MRS. BELINDA A. CARBONNEAU, 95, 7900 Redmond-Kirkland Highway, died Sunday. Born in Ireland, she came to Seattle in 1925. Mrs. Carbonneau was in the Klondike in 1898. Survivors include a sister, Mrs. Margaret Gauslin, Redmond and a brother, James Mulrooney, Spokane. Services: 9 a.m. Wednesday, in Holy Rosary Catholic Church; burial, Holyrood Cemetery.
(From Holyrood Catholic Cemetery Office)
Birth Date: May 16, 1872
[Contributed by NWpioneer (#46896368)]
This grave is shared by Stephen Allen and Belinda Carbonneau. It was a donated grave. As of January 25, 2014, there is no permanent marker. Instead, there are two concrete markers at the site. The concrete markers were meant to be temporary.
Parents:
John Mulrooney 125870605
Mary Mulrooney 125870701
[Contributed by Whitfield (#47786265)]
Burial Date: September 6, 1967∼Belinda Mulroney
To most of us, the Klondike gold rush is a multi-image photograph of grizzled men climbing the steep snow-covered slopes of the Chilkoot Pass, of unshaven men mired in the muck digging for gold, of poorly clad men roaming the streets of a shack town named Dawson City looking for their elusive dream. But that's just part of the story.
A picture seldom seen of the Klondike is that of a stately woman tidily clothed in a long flowing back dress, a white kerchief around her neck, a broad-brimmed hat tilted ever so slightly to the left. She is standing in front of the Grand Forks hotel beside Eldorado, one of the richest creeks in the Klondike valley.
Belinda Mulroney built this hotel in 1897, ran it for a year, and sold it for 24 thousand dollars. Enough to buy two claims on famed Bonanza Creek. Enough to make her fortune and more in the goldfields of the Klondike where only men were supposedly smart enough or tough enough to excel in the search for Klondike gold.
Belinda Mulroney arrived in Dawson City in 1897 from Pennsylvania. By 1899 she had three claims in the Klondike valley. One, called 39 above, produced 19 thousand dollars in one clean-up in the summer of '99. That year she had 12 men working for her on her claims.
But gold mining wasn't Ms. Mulroney's only business venture. With money from her claims, she built the Fairview Hotel, a three-story building complete with a dining room, office, bar, and electric lights.
In 1898, there was a shortage of fresh drinking water in Dawson. Belinda Mulroney set up and ran a company called Hygenia Water, a bottled water company well ahead of its time.
A Dawson City newspaper during that tumultuous time in Yukon history summed up the attitude of this Belinda Mulroney. She was quoted as saying "I like mining and have only hired a foreman because it looks better to have it said that a man is running the mine. But the truth is, I look after the management myself".
A CKRW Yukon Nugget by Les McLaughlin.
===
The castle-like building at 620 S. 48th Ave. In Yakima was once the home of "the richest woman in the Klondike."
Belinda (Mulrooney) Carbonneau made her fortune in the Klondike Gold Rush in Canada's Yukon Territory. Like legendary cattleman Ben Snipes, Carbonneau made her fortune primarily by selling goods and services to miners.
Born in County Sligo, Ireland, on May 16, 1872, she grew up in Scranton, Pa. When she was 20, she moved to Chicago with a few hundred dollars she earned as a housekeeper and bought a lot on the fairgrounds where the Columbian Exposition was setting up to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' first voyage of discovery.
In an early demonstration of her business savvy, Mulrooney leased half her land for the world's first Ferris wheel, while running a sandwich shop on the other half. When the fair closed, she had $8,000 — about $230,461 in today's money.
Her next stop was San Francisco, where after a couple of restaurant and hotel jobs and an ice cream shop that burned down, she became stewardess on the City of Topeka, a steamer that ran between Seattle and Skagway, Alaska. In her two years on the ship, Mulrooney had a side hustle trading goods from Seattle with Native women in return for furs she could sell.
When gold was found in the Klondike in 1897, Mulrooney was on her way to Dawson City with $5,000 worth of silk underwear, hot water bottles and cotton cloth. She made, according to accounts, a 600% profit, and then opened a restaurant while building cabins to sell to prospectors flooding into the region.
