The February 1965 issue of Adam magazine printed this fanciful illustration of sex work in the Klondike, illustrating a story called The Portable Brothel Of Yukon Kitty:

rough gold miners lined up in front of a brothel tent to hand pokes of gold to an almost naked sex worker

As the story begins:

In a snug, snowed-in cabin on frozen Eldorado creek in the Canadian Northwest, a naked woman relaxed on a bearskin in front of a crackling fire and beckoned seductively to the miner feasting hungry eyes on her inviting body. In his hands he held her fee for a week’s uninterrupted love-making. It was a moose-hide poke of gold dust worth $5,000.

The things that went on in that cabin that week in the winter of ’98, made the sourdough swear that every ounce of dust in the sack was well spent.

One week later, the woman packed up her sled, mushed exactly five hundred feet up the Eldorado and established herself for another week of fun and games with a different miner to the tune of another $5,000.

This Klondike hooker who charged such fantastic admissions to her playhouse of pleasure was none other than Yukon Kitty, the Belle of the Klondike Whores.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1879, as Myrtle Anne Roy, to an impoverished family who made a living catching and selling catfish on the riverfront, Yukon Kitty parlayed her body and bedroom talents into two millions in gold dust and nuggets.

From Skagway to Wind City, Circle City to Ft. Pelly Banks, she got anywhere from $200 to $10,000 from thousands of crusty miners who wanted to sample her wares. Once she got her weight in gold dust from a man to winter with him on Dominion creek. At that time, she scaled in at one hundred and twenty-five pounds and an ounce of gold was worth sixteen dollars. When spring broke, the Belle of the Klondike Whores added $32,000 to her ballooning bank account. In addition to her fee, she was allowed to “pick around the winter dump,” and keep whatever nuggets she happened to unearth. The miner didn’t know that Myrtle was as skilled as he when it came to sorting gold from hardpan.

There’s no accurate account of how much she picked out of the dump that winter, but it was rumored around Dawson that she was seen lugging a two-gallon coal-oil can into the Bank of British North America.

By now you’re probably wondering why the price of a woman’s caresses and companionship were so costly. When something is scarce it is costly. In the winter of ’97, in Dawson, men outnumbered women at the disheartening odds of five hundred to one.

Artwork is by pulp artist Hubert Rogers.

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