Gold Rush Wife: The Adventures of Nellie Frost on Turnagai

Gold Rush Wife is a captivating story about the hardships and joys of Nellie Frost’s years on the frontier during Alaska’s Turnagain Arm Gold Rush of 1896. Written with wide-eyed wonder and easy humor, Gold Rush Wife is a story of love and adventure as Nellie and her husband, Jack, toil toward their dream of striking it rich. In the end, tragic events and the failure to find a fortune in gold forever changed Nellie and the gold rush community of Sunrise City. Written and edited from 100-year-old historic documents and through narratives told to her daughter Dorothy Frost, Gold Rush Wife chronicles Nellie’s experiences in a gold rush that pre-dated the more famous stampede to the Klondike. Nellie’s story provides insight into the rich social life of an isolated, predominately male mining camp. Gold Rush Wife also captures the important bonds women formed with each other and with the Native community to survive the harsh conditions they endured. Paired with Albert Weldon Morgan’s book Memories of Old Sunrise, Gold Rush Wife offers an important and insightful contrast between masculine and feminine perspectives during the same time period in Alaska's history. Gold Rush Wife is illustrated with more than a hundred images, many of which are published here for the first time.