She expanded her empire with the Grand Forks Hotel, a two-story building with a kennel for sled dogs. Along with being the owner, Mulrooney also tended bar, selling liquor at the highest prices in the Klondike.
She also had the floor sweepings run through a sluice and managed to collect $100 a day in gold dust that fell out of miners' pockets.
She bought a half-dozen mining properties with her profits, taking advantage of information she gleaned from her customers.
===
It took courage, or desperation, to want to prospect for gold in the Yukon River valley in Alaska in the 1890s. There were a hundred ways of dying before you even got there. It was an even more forbidding environment if you were one of the tiny handful of women who took their chances in such an overwhelmingly male world. But Belinda Mulrooney was well up to the task.
She was born in Sligo in 1872 and came to the USA as a 13-year-old. She made her first sizeable sum in the restaurant business at the 1893 Chicago Exposition, which was supposed to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus in America in 1492 but didn't actually get going until the four hundred and first anniversary. After that, she moved to San Francisco where she lost her first fortune at the age of 20. She had the ill-luck to put her savings into a city lot that was burned down when a dodgy neighbor torched his property for the insurance money. Belinda wasn't insured and watched her investment go up in smoke. It was scant consolation that this meant she wasn't around for the massive 1906 earthquake.
Then came the famous Klondike gold strike of 1897. That brought her to the frigid tundra of Alaska from the rather more balmy and hospitable San Francisco. But she came armed with some useful and lucrative calling cards, in the form of hot water bottles for sale to frozen miners. She made a six hundred percent profit on the deal and used the money to buy herself a diner. Working the tables in her new restaurant she kept her ears open and bought a number of claims on the strength of gossip she heard from her hungry customers. The success of a number of these meant that she quickly graduated from a lowly diner to a twenty-two-room upmarket hotel, the Fairview, in Dawson.
This boasted steam-heated rooms, electric lights, a dining room with linen tablecloths, sterling silver knives, bone china, and steam baths. The lobby was decked out with cut-glass chandeliers and boasted a full-time orchestra. She reckoned that newly rich miners would be prepared to pay handsomely for these unaccustomed luxuries. She was right.
Belinda Mulrooney was also as tough and hard as they come, a real ten-minute egg. She was not a woman you crossed in a business deal – one story goes that an erstwhile partner double-crossed her and left her with hundreds of pairs of unsaleable rubber boots on her hands. Shortly thereafter his mine mysteriously flooded (presumably by accident!!) and he was forced to buy the boots back from her at twenty-first century Nike prices of one hundred dollars a pair. That's not far short of three thousand dollars today, acceptable for a couple of Jimmy Choos perhaps, but a regular rip-off for cheap gumboots. She was also prone to resorting to violence to achieve her ends, an unfortunate teamster who got on the wrong side of her once was beaten up for his pains.
Mulrooney was conned by a scam artist named 'Count' Charles Eugene Carbonneau. He had about as much claim to the title of Count as Casimir Markievicz. She married Carbonneau in 1900 and he almost succeeded in ruining her by implicating his wealthy wife in a number of fraudulent enterprises. She divorced him in 1906. Given her record, he was probably lucky to escape with his life.
Mulrooney eventually settled in Seattle, acquired a modest property portfolio, and died there at the age of 95 in 1967! So, despite her association with the old American West, there are probably a number of people listening who shared the planet with her.
Miles Dungan
Historian & Broadcaster
(From Holyrood Catholic Cemetery Office)
Birth Date: May 16, 1872
[Contributed by NWpioneer (#46896368)]
This grave is shared by Stephen Allen and Belinda Carbonneau. It was a donated grave. As of January 25, 2014, there is no permanent marker. Instead, there are two concrete markers at the site. The concrete markers were meant to be temporary.
Parents:
John Mulrooney 125870605
Mary Mulrooney 125870701
[Contributed by Whitfield (#47786265)]
Burial Date: September 6, 1967∼Belinda Mulroney
To most of us, the Klondike gold rush is a multi-image photograph of grizzled men climbing the steep snow-covered slopes of the Chilkoot Pass, of unshaven men mired in the muck digging for gold, of poorly clad men roaming the streets of a shack town named Dawson City looking for their elusive dream. But that's just part of the story.
