Book of the Week!

Did you watch the Discover Channel TV show, Klondike?  Adapted from Charlotte Gray's superb non-fiction account of the Gold Rush, Gold Diggers,  it was a travesty!  A good, real Canadian story turned into an American Western complete with shootouts and even a murder, that never happened either in real life or in Gray's book.

My Klondike Mystery series is fiction, and claims to be nothing else, but I got the hiostiry a lot better than the TV producers did.

And, to prove it, you can try the first in my series, Gold Digger, FREE for e-readers. In fact, it's the book of the week for iTunes!

How great is that!

Klondike Friday. Juba, South Sudan:

Gold Web is now available, so this will be the last Klondike Friday for this go-round. I hope you've all enjoyed it.  This week I'm reprinting a piece I wrote on my first visit to South Sudan back in 2011. The situation has suddenly become dire in Juba, and I am very concerned. So here is my small wish for hope and peace in a very troubled land.  (Yes, I was writing Gold Web when I was there!)

Kayaking the Nile, outside Juba, South Sudan

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Juba, South Sudan: 2011; Dawson City, Yukon: 1898
While I’ve been spending the last few weeks visiting my daughter in Juba, South Sudan, I’ve been working on Gold Web, the fourth Klondike Gold Rush mystery novel.

Seems like Juba would hardly be an inspiration, doesn’t it?

But the two places are surprisingly similar.

Take the streets. In Dawson the town flooded so much in the spring of 1897 that the Mounties needed a canoe to get from one building to another across the parade square. The town was built on a flood plain at the joining to two rivers. When it rained the streets turned into muddy passages so deep that the mud might come up to the top of a waggon wheel or to a horse’s knees. In Juba, the streets are mostly unpaved, and unmaintained. Potholes the size of a small car, open manholes, rocks and garbage and debris. I haven’t been here in the rainy season, but I shudder to contemplate.

The people. People from all over the world poured into the Klondike in search of fortune. Most of them were ill-equipped, to say the least, to live in an arctic mining town. The only ones who really made money were those who ‘mined the miners’: dance hall owners, shop owners, etc.

People from all over the world are here in Juba: aid workers from NGOs and foreign governments; people from other African countries setting up business large and small. Kenyans seem to have a monopoly on the car rental and taxi businesses, Eritreans on water delivery; Turks are building the new road to Umulei; Ugandan and Kenyan women staff restaurants and bars. White 4*4s stamped UN fill the streets along with most of the major NGOs. I have met people from Canada, UK, US, Holland, Botswana, Kenya, Germany, Ethiopia, France, South Africa, Sweden, Australia. Most of whom seem to get along in a joyous muddle.
The City. The Klondike was a rough and tumble mining town carved out of the sub-arctic wilderness. People lived in shacks made out of green wood or in canvas tents (in the winter!) and what buildings there were, were constructed with more speed than skill. This city isn’t much different. It was just a garrison town for the Northern forces for the years of the civil war. Only with the CPA in 2005 and the subsequent independence did the city start to grow. And growing it is. Construction is everywhere. Housing is a problem as people are pouring in, not only from other countries as mentioned above to take advantage of the new economic opportunities, but from the countryside. Most housing is still in tin shacks or traditional mud huts.

Environment. Cough. Hack. In Dawson sawdust covered everything, all the time. They were cutting down the forest as fast as possible and turning all that wood into boats and buildings and firewood. In Juba at this time of year not only is dust everywhere, but the farmers are burning their fields and smoke is thick in town. Neither were places for people with breathing difficulties. In Dawson there was one or two public toilets (depending on my sources) for a city of 30,000. No plumbing, no electricity, no telephone (They got electricity and telephone in 1899). In Juba, I don’t know how many public toilets there are but I’ve learned not to leave home without using one. The ‘western’ style houses have private garbage disposal and sanitation removal: the shanties, nope. What do you do without garbage collection or running water? Think about it.

