Dawson City girls c1900
Toronto. We often heard of the gold rush and the men “who moil for gold” as Robert Service says in his poem “The Cremation of Sam McGee“, but we seldom heard of the girls of questionable virtue attracted to the “wild west”.
The Daily Mail in the UK carried an article titled, “The ‘soiled doves’ of the Wild West: Photos reveal the everyday lives of prostitutes in the brothels of the American Frontier” which includes the photo at left from Dawson City in the Yukon.
One of our members once had a studio in Dawson City and gave a talk on the Chilkoot Trail in September 2o15. It was about the realities of the Chilkoot Trail and the gold rush. Like so many things, it took money and good fortune just to survive let alone succeed!
