Here are 100 books that Frontier Spirit fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’ve been a novelist all my adult life. My first three books are novels about teenagers, regarded as pioneers in the genre of Young Adult fiction. My inspiration has always been real people, events, and places. Animals, especially dogs have always been part of my life. I turned to adult fiction because I felt the need to write about the full cast of life. City Wolves was inspired, if not driven by my first Malamute, Yukon Sally. With the research she led me to do into wolves, sled dogs, the history of women veterinarians, the real people who were part of the Klondike Gold Rush, I found some marvellous biographies, histories, biological studies, and poetry.
Pierre Berton, a great popular history writer with a big research team, captures the full scope of the Klondike Gold Rush, from its exciting beginning to its bedraggled ending.
A kind of swashbuckling character himself, he grew up in Dawson City then made his way as a talented writer and broadcaster to fame and fortune across Canada. He astutely describes the wide range of characters who rushed to the Klondike from various countries making history in dramatic and sometimes comic ways.
This informative history book is a delight to read.
With the building of the railroad and the settlement of the plains, the North West was opening up. The Klondike stampede was a wild interlude in the epic story of western development, and here are its dramatic tales of hardship, heroism, and villainy. We meet Soapy Smith, dictator of Skagway; Swiftwater Bill Gates, who bathed in champagne; Silent Sam Bonnifield, who lost and won back a hotel in a poker game; and Roddy Connors, who danced away a fortune at a dollar a dance. We meet dance-hall queens, paupers turned millionaires, missionaries and entrepreneurs, and legendary Mounties such as Sam…
I’ve been a novelist all my adult life. My first three books are novels about teenagers, regarded as pioneers in the genre of Young Adult fiction. My inspiration has always been real people, events, and places. Animals, especially dogs have always been part of my life. I turned to adult fiction because I felt the need to write about the full cast of life. City Wolves was inspired, if not driven by my first Malamute, Yukon Sally. With the research she led me to do into wolves, sled dogs, the history of women veterinarians, the real people who were part of the Klondike Gold Rush, I found some marvellous biographies, histories, biological studies, and poetry.
I did a lot of research before writing my book. I’ve always written realistic fiction inspired by real people and places. But this novel was driven by a dog, my first Alaskan Malamute whom I called Yukon Sally.
I’ve always had a dog, some kind of Collie from a farm or an animal shelter. After my youngest daughter flew off to university I thought we could spring for a purebred and chose a Malamute because they come from Arctic wolves.
Intrigued by Yukon’s wolf-like traits I researched wolves then the Malamute breed and took Yukon Sally to the Yukon to study sled dogs and the background of the Klondike Gold Rush which was the glory days of the Malamute sled dogs.
While there, I discovered Bob Hayes’ book and learned some more important facts about wolves. They do not need to be culled. Read it and see why.
Bob Hayes researched wolves in the Yukon for 20 years. Using a combination of narratives and easy-to-follow essays, his book follows the history of the Yukon wolf from the end of the Ice Age to present day. Bob Hayes also explores his original research into wolf relations to moose, caribou, mountain sheep, ravens, grizzly bears and human hunters. The last chapter tells why broad-scale killing of wolves to increase game should end. Finally, Wolves of the Yukon raises profound arguments about how to value and conserve the largest remaining tract of complete wilderness on the continent.
I’ve been a novelist all my adult life. My first three books are novels about teenagers, regarded as pioneers in the genre of Young Adult fiction. My inspiration has always been real people, events, and places. Animals, especially dogs have always been part of my life. I turned to adult fiction because I felt the need to write about the full cast of life. City Wolves was inspired, if not driven by my first Malamute, Yukon Sally. With the research she led me to do into wolves, sled dogs, the history of women veterinarians, the real people who were part of the Klondike Gold Rush, I found some marvellous biographies, histories, biological studies, and poetry.
My main focus in my book is people, Meg Wilkinson the first female veterinarian and other adventurers and pioneers who wound up on the Klondike Gold Rush.
Though the wolf like nature of humans and the human nature of wolves permeates the whole story. I also had to research veterinary history but I found no particular book on that to recommend.
Pauline Johnson did not go to the Klondike but she is a very influential figure of the times and in the life of Meg. I’m a fan of Charlotte Gray’s biographies and I think her biography of Pauline Johnson is the best.
A graceful biography that was a #1 national bestseller, Flint & Feather confirms Charlotte Gray’s position as a master biographer, a writer with a rare gift for transforming a historical character into a living, breathing woman who immediately captures our imagination.
