Going beyond Pierre Berton
In 2008, award-winning Canadian writer Charlotte Gray spent three months in Dawson City, Yukon, at Berton House. The result? Gold Diggers: Striking It Rich in the Klondike (HarperCollins Canada, $35). The residency had a particular piquancy for Gray, as she was there to research and write about the Klondike gold rush - a claim staked by Pierre Berton himself in his historic tome The Last Gold Rush. Gray is best known for her biographies of Alexander Graham Bell and William Lyon Mackenzie King's mother, so it's natural her approach to the 1896 gold rush is about the lives and stories of people.
Which came first, applying for the residency or the idea for the book?
I'd been working on the book for about a year before applying for the residency, and I had the book pretty much mapped out by the time I got there. But being there changed all kinds of things for me. I hadn't settled on all the individuals I wanted to write about, and in particular I was worried that I didn't have enough Jack London material; he was the only one who hadn't left good primary material like letters and diaries.
But in Dawson I was able to talk to people who'd done work on him, and they directed me to various sources, including the diary of the man he went up the Chilkoot Pass with had written, and his own diary when he was coming out of the Yukon. While I was there I read tons of his short stories, and as I got to know the Dawson stories I realized how thinly veiled London's anecdotes (in his fiction) were.
Jack London is still a writer who is read by adolescent boys and young men.
Yes, his books represent that young male longing to break out of the constrictions of conventional life. One of my own sons said to me, I think this is the first of your books that I really, really, really want to read...I wrote the family letters home while I was up there, and they were agog for them.
The story of the Klondike gold rush is very familiar to a certain demographic in Canada.
[Laughs.] You mean what have I done that Pierre Berton hasn't?
Berton wrote his book 50 years ago and it's still a fantastic read, but it's mostly about the journey up the Chilkoot Pass. I was mesmerized by the fact that on this mud flat, where the Klondike flows into the Yukon, there were about 400 people in the summer of 1896 and two years later, there were 30,000 people. I was fascinated by what life was like for the grunts of our history - those who put together a community in the Far North, and are usually unsung.
Berton deals so magnificently with surging masses of people, masses of men; I wanted to drill down into individual psychologies. I also take women a lot more seriously than Berton, whose women were "soubrettes" and other dated terms - they're all just hookers really.
Next page: The gustiness of women, and what Dawson was like
