Gold Diggers: Striking It Rich in the Klondike Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00GWQBCAI | Format: PDF
Gold Diggers: Striking It Rich in the Klondike Description
Between 1896 and 1899, thousands of people lured by gold braved a grueling journey into the remote wilderness of North America. Within two years, Dawson City, in the Canadian Yukon, grew from a mining camp of four hundred to a raucous town of more than thirty thousand. The stampede to the Klondike was the last great gold rush in history.
Scurvy, dysentery, frostbite, and starvation stalked all who dared to be in Dawson. And yet the possibilities attracted people from all walks of life. Gold Diggers is the remarkable story of the Klondike Gold Rush told through the lives of six very different people: the miner William Haskell; the saintly priest Father Judge; the savvy twenty-four-year-old businesswoman Belinda Mulrooney; the imperious British journalist Flora Shaw; spit-and-polish Sam Steele of the Mounties; and, most famous, the writer Jack London, who left without gold but with the stories that would make him a legend.
Brilliantly interweaving their experiences, Charlotte Gray presents a fascinating panorama of a subarctic town, drawing on letters, memoirs, newspaper articles, and stories.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 12 hours and 30 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Audible, Inc.
- Audible.com Release Date: November 25, 2013
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00GWQBCAI
This book is such a great chronicle of the various Klondike gold rushes that it definitely stands together with some of the great books that have been written about the Klondike/Yukon experience. The information abut Jack London and his role in making the myths of the Yukon is just indispensable. If you think you know something about Jack London and how he did in the Klondike, I think you will be surprised by what Ms Gray digs up about London and his time in the Klondike.
The other characters, and their adventures, fairly jump off the page, with their bravado and spirit as real as a chilly Klondike breeze. The idea of a place so free and wild captures the imagination, and Ms. Gray manages to paint these word pictures with a freshness and vividness that you can really feel. The feeling of adventure and "gold fever" leaps from Ms Gray's pages. It is truly a funny and fun read, which is difficult to accomplish in what is essentially a history book.
So read this one if you want to know why people went there and what they found. I guarantee you will go away with an admiration and respect for these brave souls that you will remember long after you have finished this incredible book!!!
By S. R. Tabz
Gold Diggers is really three books in one: a short primer on the Klondike, a book about business and the economy, and a story about how far some are willing to go in pursuit of their dreams.
As a primer on the Klondike, it offers a fascinating account of the last great gold rush in world history. Gray writes in a descriptive and evocative style, with a focus on a diverse set of characters and their intriguing personal journeys to the North.
The story is also a kind of microcosm of the business world -- showing how economies quickly grow, flourish, and suddenly collapse, all as a consequence of the ebb and flow of information. It's also a story about how cunning entrepreneurs build businesses that become monopolies, which eventually fold or get bought out by larger entities, in the perennial flow of big capital and the more complicated politics of empire.
But more than anything, the book testifies to the strength of the human spirit in the face of overwhelming odds. We see this in the formidable journey that prospectors endured from the Alaskan coast, through the Yukon interior, to Dawson city -- a journey over treacherous mountain passes, violent river rapids, and countless miles of trail in the freezing cold. We also see it in the conditions suffered during winter on the creeks, where temperatures would dip as low as sixty or seventy below zero, food was scarce, and daylight hours few.
Often character here is destiny, with cunning or determination making all the difference in how things turn out. But just as often, it isn't. So, while many become rich or famous at the end of it, many more come away empty-handed or broken-hearted, or die somewhere along the way, frozen and alone in the wilderness.
Gold Diggers is a moving and illuminating story, both historically unique and universal. It holds many riches in store, just waiting to be discovered.
By Robert Francis
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