In Flint & Feather, Charlotte Gray explores the life of this nineteenth-century daughter of a Mohawk chief and English gentlewoman, creating a fascinating portrait of a young woman equally at home on the stage in her “Indian” costume and in the salons of the rich and powerful. Uncovering Pauline Johnson’s complex and dramatic personality, Flint & Feather is studded…
I’ve been a novelist all my adult life. My first three books are novels about teenagers, regarded as pioneers in the genre of Young Adult fiction. My inspiration has always been real people, events, and places. Animals, especially dogs have always been part of my life. I turned to adult fiction because I felt the need to write about the full cast of life. City Wolves was inspired, if not driven by my first Malamute, Yukon Sally. With the research she led me to do into wolves, sled dogs, the history of women veterinarians, the real people who were part of the Klondike Gold Rush, I found some marvellous biographies, histories, biological studies, and poetry.
Robert Service became a bank clerk in the Klondike Gold Rush. But that was to support his life as a poet.
At one time he lived and wrote in a log cabin now standing across the road from the house in Dawson City where Pierre Berton grew up. Pierre Berton was born long after Robert Service, but the poems of Robert Service have been popular for generations.
They portray the life and characters of the Yukon around the time of the gold rush. Pierre Berton gave many public performances reciting the whole of Service’s The Shooting of Dan McGrew. No one could do it better. I joined others rising to our feet in applause and whistles.
There is a Malamute Saloon named after a line in that famous poem which I took my Yukon Sally to in Dawson City. My photo of that brings tears to my eyes.
Robert Service wrote in the golden years of the Klondike -- of the rough and ready men, and women just as tough. No-one in Robert's world (real or imagined) minced words or had any self-consciousness about them. It was live and let live and sometimes kill or be killed. Reading his poems transports us back to that frozen place in nature when it was literally every man and every woman for him/herself, yet Robert conveys to us not only a sensitivity (in his poem extolling the simple light switch -- something quite novel in those times, especially in the Klondike),…
My interest in the Klondike gold rush was sparked by a Canadian history course I took as an undergrad. Nearly all the accounts I read then relegated female participants to the sidelines and implied that most were of dubious moral character, but I suspected there was more to the story than that. I started digging and, unlike many Klondikers, I struck gold. Since then I’ve made numerous visits to the Yukon and Alaska, hiked the Chilkoot Trail twice and spent three months as Writer in Residence at Berton House in Dawson City (where I worked on my third gold rush book, Children of the Klondike). Today, I’m still captivated by this colorful, character-rich historic event.
This impeccably researched book by Yukon historian Michael Gates provides the backstory to the 1896 discovery that kicked off the Klondike gold rush. Small numbers of gold-seekers began prowling the creeks of Alaska and the Yukon as early as 1873 and their stories are every bit as fascinating as the stories of those who followed. These men, and the occasional woman, were a particularly hardy lot who put themselves through incredible hardship in hopes of finding a fortune. They were perfectly positioned to beat the rush to the Klondike goldfields and some of them did clean up. But regardless of whether they struck it rich, all of these risk-takers and dreamers helped set the stage for the big event.
The book, based on the accounts of dozens of prospectors, follows the first gold-seekers from their arrival in 1873 until the stampede to the Klondike in 1896. Gates captures the essence of these early years of the gold rush, about which very little has been written. He chronicles the trials, hearbreaks, and successes of the unique and hardy individualists who searched for gold in the wilderness. With names like Swiftwater Bill, Crooked Leg Louie, Slobbery Tom, and Tin Kettle George, these men lived in total isolation beyond the borders of civilization. They were often eccentrics and outcasts, who shaped their…
My interest in the Klondike gold rush was sparked by a Canadian history course I took as an undergrad. Nearly all the accounts I read then relegated female participants to the sidelines and implied that most were of dubious moral character, but I suspected there was more to the story than that. I started digging and, unlike many Klondikers, I struck gold. Since then I’ve made numerous visits to the Yukon and Alaska, hiked the Chilkoot Trail twice and spent three months as Writer in Residence at Berton House in Dawson City (where I worked on my third gold rush book, Children of the Klondike). Today, I’m still captivated by this colorful, character-rich historic event.
The highly readable Wealth Woman, by longtime Alaskan Deb Vanasse, fills a major gap on the Klondike bookshelf. It is the first full biography of Kate Carmack, the Tagish woman who was wife, sister, and aunt to the men whose discovery launched the gold rush. And it flips the conventional Klondike narrative on its head and considers the event from the generally overlooked perspective of the Indigenous communities and individuals whose territories were overrun by gold-seekers.
With the first headlines screaming "Gold! Gold! Gold!" in 1896, the Klondike Gold Rush was on-and it almost instantly became the stuff of legend. One of the key figures in the early discoveries that set off the gold rush was the Tagish wife of prospector George Carmack, Kate Carmack, whose fascinating story is told in full here for the first time.
