Hi everyone,
I don’t know if you know me but I’m Cynthia Woolf. I write historical and contemporary western romance. I have 78 novels so far. 65 historical western romance, mostly mail-order brides and 6 contemporary romances, 2 contemporary western novellas, 2 historical time travel romances featuring angels and a few more stories.
Today I want to talk to you about the Klondike or Yukon Gold Rush. That is where my latest book is set. I also plan on giving away one ebook and one paperback book of The Gold Rush Bride, my latest.
The Klondike Gold Rush was from 1896 to 1899. My books are set in 1898 so basically at the height to the gold rush. It is estimated that about 20,000 men and a few women went north to Alaska and Canada looking for their fortunes. Very few of them actually made a fortune. Most only found enough to pay for their daily needs, if that.
The main town of the rush was Dawson City. It was located at the confluence of the Yukon and Klondike rivers. At the time of my books it was home to about 10,000 men. It was literally wall-to-wall people. The town was made of wood and burned down three times and was built back again.
The route to the gold fields took often six months because it was mostly a foot route. Very few animals made it often dying on the journey over the passes. There were two that were used most prevalently. White Pass and Chilkoot Pass. Chilkoot pass was the one used the most often and is the most famous. Thousands of men started up the pass, some with horses. Hundreds of men and many animals died along the way.
The Klondike Gold fields were in the Canadian Territory. Canada required the rushers to have one year of supplies before they could cross into the Canadian Territory. This was thousands of pounds of equipment and food. The men had to traverse the Chilkoot pass at least twice sometimes three times to get that amount of supplies to the Canadian border. Again, many died on route.
Those that made it were treated to a harsh environment with snow nine months out of the year. Days with only four hours of daylight, so they would have to work by lantern light in the dark. They also had days of twenty hours of daylight and they would work as long as their bodies would let them.
The gold rushers also had to protect their claims from claim jumpers. Men who were too lazy to work their own claims to find gold or had not found any. They would try to take over a producing claim and usually this resulted in death for either the claim jumper or the man whose claim was being jumped upon.
Being a Klondike gold rusher was not for the faint of heart. Most women who managed to make it there ended up working in the brothels though a few worked their claims and some actually found gold.
Here is the blurb for The Gold Rush Bride, so you can see a little bit about and that it intrigues you.
Barnaby Drake made a solemn vow to safeguard Sadie at all costs, honoring a promise to his
estranged business partner. However, when Sadie rejects his proposal to acquire her father’s share of the mine, Barnaby realizes there’s only one avenue left to ensure her safety: marriage.
Initially conceived as a practical arrangement devoid of emotional entanglements, the union takes an unforeseen turn. Barnaby finds himself captivated by his newfound wife, her presence dominating his every waking thought. The question lingers: why can’t he suppress the intense desire to possess her completely, both body and soul?
As an impending threat from an old adversary looms, will Barnaby’s overwhelming infatuation cloud his judgment, preventing him from discerning the truth? In this tale of commitment and peril, the boundaries between duty and desire blur, leading to unexpected revelations that could alter their lives forever.
I hope you’ll enjoy reading The Gold Rush Bride.
Would you have been brave enough to journey to the Klondike gold fields? If so, what you you have taken to help you survive? Be sure and leave a comment, winners of the books will be chosen from the comments left. And come by and chat with me. I’d love to talk to you.
Keli Gwyn here to whisk you back in time. Imagine this. It’s 1866. You own a hydraulic mining operation in California. It’s the middle of the summer. There’s been no rain since May. Rivers are running low. Streams and creeks are drying up. But you need water to operate your mine. What do you do? Read on to find out how two bright men of yesteryear, who lived where I do now, came up with a solution.
Mine owners were happy…provided they had water. In order to get that precious commodity, ditches (canals) were built to divert water from the sources to the mines. The ditches might be able to supply enough water for smaller operations, but the big hydraulic mines needed more than that. John Kirk, an engineer from Pennsylvania, had anticipated this need. A forward thinker, he bought the water rights to many Sierra lakes high above the Gold Country. He and his partner, surveyor Francis A. Bishop, envisioned a canal that would bring water from the mountains to the foothills below. Although their plan for the canal was well thought-out, they’d completed less than one mile when they ran out of funds in 1871.
The monumental task required a massive workforce. Over one thousand Chinese laborers came up from San Francisco, assisted by about a hundred Euro-Americans, mostly Italian. The canal cost the Company between $650,000 and $700,000, or about $25,000 per mile.
I was so impressed by the men who designed and built the El Dorado Canal that I decided to honor them in my August 2016 release, Make-Believe Beau. The hero and heroine of my latest book, Flynt and Jessie, work for the El Dorado Water and Deep Gravel Mining Company. I took fictional license in staffing the engineering department. Flynt is the engineer. Jessie is his newly hired draftswoman, which creates a stir in the office. While the story focuses on their romance—both the feigned one and the real one—I worked in as much of the history of the El Dorado Canal as I could. I’m sneaky that way. 🙂
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