Klondike Fever by Pierre Berton
Dec. 15th, 2018 04:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficI've been mentally storing up posts and just never getting around to writing them, so you'll have to forgive the deluge.
Klondike Fever by Pierre Berton
I visited Skagway this summer, a tourist town that is all about the Klondike Gold Rush. At the time I didn't know much about it--I certainly didn't know that the actual gold fields were still more than 400 miles away. I stepped into a bookstore there, which had a wall of books on Skagway and the gold rush. I asked the proprietor, if she could only pick one book, which book would she recommend, and before I'd even finished my sentence, she pointed to this one.
She is not wrong.
The author is the son of a stampeder and grew up in Dawson City, the town that sprung from nothing at the start of the gold rush. He based his research on reading seemingly everything ever written about the Klondike gold rush (the bibliography is twelve pages), including unpublished letters and newspaper archives, and on interviews with the old timers. The writing is vivid and lively.
And the reality of what the Klondike Gold Rush actually was? Holy crap. Gold was first discovered in 1896. Word didn't make it to the "Outside" until the following summer, when a beat steamer carrying crusty, unwashed miners and two tons of gold pulled into Seattle. More than a million people made plans to go to the Klondike, and more than 100,000 actually made the attempt. Almost no one reached Dawson until the following summer of 1898, by which point there was no hope of staking a claim. And by 1899, the whole thing had dried up and blown away.
Dawson itself went from not existing in 1896 to a population of 40,000 in 1898, making it the one of the largest cities on the West coast at the time.
People tried to make it to Dawson any way they could, which the majority of the successful ones crossing the White Pass out of Skagway or the neighboring Chilkoot Pass. The stories of that are harrowing enough--the White Pass wasn't called Dead Horse trail for nothing. Fearing famine in the Yukon with the onrushing hoarde, the Mounties wouldn't let anyone into Canada without a (literal) ton of supplies, enough to live for a year, meaning that the stampeders had to cross the passes over and over, walking as much as 2,000 miles, to carry their supplies. Then they made it to Bennett, where they spent the winter building boats with whip saws, so that in the spring rush, they could ride the rapid-filled Yukon River 400 miles to Bennett.
That was the easy way.
Others tried to make it from Alaska to avoid tariffs, by crossing the Malaspina Glacier. Nobody made it that way, and most who tried died in the attempt. One group that made it over the glacier into the interior, discovered that there was no way for them to press forward from there, and nothing to survive on, and so had to go back over the glacier.
More tried to walk from Edmonton, on a trail that was so hard numerous people committed suicide along the way, one after carving a note on a tree: Hell can't be worse than this trail. I'll take my chances.
The whole thing is insane, and Berton perfectly captures the entire bonkers episode in this book. (It's so bonkers I kind of can't believe that there hasn't been a reality TV show contest mimicking it. First--carry a ton of food over this pass in the height of winter! Then build a boat! Then ride that boat over rapids!)
One caveat on this book, though: It's racist as fuuuuuuuuuuu...
It was written in 1958 and accurately captures the sentiments of the miners. Meaning the way it talks about the native peoples who lived in the area is really not good. There is the repeated use of some pretty offensive terms. Like, you know how there are some plants that used to be called a very offensive thing and are now called something else? Yeah, he uses the offensive term. So you'll be reading a description of someone hiking across a swamp and a word will just jump out and slap you in the face.
So yeah. This is an excellent chronicle of the experience of the white Stampeders. It is a complete erasure of the effect of this Stampede on the indigenous people. I think I need to now go find a book that tells the other side.
Klondike Fever by Pierre Berton
I visited Skagway this summer, a tourist town that is all about the Klondike Gold Rush. At the time I didn't know much about it--I certainly didn't know that the actual gold fields were still more than 400 miles away. I stepped into a bookstore there, which had a wall of books on Skagway and the gold rush. I asked the proprietor, if she could only pick one book, which book would she recommend, and before I'd even finished my sentence, she pointed to this one.
She is not wrong.
The author is the son of a stampeder and grew up in Dawson City, the town that sprung from nothing at the start of the gold rush. He based his research on reading seemingly everything ever written about the Klondike gold rush (the bibliography is twelve pages), including unpublished letters and newspaper archives, and on interviews with the old timers. The writing is vivid and lively.
And the reality of what the Klondike Gold Rush actually was? Holy crap. Gold was first discovered in 1896. Word didn't make it to the "Outside" until the following summer, when a beat steamer carrying crusty, unwashed miners and two tons of gold pulled into Seattle. More than a million people made plans to go to the Klondike, and more than 100,000 actually made the attempt. Almost no one reached Dawson until the following summer of 1898, by which point there was no hope of staking a claim. And by 1899, the whole thing had dried up and blown away.
Dawson itself went from not existing in 1896 to a population of 40,000 in 1898, making it the one of the largest cities on the West coast at the time.
People tried to make it to Dawson any way they could, which the majority of the successful ones crossing the White Pass out of Skagway or the neighboring Chilkoot Pass. The stories of that are harrowing enough--the White Pass wasn't called Dead Horse trail for nothing. Fearing famine in the Yukon with the onrushing hoarde, the Mounties wouldn't let anyone into Canada without a (literal) ton of supplies, enough to live for a year, meaning that the stampeders had to cross the passes over and over, walking as much as 2,000 miles, to carry their supplies. Then they made it to Bennett, where they spent the winter building boats with whip saws, so that in the spring rush, they could ride the rapid-filled Yukon River 400 miles to Bennett.
That was the easy way.
Others tried to make it from Alaska to avoid tariffs, by crossing the Malaspina Glacier. Nobody made it that way, and most who tried died in the attempt. One group that made it over the glacier into the interior, discovered that there was no way for them to press forward from there, and nothing to survive on, and so had to go back over the glacier.
More tried to walk from Edmonton, on a trail that was so hard numerous people committed suicide along the way, one after carving a note on a tree: Hell can't be worse than this trail. I'll take my chances.
The whole thing is insane, and Berton perfectly captures the entire bonkers episode in this book. (It's so bonkers I kind of can't believe that there hasn't been a reality TV show contest mimicking it. First--carry a ton of food over this pass in the height of winter! Then build a boat! Then ride that boat over rapids!)
One caveat on this book, though: It's racist as fuuuuuuuuuuu...
It was written in 1958 and accurately captures the sentiments of the miners. Meaning the way it talks about the native peoples who lived in the area is really not good. There is the repeated use of some pretty offensive terms. Like, you know how there are some plants that used to be called a very offensive thing and are now called something else? Yeah, he uses the offensive term. So you'll be reading a description of someone hiking across a swamp and a word will just jump out and slap you in the face.
So yeah. This is an excellent chronicle of the experience of the white Stampeders. It is a complete erasure of the effect of this Stampede on the indigenous people. I think I need to now go find a book that tells the other side.