The Floor of Heaven: A True Tale of the Last Frontier \u0026 the Yukon Gold Rush by Howard Blum

The Floor of Heaven: A True Tale of the Last Frontier \u0026 the Yukon Gold Rush Reviews

• 
  Chrissie

  This books reads as fiction, but is classified as non-fiction. The aim of the author is to provide both solid facts and exciting adventure tales relating to gold prospectors’ stampede to the Klondike in the Yukon Territory in Canada 1897-1899. George Washington Carmack (1860 – 1922) started the stampede with his discovery of gold there in August of 1896 on Bonanza Creek. He set his claim, the news spread around the world. “The lust to become rich sparked glittering dreams” and the race began!
  
  This book zeroes in not only on the life of George, but also Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith (1860 – 1896) and Charles Siringo (1855 – 1928). Why three figures and not only one? To show us different aspects of the Gold Rush Era. Soapy, he was a conman, a trickster and a gambler through and through. Let’s just call him a gangster because that is what he was. Charlie, was a cowboy-detective and got a name for himself as a talented Pinkerton detective. George didn’t just discover the gold; he became half Indian too, well at least for a time. We learn about the entire life of the three men and through them we learn about the era.
  At the end of the paper book where sources are provided, the following is stated:
  
  Clearly, anyone setting off to tell a true story about the lives and times of these three men would need to make his way through a deep and murky historical swamp. He’d face the genuine danger—“probability” is undoubtedly more accurate—that he’d soon be knee-deep in a morass of fanciful yarns, self-serving fabrications, and, too often, blatant lies. To write a factual account, he’d need to tread gingerly through some rough historical country. No source—not even a first-person account, or contemporaneous newspaper articles, or, for that matter, an article in a scholarly journal—could be accepted at face value.
  
  I wanted to tell an engaging tale that contained both high drama and a perplexing mystery. And I wanted to write a true story, to boot.
  
  I was determined to make this a factual account, but I also had no plans (or, I admit, the abilities or the expertise) to make this a scholarly historian’s tome; I am, after all, a journalist by training and inclination.
  
  In the audiobook the notes are lacking. An introduction simply tells us that Charlie’s story is based on four first person accounts of his life. Information on Soapy is drawn from his great grandson’s biography of the man. Finally, James Albert Johnson discovered an apple crate of letters (many from George to his sister Rose) and private documents and photos and newspaper articles which provide a wealth of information on Carmack. Nevertheless, one does note the lack of impartial source material.
  
  The author does not provide or analyze conflicting information; he has chosen between alternatives and given an adventurous rip-roaring story…….that is at least for the most part true. I would have preferred a more analytical approach, but that is just my preference. I am not a big fan of adventure stories. At points, I wanted more details, for example about a fortune teller that predicted Charlie would become a detective, and at other points less, the book takes ages to get going. A third or maybe a half of the book has passed until we even get to the Yukon. Given the source material and the author’s wish to tell an engaging story one can assume that the story contains embellishments. This is the impression one gets.
  
  I did get to know Charlie and Soapy and George, both their weak points and their strong points. What does gold do to people? I did get a feel for the life up in the area where gold was discovered and for the dangers involved and the actual process of panning and mining. All three men were married, but one learns only a little about the wives. There is a connection between the three, but it is slight. In focusing on these three, we experience the search for gold and the lure as well as the hardship and lawlessness that permeated the endeavor. Charlie’s role as a detective allows the author to throw in a chase and a mystery to be solved!
  
  The author stresses two points. In the 1890s the frontiers of the “West” had been discovered, meaning that the life of the cowboy was ending. Where were these men seeking adventure to go? Secondly, an economic depression further enhanced the lure of gold.
  
  The audiobook is very well narrated by John H. Mayer. The narration gets four stars. It is clear and easy to follow.
• 
  Patricia Kitto

  A prospector, a detective, and a swindler walk into a saloon...
  
  This is narrative non-fiction at its best! The lives of three very different men tell an engaging story of the last days of the wild Wild West and of the Yukon Gold Rush. Impeccably researched, which is evidenced by "A Note on Sources" at the end of the book (that was unfortunately not included at the end of the audiobook), the author takes the reader into the wilds of the Alaska and Yukon Territories at the end of the 19th century and into the minds and motivations of the three main characters (and they sure were characters!).
  
