Northern Treasure

We can never have enough books about the Klondike gold rush. We need to be reminded constantly that it awakened us to the northern half of our country, crystallized the differences between Canadians and Americans, created the romance of sturdy Mounties amidst snowy wastelands and set the template for mostly foreign exploitation of our natural resources.

In Gold Diggers: Striking It Rich in the Klondike, Charlotte Gray has sought to “show how a community develops and how history is built from the ground up” by using her sublime narrative skills to interlace the tales of six people seeking their personal strikes during the gold rush.

Gray’s modus operandi, as is familiar from her previous books, is to dig up long-forgotten memoirs, letters, government files and contemporary journalism, and to thread together extensive excerpts from these primary sources with her own fluid contextualizing. It is no coincidence, then, that the six individuals whose...