The Great Gold Rush: A Tale of the Klondike

E-text prepared by Iona Vaughan, woodie4, Mark Akrigg, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team (http://www.pgdpcanada.net)
There is a freemasonry among Klondikers which rules that no tales shall be told out of school. If, therefore, this were an historical novel, if I were telling tales and seeking to escape censure by the subterfuge of changing names, I could hardly succeed. Let me take the case of Poo-Bah, for instance. The reader with a knowledge of the early days of Dawson accepting the story as historical, would fix as the original any one of half a dozen men indecently caricatured. But if he is told the character is a composite one, that it is the personification of Dawson graft, or, in other words, that it is the sum of a merger, he will understand and, I think, make no complaint.
Otherwise the story may be accepted as the author's best effort to convey a true account of the different phases of the world's most remarkable stampede. The stories of corruption among the officials in Dawson are those which a visitor would have heard on every hand, and at the present time there are many old-timers in the Yukon who will tell tales similar to the incidents I have introduced in my story.
When one of my characters speaks of the Dawson officials as petty larceny thieves and highway robbers, it is to be understood to be a sample of the phraseology in vogue at the time.
The different types of prospector I have attempted to portray are those I have met, lived with, and mixed with. Should it appear I have given too much space to the humble economies of the miner's life, I shall advance as my excuse the lack of our literature in this particular.
I have also made a humble attempt to establish the respectability of the miner. So much has been written to compromise him, and so many imaginations have drawn lurid pictures of his morals, I feel it his due.
In a general way the reader may accept anything in my story which has none other than an historical interest as being accurate.