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And we continue with our American story.

Between 1896 and 1899, the stampede to Dawson City in the

Yukon was the last great gold rush in history. Scurvy, dysentery, frostbite, starvation,

and worst of all failure stalked all who dared to arrive in Dawson.

Here to tell the story of one of the bravest and most successful entrepreneurs of the Klondike

Gold Rush is Roger McGrath, author of Gunfighters, Highwoodman, and Vigilantes.

A U.S. Marine and former history professor at UCLA, McGrath has appeared on numerous

history channel documentaries and is a regular contributor here for us at our American Stories.

Here's McGrath.

No woman figured more prominently on the Yukon and Alaskan frontiers than Belinda Mulrooney.

She gained international fame as the richest woman in the Klondag and made and lost more

than one fortune.

She became a character in novels and her dog, the inspiration for Buck in the Call of the Wild.

Linda Mulroney is born in Ireland in 1872, but she's reared partly in Pennsylvania

when her father leaves Ireland to work in Scranton's coal mines.

Here's Melanie Mayer, author of Staking Her Claim, The Life of Belinda Mulrooney, Klondike and Alaska Entrepreneur.

Belinda's early years in Ireland have a big effect on her personality. She doesn't know her father, John, because he leaves for America

shortly after she's born. Then, after two years of bonding with her mother, Mary, Mary disappears

too. Belinda is left in the care of her loving

grandparents on the farm in Ireland, and she does have some young, rough-and-tumble uncle

playmates who help her learn to stand up for herself and not whine. But losing her mother is traumatic.

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