Klondike Friday: Photography

The forth book in the Klondike Gold Rush series, Gold Web, will be released by Dundurn in December, 2013. In this book a photographer arrives in town to set up a business. Angus, being a keen and intelligent young lad, takes a job escorting her around town. Naturally I wanted to be able to describe the equipment and the process of taking a photograph in the day.

I contacted Jared Case at the George Eastman Museum of Photography in Rochester, NY. Jared arranged a tour of the facilities for me and a meeting with a couple of the experts on 19th century photography. It was a fascinating day.

One of the reasons the Klondike Gold Rush is so historically famous, is that it occurred at the beginning of the era of common photography. The camera and all it's equipment was becoming small enough and light enough that it could be taken outside of the studio to photograph people on the street or going about their business. By 1898 there was even a camera for hobbists. It was the Brownie, invented by the abovementioned Mr. Eastman. You took your pictures and mailed the entire camera to the Kodak offices. They developed it and sent back the pictures and a new camera.

Photography was still a clumsy business though, and it was likely my photographer would have used dry plates, rather than film. The dry plate had two sides, so one could snap two photographs before having to change plates. Light was a problem - and most pictures had to be taken in the sunlight or in a very well illuminated room. Otherwise, the photographer required a bowl of magnesium, lit to provide a sudden flash.

In the book, Angus is totally captivated by the new art of photography. What wonders it will show. Corporal Sterling thinks science has a place in the future of policing. Fiona, on the other hand, is most concerned about protecting her privacy. There are still people searching for her, you know.

Here are some pictures I took with my own camera at the museum.

Klondike Friday: Sex and Sin in the Klondike

Dawson City in 1897-98 Yukon might have been a freewheeling town, full of open prostitution, legalized gambling, and saloons that stayed open twenty four hours a day, but somethings remained completely traditional
In the Yukon as in the rest of Europe and North America at the time, there was a very strict social strata, particularly as it affected women.
Married women occupied the top rung of respectability. Some of that respectability varied of course according to the status of their husband. Then came the few businesswomen. Whether wealthy business owners such as Belinda Mulrooney or a dressmaker or the proprietor of a hat shop. Nurses and teachers would have fallen into this category.



Then we hit what was known as the demimonde. And the majority of gold rush women who made their living ‘mining the miners’. The top of those ranks were the headliners in the dancehalls. These women could make a lot of money, but it was an expensive occupation – they provided their own stage costumes and were expected to change them often. The next tier was the chorus dancers. Not headliners but still stage performers. The rung below – percentage girls. These were the women who moved in after the stage show was over to dance with the men for the legendary dollar a dance. One dollar got some lonely sourdough or cheechako a one minute turn around the dance hall and then he could expect his lady to drag him off to the bar to buy a drink – included in the dance price. They got 25 cents out of every dollar dance. Most of these women simply wore their street clothes to work. They would have worked hard too – from midnight to six or eight am six days a week, dancing constantly.

Let’s keep going down. The few independent prostitutes, some of whom ran their business under the guise of a cigar store and the employees of the better class brothels. Below them, the cheaper brothels, and then at the very bottom, the women who worked out of the cribs on Paradise Alley. Many of these poor women didn’t earn much, if anything, at all. First they had to pay for their transportation to the Klondike, then the rent on their cribs, and pay off pimps.



Information on social strata found in Gamblers and Dreamers by Charlene Porsild.

Klondike Friday: Women in the Klondike

With the publication of Gold Web, the fourth book in the Klondike Gold Rush series only two months away, I’m mentally back in the Klondike.

Today, I’m going to recommend some books that I used as research for the history of the time. The definitive book on the subject is Pierre Berton’s Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush. A highly readable popular-history book, it’s well worth starting your historical investigation with. One thing about Berton though, is that he does gloss over women’s participation. (Hardly the first historical record to do so). It’s estimated that about one-sixth of the people who went to the Klondike were women. And not just prostitutes and dance hall owners either. But businesswomen, shopkeepers, nurses, nuns, newspaper reporters, wives and mothers. They carried their babies up the Chilkoot trail or lugged pregnant bellies and tried to make homes out of the wilderness and created successful (or not-so-successful) businesses. They supported themselves, or they supported their families.

