Yukon who is who

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Esther Lyons, nee Goldstein aka Mrs. Esther Robinson (d. 1938)
	
Esther Lyons was born in New York. She was a popular actress in the late 1880s who appeared with Maurice Barrymore, Edwin Booth, and Joseph Jefferson. She was leading lady to heavyweight champion John L. Sullivan in the production //Honest Heart and Willing Hands.// The play toured the United States at the height of Sullivan’s popularity.((“Esther Lyons Dies.” //The Montreal Gazette// (Montreal), 28 October 1938 in Andrew Phillip Chernoff, “Esther Lyons, “Klondike Girl”: Was Her 1894 Yukon Expedition a Lie?” 2020 website: https://andrewchernoff.wordpress.com/tag/veazie-wilson/.))  
	
Esther Lyon published a booklet of Veazie Wilson’s photographs and declared that she and Veazie Wilson’s wife accompanied Wilson and his party on a trip down the Yukon River in 1894. Wilson wrote a book on his travels but did not mention Lyons or his wife as members of the party, nor is Lyons in any of his unaltered photographs. Ironmonger Sola, a member of the party, also wrote a book about the trip and did not mention Lyons or Mrs. Wilson. At the time of the trip, Lyons, also known as Mrs. Burt Ramsay, was getting a divorce in Cleveland, and a newspaper article reported on her performance in Eugene Robinson’s production //Paul Kauver.// The play was travelling across North America while Wilson was in the Yukon.((Michael Gates, “Unravelling the mystery of Esther Lyons.” //Yukon News// (Whitehorse), 18 October 2013. 2019 website: https://www.yukon-news.com/letters-opinions/unraveling-the-mystery-of-esther-lyons/))

In 1897 Lyon published Wilson’s photographs under her own name in a booklet //Glimpses of Alaska Klondyke and Goldfields.// Lyons wrote articles for //Leslie’s Weekly// in early 1898 and she travelled across the country giving a lecture called “A Woman’s Trip to the Klondyke.” A reporter from the //New York Sun// noted several errors in her talk that would not have been made by someone who had been in the Yukon.((Michael Gates, “Unravelling the mystery of Esther Lyons.” //Yukon News// (Whitehorse), 18 October 2013. 2019 website: https://www.yukon-news.com/letters-opinions/unraveling-the-mystery-of-esther-lyons/)) 
Lyons used Wilson’s photographs to illustrate her talk, and four of the pictures had Lyon’s image inserted. The original photographs appear without Lyons in Wilson’s //Yukon Gold Field Guide// (1895) and in //Glimpses of Alaska// (1897). Lyons gave four sets of lectures at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Science using nearly one hundred and fifty coloured lantern slides. She billed herself as the first white woman to cross the Chilkoot Pass.((Andrew Phillip Chernoff, “Esther Lyons, “Klondike Girl”: Was Her 1894 Yukon Expedition a Lie?” 2020 website: https://andrewchernoff.wordpress.com/tag/veazie-wilson/.)) 
	
Esther’s story continued to be embellished even after her death. A 1938 Whitehorse newspaper noted that Esther Robinson (stage name Lyons) left Victoria in 1890 with her husband to join D.Z. (sic) Wilson’s expedition into Alaska. She acted as secretary to the expedition and travelled for fourteen months, going as far as Point Barrow [Nuvuk].((//The Whitehorse Star// (Whitehorse), 15 July 1938.)) Esther Lyons claimed to have purchased Wilson’s photographs from his widow sometime after 1895.((Michael Gates, “Unravelling the mystery of Esther Lyons.” //Yukon News// (Whitehorse), 18 October 2013. 2019 website: https://www.yukon-news.com/letters-opinions/unraveling-the-mystery-of-esther-lyons/))
	
Esther Robinson [Lyons] was given a pauper’s burial at Elizabeth, New Jersey at the end of October 1938.