Klondike Gold (review)

Bill Howell was bored and going nowhere as a shop clerk when, in 1897, his friend Joe burst in with the news that gold had been discovered in the Yukon and was lying there for the plucking. "Without a backward glance," narrates Bill, "we pooled what savings we had," and they invested in tickets and equipment for their get-rich-quick adventure. As Bill relates their experiences making their way across the border, laboriously hauling and caching their supplies along a frozen trail, and staking and working a claim, an illustrative frieze, captioned in fine print, runs along the bottom of each spread and comments more generally on how other gold-seekers' experiences might have diverged from theirs. The text is sandwiched between a half-page double spread up top and this narrower ribbon of illustration at the bottom, both capturing in Provensen's naïve style the townscapes and wild vistas encountered by the adventurers; in several cases, pictures speak more clearly than text as to the technical side of gold mining. Although Howell's narration has an authentically autobiographical ring, and the jacket flap states this is "based on the true story of one young prospector," it's never entirely clear whether Howell himself is a fictional creation or whether he was an actual miner whose exploits have been repackaged for children's consumption. Nonetheless, Howell's tale is engrossing, and when he and his partner leave the Yukon after one season with a substantial fortune and still have had quite enough of prospecting, thank you, readers can begin to appreciate how toil and peril generally outweighed nuggets and gold dust.