A picture seldom seen of the Klondike is that of a stately woman tidily clothed in a long flowing back dress, a white kerchief around her neck, a broad-brimmed hat tilted ever so slightly to the left. She is standing in front of the Grand Forks hotel beside Eldorado, one of the richest creeks in the Klondike valley.
Belinda Mulroney built this hotel in 1897, ran it for a year, and sold it for 24 thousand dollars. Enough to buy two claims on famed Bonanza Creek. Enough to make her fortune and more in the goldfields of the Klondike where only men were supposedly smart enough or tough enough to excel in the search for Klondike gold.
Belinda Mulroney arrived in Dawson City in 1897 from Pennsylvania. By 1899 she had three claims in the Klondike valley. One, called 39 above, produced 19 thousand dollars in one clean-up in the summer of '99. That year she had 12 men working for her on her claims.
But gold mining wasn't Ms. Mulroney's only business venture. With money from her claims, she built the Fairview Hotel, a three-story building complete with a dining room, office, bar, and electric lights.
In 1898, there was a shortage of fresh drinking water in Dawson. Belinda Mulroney set up and ran a company called Hygenia Water, a bottled water company well ahead of its time.
A Dawson City newspaper during that tumultuous time in Yukon history summed up the attitude of this Belinda Mulroney. She was quoted as saying "I like mining and have only hired a foreman because it looks better to have it said that a man is running the mine. But the truth is, I look after the management myself".
A CKRW Yukon Nugget by Les McLaughlin.
===
The castle-like building at 620 S. 48th Ave. In Yakima was once the home of "the richest woman in the Klondike."
Belinda (Mulrooney) Carbonneau made her fortune in the Klondike Gold Rush in Canada's Yukon Territory. Like legendary cattleman Ben Snipes, Carbonneau made her fortune primarily by selling goods and services to miners.
Born in County Sligo, Ireland, on May 16, 1872, she grew up in Scranton, Pa. When she was 20, she moved to Chicago with a few hundred dollars she earned as a housekeeper and bought a lot on the fairgrounds where the Columbian Exposition was setting up to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' first voyage of discovery.
In an early demonstration of her business savvy, Mulrooney leased half her land for the world's first Ferris wheel, while running a sandwich shop on the other half. When the fair closed, she had $8,000 — about $230,461 in today's money.
Her next stop was San Francisco, where after a couple of restaurant and hotel jobs and an ice cream shop that burned down, she became stewardess on the City of Topeka, a steamer that ran between Seattle and Skagway, Alaska. In her two years on the ship, Mulrooney had a side hustle trading goods from Seattle with Native women in return for furs she could sell.
When gold was found in the Klondike in 1897, Mulrooney was on her way to Dawson City with $5,000 worth of silk underwear, hot water bottles and cotton cloth. She made, according to accounts, a 600% profit, and then opened a restaurant while building cabins to sell to prospectors flooding into the region.
She expanded her empire with the Grand Forks Hotel, a two-story building with a kennel for sled dogs. Along with being the owner, Mulrooney also tended bar, selling liquor at the highest prices in the Klondike.
She also had the floor sweepings run through a sluice and managed to collect $100 a day in gold dust that fell out of miners' pockets.
She bought a half-dozen mining properties with her profits, taking advantage of information she gleaned from her customers.
===
It took courage, or desperation, to want to prospect for gold in the Yukon River valley in Alaska in the 1890s. There were a hundred ways of dying before you even got there. It was an even more forbidding environment if you were one of the tiny handful of women who took their chances in such an overwhelmingly male world. But Belinda Mulrooney was well up to the task.
She was born in Sligo in 1872 and came to the USA as a 13-year-old. She made her first sizeable sum in the restaurant business at the 1893 Chicago Exposition, which was supposed to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus in America in 1492 but didn't actually get going until the four hundred and first anniversary. After that, she moved to San Francisco where she lost her first fortune at the age of 20. She had the ill-luck to put her savings into a city lot that was burned down when a dodgy neighbor torched his property for the insurance money. Belinda wasn't insured and watched her investment go up in smoke. It was scant consolation that this meant she wasn't around for the massive 1906 earthquake.
