Yukon Gold: The Story of the Klondike Gold Rush

Jones (Fingerprints and Talking Bones) recounts in detailed, if often choppy, prose a history of the brief but frenzied quest for gold in the late 1890s in the Klondike region of Canada and Alaska. She sets the stage with an explanation of the desperate economic situation in the U.S. due to a nationwide depression--the Panic of 1893--then tells of the initial gold ""strike"" in 1896 by four miners at the creek they named Bonanza and explains how the slow-moving news of the discovery led to a torrent of inexperienced would-be miners (known as stampeders) to the far north of the Yukon. Several chapters explore the different routes miners took, sometimes covering hundreds of miles, to reach the distant diggings, and the difficult, often horrific, conditions they endured along the way. The two closing chapters describe the ways miners dug for gold and how the ""boom"" of the Klondike became a ""bust"" after only three short years. Historical photographs, posters and newspaper headlines give readers a flavor of the times. This is a solid resource for information about the period, but the meandering text never fully ties together its overabundance of details and anecdotes (six to eight examples often illustrate a point where one or two would suffice) into a cohesive, fluid story. Ages 8-12. (Mar.)