Drifting Home: A Family's Voyage of Discovery Down the Wild Yukon River

Norman P. Goldman is a retired Civil Law Notaire (Notary) who also
specializes in Montreal history and culture.

In 1972, notable historian and journalist Pierre Berton and his family
traveled the Yukon River in rubber rafts that took them from Lake
Bennett, British Colombia, to Dawson in the Yukon Territory. For Berton,
it was “a journey through time as well as through space.”
Accordingly, Drifting Home also tells the story of Berton’s father,
who pretty much followed the same route in 1898 when 7000 handmade boats
paddled along the mighty Yukon River in search of the Klondike
goldfields.

Each of the book’s 13 chapters details a single day in the journey.
Woven into the travelogue is a wealth of information about the various
abandoned towns, the early settlers, the gold rush, the topography of
the region, the various dangers that confronted paddlers, and Berton’s
reminiscences of growing up in Dawson in the early 1930s. His famed
storytelling abilities are on full display in this wonderful account.