Then came the famous Klondike gold strike of 1897. That brought her to the frigid tundra of Alaska from the rather more balmy and hospitable San Francisco. But she came armed with some useful and lucrative calling cards, in the form of hot water bottles for sale to frozen miners. She made a six hundred percent profit on the deal and used the money to buy herself a diner. Working the tables in her new restaurant she kept her ears open and bought a number of claims on the strength of gossip she heard from her hungry customers. The success of a number of these meant that she quickly graduated from a lowly diner to a twenty-two-room upmarket hotel, the Fairview, in Dawson.
This boasted steam-heated rooms, electric lights, a dining room with linen tablecloths, sterling silver knives, bone china, and steam baths. The lobby was decked out with cut-glass chandeliers and boasted a full-time orchestra. She reckoned that newly rich miners would be prepared to pay handsomely for these unaccustomed luxuries. She was right.
Belinda Mulrooney was also as tough and hard as they come, a real ten-minute egg. She was not a woman you crossed in a business deal – one story goes that an erstwhile partner double-crossed her and left her with hundreds of pairs of unsaleable rubber boots on her hands. Shortly thereafter his mine mysteriously flooded (presumably by accident!!) and he was forced to buy the boots back from her at twenty-first century Nike prices of one hundred dollars a pair. That's not far short of three thousand dollars today, acceptable for a couple of Jimmy Choos perhaps, but a regular rip-off for cheap gumboots. She was also prone to resorting to violence to achieve her ends, an unfortunate teamster who got on the wrong side of her once was beaten up for his pains.
Mulrooney was conned by a scam artist named 'Count' Charles Eugene Carbonneau. He had about as much claim to the title of Count as Casimir Markievicz. She married Carbonneau in 1900 and he almost succeeded in ruining her by implicating his wealthy wife in a number of fraudulent enterprises. She divorced him in 1906. Given her record, he was probably lucky to escape with his life.
Mulrooney eventually settled in Seattle, acquired a modest property portfolio, and died there at the age of 95 in 1967! So, despite her association with the old American West, there are probably a number of people listening who shared the planet with her.
Miles Dungan
Historian & Broadcaster
MRS. BELINDA A. CARBONNEAU, 95, 7900 Redmond-Kirkland Highway, died Sunday. Born in Ireland, she came to Seattle in 1925. Mrs. Carbonneau was in the Klondike in 1898. Survivors include a sister, Mrs. Margaret Gauslin, Redmond and a brother, James Mulrooney, Spokane. Services: 9 a.m. Wednesday, in Holy Rosary Catholic Church; burial, Holyrood Cemetery.
(From Holyrood Catholic Cemetery Office)
Birth Date: May 16, 1872
[Contributed by NWpioneer (#46896368)]
This grave is shared by Stephen Allen and Belinda Carbonneau. It was a donated grave. As of January 25, 2014, there is no permanent marker. Instead, there are two concrete markers at the site. The concrete markers were meant to be temporary.
Parents:
John Mulrooney 125870605
Mary Mulrooney 125870701
[Contributed by Whitfield (#47786265)]
Burial Date: September 6, 1967∼Belinda Mulroney
To most of us, the Klondike gold rush is a multi-image photograph of grizzled men climbing the steep snow-covered slopes of the Chilkoot Pass, of unshaven men mired in the muck digging for gold, of poorly clad men roaming the streets of a shack town named Dawson City looking for their elusive dream. But that's just part of the story.
A picture seldom seen of the Klondike is that of a stately woman tidily clothed in a long flowing back dress, a white kerchief around her neck, a broad-brimmed hat tilted ever so slightly to the left. She is standing in front of the Grand Forks hotel beside Eldorado, one of the richest creeks in the Klondike valley.
Belinda Mulroney built this hotel in 1897, ran it for a year, and sold it for 24 thousand dollars. Enough to buy two claims on famed Bonanza Creek. Enough to make her fortune and more in the goldfields of the Klondike where only men were supposedly smart enough or tough enough to excel in the search for Klondike gold.
Belinda Mulroney arrived in Dawson City in 1897 from Pennsylvania. By 1899 she had three claims in the Klondike valley. One, called 39 above, produced 19 thousand dollars in one clean-up in the summer of '99. That year she had 12 men working for her on her claims.
But gold mining wasn't Ms. Mulroney's only business venture. With money from her claims, she built the Fairview Hotel, a three-story building complete with a dining room, office, bar, and electric lights.
