Bonfire Saloon

Book excerpt: The Alaska Gold Rush is the least studied era of United States history. If you pull up Alaska Gold Rush on Wikipedia, you will get the Klondike Gold Rush. The Klondike Gold Rush was centered around Dawson in Canada's Yukon Territory and lasted 14 months. The Alaska Gold Rush lasted 40 years, from 1880 to the end of the First World War, and covered an area one-fifth that of the Lower 48 states. Bonfire Saloon is not a work of narrative poetry. It is a book of history disguised as literature. The slang, words, terms, and expressions would be used in a saloon in 1903 in a gold rush. The names of the people are authentic, and the events in the book happened. Bonfire Saloon is a ground-level look at the events and personalities of 39 individuals on a single night in a Nome saloon.