Getting to the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897-98 meant taking a steamer up the Pacific Coast and hiking almost 4,000 feet over the Chilkoot Pass. It was an expensive, treacherous, death-defying ordeal. If, however, you took the word of certain Canadian newspapers (chiefly one called the Bulletin), you’d know that getting to the Klondike goldfields through the small town of Edmonton was actually a piece of cake.
There was the well used Water Route via the Athabasca and Mackenzie Rivers, or the long established Overland Trail, either of which would put you in Dawson City in a couple of leisurely months.
And so, to Edmonton they came: more than twelve hundred men and women, from the East, the United States, England, Ireland, Australia; the rich, the poor, the ingenious, the reckless – the gullible. They temporarily transformed the little fur-trade and farming settlement on the North Saskatchewan River into a ‘bustling small city,’ filling the hotels and camping on the flats, and stocking up with a fervor that turned the local merchants into minor tycoons.
And when they set out on the all-Canadian route to the Klondike, they felt their golden dreams were as good as realized.
Death Stalked The Trails: The Klondike Gold Rush Through Edmonton 1897-98 by R.G. Moyles recounts those dreams, and their extravagant payoff of hardship and horror. Through newspaper reports, letters, diaries, reminiscences and other sources, readers will discover the frequently unbelievable personal tales of Nellie Garner, Lord Avonmore, George Mitchell, Alexander Stewart, Emily Craig and more than a thousand others who, unintentionally and often with regret, placed humble little Edmonton on the world map in 1897-98.
