HarperCollins, Toronto, 2010
425 pp., illus., $34.99 hardcover
In the summer of 1896, a prospector by the name of George Carmack struck it rich on a stream in the Yukon. When word of Carmack’s discovery got out, reaching the U.S. during a particularly bleak period of economic recession, hordes of gold-crazed prospectors from all across North America flocked to the Yukon.
Following in the wake of the prospectors was a ragtag assortment of adventurers, con artists, opportunists, prostitutes, card sharks, journalists, and lawmen who together set the scene for one of the most colourful chapters in Canadian history. In Gold Diggers: Striking it Rich in the Klondike, award-winning author and History Society chair Charlotte Gray deftly weaves together the stories of six very different characters — aspiring writer Jack London, miner William Haskell, businesswoman Belinda Mulrooney, priest Father William Judge, journalist Flora Shaw, and Mountie Sam Steele — to create a vivid and comprehensive account of the last of the great gold rushes.
Just getting to the Klondike in 1896 was a gruelling test of endurance. Once the stampeders made it up the steep, icy slopes of the Elias Mountains and traversed the notorious Chilkoot Pass, they then faced a nearly one-thousand-kilometre voyage through a mosquito-infested wilderness.
Only a small percentage of those who attempted the journey made it to Dawson. Those who did found themselves in a “squalid, gold-crazy settlement of shacks and tents” that lacked even the most basic amenities. Gray paints an evocative picture of life in this raucous frontier town where the saloons rarely closed, men outnumbered women nine to one, and approximately four hundred prostitutes worked the streets.
Contrary to popular belief, not all women in the Klondike were dance hall girls or prostitutes. In fact, two of Gray’s most interesting characters — Shaw and Mulrooney — were powerful women who greatly influenced the development of Dawson. Belinda Mulrooney, the resourceful, uneducated daughter of a Pennsylvania coal miner, arrived in Dawson in 1897 to discover a city whose “commercial potential was seriously underexploited.” In typical rags-to-riches fashion, she landed in town with only one quarter to her name, and two years later she was the head of a multi-million dollar hotel empire.
Flora Shaw, the colonial correspondent for the London Times, changed the entire course of Dawson’s history when she reported widespread corruption among government officials. As a result of her exposé, Sam Steele, “the Lion of the North,” was assigned to clean up this “high-spirited circus on the brink of becoming a thieves’ kitchen.”
Rags-to-riches stories abound in Klondike mythology. However, as Gray makes clear, not all prospectors struck it rich and the streets “were paved not with gold but with muck as thick as gumbo.”
Prospecting was back-breaking labour. In summer the men slogged in the creeks from dawn till dusk. And in winter they sank shafts in the frozen muck below ground. When not working, they huddled in squalid cabins, surviving on a miserable diet of beans, bacon, and bannock — fare that left them malnourished and at risk of developing scurvy, one of the leading causes of death in the Klondike.
But despite the hard labour, isolation, illness, brutal cold, and exorbitant prices, the stampeders just kept coming. At its peak in 1898, Dawson’s population reached an astonishing thirty thousand.
The boom took its toll on the environment as well as on the indigenous people. Those who suffered most as a result of the stampede were the Han, whose way of life was destroyed when prospectors muscled in on their traditional fishing and hunting grounds and infected them with diseases to which they had no resistance.
Gray is a consummate storyteller. This ability, combined with her exhaustive research, makes Gold Diggers a must-read for Klondike enthusiasts.
— Joyce Glasner (Read bio)
Joyce Glasner is a Halifax-based freelance writer and author.