<p><p>Between 1896 and 1899, thousands of people lured by gold braved a grueling journey into the remote wilderness of North America. Within two years, Dawson City, in the Canadian Yukon, grew from a mining camp of four hundred to a raucous town of over thirty thousand people. The stampede to the Klondike was the last great gold rush in history.<p>Scurvy, dysentery, frostbite, and starvation stalked all who dared to be in Dawson. And yet the possibilities attracted people from all walks of life—not only prospectors but also newspapermen, bankers, prostitutes, priests, and lawmen. <I>Gold Diggers</I> follows six stampeders—Bill Haskell, a farm boy who hungered for striking gold; Father Judge, a Jesuit priest who aimed to save souls and lives; Belinda Mulrooney, a twenty-four-year-old who became the richest businesswoman in town; Flora Shaw, a journalist who transformed the town’s governance; Sam Steele, the officer who finally established order in the lawless town; and most famously Jack London, who left without gold, but with the stories that would make him a legend.<p>Drawing on letters, memoirs, newspaper articles, and stories, Charlotte Gray delivers an enthralling tale of the gold madness that swept through a continent and changed a landscape and its people forever.<p></p> <h3>Publishers Weekly</h3> <p>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.)</p>
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