Books in Brief: The Klondike Quest: A Photographic Essay

The Klondike Quest: A Photographic Essay, by Pierre Berton (Atlantic-Little, Brown, 240 pp., $50)

From midsummer 1897 to midsummer 1899, more than thirty thousand intrepid men, dreaming of riches, stormed the Klondike in search of gold. In this large-format album of period photographs, Pierre Berton, the author also of a history of that gold rush, remarks: “These men had learned that they were capable of feats none could have imagined possible in the years before the stampede”—feats such as carrying all their food and supplies over trails impassable by pack animals and over mountain passes that were little more than sheer walls of ice. After this, the prospector had to build his own boat and navigate five hundred miles of river, canyon, and rapids, to the boomtown of Dawson, gateway to the goldfields. But then, as Mr. Berton writes, after nine months of clawing through the wilderness in the face of “appalling hazards,” something odd happened to many of them: “They should, by all evidence, have rushed headlong for the gold creeks, yet thousands did no such thing. . . . Emotional lassitude dominated—after the tensions of the trail, something had snapped. Men wandered about, eyes glazed, like inebriates. All their energies had been funneled into one driving purpose: to reach the land of gold. Well, they had reached it; and now, in the phrase of the day, they were ‘used up.’ For them the adventure was over; there were no more barriers to breach.” Many more of them, of course, did work the fields, and a few of these hit the jackpot; but it is the image of those others that haunts the memory. Mr. Berton possesses that rare virtue, knowledge of the human heart, and The Klondike Quest is more a memorial to the pioneer spirit than a simple, factual history of looking for gold in the Far North. The two hundred photographs he has collected from various archives and libraries have been freshly developed right from the glass plates, and are heart-stirring.

JM

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Joe Mysak

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The Klondike Quest: A Photographic Essay, by Pierre Berton (Atlantic-Little, Brown, 240 pp., $50)

From midsummer 1897 to midsummer 1899, more than thirty thousand intrepid men, dreaming of riches, stormed the Klondike in search of gold. In this large-format album of period photographs, Pierre Berton, the author also of a history of that gold rush, remarks: “These men had learned that they were capable of feats none could have imagined possible in the years before the stampede”—feats such as carrying all their food and supplies over trails impassable by pack animals and over mountain passes that were little more than sheer walls of ice. After this, the prospector had to build his own boat and navigate five hundred miles of river, canyon, and rapids, to the boomtown of Dawson, gateway to the goldfields. But then, as Mr. Berton writes, after nine months of clawing through the wilderness in the face of “appalling hazards,” something odd happened to many of them: “They should, by all evidence, have rushed headlong for the gold creeks, yet thousands did no such thing. . . . Emotional lassitude dominated—after the tensions of the trail, something had snapped. Men wandered about, eyes glazed, like inebriates. All their energies had been funneled into one driving purpose: to reach the land of gold. Well, they had reached it; and now, in the phrase of the day, they were ‘used up.’ For them the adventure was over; there were no more barriers to breach.” Many more of them, of course, did work the fields, and a few of these hit the jackpot; but it is the image of those others that haunts the memory. Mr. Berton possesses that rare virtue, knowledge of the human heart, and The Klondike Quest is more a memorial to the pioneer spirit than a simple, factual history of looking for gold in the Far North. The two hundred photographs he has collected from various archives and libraries have been freshly developed right from the glass plates, and are heart-stirring.