and black costumes donned by the women in the Red Onion Saloon in twenty-first century Skagway. A Juneau journalist writing the Skagway City Clerk in 1917, simply called prostitutes “the reds.”
In a land where the summer sun set only for a few short hours and, for those with good eyesight, the newspaper could be read by natural light at midnight, a red light above a doorway sometimes rendered insufficient service in advertising a woman’s business. But a red curtain at the window could be seen all hours of the day, and later in the year, the lights that burned all night shone red through thin curtains. The “cheap flaming red cambric curtains”[3] were the hallmark of Skagway’s restricted district. They were not unique to Skagway. Often mentioned in the context of the Pacific Northwest’s prostitutes,[4] it would not be surprising if the red curtains at the windows were far more common than red lights above porches in other parts of America. Stampeder Mont Hawthorne once remarked “You never seen a good woman hanging anything red at her windows out West them days.”[5]
The sight of those curtains were a sore eye to many of Skagway’s more virtuous citizens, but a source of some considerable wealth to others. The red curtains also concealed an entire world that Skagway’s journalists, city councilmen, men of means, and storytellers meant to keep from reformers and tourists to their fine, law-abiding community. This study means to sweep aside that curtain at least as far as the parlor.
What did the people in Skagway call the red light district? “The Restricted District,” if they referred to it at all. Most of the time, they avoided talking about it, in the newspapers, in correspondence, and in conversation. And for good reason. As long as the issue, and the prostitutes themselves, stayed out of the notice of middle class housewives and clergymen, the businessmen and railroad managers running City Hall could keep property taxes low and still attend to the economic needs of the town.
A study of the interconnection between prostitution, local economics, and politics during the Progressive reform era in a working class community has not been attempted before. There have been some very fine case studies of prostitution in large urban populations[6] and a few done on mining towns, focusing mostly on their boom periods.[7] One popular recount covers a good portion of Alaska with anecdotal stories, but with limited contextual analysis.[8] These works, combined with the masterful compilations and analyses by Anne Butler of prostitution in the American west and Ruth Rosen of the institution during the reform period provide a better understanding how these women lived and the roles and function they played within their communities.[9]
The story of Skagway’s struggle with prostitution, while it mirrors that of other working class communities in America during the Progressive era, is told here as a chronology of events, punctuated by bibliographies of prostitutes, landlords, politicians, madams, businessmen, lawmen, reformers and landladies whose lives intertwined with the sex industry in Skagway during its first twenty years. These people were among its most prominent citizens, middle class businessmen and working class representatives alike. It appears that the business of the Restricted District did indeed become everyone’s business.
A Short Chronology of Prostitution in Skagway
Modern Skagway likes to promote itself as a gold rush town, beginning life during the Klondike gold rush as a stepping-off point for the White Pass Trail. But its boom time lasted only two years. Unlike the mining centers farther north, which lived and died by the wealth of the districts they supported, Skagway managed to cling to life as a transportation node by virtue of its position as a port where the White Pass and Yukon Route railroad shipped goods north to the mining districts and received the ores and mineral products for shipment to southern ports. The completion of the railroad to navigable waters of the Yukon River in May 1900 assured Skagway its continued existence.
The gold rush boom town rapidly transformed itself into working class respectability. It took about ten years to rid itself of the men and women who had built a slap-dash fortune based on the plundering of the gold diggers, and another ten to purge itself of the bad habits they left behind. Like small towns across American in the Progressive Era, Skagway espoused a number of reforms, morality among them. It did so in part by driving the prostitutes into a district, then changing the location of the district, and then finally closing it down altogether.
During the gold rush years, most Skagway prostitutes could be found working in the upstairs of saloons and dancehalls or out of “cribs” – one room shacks rented from landlords generally in the alleys behind the saloons – all located in the downtown business district. By September 1901, a group of “temperance people,” most prominently the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, succeeded in shutting down the second of two alleys where these women had worked. In response, the businessmen on the city council decided that prostitutes would be allowed to settle in the area of Seventh Avenue only, a block away from downtown. Newspaper editor John Troy took it upon himself to persecute select madams near the edges of this locale until a well-contained “district” was established.
Then, in a well-publicized harangue on self-rule by Troy and frequent arrests of the women in the “district” by both city and federal authorities, the municipality argued over which government had the ultimate authority over Skagway’s prostitutes: Skagway or the federal courts. In the end, Federal District Court Judge Melville Brown told all of the cities of southeast Alaska that he did not want to see such annoying, inconsequential matters as “the social evil” (as prostitution was then called) cluttering up his docket. With a cry of triumph, John Troy and Skagway’s founding fathers took possession of their city ordinances and sin taxes.
