A Land Gone Lonesome: An Inland Voyage Along the Yukon River Book

Part travelogue, part adventure, part love letter to a vanishing world, this is an expedition into the heart of our past in the tradition of Coming into the Countryand Goodbye to a River In his square-sterned canoe, Alaska resident Dan O'Neill set off from Dawson, Yukon Territory, onetime site of the Klondike gold rush, to trace the majestic Yukon River. His journey down river to Circle City, Alaska, is more than one man's voyage into northern wilderness; it's an expedition into the history of the river and its land, and a record of the inimitable and little-known inhabitants of the region. In A Land Gone Lonesome, O'Neill blends natural history with human history into a piece of brilliant literary travel writing. Though he spends much of his time on the river, at the heart of O'Neill's story are his forays into the Yukon wilderness and into the lives of a few souls still clinging to the old ways in a beautiful and hostile country-men like "Charley River" Charlie in his dog-fur vest and "The Iron Man of the Yukon" Percy DeWolfe-even as government policies are extinguishing people like them. More than just colorful anachronisms, these wilderness dwellers are a living archive of North American pioneer values. As O'Neill encounters these characters, he finds himself drawn into the bare-knuckle melodrama of their outmoded lives-and further back still into the very origins of the Yukon River world. With the singular perspective of an insider, O'Neill has painted an intelligent, rhapsodic-and, ultimately, probably the last-portrait of the Yukon and its authentic inhabitants.Read More