In the famous Klondike gold rush between 1896 and 1899 more than 100.000 people made their way up north, but only a few were lucky in the gold mines. The richest woman in the Klondike though was a woman who didn’t do a day of mining.
Belinda Mulrooney was born in Ireland in 1872. Her family emigrated to the US when she was a small kid. In 1893, the Chicago World Fair took place and it was HUGE! A gigantic exposition with more than 27 million (!) visitors in six months. It was here that Westinghouse Electric introduced alternating current to the public, which kicked off the use of electricity.
Belinda opened a snack stand at the Fair, which turned out to be a brilliant idea. She made enough profits to move to San Francisco and open an ice cream parlor. Sadly, her business burned down and Belinda had to start over from scratch. She started working as a stewardess on a ship going back and forth Alaska, selling goods to passengers as a side hustle. On the ship she met people seeking their luck in Alaska and northern Canada, so she was one of the first to hear about gold being found in the Klondike in 1896.
The gold rush was a completely freaky time. It lasted only a few years, but it was extreme in every aspect, including it’s inhumane conditions. The Yukon wants to kill people who try to live there. It’s fucking freezing most time of the year and it’s fucking far away from everything. To get there in the first place was hazardous like hell. No matter which route you took, the trek (on foot) from the nearest harbour took months. MONTHS! IN THE WILD! IN THE FUCKING COLD! And you had to carry every damn thing you needed to take along. Since there was no civilization worth the name, you couldn’t just run to the store and buy things you needed. Want a blanket? You gotta bring one! You need an axe to cut wood to make a fire? You gotta bring one! Just imagine the amount of food you needed on your way into the Yukon. You needed to carry all that to! Mountain Police required everyone entering the Klondike to bring one metric ton of goods and supplies, to ensure they could support themselves and not starve or freeze to death. And since you can’t carry all that heaps of stuff at once, you had to climb every part of the trail several times. Also, there were avalanches and snow storms and part of the trail involved crawling on your knees over icy rocks. Even if you made it all the way to the goldmines (and less than a third who tried did) living conditions were beyond comfortable. The whole adventure was not for the tender hearted, to say the least.
Oh, and to even try to reach the Yukon was expensive, because you had to buy all your equipment, food and passage beforehand. Even though a few lucky miners struck gold the big way, the vast majority didn’t succeed and either died or returned home empty handed. When Belinda Mulrooney hiked down the the Chilkoot Pass to Dawson City in 1897, she never planned on leaving it up to luck if she would get rich. She didn’t bother comparing prospective gold fields and grinding stones all day. Just as she had done years before at the Chicago World Fair, she made her profit from offering what was needed. Belinda didn’t bring equipment to dig for gold with, but things she cold sells to the miners, who, despite the harsh conditions, came flooding into the Yukon in great numbers. Before setting out to the big adventure, Belinda spend all her savings on hot water bottles and cloth. She sold off all her goods at six times the price she had paid for it. She immediately reinvested her profits into a tavern, cleverly located at a junction where the two main roads towards the gold fields crossed. Her place was the first establishment of any sort for miles around Dawson. If you wanted to meet anybody or just get out of your shabby shack, there was nowhere else to go than Belinda’s. Her simple restaurant was a more prosperous than he goldmines surrounding it.
One year into the gold rush basic infrastructure was available and shops opened up. Along with thousands of miners came doctors, priests, salespeople, prostitutes and so forth. Within two years, the population of Dawson City went up from 500 to 30.000 people in 1898! Some of the miners found massive amounts of gold, so money started flowing. What the city needed, was a high class salon, with entertainment, gambling and rooms to let. Belinda build the Fairview Hotel in 1898, with glass chandeliers, fancy woodwork and all. It quickly became THE place to be. Within a year after opening, Belinda had become the richest woman in the Klondike, aged 26! She claimed, that with all the miners coming in from the gold fields, from sweeping the floors alone she made 100 Dollars a day in gold dust.
Two years later she married a guy who claimed to be a Count from France. He was actually a barber from Quebec and embezzled her money. When they divorced three years later, her fortune was gone.
Just as Belinda had started all over after her ice cream parlor in San Francisco had burned to the ground, she climbed her way back to the top. With the gold rush over, Dawson City was largely abandoned. Belinda left too, heading for Fairbanks, Alaska this time and opened up a bank. Again, her business thrived and she made enough money to settle in a big ass mansion in Washington State.
The rest of her life is foggy with tales being inconsistent. We only know for sure that Belinda ran out of money eventually and died in 1967.
There’s a ton of documentaries about the absolutely crazy gold rush years. For a start, I recommend the video below, since it’s not too long and has great pictures.