  I was struck by the hardships that were seemingly just part of life on the frontier, how each man dealt with every challenge, the ease in which one could "start over" in those days, and the sheer number of people hoping to find their fortune and salvation in gold.
  
  The narrator, John H. Mayer, helped bring all of this to life and helped transport me to the Klondike.
• 
  Deb (Readerbuzz) Nance

  You'd think you were reading fiction. This story is that good.
  
  And the truth is that Floor of Heaven is a little bit fiction. Even Blum, in his final Note on Sources, acknowledges this.
  
  Just a bit fiction, though. This book contains just enough fictional elements to shape the three intermingling true stories into a great book. But the heart of the story is solidly nonfiction.
  
  It is a great book. It's the story of the beginnings of Alaska, the story of three characters so quirky and real that you can't help but be fascinated with their lives. One is a cowboy detective named Charlie Siringo. One is a gold prospector named George Carmack. One is a con artist named Soapy Smith.
  
  All three head to Alaska, all for different reasons, all with amazing stories.
  
  Sly trickery. Clever detective work. And gold.
  
  This book has it all.
• 
  Mark

  1897 Klondike Gold Rush told in three separate narratives. One follows a diligent Pinkerton man, another a con-man and thief and then there is George Carmack, a hard-working miner that first discovers the bonanza on the Klondike river. This is solid narrative nonfiction. I also loved the rough and tumble Alaska setting, which the author captures vividly. Good audio pick too.
• 
  Bookwoman67

  Howard Blum is a best-selling author and journalist. I’ve read and enjoyed his other books American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century and Dark Invasion: 1915: Germany’s Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America. In The Floor of Heaven Blum ingeniously weaves together three very interesting lives that converge in the Klondike Gold Rush, and that journey along three very different trails is thrilling.
  
  This book has a lot going for it. It is extremely readable; as many reviewers note, it reads more like a novel than a piece of non-fiction. However, the further I read, the more irritated I became. This book can be classified as non-fiction because Blum relied heavily on primary sources. (In fact, most of the time it feels as if he simply rehashed those sources.) The problem arises when the primary sources are accepted without questioning even when they are self-aggrandizing biographies and correspondence of questionable accuracy.
  
  Blum addresses this issue briefly in his “A Note on Sources” at the end of the book. I read through it because I wanted to see what he had to say about validity of Siringo, Carmack, and Smith’s accounts. I think most readers don’t generally bother to peruse such peripheral material (feel free to contradict me if you disagree), so this seems to be a way to acknowledge this issue without really drawing attention to it. Even here, Blum claims “I didn’t want to disrupt the flow of the large story I was offering up to my readers with a litany of caveats squawking that while one authority says this is what happened, another source begs (or, more often, insists) to differ.”
  
  Surely good history can at least point out the self-serving (dare I say lying?) nature of a source without descending into unreadable academic argument. But Blum insists “this is not an academic work. I set out to tell a story.” He certainly succeeds on that account. This book still left me irked with his approach. Perhaps I will try Pierre Berton’s Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 instead. I do love Berton’s books; I just wish I could find them more at libraries here in the US.
• 
  Brad

  Some went to escape. Some went to start over. Some went for adventure. All were drawn by gold.
  
  The Floor of Heaven is the amazing story of the Yukon Gold Rush, told through the lives of three men who despite their diverse backgrounds, found themselves in a showdown with a quarter million dollars worth of gold hanging in the balance.
  
  Author Howard Blum does a magnificent job tracing the lives of Jeff “Soapy” Smith (con-man one minute, benefactor the next), Charlie Siringo (a cow puncher from Texas who became a Pinkerton detective) and George Carmack (the prospector-turned-indian-turned-millionaire) and their impact on the gold rush that would draw thousands of people to the punishing Yukon.
  
  It’s hard to read this and not catch a bit of the excitement that everyday people caught as they read about people literally becoming millionaires simply through hard work and a bit of luck. The power of gold fever was such that people of all walks of life quit their jobs and traveled to an unknow land in search of gold. People like the Mayor of Seattle who quit his job and was in such a hurry to leave for Alaska that he wired his resignation from the ship.
  In the first winter after gold was struck in the Yukon “at least 100,000 people pushed across the world toward the Yukon and another 1 million people made arrangements to go.” The fever was so great that the US Secretary of the interior and the Canadian minister of the interior released advisories, urging travelers to wait until spring.
  
  As a work of non-fiction this book has all the qualities of a good fiction page-turner - adventure, incomprehensible corruption and complex charaters that you will root for at points and then find yourself rooting against.
  
