Gold at Fortymile Creek: Early Days in the Yukon

Barry M. Gough is a history professor at Wilfrid Laurier University and
author of The Northwest Coast: British Navigation, Trade, and
Discoveries to 1812.

This book is rather old-fashioned in its approach to history and
northern studies. The strictly narrative approach presents a cast of
characters as large as the landscape, trudging across the stage in due
procession. Such a historical technique has its undeniable merits, and
will appeal to many, but the reader already familiar with Yukon history
in gold rush days will find little new or revealing.

That said, Michael Gates portrays the vast northern landscape as a
place for exploitation. In the early days, after the fur trade, a few
independent goldminers came to the great river that drains into Alaska.
On the Canadian side of the border, Californians could rub shoulders
with Maritimers or Britons in the hunt for the gold. Gates recounts the
great Klondike discovery, but he quite correctly sees it as part of a
larger process that began much earlier and ended much later, if in fact
it ever did end. Native people feature little in this work, but the
author has tried to track down the women of the story, and includes in
his portrait prospectors, prostitutes, surveyors, Mounties, priests, and
government agents. Good maps and photographs complement the text. An
appendix of mining terms puts the more technical matters where they
deserve to be.