In 1898, there was a shortage of fresh drinking water in Dawson. Belinda Mulroney set up and ran a company called Hygenia Water, a bottled water company well ahead of its time.
A Dawson City newspaper during that tumultuous time in Yukon history summed up the attitude of this Belinda Mulroney. She was quoted as saying "I like mining and have only hired a foreman because it looks better to have it said that a man is running the mine. But the truth is, I look after the management myself".
A CKRW Yukon Nugget by Les McLaughlin.
===
The castle-like building at 620 S. 48th Ave. In Yakima was once the home of "the richest woman in the Klondike."
Belinda (Mulrooney) Carbonneau made her fortune in the Klondike Gold Rush in Canada's Yukon Territory. Like legendary cattleman Ben Snipes, Carbonneau made her fortune primarily by selling goods and services to miners.
Born in County Sligo, Ireland, on May 16, 1872, she grew up in Scranton, Pa. When she was 20, she moved to Chicago with a few hundred dollars she earned as a housekeeper and bought a lot on the fairgrounds where the Columbian Exposition was setting up to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' first voyage of discovery.
In an early demonstration of her business savvy, Mulrooney leased half her land for the world's first Ferris wheel, while running a sandwich shop on the other half. When the fair closed, she had $8,000 — about $230,461 in today's money.
Her next stop was San Francisco, where after a couple of restaurant and hotel jobs and an ice cream shop that burned down, she became stewardess on the City of Topeka, a steamer that ran between Seattle and Skagway, Alaska. In her two years on the ship, Mulrooney had a side hustle trading goods from Seattle with Native women in return for furs she could sell.
When gold was found in the Klondike in 1897, Mulrooney was on her way to Dawson City with $5,000 worth of silk underwear, hot water bottles and cotton cloth. She made, according to accounts, a 600% profit, and then opened a restaurant while building cabins to sell to prospectors flooding into the region.
She expanded her empire with the Grand Forks Hotel, a two-story building with a kennel for sled dogs. Along with being the owner, Mulrooney also tended bar, selling liquor at the highest prices in the Klondike.
She also had the floor sweepings run through a sluice and managed to collect $100 a day in gold dust that fell out of miners' pockets.
She bought a half-dozen mining properties with her profits, taking advantage of information she gleaned from her customers.
===
It took courage, or desperation, to want to prospect for gold in the Yukon River valley in Alaska in the 1890s. There were a hundred ways of dying before you even got there. It was an even more forbidding environment if you were one of the tiny handful of women who took their chances in such an overwhelmingly male world. But Belinda Mulrooney was well up to the task.
She was born in Sligo in 1872 and came to the USA as a 13-year-old. She made her first sizeable sum in the restaurant business at the 1893 Chicago Exposition, which was supposed to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus in America in 1492 but didn't actually get going until the four hundred and first anniversary. After that, she moved to San Francisco where she lost her first fortune at the age of 20. She had the ill-luck to put her savings into a city lot that was burned down when a dodgy neighbor torched his property for the insurance money. Belinda wasn't insured and watched her investment go up in smoke. It was scant consolation that this meant she wasn't around for the massive 1906 earthquake.
Then came the famous Klondike gold strike of 1897. That brought her to the frigid tundra of Alaska from the rather more balmy and hospitable San Francisco. But she came armed with some useful and lucrative calling cards, in the form of hot water bottles for sale to frozen miners. She made a six hundred percent profit on the deal and used the money to buy herself a diner. Working the tables in her new restaurant she kept her ears open and bought a number of claims on the strength of gossip she heard from her hungry customers. The success of a number of these meant that she quickly graduated from a lowly diner to a twenty-two-room upmarket hotel, the Fairview, in Dawson.
This boasted steam-heated rooms, electric lights, a dining room with linen tablecloths, sterling silver knives, bone china, and steam baths. The lobby was decked out with cut-glass chandeliers and boasted a full-time orchestra. She reckoned that newly rich miners would be prepared to pay handsomely for these unaccustomed luxuries. She was right.
