Gold Diggers

August 23, 2010
To mine the stories of the last great Gold Rush (1896–1899), Gray (Sisters in the Wilderness), who lives in Ottawa, spent three months living in the Canadian Yukon and sifting through the archives there. Gray focuses on diverse individuals whose paths crossed during the Gold Rush days. Recovering from scurvy, novelist Jack London left with "a gold mine of stories." Energetic London Times journalist Flora Shaw explored honky-tonk dives after midnight: "It was not Flora's world," says Gray. "She cast a cool eye on the professional gamblers, the blowsy hookers, the long-nailed barmen... and the throng of boozy miners." Lawman Sam Steele saw the boomtown Dawson City and its 400 prostitutes as "simply a hell on earth, gamblers, thieves and the worst kind of womankind," while Father Judge, a gentle Jesuit priest, sought souls rather than gold. At age 25, businesswoman Belinda Mulrooney arrived to get rich and departed a multimillionaire as the mining camp of 400 became a raucous, raunchy city of 30,000 in only two years. Writing about "the wildest, noisiest, roughest frontier town, in the middle of the bleakest landscape on the American continent," Gray has hit pay dirt with this hardscrabble history, a vibrant, detailed recreation of the frenzied boomtown of Dawson City. Photos.

Starred review from July 15, 2010

Tracing the crossed paths of six Klondikers caught up in "the last great gold rush in history."

Among the countless dreamers, adventurers, entrepreneurs, tenderfoots, prostitutes, card sharps and con men who rushed to the northwest after news of the 1896 Klondike strike, Gray (Reluctant Genius: Alexander Graham Bell and the Passion for Invention, 2006, etc.) focuses on six individuals: Bill Haskell, a miner early to the stampede who struck gold but had to suffer the drowning death of his partner; Father William Judge, the selfless Jesuit and seemingly the only Yukon dweller not obsessed with gold; Belinda Mulrooney, the brash and thoroughly ruthless shopkeeper, restaurateur, hotelier and property magnate; Jack London, who mined literary gold from his year in the Klondike; Flora Shaw, correspondent for the Times of London, whose dispatches confirmed the strike's significant dimensions and the corruption among Canadian officials; and Sam Steele, hardy lawman amid the fray. No armchair rambler, the author has visited the territory, and this familiarity comes through in her descriptions of the beauty and terror of the landscape, her keen appreciation of the near–Arctic Circle climate and her vivid depiction then and now of Dawson City, the log-cabin town at the confluence of the Yukon and Klondike Rivers, 4,000 miles from the nearest city. Relying on memoirs and letters, Gray memorably resuscitates the life of the miners: the fortuity of staking a claim, the primitive and backbreaking methods they used to extract gold from the earth, the harsh conditions under which they labored and the manifold diseases that afflicted them. Their appalling treatment of the native Han people and their desecration of the landscape were but two of the unfortunate byproducts of the gold fever that allowed a pauper to imagine becoming a millionaire overnight.

A lively, delightful reenactment of a signal era of "Klondike mythology."

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

November 1, 2010

Generations of readers have been enchanted by accounts of gold rushes, e.g., Jack London's stories taking place in the frozen Canadian north. Award-winning Canadian author Gray (Reluctant Genius: The Passionate Life and Inventive Mind of Alexander Graham Bell) now turns her skill to an enchanting recitation of lives--and deaths--in the Klondike during the gold rush over 100 years ago. Combining a keen eye for detail and firsthand histories of contemporary witnesses, Gray sets forth the lives of six "stampeders," including Jack London (who almost died in the wild before writing so wonderfully of those who did), Mountie Sam Steele, business wiz Belinda Mulrooney, high-born journalist Flora Shaw, devoted Jesuit priest William Judge, and, most of all, Bill Haskell, a simple soul who left America with a dream of exploration and riches. Readers will discover whether or not he succeeded. VERDICT This is a captivating example of lecture d'evasion (i.e., escapist reading) and of historical scholarship examining the lives of such pioneers from the--frozen or flooded--ground up. A delight for readers of all ages and interests.--Gilles Renaud, Cornwall, Ont.

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