  I picked this up at the Martinsburg Public Library and would highly recommend it to anyone with a love of character driven, non-fiction. If you enjoy the works of David McCullough or Erik Larson I think you’ll feel right at home with The Floor of Heaven.
• 
  J.R.

  Howard Blum brings up two interesting facts which are integral to this book. One, the Yukon gold rush came as a final hurrah for the displaced heroes of the Wild West. And two, it occurred while the United States was in the grip of a devastating economic depression.
  
  The first of these facts is more obvious to the casual reader. The stories of Jack London and other writers of the period grant us some familiarity with those who braved arduous conditions in hope of finding fortune in the frozen north. This is history, but it’s relatively recent history for many of us. My own grandfather reported being tempted as a boy by the reports. He would resist, deciding instead on a steady railroading job and family. Many others gave into the temptation; some to prosper, most to come home with experience rather than wealth.
  
  The discovery, credited to George Carmack, gave hope to thousands whose lives had been impacted by the economic depression.
  
  Carmack, a Marine deserter who grew up in poverty believing he was fated to find fortune, is one of the three characters on whom Blum’s book focuses. The others are Charlie Siringo, a cowboy-detective who went to Alaska as a Pinkerton agent, and Jefferson “Soapy” Smith, a conman driven out of Colorado, who also saw Alaska as his last hope.
  
  Unlike Carmack and Smith, who both hoped for a big score, Siringo’s goal was simply to do a job. Once that was accomplished he was ready to come back to the states. Carmack achieved his goal, though records indicate it didn’t satisfy him. Smith came to an even worse end.
  
  This not a history of the gold rush but rather a character study of three participants. It is a thoroughly interesting and action-filled narrative.
  
• 
  Kay

  I'm not rating or finishing this, but I'd like to mention a few things that made me call it quits on this book.
  
  The straw that broke the camel's back? 'Em. That's right, 'em:
  
  "When the gang rode the forty miles into Fort Laramie for a ranch dance, Charlie told 'em his bum leg ruled out any possibility of his dragging a gal around the floor."
  
  That was, to be clear, one of the many times that the author's attempted folksiness rubbed me the wrong way. It was the repeated use of " 'em" that really got to me, though.
  
  Now, I know this is a tale of "the Last Frontier," and that the central figures were rough-hewn men, but I very soon grew tired of references to "gals," "bum legs," and the like. Not to mention this:
  
  "Then he shoved the horse over the rock bluff. Whining with surprise, the animal fell twenty feet."
  
  Really? I've spent a lot of time around horses, but never have I known one to "whine." Whinny, now, that's another matter. And perhaps I'm being overly critical of what is nothing but a typo, but I sense that the next 300 pages of this 400-page book aren't going to improve.
  
  I persisted reading to page 95, which was well past the point that I realized that this book wasn't what I thought it was going to be -- a colorful nonfiction book about the Yukon gold rush -- so much as a strange concoction"based on a true story." The author alternates between describing the lives of three very different men, and at some point I gather their lives are going to intersect in some spectacular way, but I fear that what it will amount to won't be all that much.
  
  Any any rate, I simply can't take reading about 'em any more.
  
• 
  Kara of BookishBytes

  This book is a great example of narrative nonfiction that is compelling enough to feel like a fictional story. The author researched the lives of three men who moved to the Yukon in the gold rush.
  
  Each of the three characters left a lot of written material about their lives (letters, journals, newspaper articles, etc.), and the three of them is very different: One is a deserter from the Marines who lives with the native tribes in the Yukon, one is a Pinkerton detective on the hunt for stolen gold, and one is a conman who wants to make his money defrauding the gold miners.
  
  The author is able to tell their three stories as a surprisingly cohesive narrative. This is a great book for anyone who enjoys Westerns or books set in Alaska. (Yes, I know the Yukon is a Canadian territory, but the author describes the border as very porous between the two an the action takes place on both sides of the border).
  
  Highly recommend.
• 
  Overbooked ✎

  “Alaska is the last West.”
  Bloom has chosen three interesting characters (a legendary crook, a cowboy turned detective and a gold prospector gone native) to spin the hugely entertaining even if “embellished” portrait of Alaska’s wilderness at the end of the nineteen century.
  
  A word of warning: the blurb goes overboard IMO and reveals too much of their stories, it could be a spoiler for the reader.
  