And Troy stopped writing about prostitutes in his newspaper, as if they had suddenly disappeared from town entirely.
Well, occasionally, he would mention one or two, the evil women he thought the town needed to be rid of. They served as object lessons to the rest of the women who lived on Seventh Avenue. The system seemed to work pretty well, until the businessmen’s Citizens’ Party lost control of City Hall.
Saloon owner Chris Shea organized a Labor Party in 1906. With the support of the working class men who patronized the saloons, his party ousted every single middle class businessman from the Citizens’ Party in the 1907 city election. Shea’s party tabled petitions in 1907 and 1908 to move the Restricted District farther away from the business district.
As Shea reorganized the city’s property tax structure to favor the working class and lowering utility bills for both the city and private citizens, both common Progressive Era reforms, he refused to entertain any suggestion of moral reforms which would impact his bachelor, working class patrons. The sin taxes appeared sacrosanct. His occupation as a saloon owner made him a logical target for his opponents, so he sold out to his partner, but not in time to save his political career.
In a scandal that drove Shea to a political appointment on the Kenai Peninsula, he and Skagway’s hero, Si Tanner, found themselves eavesdropping on the town’s richest madams and one of its most desperate investors, a man who wanted to become the new landlord of the Restricted District by moving it a couple of blocks away to where he owned most of the property. In exposing how they learned of the plot, Shea had to leave town to save his family the embarrassment, and Si had to recommend closing the district down entirely.
The move saved Tanner’s career. He served five more terms in City Hall, three of those as mayor. No one wanted to disband the District. After his brave suggestion, the rest of the council simply voted to tell the women to leave Seventh Avenue and to consider where they might be better situated.
Within a year, the three wealthiest madams had purchased four lots on the far west side of town and had made a deal with City Council to have the night watchman patrol their single block of “residences.” The city no longer fined the prostitutes, as it was illegal to operate houses of ill-fame in Skagway. However, the three madams on Alaska Street maintained thriving businesses, without being fined, for seven more years.
One of the groups that had worked hardest to move the Seventh Street district was the WCTU, which had slumbered in Skagway between 1901 and 1908. With its success in 1909, the organization began to work harder at many of the reforms it had in mind. In league with other women’s political action groups all over Alaska, Skagway’s WCTU first pushed for passage of the Alaska Woman Suffrage Bill of 1913.
In 1914, the members of Skagway’s WCTU, with their newly won votes, ousted Si Tanner and the members of his Taxpayers’ Party from their seven-year hold on the local politics. In 1916, the middle class women succeeded in closing down Skagway’s saloons, and in 1917, with a complaint that illegal liquor was being smuggled into town through the Restricted District, every madam was arrested for selling liquor without a license and told to leave town. The district closed. The land-owning madams sold their properties for less than back taxes, and the era of Skagway’s restricted district came to an end.
Class, Gender and Reform
The concept of class, in this study, has been greatly influenced by Michael McGerr in his recent discourse on the Progressive movement. Central to the Progressives’ desire to transform the country into a safe, wholesome, and prosperous place for all Americans was the conflict between the middle and working class. The growing middle class, which sought to expand its wealth and political influence, accumulated and displayed its wealth, promoted individualism, delayed marriage, kept their daughters at home or, conversely, increasingly educated them. In contrast, the working class, with its low wages and unskilled labor, valued cooperative behavior and conformism, splurged when it came upon good times, often on pleasurable pursuits, and married their daughters off early or sent them off to work. What a working class man viewed as “not being a show-off,” a middle class man saw as lack of ambition. The middle class businessman and his wife interpreted the licentious saloons and brothels as a waste of good money that should be saved for hard times. The laborer knew them only as collective gathering places and just rewards from his mindless, strenuous work.[10]
In the first five years of Skagway’s incorporation, middle class businessmen controlled by the White Pass and Yukon Route railroad and its management governed the city’s largely working class male population. This government not only tolerated, but indeed, welcomed the institution of prostitution. Paradoxically, the attitude did not change until a saloon keeper organized the working class voters and took over City Hall. At that point, the middle class businessmen re-evaluated their approach to Progressive reforms, espoused a wider range of issues, including moral reforms, and succeeded in driving the saloon man and his working class constituency from city government. In the process, they helped their middle class wives achieve the moral reforms that had been the goal of the WCTU as early as the gold rush days: eliminate the saloons and prostitution. By teaming a class issue (labor) with a gender issue (moral reform), the middle class husbands and wives of Skagway combined to control the social behavior of the working class bachelors, so they would not despoil their virgin daughters or influence the moral of their sons. While the motives of husbands and wives might not have been the same, the results were: no more saloons and no more restricted district.
