Contents:
The Last Great Gold Rush, Women of the Klondike. Published by University of British Columbia Press.
A Journal of the Klondike Gold Rush. Published by Washington State University Press.
Adney's description of the folks who flooded the streets of Dawson in its gold rush heyday is one of the best I've encountered: Does this product have an incorrect or missing image? He has lived among and studied its natives, has explored unmapped wilds, has paddled his canoe or driven his dogs over almost all sections of Alaska, and sampled all its climates. The specific requirements or preferences of your reviewing publisher, classroom teacher, institution or organization should be applied. Linked Data More info about Linked Data.
In many senses, the famous Klondike gold rush -- which climaxed a century ago this year -- "resembled a great war," writes Pierre Berton in his extraordinary history, Klondike: It brutalized some and ennobled others, but the majority neither sank to the depths nor rose to the heights; instead, their characters were tempered in the hot flame of an experience which was as much emotional as it was physical.
Those experiences were captured in s newspaper reports and were repeated dramatically over the ensuing decades by the men and far fewer women who had given up their families and their jobs, and risked their futures for a shot at the "easy money" said to be available to anyone who could reach the rivers and streams of northwestern Canada's Yukon region.
Few events of the 19th century drew as many folks from around the world as the Klondike stampede. Fewer still were so thoroughly or enthusiastically covered by the press, which in the so-called Gay 90s was conveniently enjoying the use of advances in typography and photo reproduction, faster printing equipment, and a new commitment to employing well-educated wordsmiths.
As a consequence of all this, the body of work -- both third-person accounts and first-person diaries -- that can be tapped years later by readers interested in learning more about North America's last great frontier adventure is voluminous. And many titles have been published or re-published over the last two years to honor the gold rush centennial. The Life and Death of the Last Great Gold Rush provides the best overview of events leading up to and following what the author terms this "bizarre and unforgettable moment in history.
He recalls that rumors of vast mineral deposits in the Yukon had circulated ever since the early s. But it was only in August that trail packer George Washington Carmack, together with his Tagish Indian brother-in-law Keish familiar to whites as Skookum Jim and another native man, Tagish or Dawson Charley, happened upon a significant bed of gold in Rabbit Creek, an offshoot of the Yukon's Klondike River that was later renamed Bonanza Creek.
And not until July did the steamships Excelsior -- docking at San Francisco, California -- and the Portland -- nosing into the wharves at Seattle, Washington -- finally bring proof of these gold strikes to the outside world, disgorging the first loads of Klondike miners, grizzled, sunburned men who would probably have been greeted with disgust had it not been for what they carried: Within a week after those dockings, men from up and down the western shore of North America had turned in their resignations and bought boat tickets to the raw southeast Alaskan hamlets of Skagway or Dyea, from which two parallel trails --respectively, the White Pass route and the more popular climb over Chilkoot Pass -- led across the Coast Mountains separating Alaska from the Yukon and the Klondike Valley.
Joining the stampede was seen by many as their best way to recover from a severe economic depression that had kept a stranglehold on North America and Europe, beginning in Berton uses innumerable journal recollections, excerpts from letters, and personal interviews to explain the sentiment of those times and lend ample human interest to his story.
Fraser, a "Klondiker" from San Francisco. Not surprisingly, Klondike concentrates on several of the people whose activities -- noble or nefarious -- set the tone for the entire stampede. People such as Robert Henderson, a seasoned prospector from Canada's Atlantic provinces, whose offhand insulting of George Carmack's Indian kin cost him his chance to become one of the Klondike's richest men; Jefferson Randolph "Soapy" Smith, a con artist whose reign as Skagway's uncrowned king of criminality ended in a deadly exchange of gunfire with the town's surveyor; and the inimitable Colonel Samuel B.
Steele of Canada's North-West Mounted Police, who maintained the peace at Dawson City, at the very heart of Klondike country, and "enforced the order that no man could cross the border [between Alaska and Canada] without a year's supply of food" -- some 2, pounds worth.
This is history written -- thankfully -- to excite readers, not put them prematurely to sleep with frequent footnotes and ponderous passages designed to do nothing more than demonstrate the author's scholarship. Write a review Rate this item: Preview this item Preview this item. Samuel Hall Young Publisher: New York ; Chicago: English View all editions and formats Rating: Yukon -- Klondike River Valley.
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