Tales From Before And After The Gold Rush
The extreme focus on the drama of the Klondike Gold Rush tends to obscure the stories about the gold seekers…
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The Book Shelf
Having Fun With Animal Names
I don’t know about other languages, but English tends to have names for groups of creatures. These are called collective nouns…
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Tales Of ‘An Alternative Klondike’
I’m not just sure when David Thompson started writing his tales of an alternative Klondike, but he began submitting entries…
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There Is Much to Savour In This Memoir
This book tests my understanding of the word calamity, which is usually defined as “a state of deep distress or misery.”
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A Yukon Mosaic
Eleanor Millard’s story is a familiar one. She came to the Yukon in 1965 and got captured. She has mostly been here since…
A Peek At The Yukon During ‘The Quiet Years’
Aside from just being a darn good read, this book covers a period about which very little has been written.
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The Bookshelf: When Dawson Made Hockey History
The Dawson Challengers had a dream to contest for the Dominion Hockey Challenge Cup (better known as the Stanley Cup.
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Dublin Gulch
The present book, one of several projects Michael Gates has had on the go since he retired, is one he was commissioned to write by Victoria Gold, the owners of the Eagle Gold Mine.
Why did it have to be snakes?
Book Review: Bury Your Horses by Dan Dowhal
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The Klondike Gold Rush Steamers
In these days of highways and 1000-year level flood dikes, it’s easy to forget that the best way to get to Dawson used to be by sternwheelers. While most of the stampeders made their way here in small boats and rafts in 1898, a sizeable number cruised to the fledgling town from St. Michael’s, Alaska, in riverboats and steamers and, once the White Pass chugged into Whitehorse, still more hopped on boats from there.
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Missives from One Bucket Creek
For 20 years, from 1994 to 2014, Al Pope produced a regular column for the Yukon News. It was called Nordicity. He said it started because
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How real life can inform fiction
In the course of his Massey Lecture series in 2013 (published as Blood: The Stuff of Life, from House of Anansi Press), Lawrence Hill used a
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Sigmund Brouwer says put your character in a problem situation
With over 100 titles and four million books in print, Sigmund Brouwer is a bestselling author of books for children, young adults and adults. He
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Murder and romance in small-town Alaska
With over 225 novels to her credit, Nora Roberts is a bestseller by any definition. Wikipedia says the books are all romance novels, so I’m
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John Henderson: Celebrating the Great White North
When he arrived in Yellowknife, back in 2004, with his wife, Serena, and baby daughter, Janessa, it didn’t occur to John Henderson that he might
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Where the Trump family fortune got started
“I’m a fifty-pager,” says Whitehorse writer Pat Ellis, commenting on her preference for producing short history booklets. Her latest, Financial Sourdough Starter Stories—“The Trump Family,
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A dystopian life near the Blackstone River
The Wolves of Winter is Tyrell Johnson’s first published novel. It’s set in the Yukon, but he hadn’t actually been here until he came to Whitehorse for last month’s Yukon Writers’ Festival.
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The Northern Review looks at literature
The Northern Review, which is published by the School of Liberal Arts at the Yukon College, describes itself as “a multidisciplinary journal exploring human experience in the Circumpolar North.
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Putting Canada 150 between two covers
CBC/Radio-Canada got involved in the Canada 150 sesquicentennial celebrations in a big way, starting about a year earlier with an open call for submissions to be put in a 2017 yearbook.
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Looking back at Canada’s Centennial Year
When we look back on Canada’s sesquicentennial year (and yes, I did look it up to make sure I spelled it correctly), what will we think of it?
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13 Ways to look at Canada
With I Am Canada – A Celebration (North Winds Press) Heather Patterson has come up with a novel way of assembling an overview of special things about our country.
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Strange things won from the midnight sun
In keeping with this column’s focus on Yukon related material, I’m returning this week to a successful thriller that is set in a version of
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A tale of Arctic exploration
Yukon author Eva Holland has taken advantage of Amazon’s Kindle Singles format to produce what might have been a 45-page volume about the early history of Arctic exploration.
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Drifting Home covers 3 generations of Bertons
Summer, 1972 Pierre Berton recreated a trip he had taken back in the 1930s rafting from Bennett Lake to Dawson City.
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The Northern Review remembers World War I
Volume 44 of The Northern Review contains the complete list of the papers from The North and the First World War Conference that was held in Whitehorse, and in Dawson City, May 9-12 2016.
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People who crafted the promise of Canada
Continuing this series of reviews of books that deal with the Canadian identity and, to an extent, with the idea of Canada at 150, we
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Poking Fun at Some National Icons on Our Birthday
During a year when there have been a lot of serious books written about our national identity, it stands to reason that a nation that
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Yukon’s Fictional Geography
Dan Carruthers’ more recent thriller, Anya Unbound (2017), introduces us to Sean Carson, a recovering widower, who stumbles across a 17-year-old Polish girl on the
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Remembering Canada’s Centennial Year
I was in Grade 10 in 1967. For some reason my school provided high school students with tree saplings to take home and plant. Why
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Books to Celebrate 150 years of Canada
The Story of Canada in 150 Objects Canadian Geographic & The Walrus Magazine format 130 pages plus pullouts $15 On an older note, there are
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Early Adventures in Yukon Tourism
Watching visitors to town wander about taking pictures of things that seem quite ordinary to those of us who live here is a reminder that
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A Close Look at the Klondike’s Frozen Gold
While we are on the cusp of a new gold rush in the Klondike, an era of exploration that is seeing a gradual shift from
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