The Biographies
Due to the extraordinary documentary record curated in Skagway’s City Hall, it was possible to pull together the story of a community’s struggle with its moral conscience. Combined with the accounts of the daily newspaper, and the almost limitless resources available to the genealogist on the internet, it became possible to tell that story through the lives of the individuals who lived, worked, exploited, profited, used, benefited, or lost their fortunes in their dealings with the restricted district. While many of these people were women, just as many were men. During the gold rush, the most powerful were men. In the end, the power structure shifted towards the women, both the successful business entrepreneurs in the district, and the determined middle class social reformers of the WCTU.
This study tells the story of the evolution of prostitution in Skagway from the unregulated days of the gold rush, when most women paid huge rents to male landlords and earned small returns for quick “tricks,” while men owned the politics of Skagway, to the time of the walled-off Alaska Street District, owned by two very wealthy women, and the women of the WCTU ran City Hall. It does so through the biographies of typical people – common prostitutes, madams, landlords, landladies, temperance leaders, businessmen, and political leaders – who had a deep, abiding interest in the women of the district.
Other than its spectacular setting amongst towering peaks and a rather flamboyant start in life, Skagway’s morality story is no different than can be found in most working class towns in America during the early twentieth century. Its very ordinariness makes it extraordinary. As such, Skagway’s story of prostitution offers an intriguing case study of the shift in political power in a working class community during the Progressive Era as viewed from the perspective of one of women’s oldest sources of income.
[1] U.S. Census Office, Population, Part I, Census Reports, Volume I, Twelfth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1900 (Washington, D.C.: United States Census Office, 1901) 47, 492, 493; U.S. Census Office, Population, Part II, Census Reports, Volume II, Twelfth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1900 (Washington, D.C.: United States Census Office, 1902) ccxvi.
[2] Elizabeth Knowles (editor), The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (Oxford University, New York; 2000), page 907; Gary Meier and Gloria Meier, Those Naughty Ladies of the Old Northwest (Maverick: Bend, Oregon, 1990), page 3.
[3] The Daily Alaskan, April 11, 1901, “Great Moral Wave Sweeping the City,” page.
[4] Betty Keller, On the Shady Side: Vancouver 1886-1914 (Horsdal and Shubart, Ganges, B. C.: 1986).
[5] Martha Ferguson McKeown, The Trail Led North: Mont Hawthorne’s Story (Binfords and Mort: Portland, 1960), page 104.
[6] Jacqueline Baker Barnhart, The Fair But Frail: Prostitution in San Francisco, 1849-1900 (University of Nevada: Reno, 1986); Marilynn Wood Hill, Their Sister’s Keepers: Prostitution in New York City, 1830-1870 (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1993); Jeffrey Nichols, Prostitution, Polygamy, and Power: Salt Lake City, 1847-1918 (University of Illinois, Urbana: 2002); Benson Tong, Unsubmissive Women: Chinese Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (University of Oklahoma Press: Norman, 1994); Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (University of Chicago: Chicago, 1992).
[7] Marion S. Goldman, Gold Diggers and Silver Miners: Prostitution and Social Life on the Comstock Lode (University of Michigan: Ann Arbor, 1981); Bay Ryley, Gold Diggers of the Klondike: Prostitution in Dawson City, Yukon, 1898-1908 (Watson and Dwyer, [Ottowa, Manitoba?], 1997); Charlene Porsild, Gamblers and Dreamers: Women, Men and Community in the Klondike, University of British Columbia: Vancouver, 1998); Paula Petrik,. No Step Backward: Women and Family on the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier, Helena, Montana, 1865-1900, (Montana Historical Society: Helena, 1987).
[8] Lael Morgan, Good Time Girls of the Alaska-Yukon Gold Rush (Epicenter Press: Fairbanks, 1998).
[9] Anne M. Butler, Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery: Prostitutes in the American West, 1865-90 (University of Illinois: Urbana, 1986); Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in American, 1900-1918. (Johns Hopkins University: Baltimore, 1986); see also Barbara Meil Hobson, Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the American Reform Tradition (Basic Books, New York. 1986) and James A. Morone, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (Yale University: New Haven, Connecticut, 2003).
[10] McGerr, Fierce Discontent, 1-58.
