| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Kathryn Morse. The Nature of Gold: An Environmental History of the Klondike Gold Rush. Foreword by William Cronon. (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Book.) Seattle: University of Washington Press. 2003. Pp. xviii, 290. $29.95.
The Klondike gold rush is perhaps better known as a metaphor than as an actual event. For some, it symbolizes the folly of human nature, the willingness of people to do anything, to go anywhere, in pursuit of gold. Here, one needs only see the photograph of prospectors trudging up Alaska's Chilkoot Pass, their supplies strapped to their backs, their bodies arched forward as they march into the snow-blown nothingness of the arctic. The image conveys the only necessary detail: fired by greed, Americans will do the darnedest things. For readers of the goldrush's most famous writer, Jack London, the Yukon wilderness made the event a symbol of struggle and survival: tales of men battling wind chill and frostbite; social Darwinist novels of citified pets unleashed by "the wild's" call to compete, to become dogsled team leaders, to run at the head of the wolf pack.	1
Kathryn Morse treats the Klondike gold rush as both metaphor and real event. As an event, she argues, it was shaped by connections to the nature of the arctic and the culture of an industrializing United States. As a metaphor, it stands as an example of the ways an industrial people understand nature: ways, she concludes, that have resulted in environmental destruction and the abstraction of labor. As Morse admits, she could have written this book about a can of pork and beans and made many of the same points—without, that is, the sense of drama.	. . .

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