Dalton's Gold Rush Trail: Exploring the Route of the Klondike Cattle Drives
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by Michael Gates
Harbour Publishing, Madeira Park, British Columbia, 2012
303 pp., illus., $24.95 paperback
Dalton’s Gold Rush Trail is a terrific book for those who love stories of exploration and adventure in the northern wilderness. Michael Gates’ writing is reminiscent of R.M. Patterson’s style of storytelling about the Nahanni River.
Here Gates helps readers discover Dalton’s Trail, a centuries-old Native trade route running near to five hundred kilo-metres from the Lynn Canal in southeast Alaska to the Yukon River. The book focuses on the time during the Klondike gold rush of the late 1890s, when pioneer Jack Dalton seized control of the trail and operated it as a toll road.
A self-described history detective, Gates pieces together the storied history of this lesser-known Klondike route by drawing from archaeological and historical research as well as his own personal journeys along the trail. He offers riveting accounts of the fires, famines, frauds, and flights of fancy that were all a part of ushering thousands of stampeders and tens of thousands of cattle safely to Dawson City.
— Deborah Morrison (Read bio)
Deborah Morrison is the executive director of SEVEC and the former president and CEO of Canada’s History Society.