In the first 200 pages, the geography, parade of characters and human dramas were overwhelming. Granatstein, later conceded, “Without Pierre Berton there would scarcely be any Canadian history left.” I reviewed Klondike as a classic of Canadian historical creative nonfiction, rooted in a sense of place, looking for lessons for my own project on Petawawa. With two further editions and several translations, it still ranks among Amazon’s bestsellers in Canadian History and the CBC’s 150 essential books for Canada’s sesquicentennial. Unaffected by the academics historians’ initial disapproval of its popular, social history approach, Klondike sold ten thousand copies in Canada in its first three months and won the Governor General’s Award for Non-fiction. Having grown up in Dawson City and worked in the goldmines as a student, Berton drew on those links and painstaking research to produce one of the earliest and best of his twenty-plus books. First published in 1958, Klondike is the sprawling story of what Pierre Berton calls “a great trek represents one of the weirdest and most useless mass migrations in human history.” The book traces the history, geography, and the array of characters, hardships, ludicrous and occasionally inspiring episodes in this frenzied period of three years. Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899.
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