When gold was discovered in the far northern regions of Alaska and the Yukon in the late nineteenth century, thousands of individuals headed north to strike it rich. This massive movement required a vast network of supplies and services and brought even more people north to manage and fulfill those needs. In this volume, archaeologists, historians, and ethnologists discuss their interlinking studies of the towns, trails, and mining districts that figured in the northern gold rushes, including the first sustained account of the archaeology of twentieth-century gold mining sites in Alaska or the Yukon. The authors explore various parts of this extensive settlement and supply system: coastal towns that funneled goods inland from ships; the famous Chilkoot Trail, over which tens of thousands of gold-seekers trod; a host of retail-oriented sites that supported prospectors and transferred goods through the system; and actual camps on the creeks where gold was extracted from the ground. Discussing individual cases in terms of settlement patterns and archaeological assemblages, the essays shed light on issues of interest to students of gender, transience, and site abandonment behavior. Further commentary places the archaeology of the Far North within the larger context of early twentieth-century industrialized European American society.

Prostitution, gambling, and saloons were a vital, if not universally welcome, part of life in frontier boomtowns. In Saloons, Prostitutes, and Temperance in Alaska Territory, Catherine Holder Spude explores the rise and fall of these enterprises in Skagway, Alaska, between the gold rush of 1897 and the enactment of Prohibition in 1918. Her gritty account offers a case study in the clash between working-class men and middle-class women, and in the growth of women’s political and economic power in the West. Where most books about vice in the West depict a rambunctious sin-scape, this one addresses money and politics. Focusing on the ambitions and resources of individual prostitutes and madams, landlords and saloon owners, lawmen, politicians, and reformers, Spude brings issues of gender and class to life in a place and time when vice equaled money and money controlled politics. Women of all classes learned how to manipulate both money and politics, ultimately deciding how to practice and regulate individual freedoms. As Progressive reforms swept America in the early twentieth century, middle-class women in Skagway won power, Spude shows, at the expense of the values and vices of the working-class men who had dominated the population in the town’s earliest days. Reform began when a citizens’ committee purged Skagway of card sharks and con men in 1898, and culminated when middle-class businessmen sided with their wives—giving them the power to vote—and in the process banned gambling, prostitution, and saloons. Today, a century after the era Spude describes, Skagway’s tourist industry perpetuates the stereotypes of good times in saloons and bordellos. This book instead takes readers inside Skagway’s real dens of iniquity, before and after their demise, and depicts frontier Skagway and its people as they really were. It will open the eyes of historians and tourists alike.

The Galápagos Islands are one of the world’s premiere nature attractions, home to unique ecosystems widely thought to be untouched and pristine. Historical Ecology and Archaeology in the Galápagos Islands reveals that the archipelago is not as isolated as many imagine, examining how centuries of human occupation have transformed its landscape. This book shows that the island chain has been a part of global networks since its discovery in 1535 and traces the changes caused by human colonization. Central to this history is the sugar plantation Hacienda El Progreso on San Cristóbal Island. Here, zooarchaeological and archaeobotanical evidence documents the introduction of exotic species and landscape transformations, and material evidence attests that inhabitants maintained connections to the outside world for consumer goods. Beyond illuminating the human history of the islands, the authors also look at the impact of visitors to Galápagos National Park today, raising questions about tourism’s role in biological conservation, preservation, and restoration. A volume in the series Society and Ecology in Island and Coastal Archaeology, edited by Victor D. Thompson

This reference work lists and describes all known tokens (privately issued substitutes for coins) used from the 1890s gold rush through 1959, when Alaska gained statehood. New to this edition are tokens from the Yukon Territory, with extensive coverage of Yukon tokens through 1989. Entries describe individual tokens, are arranged alphabetically, and are divided into seven sections: Traditional Alaska Tokens, Alaska Transportation Tokens, Alaska Food Stamp Change Tokens, Alaska Prison Tokens, Metallic Identification Chits, Yukon Territory Metallic Tokens 1897-1945, and Yukon Territory Plastic Tokens 1946-1989. For each token, information includes the issuer, a physical and historical description, and current value.

2017 Nancy Pearl Book Award After the tragic death of her husband and son on a remote island in Washington’s San Juan Islands, Eliza Waite joins the throng of miners, fortune hunters, business owners, con men, and prostitutes traveling north to the Klondike in the spring of 1898. When Eliza arrives in Skagway, Alaska, she has less than fifty dollars to her name and not a friend in the world—but with some savvy, and with the help of some unsavory characters, Eliza opens a successful bakery on Skagway’s main street and befriends a madam at a neighboring bordello. Occupying this space—a place somewhere between traditional and nontraditional feminine roles—Eliza awakens emotionally and sexually. But when an unprincipled man from her past turns up in Skagway, Eliza is fearful that she will be unable to conceal her identity and move forward with her new life. Using Gold Rush history, diary entries, and authentic pioneer recipes, Eliza Waite transports readers to the sights sounds, smells, and tastes of a raucous and fleeting era of American history.

The area claimed by the British Empire as Western Australia was primarily colonized through two major thrusts: the development of the Swan River Colony to the southwest in 1829, and the 1863 movement of Australian born settlers to colonize the northwest region. The Western Australian story is overwhelmingly the story of the spread of market capitalism, a narrative which is at the foundation of modern western world economy and culture. Due to the timing of settlement in Western Australia there was a lack of older infrastructure patterns based on industrial capitalism to evoke geographical inertia to modify and deform the newer system in many ways making the systemic patterns which grew out of market capitalist forces clearer and easier to delineate than in older settlement areas. However, the struggle between the forces of market capitalism, settlers and indigenous Australians over space, labor, physical and economic resources and power relationships are both unique to place and time and universal in allowing an understanding of how such complicated regional, interregional and global forces shape a settler society. Through an examination of historical records, town layout and architecture, landscape analysis, excavation data, and material culture analysis, the author created a nuanced understanding of the social, economic, and cultural developments that took place during this dynamic period in Australian history. In examining this complex settlement history, the author employed several different research methodologies in parallel, to create a comprehensive understanding of the area. Her research techniques will be invaluable to researchers struggling to understand similarly complex sociocultural evolutions throughout the globe.