The Richest woman in the Klondike? Magazine and newspaper writers created the legend of Belinda Mulrooney because they loved to write about her. Belinda explained that nothing much happened in Dawson to write about and they needed copy.
Link to another story “The Bride of the Klondike”
When Belinda, as a child, immigrated from Ireland. She brought with her intelligence, imagination, and a thoroughly entrepreneurial attitude. Barely an adult in 1893 she opened a sandwich stand at the Columbia Exposition in Chicago, and when the Exposition ended she took her profits to San Francisco and opened an ice cream parlor.
The ice cream parlor burned down, and Belinda found herself a job as a stewardess on a ship that hauled passengers between California and Alaska. Belinda followed news of a gold strike to Juneau in 1896. Worked in a clothing store there, still looking for the opportunity she found on the Klondike.
Belinda brought supplies of silk underwear, bolts of cotton cloth and hot water bottles up to Skagway, hauled them over the Chilkoot Pass and floated them down the Yukon to Dawson. She sold her stock and used the profit to open a roadhouse, the Grand Forks Hotel and Restaurant. In addition to normal profits she ran sweepings from her floors through a sluice and made as much as $100 a day from gold dust that fell from miners’ clothes.
Belinda sold the Grand Forks and built the luxurious Fair View Hotel in Dawson, but then, at the turn of the century, the richest woman on the Klondike caught the attention of a self-styled French aristocrat. The “Count” may have been an aristocrat… Or he may have been a barber from Montreal.
Either way, they married in 1900; separated in 1903. In 1904 when French authorities arrested the “Count” for fraud and embezzlement. Belinda, no longer the richest woman on the Klondike, divorced him.
Down but not out, Belinda moved to Fairbanks and opened the Dome City Bank. And she had not lost her touch. She made another fortune.
Belinda ultimately moved back to Washington, and she died in Seattle, aged 95, in 1967.