One Man?s Gold Rush: A Klondike Album

When Eric A. Hegg rushed north to Alaska in 1897, he as a journeyman photographer, largely self-trained. He forced a sled load of photographic equipment across the coastal mountains in the dead of winter. He hiked out to the claims on Bonanza and Eldorado, and he poked his camera into the banks and bars and bordellos in Dawson. He rode a paddle-wheel steamer down the Yukon to the Bering and was on the dark sands of the beach at Home when the prospectors swirled gravel in their pans and worked their mechanical rockers. Most important, he was there, high on the Chilkoot Pass in the winter of 1897-98, as the dark-clad men climbed antlike up the frozen steps of The Scales under the burden of a year's supplies.

"Hegg, like Mathew Brady, was a pictorial documentor rather than a camera artist, and he took many of these pictures--of miners at work, miners drunk, miners' womenfolk, miners dead in gunfights, miners in bawdy houses, miners on the trek--to sell to the people in them. What we have, then, is a superbly illustrated and superbly deadpan chronical of a not always attractive but certainly interesting episode in human history." --The New Yorker

"Better than any other record, reflects the folly and the glory of the stampede to the Klondike." --New York Times Book Review