Gold Fever! Deadly Cold! And the Amazing True Adventures of Jack London in the Wild

On July 25, 1897, writer Jack London saild to join the Klondike Gold Rush where he would write his first successful stories. An excerpt from the article:

"Because he was only 21, it’s easy to assume that Jack London was innocent and naive when he set out for the Far North. But that wasn’t the case. He grew up poor in a broken home, and at age 15, he joined a gang of prison-hardened oyster pirates who risked their lives in small boats at night, trying to outwit the armed guards who watched over the oyster beds in San Francisco Bay. Jack soon became an expert sailor, and an accomplished drinker and brawler in the waterfront saloons. At 17, he sailed across the Pacific and up to the Bering Sea on a seal-hunting ship. He also worked 16-hour days in a Dickensian canning factory in Oakland, hoboed from coast to coast on freight trains, learned to beg and steal, spent 30 days for vagrancy in a vicious New York jail, and became a confirmed socialist—all by the age of 19.

In July 1897, he had just quit a job in a laundry when the steamship Portland docked in Seattle and the Excelsior in San Francisco. Miners came down the gangplanks hefting three tons of gold from far northwest Canada. Newspapers and telephones spread the word almost instantly, and sparked one of the biggest, wildest, most delusional gold rushes in history. Experienced miners and prospectors were joined by great hordes of factory workers, store clerks, salesmen, bureaucrats, police officers and other city dwellers, most of them completely inexperienced in the wilderness and clueless about the Far North"