In my years as curator of collections for Klondike National Historic Sites in Dawson City, I learned one thing: that gold rush stereotypes are difficult to overcome.
Take the frontier brothel, for example. One summer we polled visitors who looked at
In my years as curator of collections for Klondike National Historic Sites in Dawson City, I learned one thing: that gold rush stereotypes are difficult to overcome.
Take the frontier brothel, for example. One summer we polled visitors who looked at the window displays in various historical buildings scattered around Dawson. Several of the people we interviewed were men who, I noted, had their wives photograph them standing on the doorstep of Ruby’s Place, a former brothel now designated a national historic site.
When interviewed about the content of the window displays at Ruby’s Place, the people didn’t seem to receive the messages presented in the display. Instead, they imposed their pre-established notions about prostitution on the frontier.
Similarly, Catherine Holder Spude, in her new book, Saloons, Prostitutes and Temperance in Alaska Territory notes that when visitors arrive in Skagway, they aren’t exposed to the authentic prostitute in a shapeless muslin gown or well-dressed dance hall girls. Instead, they see (and believe them to be genuine) women dressed in costumes more fitting to Barbary Coast saloons.
Spude can speak with authority on the saloons, gambling and prostitution in the coastal Alaskan town of Skagway. She was introduced to the topic through her work there as an archaeologist when, in 1983, she was assigned to excavate a trench to the Peniel Mission, a building constructed in 1900 on Sixth Avenue. Later that year, she entered graduate school, which eventually led to her conducting statistical analysis of the collection of artifacts from the site to determine how much of the remains could be related to saloons and prostitution.
What followed were years of study of newspaper accounts, genealogical sources and a rich collection of old city records. The result is Saloons, Prostitutes and Temperance, which is rich in the story of vice and reform told through the lives of the “individuals who lived, worked, exploited, profited, used, benefited or lost their fortunes in their interactions with saloons, restricted districts, politics and reform.” Further, Spude describes how vice in Skagway led to women obtaining the right to vote.
Skagway came into existence as an entry port to the interior when gold was discovered in the Klondike in 1896. Its survival was assured when the White Pass and Yukon Route Railroad was completed to Whitehorse in 1900. Skagway’s transient population spiked at 7,000 to 8,000 – predominantly men – during the stampede. By December of 1898, there were no less than 89 saloons in operation.
The tiny port city witnessed the reign of con artist Soapy Smith and the subsequent concentration of prostitutes’ cribs in a red light district along an alley between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Changing demographics and social and political events led to the relocation in 1901 of the cribs to a “restricted district” on Seventh Avenue, farther from the curious eyes of children attending Union School on Fifth Avenue.
In 1906, gambling was prohibited in Skagway. In 1909, the restricted district was relocated again. The vote was granted under the Women Suffrage Act of 1913. June 6, 1916, the City of Skagway refused to renew the licenses of the four remaining saloons, bringing that era to an end, and in 1917, the restricted area was closed for good. All of these events are connected.
Saloons, gambling and prostitution were at the centre of social change in Skagway in the first decades of the 20th century. Skagway, because of the labour force building, and then later operating the railroad, had a high proportion of single working-class men. Spude details the cultural divide between the middle class and management on one side and the labouring class on the other. The balance of political power shifted back and forth between the two elements for several years.
The middle class merchants and power brokers eventually realized that their wives, who embraced the temperance movement had common shared interests. Gold rush Skagway had an imbalance of men that outnumbered women by a factor of at least four to one. The working class labour-based male population was disposed to drinking, gambling and prostitution.
The middle class was more inclined toward what today would be called “family values” – temperance, attending church, accumulating wealth, pursuing education and self-control. Giving women the vote would double middle class electoral power in the polling booths and tip the scales away from the labour ticket. It’s an intriguing interplay of forces masterfully articulated by Spude in a readabl