  
  Charlie Siringo, the detective, was my favourite character, what a fascinating life!
  
  George Washington Carmack, Yukon prospector
  
  Soapy Smith, the conman
  
  “Klondicitis,” as the New York Herald dubbed the phenomenon, gripped folks everywhere. A giddy mix of greed, a yearn for adventure, and wishful thinking, Klondicitis convinced people to abandon their old lives in a rash instant and confidently set off for the far north. “Klondike or bust!” pledged tens of thousands, the three words sealing an oath of allegiance to an intrepid fraternity. The lure of gold, people in all walks of life agreed, was too hypnotic to resist.
  
  In Seattle, it was as if the city had been attacked by a devastating plague, so quickly did thousands of its citizens rush to escape. Streetcar service came to a halt as the operators walked away from their jobs. Policemen resigned. Barbers closed shops. Doctors left their patients. The Seattle Times lost nearly all its reporters. Even the mayor, W. D. Wood, boarded a steamer to Alaska, wiring his resignation from the ship rather than dallying to say his good-byes at city hall. “Seattle,” a New York Herald reporter observed, “has gone stark, staring mad on gold.”
  
  It is labelled non-fiction, but admittedly, this book is not scholarly work nor aims to be proper biographies. The note at the end of the book reveals the author intent in writing it and the difficulties in choosing which version to pick when multiple versions of the same historical event exist.
  Bloom clearly explains the reasons behind his choices in terms of historical sources. You can’t be more honest than that.
  
  Clearly, anyone setting off to tell a true story about the lives and times of these three men would need to make his way through a deep and murky historical swamp. He’d face the genuine danger—“probability” is undoubtedly more accurate—that he’d soon be knee-deep in a morass of fanciful yarns, self-serving fabrications, and, too often, blatant lies. To write a factual account, he’d need to tread gingerly through some rough historical country. No source—not even a first-person account, or contemporaneous newspaper articles, or, for that matter, an article in a scholarly journal—could be accepted at face value.
  
  I wanted to tell an engaging tale that contained both high drama and a perplexing mystery. And I wanted to write a true story, to boot.
  
  I was determined to make this a factual account, but I also had no plans (or, I admit, the abilities or the expertise) to make this a scholarly historian’s tome; I am, after all, a journalist by training and inclination.
  
  I enjoyed this book very much and I would highly recommend if you are looking for a fun and engaging adventure tale with solid historical foundation, i.e. history that reads like a novel. 4.5 stars
• 
  Melody

  Outside my usual reading focus, and delightfully new to me. I loved reading all of the different stories herein, and despite my sorrow at the opening of the land, wow, what an adventure tale!
  
  The casual, insidious racism that was part and parcel of the time stands out here in stark relief.
  
• 
  Neil

  This is a essentially a biography of three men--Charles Siringo, a cowboy turned detective; George Carmack, whose discovery launched the Yukon Gold Rush; and Soapy Smith, a con man who for a while had control over the Gold Rush, extracting every penny from prospectors. In many ways, this is a broader tale of the late Old West, as it takes several hundred pages to get the men to the Alaskan conclusion where they actually interact with each other, but every step along the way is entertaining and these guys really were larger than life. This is a wonderful piece of narrative nonfiction that really captures the time and place.
• 
  nisie draws

  it was slow reading and I dislike that I sympathized with jerky people throughout it. Also most of it felt like tall tales made of what these men wanted to believe about themselves rather than actual events. :/
• 
  Adam

  The characters are so dear - whether the law, criminal, gold diggers, outdoorsmen. I didn't want the book to end.
• 
  Idril Celebrindal

  I did not like this. Wow did I not like this. I disliked it a lot. The further it progressed the more I disliked it. This should be shelved in the fiction section, if one is forced to shelve it at all.
  
  Blum ascribes moment-by-moment emotions to the historical people he's writing about; he gives them dialog that almost certainly was not recorded in the 3 primary source documents he used as reference; he thinks it's appropriate to use the word "injun" in his narration as an actual human living in the 21st century. I believe strongly that it's inappropriate to judge historical figures for acting within the context of their own times, but that does not mean that an author should identify so closely with his subjects that he takes their mores for his own.
  
