Gold Diggers Striking It Rich in the Klondike

The Gold Dust Weighed them Down, it was so heavy, but they just grinned at each other as they shouldered the clumsy canvas backpacks and took the track to Dawson City. They soon found themselves in a crowd of grinning miners, heading towards Dawson's saloons. Bill reckoned there were four hundred valuable claims stretched along Bonanza and Eldorado, and every digging "was a fabulous mine of gold...Men who had stumbled over the rough trail in September, poor and disheartened, disgusted with their condition and sick of the country, came down in the spring as millionaires and threw their gold dust about like so much grass seed." The men greeted each other as "sourdoughs," the nickname for those who had survived at least one brutal northern winter, living on bread made with wild yeast. Like Bill, these tough, emaciated men were clad in the prospectors' uniform of thick wool pants held up with suspenders, heavy boots, worn flannel shirts and misshapen felt hats. Their eyes, like Bill's, were bloodshot from wood smoke and bouts of snow-blindness, and the prevalence of tangled beards and unkempt moustaches made the crowd look like an assembly of Old Testament prophets. And like Bill, they poured into Dawson City, eager to put the bitter winter behind them. Book jacket.

Charlotte Gray is the author of several award–winning works of nonfiction, including Sisters in the Wilderness and Reluctant Genius: The Passionate and Inventive Mind of Alexander Graham Bell. She lives in Ottawa.