Alaska

1914 · 61710 — Los Angeles: Times-Mirror Printing and Binding House 1914. 8vo. 281 1 pp. With photo frontisp. photo plates plates illustrations historiated initials. Pictorial blue publisher’s cloth cover art in gilt silver & red of musher on an iceflow gilt lettering on spine minor shelfwear slight rubbing still VG bright copy from the library of former California State Librarian Gary Kurutz and Joseph Luke Janulaw 1893-1937 a Los Angeles CA fireman w/ ownership markings on front pastedown. First edition of this sensationalistic Klondike gold rush memoir recounting the experiences of 18 gold seekers from the YMCA setting out from New York Feb. 1 1897. After voyaging on a condemned brigantine with a drunken captain they purportedly attempted the Malaspina Glacier trek to the gold fields traversing from Yakutat Bay across the Wrangell-St. Elias range and dropping into the headwaters of the Tanana and Yukon Rivers. The absorbing tale is filled with contradictions as it relates the loss of three into ice crevasses madness while wintering in a cabin starving retreat across icefields and finally rescue by a passing revenue cutter. See: Terrence Cole Klondike Literature: These Alaska Gold Rush Tales Share a Prominent Characteristic with the Region’s Mountainous Terrain -- They are Very Tall. Columbia Magazine WHS 2008 Vol. 22 No. 2 pp. 9-16; Kurutz Klondike & Alaska Gold Rushes A Descriptive Bibliography 172. Times-Mirror Printing and Binding House, hardcover