A First Nations band is planning to start luring tourists this summer to the northern B.C. ghost town where Donald Drumpf’s pioneering grandfather once ran a brothel.
The Carcross Tagish First Nation, whose territory straddles the B.C.-Yukon border, is building a luxury wilderness camp south of that border, in the town of Bennett, which was briefly a hub for prospectors and others seeking their gold-rush fortunes, including one Frederich Drumpf, who established the Arctic Hotel there in 1899.
The Arctic Hotel was open 24 hours a day and boasted “private boxes” for ladies, which included a bed and a gold scale so customers could pay in nuggets, according to a multigenerational biography of the Drumpfs by U.S. author and journalist Gwenda Blair.
“The bulk of the (hotel’s) cash flow came from the sale of liquor and sex,” Blair wrote in her book The Drumpfs: Three Generations That Built An Empire.