  Not to put too fine a point on it, it's bullshit that the only name given by this book for Keish, whose legal name was James Mason, is "Skookum Jim." The definition of "skookum" is never even supplied. Why would it be? According to Blum, George Carmack had a fucking magical frog dream and discovered the gold that started the Yukon Gold Rush, and Carmack was kindly enough to drag his brother-in-law along, which I say with heavy sarcasm because actual historians now generally agree that Carmack was only credited as the discoverer due to concern that the authorities would not recognize the rights of an indigenous claimant. Ironic that Blum more than a century later behaves the same way! No, wait, not ironic; "bullshit" was the word I meant.
  
  I don't have the energy to wade further into this nonsense because all of it was bullshit, but I have to wonder how Blum ever received two Pulitzer nominations when he's this bad at fact checking. He offers "I'm a journalist, not a historian" as justification for his total disregard for reality in the story he presents. Sometimes he doesn't even bother to hide the facts, just dismisses them. Carmack's treatment of his Tagish wife after he discovers gold is dismissed with "Kate didn't understand the way gold can make men greedy" like it's KATE'S fault her husband is a total racist dickbag after he gets a little money. Why can't she just understand Blum's need to present his main subjects as unnuanced heroes?!
  
  And I mean, the misogyny is just as pervasive as the racism. I know that men in the 1890s regarded prostitutes as less than people; it's not okay for an author writing in 2011 to regard them in the same way. Soapy Smith? Violent murderous asshole. Even in the context of his day.
  
  So yeah, I fucking despised this, and stopped listening to it after my daily commutes just became me shouting "BULLSHIT!" at 60 second intervals.
• 
  Randy Harris

  This is an epic mini-series level tall tale that follows three characters on their winding paths that intertwine and eventually all come together during the late 19th century of the west and the Alaskan gold rush. Counting the Jack London biography, this is the second book this month about this crazy time. Reading this you have to keep reminding yourself that this isn’t fiction, as his elaborate bibliography at the back attests. For anyone who loves history particularly that late west transitional period of the 1890s or so will love this. Very enjoyable.
• 
  JC

  “What had brought America to its knees? Congress certainly deserved a large share of the blame. These legislators had, in their reckless wisdom, created an opportunity to buy dollars at nearly half price. [Congress] had a sporting attitude toward the nation’s treasury. In 1890 it had passed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which obligated the government to buy 4.5 million ounces of silver each month—and to pay for these purchases at a set price with an equal amount of notes backed by either silver or gold. Gold had a market value of nearly twice that of silver, so it didn’t take considerable financial acumen to prefer a payout in gold dollars. And for once a deal that seemed too good to be true really was true—at least for a while. A silver dollar worth only 58 cents could be exchanged for a dollar certificate backed by gold worth a full 100 cents. But greed being what it is, and human nature, too, it soon transpired that the western mines produced—and then avidly sold to the government—more silver than Congress had ever anticipated. As a result, the U.S. Treasury began running through its gold supplies. When a despairing secretary of the Treasury confessed that the nation’s gold reserves had plunged below the traditionally acceptable level of $100 million, ...panic spread. It galloped pell-mell through the national marketplace, destroying illusions, toppling empires, and jamming the machinery that operated everyday life. The forebodings of disaster had become prophecy. Yet even as the country was sent reeling, there remained one economic certainty: gold. Its value was sacrosanct. Its worth held steady. It was the one true thing. So governments demanded it. Investors hoarded it. And prospectors went to great lengths to discover it.”
  
  After reading an excerpt from Blum like that it’s hard not to think about Marx. Haha, I'm sorry for always going there, but I just find Marx provides some really interesting frameworks for thinking through history, especially where commodities are concerned. These are some excerpts from his
  Critique of Political Economy 1859:
  
  “If, for instance, one evaluates all commodities in terms of oxen, hides, corn, etc., one has in fact to measure them in ideal average oxen, average hides, etc., since there are qualitative differences between one ox and another, one lot of corn and another, one hide and another. Gold and silver, on the other hand, as simple substances are always uniform and consequently equal quantities of them have equal values.”
  
  “As means of circulation gold and silver have an advantage over other commodities in that their high specific gravity – representing considerable weight in a relatively small space – is matched by their economic specific gravity, in containing much labour-time, i.e., considerable exchange-value, in a relatively small volume. This facilitates transport, transfer from one hand to another, from one country to another, enabling gold and silver suddenly to appear and just as suddenly to disappear – in short these qualities impart physical mobility, the sine qua non of the commodity that is to serve as the perpetuum mobile of the process of circulation.”
  