The Wildlife: Zip. Nada. What else happens when the wilderness is destroyed and the people move in.

The future. There was no future for Dawson City. The gold rush ended abruptly in the summer of 1899 and everyone fled for other prospects. The era of the great gold rushes was over: most mining would be done by companies now, with industrial equipment and scientific innovations. By the early 20th century the city was pretty much a ghost town. It’s revived today, but the population is about 8,000 (it had been 30,000 in summer 1898) and it’s mostly a tourist town, reliving its glory days.

For Juba? There are difficulties to be sure: Crime is on the increase; war with the North still threatens; there are ethic and regional disputes. But everyone is optimistic and the energy is fantastic. I’m looking forward to coming back in a year or two and seeing how it’s progressed.

Klondike Friday – An Armada

It’s well known that the route to the Klondike in 1897-98 was nothing if not difficult. The photographs of a line of men and sometimes women climbing steadily up the Chilkoot trail, carrying a portion of their one ton of goods on their backs, is iconic. So iconic it’s featured on Alaska licence plates. (I’ve always thought it a bit ironic that the Alaska licence plate proudly features people LEAVING Alaska).

But lesser known perhaps is what those would-be prospectors faced once they reached the summit. Could they take a rest and congratulate themselves on making it? Was it smooth sailing the rest of the way? A gentle stroll down the mountainside followed by a leisurely cruise?

Not exactly.

Because once they reached the summit, and were inspected by the Mounties posted there and allowed to go forward, there was, of course, nothing until they got to Dawson City. Eight Hundred kilometres of nothing.
The only way to get to Dawson from here was by water, up the Yukon River. As there wasn’t exactly a port at the lakes, they had to build their own boats – and then navigate a river full of rapids through the wilderness.

And build boats they did, out of green wood they hacked out of the wilderness forest themselves. And not a canoe, but something that would transport all of their party and everyone’s ton of goods. While they waited the winter out on the shores of Lake Bennett for the river ice to break up. One day ice clogged the waterway, the next day it did not. And the armada set off. Just imagine a wilderness river, barely disturbed by so much as a paddle in all the years of its existence. Suddenly tens, then hundreds, of craft arrive. Canoes and rowboats, scows and barges, rafts that were living trees a few days before. Billowing with sails made out of the sides of tents or tarpaulins.

As this was Canada, and not the ‘wild west’ the Mounties kept an eye on the proceedings, they inspected the boats for some minimal degree of seaworthiness, and those they feared not capable of operating their craft were ordered to learn water skills first. At various points where the rapids were strong the police ordered women and children out of the boats to walk around.



Many boats and many possessions and even some lives were lost on the river. Imagine carrying all that stuff up the Chilkoot trail and over the summit only to watch it sink to the bottom of the mighty river.

GOLD WEB, the fourth book in the Klondike Gold Rush series, is now available for pre-order for both paper and ebook versions.  Click for Amazon.ca, Amazon.com, Kobo, Chapters.ca or remember your favourite independent bookstore.

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)

Klondike Friday: Sex and Sin in the Klondike

Dawson City in 1897-98 Yukon might have been a freewheeling town, full of open prostitution, legalized gambling, and saloons that stayed open twenty four hours a day, but somethings remained completely traditional
In the Yukon as in the rest of Europe and North America at the time, there was a very strict social strata, particularly as it affected women.
Married women occupied the top rung of respectability. Some of that respectability varied of course according to the status of their husband. Then came the few businesswomen. Whether wealthy business owners such as Belinda Mulrooney or a dressmaker or the proprietor of a hat shop. Nurses and teachers would have fallen into this category.



