Yukon

Photo by Kalen Emsley on Unsplash

 

The Yukon is a land of superlatives. It is home to the highest mountains in Canada (in Kluane National Park), the world's smallest desert (Carcross Desert), the largest non-polar icefield in the world (St. Elias Icefields), and the longest mammal migration in the world (porcupine caribou). Yukon is also a land of quirkiness. This Canadian territory is home to the Signpost Forest with thousands upon thousands of signs from over the world, and it is where the Great Klondike International Outhouse Race takes place, which is exactly what it sounds like. To this expansive, icy, and unique land in the north, you can travel through the pages of these books:

Classic

📚 White Fang by Jack London

White Fang is part dog and part wolf, and the lone survivor of his family. In his lonely world, he soon learns to follow the harsh law of the North--kill or be killed. But nothing in White Fang's life can prepare him for the cruel owner who turns him into a vicious killer. Will White Fang ever know the kindness of a gentle master?

Historical Fiction

📚 The Tent Peg by Aritha Van Herk

In The Tent Peg, award-winning novelist Aritha van Herk uses her unerring perception and impressive literary skill to capture the mystical mood of the Arctic and the people who are drawn to it.

In this intriguing story, a young woman who disguises herself as a man to work in a uranium prospecting camp deep in the Yukon mountains. J.L. is on the run from an empty heart and is desperate for solitude. Yet solitude eludes her from the moment she hangs up her pots and pans in the cook tent, and the men in the camp begin to drift toward her, drawn by her silence. These men are drifters, romantics and outcasts - men who have come to the North in search of answers for questions they can't define.

📚 Toward the Midnight Sun by Eoin Dempsey

Seattle, 1897. Anna Denton is not like the other prospectors traveling to the Yukon on the promise of riches. It’s duty—not profit—that calls her into the wild unknown. With her family nearing financial ruin, Anna has agreed to marry Henry Bradwell, the wealthy King of the Klondike.

She meets Will and Silas, childhood friends, on the steamer north. After the ship docks in a lawless Alaska town, Anna’s chaperones run afoul of local criminals, leaving her stranded. Will and Silas agree to escort her the hundreds of treacherous miles to Dawson City—the gateway to the goldfields—and her betrothed, a man she doesn’t know.

Upon their arrival, Bradwell warmly welcomes them all. But as a brutal winter sets in, relations sour, and Anna is caught between the promise her family made to the power-hungry Bradwell and her feelings for Will. Anna and her companions soon find themselves in a deadly game where few can be trusted and where the greatest danger in the frozen wilderness of the Klondike is man himself.

📚 Journey by James A. Michener

One of the premier novelists of the twentieth century, James A. Michener captures a frenzied time when sane men and women risked their very lives in a forbidding Arctic land to win a dazzling and elusive prize: Yukon gold. In 1897, gold fever sweeps the world. The promise of untold riches lures thousands of dreamers from all walks of life on a perilous trek toward fortune, failure—or death. Journey is an immersive account of the adventures of four English aristocrats and their Irish servant as they haul across cruel Canadian terrain toward the Klondike gold fields. Vivid and sweeping, featuring Michener’s probing insights into the follies and grandeur of the human spirit, this is the kind of novel only he could write.

Nonfiction - History

📚 Gold Diggers: Striking it Rich in the Klondike

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.

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. Gold Diggers 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.

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.

📚 Women of the Klondike by Frances Blackhouse

Here are the stories of those fascinatingly diverse women -- entrepreneurs, domestics, nuns, doctors, nurses, and journalists -- who played a critical role in the Klondike gold rush at the turn of the century.

Humor

📚 Talking at the Woodpile by David Thompson

In this humourous and refreshing collection of short stories, David Thompson reveals the charm and grit of life in the Yukon. Talking at the Woodpile is a masterful blend of fact and fiction, history and the contemporary and intriguing stories that begin as long as 10,000 years ago. In "Frozen in Time," an unsuspecting miner discovers a frozen carcass while digging for gold. After much to-do about the origin of the gigantic creature, the mammoth and its unfortunate victim are laid to rest by the local First Nations community. In a moment of wry humour, Thompson describes a small town rivalry that ends when a firewood thief blows his fireplace sky high, to the delight of his victimized neighbours. And in the collection's title story "Talking at the Woodpile," two long-time friends unwittingly challenge each other to a talking duel, which ultimately leads to a nasty case of frostbite, and an even nastier case of cold shoulder.