Charlotte Gray’s book: Gold Diggers: Striking it Rich in the Klondike, examines, among others, Belinda Mulrooney, prominent businesswoman.

I’d recommend Also Gamblers and Dreamers: Women, Men, and Community in the Klondike. by Charlene Porsild

And Goodtime Girls of the Alaska-Yukon Gold Rush by Lael Morgan for a peek into the demimonde.

And now, a word from our sponsor: Pre-orders are important to build interest in a book (and usually at a reduced price) Gold Web is available for Pre-Order at a reduced price.

From Amazon.ca, From Amazon.com, From Chapters/Indigo. Also your favourite independent bookstore.

The Return of Klondike Friday!

With just two months to go until the release of GOLD WEB, the fourth in the Klondike Gold Rush series from Dundurn Press, it's time for more facts and trivia and tidbits from the Last Great Gold Rush.

I'll be running something about the Klondike every Friday until the end of December, so please check back often.

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The Klondike in 1896, when the rush began, was most definitely not the “wild west”.  Please don’t think Deadwood.

Because in this case, the police were there first.

The border between the US and Canada was still in dispute.  Some gold had been discovered at Forty Mile, just inside the Canadian border, and a small settlement set up there. The Canadian government wanted to enforce its claim, so sent a group of North West Mounted Police (NWMP) to the territory in 1894, under the control of Inspector Charles Constantine. On arrival they set up a fort and established the police presence.

Thus the NWMP was firmly in place when tens of thousands of people began pouring into the territory in 1897-98. And what all those miners and dance hall owners, prostitutes and pimps, bartenders and adventurers, and businessmen (respectable and shady) found when they at long last arrived in the promised land, was the long arm of the law waiting for them, in the form of the North West Mounted Police (precursors of the RCMP).

Prostitution and gambling were illegal in all parts of Canada, but the NWMP recognized, wisely in my opinion, that some things were going to happen whether they were legal or not, and the police would be better having some control. 

So prostitution was practiced openly and dance halls all had a gambling room. Police oversight was strict and they could, and did, close down any business stepping over the line. However, there were things the Mounties didn’t bend on – the use of ‘vile language’ was an offence, and Sunday closing was strictly observed. People were jailed for chopping wood for their own homes on a Sunday. Firearms were strictly banned. Every person coming into the Territory was required to have a year’s supply of goods with them: a lesson learned during the winter of 1897-98 when the town nearly starved.

In 1898, the year of the height of the Gold Rush, when the town of Dawson had a population of 40,000, there was not one murder in town. Not one. Reports I have read say that people were comfortable leaving their doors unlocked and their possessions out in the open. In contrast to the nearby town of Skagway, Alaska, where gangsters such as Soapy Smith ruled and crime and corruption were rampant. Soapy himself was killed in a shootout on the Skagway boardwalk in July 1898.

Not one murder.  Well, I’ve had to bend that historical record a bit.  

As you'll see in GOLD WEB. Now available for pre-order.

THIRTEEN: AN ANTHOLOGY

I have a story in a just-released anthology of crime stories.  The book is titled Thirteen, because it just happens to have thirteen stories.  The contributors are a group of women writer friends from Southern Ontario, and range from never-before-published, to Canadian-bestsellers.

My story is titled SORE FEET AND GOLD DUST and is set in the Klondike in 1898, during the Great Klondike Gold Rush.  If you are a fan of Fiona MacGillivrary, you'll be delighted to hear that Fiona makes a small appearance in the story.
The book is now available on Kindle, and will be released in paperback (with very limited distribution) some time in October.  So, if you're a fan of short stories, looking for something new and different, why not give it a try?

Here's a sample:

Sore Feet and Gold Dust: A Story of the Klondike

By Vicki Delany

My feet hurt. My boots don’t fit too well, and my feet always hurt at this time of night.

Six a.m. The musicians are packing up their instruments and the men are being shown the door. Sometimes there’s trouble: a drunk wants to keep on dancing or shouts for the band to keep playing, but not often it’s anything bad enough to bother us. The bouncers here are good, and the regular customers know the rules and don’t want any stranger messing up things for everyone.