  “The high specific value of precious metals, their durability, relative indestructibility, the fact that they do not oxidise when exposed to the air and that gold in particular is insoluble in acids other than aqua regia – all these physical properties make precious metals the natural material for hoarding. Peter Martyr, who was apparently a great lover of chocolate, remarks, therefore, of the sacks of cocoa which in Mexico served as a sort of money.
  ‘Blessed money which furnishes mankind with a sweet and nutritious beverage and protects its innocent possessors from the infernal disease of avarice, since it cannot be long hoarded, nor hidden underground!’ (De orbe novo [Alcala, 1530, dec. 5, cap. 4].24)”
  
  “Metals in general owe their great importance in the direct process of production to their use as instruments of production. Gold and silver, quite apart from their scarcity, cannot be utilised in this way because, compared with iron and even with copper (in the hardened state in which the ancients used it), they are very soft and, therefore, to a large extent lack the quality on which the use-value of metals in general depends. Just as the precious metals are useless in the direct process of production, so they appear to be unnecessary as means of subsistence, i.e., as articles of consumption… negatively superfluous”
  
  These remarks by Marx remind me of Thomas More’s Utopia, where the citizens of the land find gold useless and vulgar. Reading Blum’s book here, some of the Tagish figures recounted in the pages recall for me some of More’s Utopians:
  
  “IT WAS raining money. One after another, half-dollar coins flew out of the fifth-story hotel window. Coins bounced on the sidewalk and rolled clanging into the street. All at once streetcars came to a screeching halt, and the passengers and even the conductors jumped off to scramble after the loose change. Word spread quickly through downtown Seattle, and people flocked to the sidewalk outside the hotel. It was pandemonium. And the money kept raining down.
  Tagish Charley was enjoying himself. Sitting in the hotel room with Jim and Kate, the three of them happily passing a bottle around, it had occurred to him that it would be a lark to see the white men fight over something as meaningless as money. Besides, he’d more than he needed; why not give it away? ...The three of them were pouring money down on Seattle when the police arrived. They would’ve been arrested for disturbing the peace if George had not returned in time …He told Jim and Charley that they would need to return at once to the Klondike. They were glad to go. They’d had enough of Seattle. They missed vast spaces and solemn quiet. They had no connection to this unnatural world. If this is what gold bought, then they were only too glad to throw their money out the window.”
  
  George Carmack is often memorialized in American history as the prospector whose gold strike in the Yukon would ignite the Klondike gold rush. The Canadian story often attributes this discovery to Keish (Skookum Jim) one of the two Tagish friends/in-laws that joined Carmack on his prospecting quests through the Yukon wilderness. The three of them were there when it happened. Blum attributes the guiding initiative to Carmack, though the severe subjective interiority that pervades this entire book makes me very suspicious of its historical merit at times. Blum does mention this in his Note on Sources:
  
  “While there’s My Experiences in the Yukon, Carmack’s self-published first-person account of his find and the events leading up to it, there are also several revisionist tellings of the story. For example, in 1949 Jennie Mae Moyer published a pamphlet (Early Days at Caribou Crossing and the Discovery of Gold on the Klondike) that was a transcription of another take on the events, one delivered as a lecture in the waiting room of the White Pass and Yukon Railway Station at Carcross, in the Yukon Territory. There seventy-three-year-old Patsy Henderson, Tagish Charley’s brother, had insisted that it was Charley who should be credited with the find that ignited the stampede to the Yukon. According to this angry account, the white man is once again the usurper of something that by right belonged to an Indian.”
  
  I also won’t be rating this book because it is full of an extremely offensive word to refer to Skookum Jim's sister Kate and indigenous women in general that really needs to be totally expunged from this sort of literature. I’ll admit I never even knew this word a couple years ago, and it was only after reading a book by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson that I encountered it. I think it’s so vital to read literature by indigenous writers if you ever want to even touch history written by white men. Otherwise you’d be oblivious to the sort of racism that is layered throughout its pages. This slur even found its way into this book’s synopsis. It’s a little frightening to think about all the prejudices I’ve absorbed over the years from my still improperly balanced reading habits.
  
