Frontier Spirit – The brave women of the Klondike –

“They may have been holding a gun, or an axe, or her hiked-up skirts, but she was there, in the Klondike of the Gold Rush. And their decision to venture everything on the dream of northern gold was in every way bolder and riskier than any man’s.

Frontier Spirit tells the stories of eight of these extraordinary women. Of Shaaw Tláa, daughter of Tagish and Tlingit parents and known to the white community as Kate Carmack, who may have been the first woman to find gold in the Klondike. Of the fierce and fearless Belinda Mulrooney, who paid her passage north by taking work as a stewardess on a steamer and wound up building one of the grandest hotels in the Klondike and making a fortune. And of the Chicago-born patrician Martha Black, who pushed on with her northern adventure even after her young husband decided the trip was too daunting. Martha divorced him and made her home in the Yukon, where she followed her second husband into politics and became only the second woman to sit in the Canadian House of Commons.

Jennifer Duncan is a writer and educator who constantly abandons her Toronto apartment for tents, trailers, and cabins in the Yukon. …”