DCB/DBC Mobile beta
+

As part of the funding agreement between the Dictionary of Canadian Biography and the Canadian Museum of History, we invite readers to take part in a short survey.

I’ll take the survey now.

Remind me later.

Don’t show me this message again.

I have already taken the questionnaire

DCB/DBC News

New Biographies

Minor Corrections

Biography of the Day

ROBINSON, ELIZA ARDEN – Volume XIII (1901-1910)

d. in Victoria 19 March 1906

Confederation

Responsible Government

Sir John A. Macdonald

From the Red River Settlement to Manitoba (1812–70)

Sir Wilfrid Laurier

Sir George-Étienne Cartier

Sports

The Fenians

Women in the DCB/DBC

The Charlottetown and Quebec Conferences of 1864

Introductory Essays of the DCB/DBC

The Acadians

For Educators

The War of 1812 

Canada’s Wartime Prime Ministers

The First World War

JOHNSON, LULU MAE (Eads), dance-hall performer and hotel proprietor; b. c. 1877 in the United States, possibly in Alabama; d. 25 Oct. 1918 at sea in Lynn Canal, Alaska.

Lulu Mae Johnson came to the Yukon in 1899 with a troupe of other performers. Touted as one of the great beauties of the Klondike, she worked as a performer in the various dance halls of Dawson until December 1904 when she agreed to marry her boss Murray S. Eads. Eads had arrived in Dawson at the beginning of the great Klondike gold-rush and soon established himself as a saloon and dance-hall keeper. When Murray Eads met Lulu Mae, he was running the Flora Dora dance hall and together the couple continued its operation for another decade, later changing its name to the Royal Alexandra in an attempt to gain respectability.

By Murray Eads’s own acknowledgement, prostitution was occasionally carried on in the Flora Dora, although he claimed that he dismissed the principals involved whenever such a situation occurred. In fact, the opposite was more or less the rule. In 1907, for example, Zachary Taylor Wood of the local North-West Mounted Police noted that nearly 20 women had rooms over the Flora Dora and that these women were generally known to be prostitutes. The mounted police kept a careful watch on such businesses in Dawson and that year they charged Lulu Mae Eads with allowing “women of loose, idle or suspicious character” on her premises “for the purpose of drinking and keeping company with men.” Only she was arrested, perhaps because her name was on both the dance-hall licence and the liquor licence, or perhaps because her husband was out of town. In any case she was clearly in charge of the Flora Dora at the time, an arrangement that probably left Murray Eads free to pursue other ventures and protected some of his assets.

In 1918 Lulu Mae and Murray Eads booked themselves their first trip south in 20 years, Lulu Mae packing $5,000 worth of jewellery for the voyage. Unfortunately, they took passage from Skagway, Alaska, to Seattle on the Canadian Pacific steamer the Princess Sophia. The Sophia left port on 23 October and during a storm the next morning went aground on Vanderbilt Reef in Lynn Canal. On the 25th, while the rescue fleet was mobilizing, the Sophia sank, taking all 353 passengers and crew with it. Eerily, Lulu Mae and her husband, apparently nervous of sea travel, had drawn up their last will and testament only days before taking passage on the ill-fated voyage.

Charlene Porsild

NA, RG 31, C1, 1901, Dawson City, Yukon; RG 85, 658, file 3417. Yukon Arch. (Whitehorse), GOV 1313 (acc. 82.86, Can., Dept. of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, National Hist. Sites Div., V. A. B. Faulkner, “The Palace Grande Theatre, Dawson, Y.T.”); GOV 1684 (Yukon government records, YRG 1 (central registry files), ser.1, vol.74), file 78 (mfm. in NA, RG 91); GOV 1686 (YRG 1, ser.1, vo1.76), file 8, no.578. K. [S.] Coates and [W. R.] Morrison, The sinking of the “Princess Sophia”: taking the north down with her (Toronto, 1990).

General Bibliography

Cite This Article

Charlene Porsild, “JOHNSON, LULU MAE,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 14, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed March 19, 2024, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/johnson_lulu_mae_14E.html.

The citation above shows the format for footnotes and endnotes according to the Chicago manual of style (16th edition). Information to be used in other citation formats:


Permalink:   http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/johnson_lulu_mae_14E.html
Author of Article:   Charlene Porsild
Title of Article:   JOHNSON, LULU MAE
Publication Name:   Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 14
Publisher:   University of Toronto/Université Laval
Year of publication:   1998
Year of revision:   1998
Access Date:   March 19, 2024