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In his square-sterned canoe, Alaskan author Dan O’Neill set off down the majestic Yukon River, beginning at Dawson, Yukon Territory, site of the Klondike gold rush. The journey he makes to Circle City, Alaska, is more than a voyage into northern wilderness, it is an expedition into the history of the river and a record of the inimitable inhabitants of the region, historic and contemporary. A literary kin of John Muir’s Travels in Alaska and John McPhee’s Coming into the Country, A Land Gone Lonesome is the book on Alaska for the new century. Though he treks through a beautiful and hostile wilderness, the heart of O’Neill’s story is his exploration of the lives of a few tough souls clinging to the old ways-even as government policies are extinguishing their way of life. More than just colorful anachronisms, these wilderness dwellers-both men and women-are a living archive of North American pioneer values. As O’Neill encounters these natives, he finds himself drawn into the bare-knuckle melodrama of frontier life-and further back still into the very origins of the Yukon river world. With the rare perspective of an insider, O’Neill here gives us an intelligent, lyrical-and ultimately, probably the last-portrait of the river people along the upper Yukon.… (more)
User reviews
The book itself is very well researched and tackles a paradoxical problem of human relationship's with wilderness. We create preserves to prevent the destruction of a landscape, but the point of the preserve is it's development by humans in the past and human subsistence methods such as fishing, logging, hunting. It may seem like a clear cut argument to not allow any development at all in a national preserve but O' Neill makes a very clear case against the National Park's policies.
I found many similarities to the issues associated to the Chilkoot Pass Trail and their attempts to preserve history and block any changes to the landscape. For instance, take the case of trash as an artifact. There is a cut off date for when trash becomes historically significant. Anything after certain year need to be removed and leaving trash in the park is obviously forbidden. However, any "trash", like an old coffee can, or bent nails is an "artifact" which you are not supposed to remove from the park, or in some instance even touch.
In addition to general history, O'Neill uses interviews, legal records, policy documents, artifacts and oral history to illustrate his journey down the river. I found it very interesting and I highly recommend anyone journeying into the Yukon Charley Preserve to give it a read.