Boom and the great bust: sin, sex, and freedom in the Alaskan gold rush.

• Author: Russell, Thaddens
• Position: Book review

Saloons, Prostitutes, and Temperance in Alaska Territory, by Catherine Holder Spude, University of Oklahoma Press, 344 pages, $24.95

Like many boomtowns of the 19th century West, where the discovery of precious natural resources on ungoverned land caused explosions of economic development and population growth, Skagway, in what was then the District of Alaska, was for a time a virtually anarchocapitalist republic, a working-class libertine haven, and a seat of women's power. But as with many Western boomtowns, the eventual exhaustion of the resources combined with invasions by moral and governmental authorities to end the dreams of the men who came to Skagway with pickaxes, gold pans, and a thirst for the good life.They also pushed some of America's wealthiest and most independent women onto the streets, into jail cells, and mired in poverty.

After four prospectors found gold along a creek in the Klondike region in August 1896, the tiny settlement that stood 500 miles south, at the nearest port, was almost instantaneously transformed into a city of the demimonde. Over the next four years, some 100,000 men passed through Skagway on their way to the gold fields of the Klondike, and many made it their residence. By 1898 Skagway was the largest city in Alaska, and its population was nearly 80 percent male. Along with all those men came a few enterprising women who cared little about the roles prescribed for them by America and who understood something about the laws of supply and demand.

From Saloons, Prostitutes, and Temperance in Alaska Territory, the independent historian Catherine Holder Spude's book on the rise and fall of gold-rush Skagway, we learn that women such as Pop Corn Kate, Belle Schooler, Frankie Belmont, and Ruth Brown used the proceeds from selling sex to open brothels and purchase substantial tracts of land as well as hotels, saloons, and numerous houses. "The ease with which [they] located, staked, and purchased property," Spude writes, "indicates that prostitutes, like other women of the time, had no trouble procuring real estate in Alaska." Belmont's brothel, housed in one of the largest and most valuable residential buildings in Skagway, was known as "The Cottage" and was decorated with large swaths of red, white, and blue ribbons every Fourth of July. Though the town was overwhelmingly white, and though this was the height of segregation and violent racism in the lower 48, Ruth Brown, an AfricanAmerican madam, owned the...