In August 1898, Mary B. Mason returns to Seattle from the Yukon with $5,000 in gold dust. She is thought to be the first black woman to go to the Yukon in the gold rush of 1897.
That year she refused a $6,000 offer for her claim in Hunter Creek in the Yukon. She married Conrad Rideout and at her wedding wore "a black silk gown and her ears and fingers sparkled with diamonds."
Sources:
Esther Hall Mumford, Seattle's Black Victorians, 1852-1901, (Seattle: Ananse Press, 1980), 209-210.
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