Then we hit what was known as the demimonde. And the majority of gold rush women who made their living ‘mining the miners’. The top of those ranks were the headliners in the dancehalls. These women could make a lot of money, but it was an expensive occupation – they provided their own stage costumes and were expected to change them often. The next tier was the chorus dancers. Not headliners but still stage performers. The rung below – percentage girls. These were the women who moved in after the stage show was over to dance with the men for the legendary dollar a dance. One dollar got some lonely sourdough or cheechako a one minute turn around the dance hall and then he could expect his lady to drag him off to the bar to buy a drink – included in the dance price. They got 25 cents out of every dollar dance. Most of these women simply wore their street clothes to work. They would have worked hard too – from midnight to six or eight am six days a week, dancing constantly.

Let’s keep going down. The few independent prostitutes, some of whom ran their business under the guise of a cigar store and the employees of the better class brothels. Below them, the cheaper brothels, and then at the very bottom, the women who worked out of the cribs on Paradise Alley. Many of these poor women didn’t earn much, if anything, at all. First they had to pay for their transportation to the Klondike, then the rent on their cribs, and pay off pimps.



Information on social strata found in Gamblers and Dreamers by Charlene Porsild.

Klondike Friday: Women in the Klondike

With the publication of Gold Web, the fourth book in the Klondike Gold Rush series only two months away, I’m mentally back in the Klondike.

Today, I’m going to recommend some books that I used as research for the history of the time. The definitive book on the subject is Pierre Berton’s Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush. A highly readable popular-history book, it’s well worth starting your historical investigation with. One thing about Berton though, is that he does gloss over women’s participation. (Hardly the first historical record to do so). It’s estimated that about one-sixth of the people who went to the Klondike were women. And not just prostitutes and dance hall owners either. But businesswomen, shopkeepers, nurses, nuns, newspaper reporters, wives and mothers. They carried their babies up the Chilkoot trail or lugged pregnant bellies and tried to make homes out of the wilderness and created successful (or not-so-successful) businesses. They supported themselves, or they supported their families.

Charlotte Gray’s book: Gold Diggers: Striking it Rich in the Klondike, examines, among others, Belinda Mulrooney, prominent businesswoman.

I’d recommend Also Gamblers and Dreamers: Women, Men, and Community in the Klondike. by Charlene Porsild

And Goodtime Girls of the Alaska-Yukon Gold Rush by Lael Morgan for a peek into the demimonde.

And now, a word from our sponsor: Pre-orders are important to build interest in a book (and usually at a reduced price) Gold Web is available for Pre-Order at a reduced price.

From Amazon.ca, From Amazon.com, From Chapters/Indigo. Also your favourite independent bookstore.

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.

Whitehorse and the Yukon

We finished our fabulous visit to Yellowknife and then flew to Whitehorse, the capital of the Yukon Territory.

Whitehorse is still a wilderness city, but much more tourist oriented than Yellowknife.  Almost the first thing you notice, after the mountains, is the plethoria of coffee shops.  Barbara and I instantly fell into the habit of beginning our morning with coffee and scones at Baked.

So far, we've spoken to the Toastmasters, presented at the Whitehorse Library, given a workshop at the library in Haines Junction, driven to Skagway, Alaska for a presentaiton at the Klondike Gold Rush National Park and signed at Skagway News Depot, and also had a signing at the famous bookstore Mac's Fireweed in Whitehorse.  It makes for a lot of driving and action packed days.

Including the flat tire after our event in Haines Junction!
But the excitement never ends and we still have a mystery lovers panel in Whitehorse, an appearance at the MacBride Museum, and another book signing. Plus a trip to Pelly Crossing to speak at the library and then to the Dawson City Museum.

Gosh, I'm tired just typing all that.

But it's been all fun too, and tonight the university students who are staying in our B&B prior to heading out to a dig, had a BBQ in the back yard.  Barbara and I were invited and had a great time.

Enough chat. Here are some pictures.

Klondike and Titanic: A Lot in Common

Over the past week people have been fascinated by the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic.

What is it about this ship that has captured our attention for so long? Plenty of other disasters, on sea or land, on which we could have focused our attention.

But the Titanic stands above all for a story we are drawn to again and again.
I believe that one of the reasons the Titanic is so interesting to us in the 21st century, is that it marked the beginning of the modern era.

