Belinda Mulroney

Belinda Mulroney (usually spelled Mulrooney in the sources) was born on May 16, 1872, in County Sligo, Ireland, and emigrated as a child to the Pennsylvania coal country. Ambitious and restless, she worked at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and as a stewardess on Pacific coastal steamers before heading north when news of the Klondike strike broke.

She crossed the Chilkoot Pass in early 1897 carrying a cargo of silk goods and hot-water bottles, which she sold in Dawson City at a 600 percent profit. She reinvested immediately, building a roadhouse at Grand Forks, at the junction of the fabulously rich Bonanza and Eldorado creeks, and trading in miners' claims on the side. In July 1898 she opened the Fairview Hotel in Dawson, the finest in town, and by 1900 she was managing the Gold Run Mining Company, unheard-of authority for a woman of her day. Contemporaries called her the richest woman in the Klondike.

In 1900 she married Charles Eugène Carbonneau, a Quebec barber and champagne salesman who passed himself off as a French count. His ventures and eventual disgrace consumed much of her Klondike fortune. Undeterred, she moved to Fairbanks and then to the Tanana goldfields, where she founded the Dome City Bank and rebuilt her wealth. She later settled in Yakima, Washington, and died in Seattle in 1967, aged 95, one of the gold rush era's most remarkable business figures.