Gold Diggers: Striking It Rich in the Klondike

To mine the stories of the last great Gold Rush (1896–1899), Gray (Sisters in the Wilderness), who lives in Ottawa, spent three months living in the Canadian Yukon and sifting through the archives there. Gray focuses on diverse individuals whose paths crossed during the Gold Rush days. Recovering from scurvy, novelist Jack London left with "a gold mine of stories." Energetic London Times journalist Flora Shaw explored honky-tonk dives after midnight: "It was not Flora's world," says Gray. "She cast a cool eye on the professional gamblers, the blowsy hookers, the long-nailed barmen... and the throng of boozy miners." Lawman Sam Steele saw the boomtown Dawson City and its 400 prostitutes as "simply a hell on earth, gamblers, thieves and the worst kind of womankind," while Father Judge, a gentle Jesuit priest, sought souls rather than gold. At age 25, businesswoman Belinda Mulrooney arrived to get rich and departed a multimillionaire as the mining camp of 400 became a raucous, raunchy city of 30,000 in only two years. Writing about "the wildest, noisiest, roughest frontier town, in the middle of the bleakest landscape on the American continent," Gray has hit pay dirt with this hardscrabble history, a vibrant, detailed recreation of the frenzied boomtown of Dawson City. Photos. (Oct.)