In his first collection of short stories David Thompson portrays life in a small Canadian community, weaving his characters in and out of each other's tales and in and out of the history that shaped the great Canadian North.

Science Fiction

📚 The Wolves of Winter by Tyrell Johnson

Forget the old days. Forget summer. Forget warmth. Forget anything that doesn’t help you survive.

Lynn McBride has learned much since society collapsed in the face of nuclear war and the relentless spread of disease. As memories of her old life haunt her, she has been forced to forge ahead in the snow-covered Canadian Yukon, learning how to hunt and trap to survive.

But her fragile existence is about to be shattered. Shadows of the world before have found her tiny community—most prominently in the enigmatic figure of Jax, who sets in motion a chain of events that will force Lynn to fulfill a destiny she never imagined.

Horror

📚 The Wildfire Season by Andrew Pyper

Haunted. Scarred. Alone. And the nightmare's just beginning. 

Of all the end-of-the-world places he could have run to after he was burned, Miles McEwan chose Ross River.

Buried deep in the vast wilderness of the Yukon, it seemed the perfect place to escape the past. Best of all, he could carry on doing what he did best--fighting fire. But five years on, Miles is still troubled by two phantoms of his previous life: the young man whose agonizing death preys on his conscience, and the woman he abandoned as a consequence.

And in the dark forest around Ross River, fire and violence are brewing. As a small blaze becomes an inferno, a group of bear trackers is about to encounter nature in its wildest form. Elsewhere a killer is going about his work, quietly and ruthlessly. As the survivors of the hunting party are picked off one by one and fire rages through the mountains, Miles embarks on a desperate rescue mission, driven by love for a daughter who, until this dangerous summer, had been a perfect stranger.

A remarkable work, The Wildfire Season is an edgy psychological thriller, a supernatural chiller, a terrifying tale of untamed nature, and an unusual--and unusually moving--story of what one can choose to endure in the name of love.

Nonfiction - Travel

📚 Drifting Home by Pierre Berton

In the 1970s, Pierre Berton and his family recreated the trip down the Yukon made by his father, Francis George Berton, in 1898. This compelling story of the later journey is a valentine from son to father, a magical tale of a family adrift, and a poetic exploration of the region’s rich history. In experiencing this great wilderness, Berton and his family discover their deep connection to nature — and each other.

Poetry

📚 The Spell of the Yukon and Other Poems by Robert W. Service

In this omnibus volume is included the verse of Robert Service from the beginning of his remarkable career up to 1940.

Romance

📚 At the Mountain's Edge by Genevieve Graham

In 1897, the discovery of gold in the desolate reaches of the Yukon has the world abuzz with excitement, and thousands of prospectors swarm to the north seeking riches the likes of which have never been seen before.

For Liza Peterson and her family, the gold rush is a chance for them to make a fortune by moving their general store business from Vancouver to Dawson City, the only established town in the Yukon. For Constable Ben Turner, a recent recruit of the North-West Mounted Police, upholding the law in a place overrun with guns, liquor, prostitutes, and thieves is an opportunity to escape a dark past and become the man of integrity he has always wanted to be. But the long, difficult journey over icy mountain passes and whitewater rapids is much more treacherous than Liza or Ben imagined, and neither is completely prepared for the forbidding north.

As Liza’s family nears the mountain’s peak, a catastrophe strikes with fatal consequences, and not even the NWMP can help. Alone and desperate, Liza finally reaches Dawson City, only to find herself in a different kind of peril. Meanwhile, Ben, wracked with guilt over the accident on the trail, sees the chance to make things right. But just as love begins to grow, new dangers arise, threatening to separate the couple forever.

Inspired by history as rich as the Klondike’s gold, At the Mountain’s Edge is an epic tale of romance and adventure about two people who must let go of the past not only to be together, but also to survive.