History has long ignored many of the earliest female pioneers of the Klondike Gold Rush of North America-the prostitutes and other disreputable women who joined the mass pilgrimage to the booming gold camps at the turn of the century. Leaving behind hometowns in North America and Europe and most constraints of the post-Victorian era, the good time girls crossed both geographic and social frontiers, finding freedom, independence, hardship, heartbreak, and sometimes astonishing wealth.

These women possessed the courage and perseverance to brave a dangerous journey into a harsh wilderness where men sometimes outnumbered them more than ten to one. Many later became successful entrepreneurs, wealthy property owners, or the wives of prominent citizens. Their influence changed life in America's Far North forever.

At Howard Rock's birth, a shaman predicted that he would become a great man. Born in 1911 in a sod igloo in Point Hope, an ancient Eskimo village, Howard became an accomplished artist and crusading newspaper editor who helped to defend his people from a controversial Atomic Energy Commission proposal to excavate a harbor near his native village with an atomic blast. Art and Eskimo Power chronicles the life of this influential and artist, editor, and founder of the Tundra Times-under whose leadership the newspaper helped to organize Alaska's native people to press their aboriginal land claims before Congress, which ultimately led to their being awarded over $1 billion and 40 million acres.

A shaman had predicted that Howard Rock would become a great man. He was born in 1911 in Point Hope, an Inupiat village in northwest Alaska where the people had lived off the land and sea for centuries. Instead of following tradition, however, Howard elected to go to a government boarding school and became a successful artist. Later he defended his people against a government plan to excavate a harbor near his village with a powerful atomic blast. Then he co-founded and edited the Tundra Times, a newspaper that aided Alaska's Native people in pressing their aboriginal claims before Congress, ultimately winning a settlement of $1 billion and 40 million acres.

The blazing marquee of the plush Astor Theater in New York City billed the 1933 premier of Eskimo as THE BIGGEST PICTURE EVER MADE, propelling a 27-year-old Inupiat Eskimo from Candle, Alaska, to overnight stardom. The handsome actor was not only the first Alaskan to become a Hollywood movie star but also the first non-white actor to play in a leading role.

This is the story of Ray Wise Mala, the talented and enterprising son of an itinerant Russian trader and an Eskimo mother. Mala became part of the white man's world but for most of his life struggled to find a place in it, discriminated against because of his mixed race and his father's Jewish faith. At age 16, Mala got his break in Alaska in 1921 when hired to help film Primitive Love in which he was given a role. Mala appeared in more than 25 films over the next three decades, playing Hawaiians, South Pacific Islanders, American Indians, and other exotics.