The Broken Rose

Gus murders Rose and runs to Russia. But why, and what were they doing in Alaska in the second decade of the 20th Century?

Gus Priesner is a coal miner from the Ruhr Valley. A Prussian who served in the Kaiser's Navy in Scandinavia in 1900, he finds his way to Canada prior to World War I. Enroute to the Klondike, he meets a Boer War veteran, Grumble Brantley, changes direction, and becomes a copper miner in the remote Alaskan wilderness. A strike at the mine changes his focus again, and with the help of "Dr. Phineas Titsworth" of Ottumwa, Iowa, Gus becomes a druggist, dispensing medicinal alcohol at the time of Prohibition.

Rose Silberg is a Long Island socialite, dumped by a philandering husband, who resolves to find her fortune in the only way she knows, in the wide-open town of McCarthy Alaska, near the Kennecott Copper Company's mine. How she leaves a life of ease and travels across the country is a hilarious story. She does, and becomes the most expensive madam in the Alaskan Territory.

Rose and Gus are thrown together by an influenza quarantine in 1918. He needs her money for an expensive shipment. She needs her money to "go home" to Long Island. The lifting of the quarantine brings the situation to a head. Gus runs to Russia. This story tells what happened to McCarthy Rose.