Mrs. MacGillivray, co-owner of the Savoy Saloon and Dance Hall, smiles at a big spender. I wonder how she keeps that smile on her face, with her ear turned just so towards the man and her chin pointed forward in rapt attention. He’s almost melting under her charm. Here it comes: he’s asking her if she’d like to get a bite of supper. Then he laughs, blushing and pulling at his tattered collar, telling her he’d say breakfast except that sounds so improper. She lets the smile fade slightly and her face fills with regret. “No, thank you,” she says. No excuses, no perhaps another time. Just no.

A Podcast Interview with Vicki Delany

Here's the link to an interview I did with Jacqui of What they Said.  I talk about A COLD WHITE SUN, the next Molly Smith book,  UNDER COLD STONE, why I read (and write) crime novels, what I'm reading now, and lots more.

http://whattheysaid.podbean.com/2013/08/26/a-cold-white-sun-the-new-molly-smith-novel-from-vicki-delany/#.UhuFnoUruM4.twitter

Hope you enjoy it.

Vicki

A Review of A COLD WHITE SUN

I am so delighted by the review of A COLD WHITE SUN in the London Free Press, that I want to reproduce it here.

In the latest book by Vicki Delany, a middle-aged and married mother of two heads out on a trail for a healthy, head-clearing hike on the first day of spring — and is then picked off by a sniper.

By Joan Barfoot, Special to QMI Agency

Wednesday, August 14, 2013 10:41:43 EDT PM

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A COLD WHITE SUN

By Vicki Delany

Poisoned Pen Press, $24.95 and $14.95

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Vicki Delany should be better known than she is, as a sterling Canadian crime novelist who has created a world in a British Columbia town and populated it with characters who manage to be not only lively and intriguing, but reassuringly reliable company, as well.

A Cold White Sun is Delany’s sixth novel starring Constable Molly Smith (along with her superior officer Sergeant John Winters) of the police force in the mountain town of Trafalgar B.C.

The place is a sports resort for tourists, but also a town where people actually live, go to school, run businesses, hang out. Molly herself is virtually a lifelong resident, and her mother is a well-known local activist. John Winters’ wife Eliza, an ex-supermodel, meanwhile runs an art shop.

And then there’s Cathy Lindsay, a middle-aged, married mother of two, a high school English teacher and occasional creative writing instructor. This apparently ordinary, inoffensive woman rises early on the first day of school spring break intending a healthy, head-clearing hike with her dog — until on a trail high above town, she is picked off by a sniper.

The question immediately becomes not only who has shot her, but whether she was targeted, or a mistake, or a random victim.

In any unwitnessed murder, those closest to the victim inevitably get looked at first. Cathy’s husband, an Internet developer who evidently was getting breakfast for his kids at the time of her death, is first to be queried by Winters and Smith. Hovering unhappily in the background, too, is their teenaged son, well known to police as a sullen, troubled kid given to petty crimes.

But the case for randomness is also strong — the chances of an armed nutcase, possibly a well-trained, unhinged military veteran roaming the region, aren’t awfully remote, and they’re much scarier than the notion of someone who was only aiming at Cathy. Random targeting would mean anyone at all could be in danger, as would the notion that the gunman mistook her for someone else.

There are, after all, lots of strangers around, as well as dodgy residents. One might be a man determined on a solitary, isolated life; or the fellow who becomes a sad obsession for an employee at Eliza Winters’ art shop.

A reader might even have suspicions of a skier with whom Molly takes up, at least on the slopes, in the absence of her cop boyfriend Adam.

There are, in fact, plenty of options for suspicion and investigation, including some that arise from around-the-town information picked up by Molly’s mother, as well as Eliza Winters.

The course of the plot to its resolution makes a good deal more sense than occurs in a lot of crime fiction, but just as important, getting to it, through various investigative false trails and personal twists, is suspenseful and solid.

The only remaining mystery at the end is why Vicki Delany isn’t yet as famous a crime writer, both nationally and internationally, as such fellow Canadians as Louise Penny or Linwood Barclay. Maybe this is the novel to fix that — and send readers in search of her backlist, as well.

Joan Barfoot is a novelist living in London