I talk a great deal, in public appearances and blog posts, about the Klondike Gold Rush as a time of enormous optimism. Tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of people set off, on foot, across the continent, over the mountains, because they believed that though hard work and a bit of luck they could make their fortune.

Most did not. Most of them found nothing but hardship and toil. By the time news of the great gold strike reached the Outside world, the best claims were taken by the miners who were already there. All the tens of thousands of late-comers could do was get a job working someone else’s claim or turn around and go back home.
The only people who really made money where those who “mined the miners”, like my protagonist, Fiona MacGillivray, the owners of dance halls and saloons and other businesses.



The dawn of the 20th century was a time of great optimism. Everyone looked forward to the wonders the future would bring. In Gold Digger, Mrs. Mann tells Angus MacGillivray, twelve years old, when he wishes they had a telephone, “many wonderful things you’ll see in your lifetime, dear.”

Yet many of the new things in the 20th century weren’t exactly wonderful. Angus is 12 years old in 1898. He’ll be twenty-seven in 1914, and we know what that means.
Same with the Titanic. It was an unsinkable ship, the marvel of the era. No need for adequate lifeboats, they wouldn’t be necessary.

Technology and ingenuity would be all one would need.

And we all know how that turned out.

The sinking of the Titanic was a turning point in the sense of optimism that had greeted the arrival of the 20th century. As those Klondike would-be prospectors had discovered fourteen years before, perhaps the new century wasn’t going to be as wonderful as everyone expected.




Both events merely set the stage for the beginning of the truly modern world in August of 1914.

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/

Klondike Friday: Law and Order (Sometimes)

In Gold Mountain, the third in the Klondike Gold Rush Series, due out next April from Dundrun Press, there are some flashbacks to when Fiona and Angus first arrived in Skagway, Alaska in August of 1897. Fiona’s on the run from the law in Toronto. She has no intention of going on the difficult trip to Dawson, and thinks it might be a nice idea to set up a theatre in Skagway, something for the entertainment of all the eager prospectors sure to follow.

Then she has an encounter with the legendary outlaw Randolph Jefferson Smith, and decides it expedient to take her prospects across the border into Canada and then to Dawson City.

Smith (aka Soapy) is a real historical character and I did a fair amount to research into him for his small part in this book. There was pretty much nothing in Skagway before July of 1897, when news of the gold strike hit the cities of the south and tens of thousands of people headed north. Skagway, and nearby Dyea, were the jumping-off points for the interior. Passengers travelled by ship from Seattle, San Francisco, Vancouver or Victoria and disembarked at Skagway or Dyea to head overland into Canada.

The aforementioned Mr. Smith, who got his nickname from a confidence game involving a bar of soap, was one of the first on the scene. Seeing an opportunity, he quickly took over the town, and ruled Skagway for the next year.

What little there was in the way of law and order, looked the other way. (The Marshall was in Smith’s pocket.)

Smith was killed in July of 1898 in a shootout on the Skagway waterfront. His killer died of his own wounds a few days later. The picture of Smith on the horse was taken was he was the Grand Marshall of the July 4th parade, but a few days before his death.



Meanwhile, at the top of the Chilkoot Trail, at the Canadian border, the North-West Mounted Police kept a Maxim Machine Gun with the express purpose of keeping Soapy and his gang out of Canada.

Many an American was not impressed to arrive in Canada and find that there were rules and the law was enforced. For example, the NWMP inspected all boats leaving Lake Bennett for sea-worthiness, and insisted that women and children get out and walk around the rapids. In town they kept an eye on the gambling halls and cribs, enforced Sunday closing, and banned firearms from town and the Creeks.

And created a very Canadian version of the not-so-wild west.



The picture to the right is of Sir Sam Steele, who in typical Canadian fashion, gets far less recognition than he deserves.

