Klondike Friday: Mud

I sometime thought that in later years, if I should be so lucky, the thing I would remember most about Dawson, in this summer of 1898, was the mud. The town had been built with no thought for anything other than access to the gold fields. Inconveniences such as being located on a floodplain, on the flats beside one river and at the mouth of another, right at the spot where the rivers would jam during spring break-up, were inconsequential in light of the town’s desperate need to be at the road to the Creeks where lumps of gold waited to be found.
-Fiona MacGillivray, Gold Fever (Dundurn Press).

Mud.

And a lot of it. Dawson City was built where the Klondike River flows into the Yukon River. A good location for a town, near a waterway, close to the gold fields. But it was also a floodplain. When the ice broke up on the river in May of 1898, the newly arrived townsfolk discovered just what a poor choice of site it was. There are pictures of the Mounties crossing from one building in Fort Herchmer to another in a canoe (sorry can’t find such a picture today, I’ll keep an eye out for it ).

Every tree for miles around had been hacked down for lumber, firewood, and to make room for houses. All that water had nothing stopping it.

The streets were, literally seas of mud. The mud could be as high as a horse’s knees. Duckboards were laid across the streets so people could get across. And mud, as we all know, breeds insects and disease. Never mind what it must have been like trying to keep the floors clean!









GOLD WEB the fourth book in the series, will be released on December 28th.  It is now available for pre-order from all your usual sources including Amazon.ca, Amazon.com Chapters.ca And don't forget your favourite independent bookstore.  (Pre-orders apply to paperback only. E-books will be available on publication date)

THIRTEEN: AN ANTHOLOGY

I have a story in a just-released anthology of crime stories.  The book is titled Thirteen, because it just happens to have thirteen stories.  The contributors are a group of women writer friends from Southern Ontario, and range from never-before-published, to Canadian-bestsellers.

My story is titled SORE FEET AND GOLD DUST and is set in the Klondike in 1898, during the Great Klondike Gold Rush.  If you are a fan of Fiona MacGillivrary, you'll be delighted to hear that Fiona makes a small appearance in the story.
The book is now available on Kindle, and will be released in paperback (with very limited distribution) some time in October.  So, if you're a fan of short stories, looking for something new and different, why not give it a try?

Here's a sample:

Sore Feet and Gold Dust: A Story of the Klondike

By Vicki Delany

My feet hurt. My boots don’t fit too well, and my feet always hurt at this time of night.

Six a.m. The musicians are packing up their instruments and the men are being shown the door. Sometimes there’s trouble: a drunk wants to keep on dancing or shouts for the band to keep playing, but not often it’s anything bad enough to bother us. The bouncers here are good, and the regular customers know the rules and don’t want any stranger messing up things for everyone.

Mrs. MacGillivray, co-owner of the Savoy Saloon and Dance Hall, smiles at a big spender. I wonder how she keeps that smile on her face, with her ear turned just so towards the man and her chin pointed forward in rapt attention. He’s almost melting under her charm. Here it comes: he’s asking her if she’d like to get a bite of supper. Then he laughs, blushing and pulling at his tattered collar, telling her he’d say breakfast except that sounds so improper. She lets the smile fade slightly and her face fills with regret. “No, thank you,” she says. No excuses, no perhaps another time. Just no.

All she wants is a quiet life: Fiona MacGillivray guests at Killer Characters

Fiona MacGillivray, owner of the Savoy Saloon and Dance Hall in Dawson City, 1898, guests today at the fun blog Killer Characters. Head on over to see what she has to say about her adventures and about being a character in a book. http://www.killercharacters.com/

In Depth Interview with Fiona MacGillivray

Fiona has been interviewed extensively over at the Historical Mystery Blog. See what she has to say about her life and times. Click here.

Klondike Fridays: A newspaper story run amok.

The Promised Land. Not.

In her book Gold Diggers (a non-fiction account of the Klondike Gold Rush) Charlotte Gray points out that the rush was largely a journalistic or media event.

That there was gold in the Yukon was not exactly a big secret. People had been mining there and finding gold for more than twenty years. So what happened in 1897 that set off a world wide rush that saw tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, of people from all parts of the world packing up all their worldly belongings and rushing into the wilderness?

Media.



There was a severe depression going on in the United States. When word arrived that a ship was heading to Seattle, carrying gold and now-rich gold miners, the newspapers, particularly the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Seattle Times, saw the opportunity to pump up the business prospects of Seattle. And they played it up for all it was worth. They made the arrival of the Portland in July 16, 1897 into a media event of unprecedented proportions. Other papers, of course, picked it up, and the news spread to a highly receptive audience like wildfire.

The amount of gold in that first shipment wasn’t really all that impressive. The papers reported it in weight – which did sound pretty good – rather than value – nothing too special.

Once the story had legs, as they say in the newspaper biz, everyone else was jumping on the bandwagon. Outfitting shops sprouted overnight, stores put ads in newspapers and hung signs and banners, books and maps were printed by the boatload, and everyone with a boat rushed to the docks to provide transportation. That the books and maps were likely to be laughably inaccurate, and the goods one supposedly needed wouldn’t do much other than take money from a wanna-be prospector’s pocket, was of no relevance. People needed to believe and other people were happy to take advantage of that need.

Unfortunately for the tens of thousands who made it to the Klondike, the reality was a lot different. There wasn't gold lying on the ground waiting to be swept up, and the profitable mines were already owned by those who’d been in the area when the strike happened.

The only real money to be made was in the shops or the saloons and dance halls.

Enter Fiona MacGillivray.

Modesty Blaise

My ode to Modesty Blaise is posted on The Rap Sheet. Modesty, in some small way, was an inspiration for the character of Fiona MacGillivray.