Belinda’s journey from Sligo to being a ‘countess’ during Canada’s gold rush
It’s the 125th anniversary of the beginning of the Klondike Gold Rush. Alan Finn learned about one of the few people to truly prosper in what was Canada’s largest and the world’s last great gold rush – Sligo-born entrepreneur Belinda Mulrooney, known as the Queen of the Klondike
THE 19TH CENTURY was a pivotal period in North American history as hopes of literally striking a fortune prompted mass migration in the hundreds of thousands.
Gold rushes throughout the continent attracted people from all walks of life in the hope of staking a claim at their own fortune as word travelled from mines of the first evidence of the valuable substance.
Gold rushes came with promises of prosperity – but those who came out the other end with a profit numbered in the few as many who migrated did so in vain.
Those who left empty-handed may also have been fortunate, in a morbid sense, as the thirst for finding those nuggets prompted plenty of violence – particularly on migrant and Native American prospectors – which often proved to be fatal.
Many people also met their ends at the hand of the rapid spread of disease at these sites – usually from contracting typhoid fever.
The gold rush phenomanon in the United States is synonymous with California, which saw major activity from 1848 until 1855.
Some 48 years later, Canada experi- enced its equivalent with the Klondike Gold Rush which began 125 years ago in 1896 – considered the world’s last “great” gold rush.
This prompted yet another mass migration where only few enjoyed the riches that were promised.
One of those people was a Sligo-born woman whose very legacy being intertwined with the gold rush is immortalised by her moniker – The Queen of the Klondike.
She became prospecting royalty, but Belinda Mulrooney came from humble beginnings.
She was born in the village of Carns in north Sligo in 1872. Belinda’s parents had emigrated to the United States shortly after her birth, leaving her behind to be raised by her grandmother.
As a teenager, she too emigrated to the US to be reunited with her parents in Scranton, Pennsylvnia, though some reports suggest that she lived with other relatives there.
Seeking a more exciting business environment, Belinda took it upon herself to move to Chicago, where she landed on her feet with a popular sand- wich stand at the Chicago Exposition in 1893 – a summer-long world’s fair to mark the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World.
By 21, the young north Sligo native was proving to be business savvy both on street level and under the radar. When the exposition ran its course, Belinda set up her next venture, an ice cream parlour, in San Francisco in California.
This dream was quickly shattered when she lost the business in a fire, but she found employment soon after as a stewardess aboard the SS City of Topeka steamship, which ran between San Francisco and south-eastern Alaska, known as the Panhandle. On board, she wore a distinctive fur coat which concealed 24 half-pint bottles of bootlegged liquor, which she sold for a significant profit to passengers desperate for a tipple. During this time, gold was discovered in Juneau, Alaska, prompting her to disembark there.
Mere weeks later, news filtered through of a bigger discovery in the Yukon territory.
Upon hearing this, Belinda packed up to join the Klondike Gold Rush. She made the treacherous trek from Alaska to Dawson City – along with two guides and cases filled with hot-water bottles, silk underwear and cotton cloth for the cold miners, selling them for a major profit.
She soon opened her own roadhouse, called the Magnet, which welcomed various guests including the author Jack London, who set many of his stories – including Call of the Wild and White Fang – in the region during the gold rush.
It is even claimed that Buck, the dog in Call of the Wild, was modelled after a beloved pet of Belinda’s.
Acting as the sole bartender of the road house, Belinda is believed to have built up a sizeable stock in several mines based on local gossip she picked up as prospectors and businessmen talked shop on her premises. She put her ever-growing fortune into building the Fairview Hotel – where many tired miners paid for the luxury of a hot meal in a warm room where they were often entertained by an orchestra.
Around this time she had partnered with Alex McDonald, another noteable figure of the Klondike gold rush, to salvage cargo from a wrecked ship. Serving as a reminder to the ruthlessness rampant during such a major gold rush, McDonald quietly arrived at the shipwreck and took all of the food – leaving only gum boots and whiskey for Belinda.
A twist of fate enabled her to get her own back. Months later, McDonald
needed boots for his workers and contacted the very partner he had pulled a fast one on. Mulrooney charged him $100 per pair – which is approximately $3,000 in today’s money.
She had achieved all of this by the age of 27 – the same age she met her husband, Charles Eugene Carbonneau.
Charles had introduced himself as a count who was seeking investment in mines for an Anglo-French syndicate. Belinda was smitten, so much so that she allegedly ignored a claim from the foreman of a FrenchCanadian mine that he was, in fact, a barber from Montreal and not a European aristocrat.
The two married in 1900, enjoying a number of years in the status of ‘count’ and ‘countess’ – only for the marriage to end in divorce in 1906 when Belinda finally discovered that Charles was indeed not the man he claimed to be and had married her to swindle as much of her fortune as possible.
Despite this setback, Belinda still maintained some of her fortune and used it to establish the Dome City Bank in Fairbanks, Alaska, with her sister Margaret.
As prospecting for gold on a large scale began to phase out around the time of World War I, she also invested in real estate.
She eventually retired in Yakima in the US state of Washington, where she had built a large mansion to live with her siblings.
She used the remainder of her fortune to support her family until 1920, when it depleted and she had to rent her dream home out as a means of income.
She moved to Seattle after this and she died there in 1967, aged 95. Belinda Mulrooney lived long enough to enjoy her own legacy as she regaled fascinated fellow citizens with her story of being one of the few women who prospered in an often dogged, nasty world of gold prospecting.