Klondike Friday: A Day Off

I'm taking a day off today. Yup, a holiday. Normally, when I'm at home I write every day until about noon or one-ish. Yesterday I realzied that summer is ending, I have a fridge full of blueberries, a counter-top covered in tomatoes, and almost nothing made for the freezer. I have books to read and a swimming pool to enjoy while I still can. So I'll take a day off.

But wait - the last-minuite edits for Gold Mountain are due today. I can do those quickly. And it's Klondike Friday!

Sunday was the Lord's Day in the Yukon. Everything was shut down, the bars, the dancehalls, the shops. People could be (and were) fined for chopping wood for their own stoves on a Sunday. So consider this my version of Sunday, and that's the end of Klondike Friday for this week!

One more thing - the release date of Gold Mountain has been moved up to April.

Klondike Friday: Gotta Spend it.

When I sent the manuscript for the first book in the Klondike Gold Rush series, Gold Digger, into my editor she returned it questioning every instance in which I’d specified the amount of money flowing.

Yup, I said, they really did spend money in those quantities.

Very few people made much money in the rush: of all those tens of thousands of people who set off for the Klondike, almost all of them were too late. By the time they heard the news, headed to Seattle or San Francisco or Vancouver, bought the required one ton of possessions, got on a boat to Skagway or Dyea, carried all their things over the passes and into Canada, made a boat and braved the rapids on the Yukon River, and finally arrived in Dawson… all the claims were taken.

There were a few exceptions of prospectors who got lucky, but generally speaking the only ones who truly stuck it rich were already in the area when the initial strike was made.

Aside, that is, from those who mined the miners – the bartenders and dance hall girls and far-sighted shopkeepers.

Yet for those who did strike it rich it was a time of almost unimaginable indulgence. Any luxury available in the South – champagne, oysters, pâté, silk dresses, ostrich plume hats, not to mention real luxuries like fresh eggs! could be had for the right price.




Men dropped ten thousand dollars in a night at the gambling tables (in 1898 dollars!), threw nuggets at the feet of their favourite dance hall performer, bought drinks for all and sundry. A dancer known as Diamond Tooth Gertie (incidentally, you can visit Diamond Tooth Gertie’s in Dawson today) reportedly said, “The poor ginks have just gotta spent it, they’re that scared they’ll die before they have it all out of the ground.”

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.

Klondike Fridays

Time to head back to the wild days of the Klondike Gold Rush. And wild days they were.

Gold Mountain is on schedule for a May 2012 release and I am sitting down this morning to begin plotting out the next Klondike Gold Rush book. No title as of yet, but ideas are simmering. Last night when I pulled out my history books to start getting back into the sense of the time period, I thought it might be fun over the next year to post things of interest on this blog, for anyone wanting to know more about the background to the books. I’ll try to keep to a regular schedule of Klondike Fridays. Yes, yes, today is Saturday, but I only thought of the idea last night.

One of the reasons the Klondike Gold Rush is so well known (and so darned easy to research) is that it was not only the last great gold rush, but it was also the only one to be captured extensively on film.

You all know those iconic images of the lines of packers trudging up a 45 degree slope in the snow.

In the 1890s, the camera and all necessary supplies for it had become small enough that photographers were able to get out of their studios and stiffly posed portraits and take their camera not only into the streets but also the mountains and the gold fields and peoples’ homes. Thus we have a fully documented photographic record of the period.



Some were professional photographers, perhaps the best known of which was Eric A Hegg, who opened a studio in Dawson City and made a living taking photographs of Klondike scenes to sell in an early version of the postcard. There were many amateurs as well, people who loved their cameras and the new art of photographer such as George Hicks. The White Pass & Yukon Route company employed a full time photographer, Harry Barley, to keep company owners and shareholders informed about the progress of the railway.

One of the books I rely most on for my research is The Klondike Quest: A Photographic Essay 1897-1899 by Pierre Berton. It’s a big beautiful book packed with wonderful photos of the amazing people who made the great journey to the promised land.



That the promised land didn’t turn out to be quite so promising will be the subject of my next posting.