Stampede: Gold Fever and Disaster in the Klondike
Stampede: Gold Fever and Disaster in the Klondike
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Publisher's Hardcover ©2021--
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Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Annotation: A gripping and wholly original account of the epic human tragedy that was the great Klondike Gold Rush of 1897-98. One h... more
Genre: [World history]
 
Reviews: 3
Catalog Number: #288176
Format: Publisher's Hardcover
Copyright Date: 2021
Edition Date: 2021 Release Date: 04/13/21
Pages: 269 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates
ISBN: 0-385-54450-2
ISBN 13: 978-0-385-54450-4
Dewey: 971.9
LCCN: 2020055497
Dimensions: 25 cm
Language: English
Reviews:
Kirkus Reviews

A tangy tale of the 19th century's last, storied gold rush, timed for its 125th anniversary.Journalist and Iraq War veteran Castner, who chronicled a comrade's battlefield death in the excellent All the Ways We Kill and Die (2016), has a fine time depicting the salty, seldom virtuous figures who drifted north to Alaska following the acquisition of the Russian territory in the purchase known as "Seward's Folly." There was no folly in it, for the deal opened up a vast new land to economic exploitation, as manifested by the mass arrival of gold-seekers in 1896. Invoking the rational actor theory of economics, the author observes that the boom served the interests of only a very few people in a whirl of pyramid schemes and other scams: "Perhaps ‘Klondicitis' was the best term for the infectious cloudiness of reason that ran amok," he writes, also chronicling the racism and contempt for Native peoples that characterized the era. Soon every loose hand in the world, it seemed, was on the way to Dawson City, Juneau, and points north, looking to get rich. Castner's dramatis personae includes the best known of them all, Jack London, who arrived poor and left pretty much that same way-but with a trove of stories that he would turn into bestsellers. Others are less well known, including a star-crossed band of New Yorkers who were caught by "avalanches, driving winds, plunging temperatures that broke their thermometers" and were reduced to eating their dogs. There's a lot of swagger and a lot of swishing skirts in Castner's pages, rife with entertaining accounts of all seven deadly sins, but many of his unfortunates bow in and disappear, even as "the circus left almost as soon as it arrived."A vigorous historical page-turner packed with a cast of decidedly colorful (and off-color) actors.

Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

Journalist Castner (Disappointment River) paints a dramatic and frequently gruesome portrait of the Klondike gold rush. In July 1896, prospector George Carmack discovered in a Yukon River tributary -so much gold layered in the slabs of bedrock, he thought they looked like cheese sandwiches.- He staked two claims for himself and his brother-in-law, and rushed to the settlement of Fortymile to file legal paperwork, setting off the largest gold stampede in U.S. history. In 1897, more than 100,000 people set out for the Klondike, most of them woefully ill-prepared for the harsh conditions. According to Castner, 75% of the would-be prospectors -were shipwrecked, shot, suffocated, frozen, starved, drowned, or gave up and went home.- Castner brings the survivors to vivid life, including Arthur Arnold Dietz, who set out with 18 men across the Malaspina Glacier in Alaska to reach the gold strike. Only four survived; the rest fell in crevices, died of scurvy, suffocated in avalanches, or starved to death during their two-year ordeal. Castner also profiles Jack London, who came down with scurvy in the Klondike, and hotelier Belinda Mulrooney, who lost her fortune when Dawson City was destroyed by fire in 1899. Packed with evocative details and colorful personalities, this immersive history captures the tragic consequences of -gold fever.- (Apr.)

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Kirkus Reviews
Library Journal
Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)
Bibliography Index/Note: Includes bibliographical references (pages 261-265).
Reading Level: 6.0
Interest Level: 9+

A gripping and wholly original account of the epic human tragedy that was the great Klondike Gold Rush of 1897-98. One hundred thousand men and women rushed heedlessly north to make their fortunes; very few did, but many thousands of them died in the attempt.

In 1897, the United States was mired in the worst economic depression that the country had yet endured. So when all the newspapers announced gold was to be found in wildly enriching quantities at the Klondike River region of the Yukon, a mob of economically desperate Americans swarmed north. Within weeks tens of thousands of them were embarking from western ports to throw themselves at some of the harshest terrain on the planet--in winter yet--woefully unprepared, with no experience at all in mining or mountaineering. It was a mass delusion that quickly proved deadly: avalanches, shipwrecks, starvation, murder.

Upon this stage, author Brian Castner tells a relentlessly driving story of the gold rush through the individual experiences of the iconic characters who endured it. A young Jack London, who would make his fortune but not in gold. Colonel Samuel Steele, who tried to save the stampeders from themselves. The notorious gangster Soapy Smith, goodtime girls and desperate miners, Skookum Jim, and the hotel entrepreneur Belinda Mulrooney. The unvarnished tale of this mass migration is always striking, revealing the amazing truth of what people will do for a chance to be rich.


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