The Lost WHAT of WHERE?
From my first day as a cheechako placer gold miner in 1972 working for Art Fry at the Grand Forks’ confluence of Eldorado and Bonanza creeks in the heart of the fabled Klondike goldfield, I began hearing stories of a mythic nature about the massive placer gold deposits in Siberia just on the other side of next door Alaska.
Fry himself was fond of saying the entire Klondike was just “a drop in the bucket” compared to the rich goldfields the Russians had hidden away in Siberia. Such stories had been told in the Yukon since the next rush after Dawson, to Nome in 1903, where the gold was so plentiful and easy to find, nuggets were said to be lying on the beaches and could be picked up like popcorn in a movie theatre, which was actually true for a while until it all got picked up and they had to start digging or dredging to find more.
As it turned out over the 20th century, you could find gold just about anywhere in Alaska along the route of the meandering Yukon River from its headwaters upstream of Whitehorse to St. Michael’s on the Bering Sea, a little southeast of Nome.
But the stories from Siberia just kind of dried up and went dark in a mythical way, hastened by the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago” in 1973, which detailed the horrors of the Stalin death camps in the Kolyma goldfields which were mined by forced labour.
For the next 50-plus years Siberia became a long-forgotten neighbour until I found Sophy Roberts under the tree on Christmas morning, 2024 with an invitation to read her first book: “The Lost Pianos of Siberia.”
She was 46 when it was published in 2020. She is now preparing her second book, which is about schools for elephants.
Roberts was born and raised on the west coast of Scotland, daughter of a fisherman. She says if she had to pick just one, her favourite writer would be Joseph Conrad but I kept finding myself thinking of Steinbeck while reading her long flowing sentences about horrible places as if she was reading a wine menu and ordering a decanter of the “Grapes of Wrath” with her light lunch
She also reminded me of gonzo guru, Hunter S. Thompson, but I can’t find the right sentences to explain why. There is nothing remotely gonzo about her except, possibly, her self-confident smile while cranking out fear and loathing copy.
This woman is either a literary genius or has the best copy editor since Maxwell Perkins.
And because it needs to be said before we run out of inches, there are hundreds of pianos in this book – possibly thousands – but the one she really wanted to find is the one the Romanov family owned just before the rebel murderers gunned them down and sent their bloodline to eternity.
The lost piano was never located and only partial remains of the Romanov massacre victims, which included the Czar, his young male heir and his five beautiful, well dressed daughters who looked like they were on their way to a piano recital.
In passing comments written in simple Geo-speak, Sophy even explained why Siberia was so gold-blessed by nature and was the source of over half the world’s gold production during WWII. To oversimplify, Nazi Germany was ultimately defeated by Kolyma gold and U.S. industrialists made so much money they had to make it all Top Secret until years after the war ended in 1945.
Is there anything about Siberia, Sophy Roberts does not know? Every sentence is like a quick education in geography, history, gold mining, politics, pianos or the inhumanity of the human race. It was almost too much to attempt a review, but I loved every word of it and can’t wait for the elephants to come to town. You probably won’t find “The Lost Pianos of Siberia” in fancy bookstores with trendy names but Well Read Books in Whitehorse would be worth a look.
