STAMPEDE

A tangy tale of the 19th century’s last, storied gold rush, timed for its 125th anniversary.

Journalist and Iraq War veteran Castner, who chronicled a comrade’s battlefield death in the excellent All the Ways We Kill and Die (2016), has a fine time depicting the salty, seldom virtuous figures who drifted north to Alaska following the acquisition of the Russian territory in the purchase known as “Seward’s Folly.” There was no folly in it, for the deal opened up a vast new land to economic exploitation, as manifested by the mass arrival of gold-seekers in 1896. Invoking the rational actor theory of economics, the author observes that the boom served the interests of only a very few people in a whirl of pyramid schemes and other scams: “Perhaps ‘Klondicitis’ was the best term for the infectious cloudiness of reason that ran amok,” he writes, also chronicling the racism and contempt for Native peoples that characterized the era. Soon every loose hand in the world, it seemed, was on the way to Dawson City, Juneau, and points north, looking to get rich. Castner’s dramatis personae includes the best known of them all, Jack London, who arrived poor and left pretty much that same way—but with a trove of stories that he would turn into bestsellers. Others are less well known, including a star-crossed band of New Yorkers who were caught by “avalanches, driving winds, plunging temperatures that broke their thermometers” and were reduced to eating their dogs. There’s a lot of swagger and a lot of swishing skirts in Castner’s pages, rife with entertaining accounts of all seven deadly sins, but many of his unfortunates bow in and disappear, even as “the circus left almost as soon as it arrived.”

A vigorous historical page-turner packed with a cast of decidedly colorful (and off-color) actors.