Zachary's Gold

Burke Cullen teaches English at the University of Toronto.

Set in British Columbia’s Cariboo gold fields of the 1860s,
Zachary’s Gold is a suspenseful and entertaining, if somewhat
formulaic, “western” adventure novel. The plot is the novel’s
strongest feature. With one false move, Zachary Beddoes stumbles upon
gold, and in so doing sets off a chain of events that quickly turns the
challenge to retain the gold into a struggle to survive. The
narrator-hero, a young, educated American who is hopelessly naive about
the perils of the gold field, effectively serves Krumm’s twofold
strategy, which is to make articulate, witty, and ironic observations
about the gold-rush characters and conditions while exploiting the
dramatic immediacy of Beddoes’s frequent scrapes, great escapes, and
gun battles. Yet in this novel of good-guy-versus-bad-guy, the moral
credibility of the hero wanes as his crimes mount. True, this greenhorn
turns fugitive for good reason, but that he kills four of his detractors
at different times out of self-defence cannot hide the consuming greed
that motivates him to hang on to the gold—at any cost. But this is
clearly not a moral tale, and whatever the contradictions and moral grey
areas, whatever Beddoes’s inadvertent villainy, Krumm washes them away
in a gloriously comic (though hastily arrived at) ending that eclipses
the romance conventions of luck and coincidence abounding in the novel.
As for the novel’s historical contributions, the Cariboo and
Barkerville are always part of its backdrop, but because Beddoes is
never in one place for long, the historical chartings and such
references as the one to B.C.’s “hanging judge” (Matthew Begbie)
serve as little more than points of interest. Nevertheless, Krumm does
offer along the way sustained and convincing portraits of the harsh
conditions of prospecting life in those days. Above all, Zachary’s
Gold capitalizes on the adventure, suspense, and lawlessness of B.C.’s
gold-rush era.