In Wealth Woman, Deb Vanasse recounts Kate's life from her early years on the frontier with George, through the history-making discovery of gold, and on to her subsequent fame, when she traveled alone down the West Coast through Washington…
Over my past 87 years, I have experienced a multitude of intimate relationships, including “falling in lust,” infidelity, “one-night stands,” one-week trysts to 40-year companionships, two marriages, and fatherhood, but the one that was most lasting and important to me was one of unconditional love.
I love this book because Robert Service is the most famous Canadian author and writes about adventuresome people who don’t fit in.
The poet descriptively pens events foreign to that experienced by most everyday, common people, and romanticizes his characters in such a way
that the reader can’t help but have empathy for them and their situation.
Robert Service, who is known as the “Bard of the Yukon,” is known for his ability to capture the adventure, desolation, and beauty of the Canadian North, and this authoritative collection highlights his most popular works that came to immortalize the Klondike Gold Rush. This expansive edition of the poetry of Robert Service includes his most beloved works, including The Spell of the Yukon and Ballads of a Cheechako, in one beautiful hardbound collection.
Perfect for fans of Jack London and Rudyard Kipling, Service’s work is readable verse that will appeal to adventurers, nature-lovers, and historians. Filled with colorful characters…
I’ve had a passion for northern places ever since I was a kid. I prefer locales that boast plenty of nature and not very many human beings. I’ve been to Greenland 15 times, but only once to Paris and never to Rome (Rome in New York State once). The more remote the locale, the better. Which is why I’ve only once been to Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, but several times to almost never visited villages in East Greenland.
I’m recommending this book because I think it’s the best book ever written about the Klondike Gold Rush. During his numerous adventures, the main character, George Mitchell, finds something far more valuable than gold. The book was so little known that I felt obliged to get it back into print as well as write an introduction to the reissue.
As a child, all I wanted to read were books about adventure. I also had an adventurous childhood, growing up in the Louisiana swamps with a father who actually hunted alligators and took me with him. As I came of age, I longed to tell stories, and, as they say, it’s best to write about what you know. To date, I’ve penned six novels, all set in the exotic wetlands of Cajun, Louisiana. I feel missionary about this—that my writing gifts allow me to decode my homeplace in a way that makes it easier for outsiders to see the singular niche it occupies on the American landscape.
I love this book for its fabulous sense of place, nonstop action, and realistic depiction of the rough-and-tumble Yukon during the 1890s Gold Rush.
The protagonist may be a dog but Buck, the good-heard Saint Bernard we meet as affable and innocent puppy, is I truly believe one of the most unforgettable characters in the history of adventure novels. His transition to a feral state is utterly believable as the book unfolds the darkness that lies at the heart of all too many men and the often violent chain of events that causes Buck to seek a new life.
I have read this book three times, and each time, it continues to amaze me.
Puffin Classics bring together the best-loved stories to a new generation.
In The Call of the Wild life is good for Buck in Santa Clara Valley, where he spends his days eating and sleeping in the golden sunshine. But one day a treacherous act of betrayal leads to his kidnap, and he is forced into a life of toil and danger. Dragged away to be a sledge dog in the harsh and freezing cold Yukon, Buck must fight for his survivial. Can he rise above his enemies and become the master of his realm once again?
I’m Marsali Taylor, a retired teacher of English, French and Drama. I’ve always been interested in women’s history—not queens and countesses, but what life was like for ordinary people like me. A chance to research women’s suffrage in the Scottish National Library got me started reading these women’s stories in their own words—and what stories they were, from the first women graduates to the war workers. Women’s Suffrage in Shetlandtook two years of fascinating research, and Ihope it’s the foundation for more work by other researchers, both here in Shetland and in other communities whose women fought for the vote.
These women did know their place – they’d measured it out, filled in the claim forms, assembled their tiny wood shack cabin or turf –roofed dugout, sewn their corn and dug their vegetable patch. The usual picture of pioneer women is as the mother of the family, but a staggering 12% of those Wild West pioneering homesteaders were single women or widows, and this is the story of over twenty of them. After introductory chapters, it’s told in their voices, through magazine articles, letters back home and memoirs written later. We learn about how they set out on their adventure, the reality of farming and how they coped, and their triumph as they won their claim. Fascinating.
Instead of talking about the rights of women, these frontier women grabbed the opportunity to become landowners by homesteading in the still wild west of the early 1900s. Here they tell their stories in their own words-through letters and articles of the time-of adventure, independence, foolhardiness, failure, and freedom.
