It’s difficult to conceive how hard life was like 200 years ago. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the gold rush in California promised a chance to improve one’s life. Half a century after that, gold came to the Yukon and once more men and women journeyed there for some of the spoils. You can read about the travails of those explorers in the 2010 Charlotte Gray book, Gold Diggers: Striking It Rich In The Klondike. In the tail end of winter when I began writing this book, the United States experienced Arctic air for much too long, but it pales in comparison to that of Alaska and northern Canada, where gold diggers saw temperatures of 40° below zero or worse. The stove that burned wood helped somewhat, but even that left many shivering.

            Belinda Mulrooney was one of those who went to the Yukon, a woman way ahead of her time. She didn’t pan for gold but emptied the wallets of the gold diggers with her cunning. She didn’t roll the guys in the alley, merely provided them with needed goods and services, for which she charged hefty prices. It was all about supply and demand. Through the 26-year old’s enterprising efforts the three-story Fairview Hotel opened on July 27, 1898 in Dawson City. It had all the amenities and more, including such technological advances as electric lights, telephones which connected to other businesses in Dawson City, a separate entrance for women and a furnace in the basement. Costing about $100,000, Belinda covered that with bets she won against others who figured she couldn’t get it built. As you might have guessed, getting a room for the night wasn’t kind to the wallets of the patrons. 

Besides wood, the arrival of the twentieth century brought new energy sources, including oil, gas, coal and nuclear. These were fine for a time, but the next century featured renewable energy such as wind, solar and geothermal, for starters. Today, old energy methods are vastly out of date and so twentieth century, as their label indicates: fossil fuels. The word fossil describes something preserved in the earth from the past or something that is antiquated or outdated, not unlike the 113th and 114th congresses of the United States. Each has had problems, causing huge devastation to the planet.