Belinda Mulrooney was also as tough and hard as they come, a real ten-minute egg. She was not a woman you crossed in a business deal – one story goes that an erstwhile partner double-crossed her and left her with hundreds of pairs of unsaleable rubber boots on her hands. Shortly thereafter his mine mysteriously flooded (presumably by accident!!) and he was forced to buy the boots back from her at twenty-first century Nike prices of one hundred dollars a pair. That's not far short of three thousand dollars today, acceptable for a couple of Jimmy Choos perhaps, but a regular rip-off for cheap gumboots. She was also prone to resorting to violence to achieve her ends, an unfortunate teamster who got on the wrong side of her once was beaten up for his pains.
Mulrooney was conned by a scam artist named 'Count' Charles Eugene Carbonneau. He had about as much claim to the title of Count as Casimir Markievicz. She married Carbonneau in 1900 and he almost succeeded in ruining her by implicating his wealthy wife in a number of fraudulent enterprises. She divorced him in 1906. Given her record, he was probably lucky to escape with his life.
Mulrooney eventually settled in Seattle, acquired a modest property portfolio, and died there at the age of 95 in 1967! So, despite her association with the old American West, there are probably a number of people listening who shared the planet with her.
Miles Dungan
Historian & Broadcaster
(From Holyrood Catholic Cemetery Office)
Birth Date: May 16, 1872
[Contributed by NWpioneer (#46896368)]
This grave is shared by Stephen Allen and Belinda Carbonneau. It was a donated grave. As of January 25, 2014, there is no permanent marker. Instead, there are two concrete markers at the site. The concrete markers were meant to be temporary.
Parents:
John Mulrooney 125870605
Mary Mulrooney 125870701
[Contributed by Whitfield (#47786265)]
Burial Date: September 6, 1967∼Belinda Mulroney
To most of us, the Klondike gold rush is a multi-image photograph of grizzled men climbing the steep snow-covered slopes of the Chilkoot Pass, of unshaven men mired in the muck digging for gold, of poorly clad men roaming the streets of a shack town named Dawson City looking for their elusive dream. But that's just part of the story.
A picture seldom seen of the Klondike is that of a stately woman tidily clothed in a long flowing back dress, a white kerchief around her neck, a broad-brimmed hat tilted ever so slightly to the left. She is standing in front of the Grand Forks hotel beside Eldorado, one of the richest creeks in the Klondike valley.
Belinda Mulroney built this hotel in 1897, ran it for a year, and sold it for 24 thousand dollars. Enough to buy two claims on famed Bonanza Creek. Enough to make her fortune and more in the goldfields of the Klondike where only men were supposedly smart enough or tough enough to excel in the search for Klondike gold.
Belinda Mulroney arrived in Dawson City in 1897 from Pennsylvania. By 1899 she had three claims in the Klondike valley. One, called 39 above, produced 19 thousand dollars in one clean-up in the summer of '99. That year she had 12 men working for her on her claims.
But gold mining wasn't Ms. Mulroney's only business venture. With money from her claims, she built the Fairview Hotel, a three-story building complete with a dining room, office, bar, and electric lights.
In 1898, there was a shortage of fresh drinking water in Dawson. Belinda Mulroney set up and ran a company called Hygenia Water, a bottled water company well ahead of its time.
A Dawson City newspaper during that tumultuous time in Yukon history summed up the attitude of this Belinda Mulroney. She was quoted as saying "I like mining and have only hired a foreman because it looks better to have it said that a man is running the mine. But the truth is, I look after the management myself".
A CKRW Yukon Nugget by Les McLaughlin.
===
The castle-like building at 620 S. 48th Ave. In Yakima was once the home of "the richest woman in the Klondike."
Belinda (Mulrooney) Carbonneau made her fortune in the Klondike Gold Rush in Canada's Yukon Territory. Like legendary cattleman Ben Snipes, Carbonneau made her fortune primarily by selling goods and services to miners.
Born in County Sligo, Ireland, on May 16, 1872, she grew up in Scranton, Pa. When she was 20, she moved to Chicago with a few hundred dollars she earned as a housekeeper and bought a lot on the fairgrounds where the Columbian Exposition was setting up to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' first voyage of discovery.
In an early demonstration of her business savvy, Mulrooney leased half her land for the world's first Ferris wheel, while running a sandwich shop on the other half. When the fair closed, she had $8,000 — about $230,461 in today's money.
