Now available from Harbour Publishing! A lavishly illustrated volume of Klondike frontier history.

"During the Klondike Gold Rush, sternwheeled steamboats were the key mode of transportation. This book tells the dramatic story of these amazing boats, the people who built and ran them, and the services they gave to a vast, lonely, frenzied, challenging frontier. Like Turner's 17 other books of transportation history, it combines meticulously researched text with stunning photographs, here over 500 (including rare colour images)"--

-A middle grade biography of Jack London that sheds light on how he drew upon adventure and life experience to create works of literature---

Now in paperback: A special edition celebrates the 100th anniversary of the Klondike gold rush -- written by Canada's leading popular historian and illustrated with over 200 rare period photographs.

As the Klondike gold rush peaked in spring 1898, adventurers and gamblers rubbed shoulders with town-builders and gold-panners in Skagway, Alaska. The flow of riches lured confidence men, too—among them Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith (1860–98), who with an entourage of “bunco-men” conned and robbed the stampeders. Soapy, though, a common enough criminal, would go down in legend as the Robin Hood of Alaska, the “uncrowned king of Skagway,” remembered for his charm and generosity, even for calming a lynch mob. When the Fourth of July was celebrated in ’98, he supposedly led the parade. Then, a few days later, he was dead, killed in a shootout over a card game. With Smith’s death, Skagway rid itself of crime forever. Or at least, so the story goes. Journalists immediately cast him as a martyr whose death redeemed a violent town. In fact, he was just a petty criminal and card shark, as Catherine Holder Spude proves definitively in “That Fiend in Hell”: Soapy Smith in Legend, a tour de force of historical debunking that documents Smith’s elevation to western hero. In sorting out the facts about this man and his death from fiction, Spude concludes that the actual Soapy was not the legendary “boss of Skagway,” nor was he killed by Frank Reid, as early historians supposed. She shows that even eyewitnesses who knew the truth later changed their stories to fit the myth. But why? Tracking down some hundred retellings of the Soapy Smith story, Spude traces the efforts of Skagway’s boosters to reinforce a morality tale at the expense of a complex story of town-building and government formation. The idea that Smith’s death had made a lawless town safe served Skagway’s economic interests. Spude’s engaging deconstruction of Soapy’s story models deep research and skepticism crucial to understanding the history of the American frontier.

February 5, 1898. Witnesses report a giant orange fireball reflected in the glacial waters of Alaska's Lynn Canal. At the height of Klondike gold fever, the Clara Nevada disappeared into an epic storm-- taking passengers and priceless cargo with her. Was the explosion an accident or a robbery gone wrong? Did Captain C.H. Lewis make off with $165,000 ($13.6 million in today's currency) in raw gold? Or was the sinking a case of a sea-weary steamer meeting an untimely end? Alaska historian Steven C. Levi combs the archives to piece together the true account of the Clara Nevada's final voyage, attempting to solve the riddle of the lost steamer that resurfaced ten years after that tragic night and became known as Alaska's ghost ship.

In 1896, a small group of prospectors discovered a stunningly rich pocket of gold at the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon rivers, and in the following two years thousands of individuals traveled to the area, hoping to find wealth in a rugged and challenging setting. Ever since that time, the Klondike Gold Rush - especially as portrayed in photographs of long lines of gold seekers marching up Chilkoot Pass - has had a hold on the popular imagination. In this first environmental history of the gold rush, Kathryn Morse describes how the miners got to the Klondike, the mining technologies they employed, and the complex networks by which they obtained food, clothing, and tools. She looks at the political and economic debates surrounding the valuation of gold and the emerging industrial economy that exploited its extraction in Alaska, and explores the ways in which a web of connections among America’s transportation, supply, and marketing industries linked miners to other industrial and agricultural laborers across the country. The profound economic and cultural transformations that supported the Alaska-Yukon gold rush ultimately reverberate to modern times. The story Morse tells is often narrated through the diaries and letters of the miners themselves. The daunting challenges of traveling, working, and surviving in the raw wilderness are illustrated not only by the miners’ compelling accounts but by newspaper reports and advertisements. Seattle played a key role as “gateway to the Klondike.” A public relations campaign lured potential miners to the West and local businesses seized the opportunity to make large profits while thousands of gold seekers streamed through Seattle. The drama of the miners’ journeys north, their trials along the gold creeks, and their encounters with an extreme climate will appeal not only to scholars of the western environment and of late-19th-century industrialism, but to readers interested in reliving the vivid adventure of the West’s last great gold rush.

By the thousands they came, the gold-seekers of 1897, pouring through Alaska's White and Chilkoot passes on their way to the Klondike and to fortune. Fast behind them came the entrepreneurs, the bunco artists, and before long, the engineers and financiers whose driving ambition was to build a railway through the White Pass's rocky precipices. This is the epic northern adventure of the men who rushed for gold, the workers who toiled in winter storms and thaw-time muck, carving the grade and laying rail, and the ingenious characters who dreamed, schemed, promoted, and finally built the White Pass and Yukon Railway.

A powerful tale of the Pacific Northwest in the 1950s, reminiscent of To Kill a Mockingbird. Courtroom drama, love story, and war novel, this is the epic tale of a young Japanese-American and the man on trial for killing the man she loves.