Gold at Fortymile Creek

Book excerpt: Gold at Fortymile Creek tells the story of the search for gold in the Yukon before the great Klondike gold rush. Michael Gates writes about the life and times of the early pioneers, who suffered unimaginable hardships in search of the big strike. It is a story about survival and adversity, life and death, good times and bad on one of the harshest, most formidable frontiers in the world. The book, based on the accounts of dozens of prospectors, follows the first gold-seekers from their arrival in 1873 until the stamped to the Klondike in 1896. Gates captures the essence of these early years of the gold rush, about which very little has been written. He chronicles the trials, heartbreaks, and successes of the unique and hardy individualists who searched for gold in the wilderness. With names like Swiftwater Bill, Crooked Leg Louie, Slobbery Tom, and Tin Kettle George, these men lived in total isolation beyond the borders of civilization. They were often eccentrics and outcasts, who shaped their own rules, their own justice and their own social order. Into this no-man's-land came the harbingers of civilization: the traders, missionaries, gentlemen travellers, pioneer women, North-West Mounted Police, and counless others who populated the rough-and-ready settlements--Fort Reliance, Forty Mile, Circle, and Dawson--which grew up around each new find. Fascinating and informative, Gold at Fortymile Creek tells the story of a rag-tag group of risk-takers and dreamers, who set the stage for one of the most remarkable events of the nineteenth century--the Klondike gold rush.