“A brilliant tale on a misunderstood time in American history; the best book ever written on the Alaskan gold rush,” gushed another.
In a thoughtful podcast interview by Canadian historian Sean Graham, Castner admits that he’s not an academic historian, but the book is entirely based on real people and real experience.
You can look up these passages in the 39 pages of end notes that precede the four-page bibliography at the end of the book.
It is written from the perspective of several well documented participants of the Klondike stampede, including Tappan Adney, Jack London, Sam Steele, Belinda Mulroney and a dozen others.
I think this would have made a significant addition to the story, but suspect that it would not support his contention, which seems to be that the Klondike gold rush was characterized by death and misery.
People died on desolate glaciers, smothered in avalanches, drowned on the lakes and rivers of the Yukon, perished in shipwrecks, and succumbed to disease.
In his interview with Sean Graham, Castner states that 100,000 people started out for the Klondike, but only 30,000 made it.
I repeat them only as required, and in service of a historically accurate story.” This is a challenge that any writer of history faces when confronting the shifting social values expressed in current times.
Like many authors who have come before him, Castner was heavily influenced by the structure Pierre Berton’s classic book on the Klondike gold rush, even to the extent of omitting, just as Berton did, almost all reference to the so-called Dalton Trail over the Chilkat Pass.
I don’t want to seem too harsh in my criticism about Stampede: Gold Fever and Disaster in the Klondike, and I do not want to quibble over the numerous historical inaccuracies I stumbled across while reading Stampede.
The author has absorbed much of the reality and context of the gold rush and renders them in a creditable fashion, but I would challenge his assertion that tens of thousands died on the way to the Klondike.
Take for instance the book Gold Diggers, by Charlotte Gray, who builds the story around the accounts of miner William Haskell, Jesuit Priest Father William Judge, businesswoman Belinda Mulroney, Mountie Sam Steele and budding author Jack London.
I like, for example, early in the book, the way in which he painted a word-picture of Robert Henderson’s ordeal after having injured his leg while prospecting on the Indian River in 1895.
His latest book, “Dublin Gulch: A History of the Eagle Mine,” received the Axiom Business Book Award silver medal for corporate history.