Her next stop was San Francisco, where after a couple of restaurant and hotel jobs and an ice cream shop that burned down, she became stewardess on the City of Topeka, a steamer that ran between Seattle and Skagway, Alaska. In her two years on the ship, Mulrooney had a side hustle trading goods from Seattle with Native women in return for furs she could sell.
When gold was found in the Klondike in 1897, Mulrooney was on her way to Dawson City with $5,000 worth of silk underwear, hot water bottles and cotton cloth. She made, according to accounts, a 600% profit, and then opened a restaurant while building cabins to sell to prospectors flooding into the region.
She expanded her empire with the Grand Forks Hotel, a two-story building with a kennel for sled dogs. Along with being the owner, Mulrooney also tended bar, selling liquor at the highest prices in the Klondike.
She also had the floor sweepings run through a sluice and managed to collect $100 a day in gold dust that fell out of miners' pockets.
She bought a half-dozen mining properties with her profits, taking advantage of information she gleaned from her customers.
===
It took courage, or desperation, to want to prospect for gold in the Yukon River valley in Alaska in the 1890s. There were a hundred ways of dying before you even got there. It was an even more forbidding environment if you were one of the tiny handful of women who took their chances in such an overwhelmingly male world. But Belinda Mulrooney was well up to the task.
She was born in Sligo in 1872 and came to the USA as a 13-year-old. She made her first sizeable sum in the restaurant business at the 1893 Chicago Exposition, which was supposed to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus in America in 1492 but didn't actually get going until the four hundred and first anniversary. After that, she moved to San Francisco where she lost her first fortune at the age of 20. She had the ill-luck to put her savings into a city lot that was burned down when a dodgy neighbor torched his property for the insurance money. Belinda wasn't insured and watched her investment go up in smoke. It was scant consolation that this meant she wasn't around for the massive 1906 earthquake.
Then came the famous Klondike gold strike of 1897. That brought her to the frigid tundra of Alaska from the rather more balmy and hospitable San Francisco. But she came armed with some useful and lucrative calling cards, in the form of hot water bottles for sale to frozen miners. She made a six hundred percent profit on the deal and used the money to buy herself a diner. Working the tables in her new restaurant she kept her ears open and bought a number of claims on the strength of gossip she heard from her hungry customers. The success of a number of these meant that she quickly graduated from a lowly diner to a twenty-two-room upmarket hotel, the Fairview, in Dawson.
This boasted steam-heated rooms, electric lights, a dining room with linen tablecloths, sterling silver knives, bone china, and steam baths. The lobby was decked out with cut-glass chandeliers and boasted a full-time orchestra. She reckoned that newly rich miners would be prepared to pay handsomely for these unaccustomed luxuries. She was right.
Belinda Mulrooney was also as tough and hard as they come, a real ten-minute egg. She was not a woman you crossed in a business deal – one story goes that an erstwhile partner double-crossed her and left her with hundreds of pairs of unsaleable rubber boots on her hands. Shortly thereafter his mine mysteriously flooded (presumably by accident!!) and he was forced to buy the boots back from her at twenty-first century Nike prices of one hundred dollars a pair. That's not far short of three thousand dollars today, acceptable for a couple of Jimmy Choos perhaps, but a regular rip-off for cheap gumboots. She was also prone to resorting to violence to achieve her ends, an unfortunate teamster who got on the wrong side of her once was beaten up for his pains.
Mulrooney was conned by a scam artist named 'Count' Charles Eugene Carbonneau. He had about as much claim to the title of Count as Casimir Markievicz. She married Carbonneau in 1900 and he almost succeeded in ruining her by implicating his wealthy wife in a number of fraudulent enterprises. She divorced him in 1906. Given her record, he was probably lucky to escape with his life.
Mulrooney eventually settled in Seattle, acquired a modest property portfolio, and died there at the age of 95 in 1967! So, despite her association with the old American West, there are probably a number of people listening who shared the planet with her.
Miles Dungan
Historian & Broadcaster
Family Members
See more Carbonneau or Mulrooney memorials in:
- Holyrood Cemetery Carbonneau or Mulrooney
- Shoreline Carbonneau or Mulrooney
- King County Carbonneau or Mulrooney
- Washington Carbonneau or Mulrooney
- USA Carbonneau or Mulrooney
- Find a Grave Carbonneau or Mulrooney