  Anyway, while in the Yukon I had a chance to visit Carcross, where Skookum Jim lived and saw a replica that has been built of his home, with a mural designed by coastal Tlingit artist Keith Wolf Smirch and painted by Bill Oster. It was fascinating to read that Lake Bennett was the end of the Chilkoot Trail and the White Pass trail, and that I had a chance to take in the winter air of this very same Lake Bennett, standing on its opposite shores at Carcross. It was the beginnings of the Yukon River that ran its way right through Whitehorse. This is a fairly interesting excerpt from Blum’s book about the White Pass Trail:
  
  “A QUIET decade before the Klondike gold rush, Skookum Jim had led a surveyor through the undulating hills, canyons, and valleys that became known as the White Pass. And as was the case when he accompanied George Carmack on the momentous expedition that discovered gold on Bonanza Creek, the big Indian’s role became only a footnote in the white man’s history. It was seventy-one-year-old Captain William Moore who became renowned for charting the long, snaking trail. And it was the sturdy white pioneer who in time grew rich as the sole founding father of Skagway… Moore had heard stories about a pass through the mountains that was less precipitous than the Chilkoot, and with Skookum Jim leading the way, he went out in search of it. It was two months of grueling work. Yet they succeeded in marking the path of a forty-five-mile trail wide enough for men and pack animals. It led through high country that twisted and turned along narrow cliff-sides; passed through deep bogs and swampland; crossed and then recrossed fast-moving rivers; and built to a thousand-foot climb over sharp rocks before it scurried down to Lake Bennett and the beginnings of the Yukon River. Moore named the trail in honor of Sir Thomas White, the Canadian minister of the interior.”
  
  There’s a certain melancholy in recognizing that even though indigenous peoples were in many ways the key figures behind the Yukon gold strikes, it was the promise of gold that ended up destroying the ecosystems they so heavily relied upon. It’s remarkable how the disappearance of salmon from rivers in the Yukon mirrors the heartbreaking experiences of the Anishinaabe along the Missinihe (Credit River) right in the very city I live in on the other side of the continent. One of the most fascinating things I discovered with respect to this was the etymology of ‘Klondike’ (the sort of word I mostly associate with ice cream, potatoes, or Kanye West):
  
  “As [Carmack] worked in the strong sun, he gave some thought to where he’d set his net. He’d hunted and fished with the Tagish along many of the streams that emptied into the Yukon. There were plenty of rich fishing grounds. But as soon as he began to consider the possibilities, one location took an iron hold in his mind. About fifty miles to the north, in Canadian territory, a small, swift stream of placid blue-green waters cut off from the roaring Yukon River. The Indians called it Throndiuk; the name meant “Hammer Water,” in recognition of the fence of stakes they’d hammer across its shallow waters to hold their gill nets. Trappers and prospectors had taken to netting salmon there, too. But they found the guttural Indian word unpronounceable. Mangled by the white man, it came out “Klondike,” and the new name stuck.
  George now had a plan. To his surprise, his life had been given a new and resolute direction. He’d fish for salmon, and grow rich from selling his catch. On the first day of July 1896, George loaded his boat and started upriver for the Klondike.
  THE INDIANS blamed the white man’s steamboats. They believed that the constant churning of the paddle wheels as the boats chugged downstream had disturbed the pattern of the currents flowing through the Yukon River. George had no idea whether this explanation was correct. All he knew was that this year the salmon weren’t running on the Klondike. He’d hammered in the stakes and stretched his fish trap across the shallow water at the mouth of the river. He’d built a birch frame where he’d hang the fish to dry in the sun. But there was little to catch or dry. In all his years in the north, George had never seen a poorer run of fish.”
  
  This impingement of capital on the so-called “last frontier”, one supposedly embodying the sacrosanct principle of protecting private property, ironically had so little regard for the material livelihoods of indigenous people. South of the Yukon today, in Northern BC, the same disregard is forcefully shoved upon the Wet’suet’en. Back in the late 19th century, there emerged a thriving demand for private detectives, who laboured their many hours over protecting the property of the monied classes. One of these figures is a main character in Blum’s book, and I think his initiation story into this career is fairly telling:
  
  “Charlie... arrived just days before a bomb had exploded near his boardinghouse in Haymarket Square; eight policemen assigned to control a labor rally would eventually die from the wounds caused by the explosion, and more than one hundred more, both officers and protesters, had been wounded in the shoot-out that followed. Fears spread that new terror plots were brewing, that Chicago had become a city of targets. A state of anxious vigilance gripped the local business owners, and private detectives were in sudden demand. To keep pace with the boom times, the Pinkerton Detective Agency ran notices in the Chicago papers asking prospective employees to apply.”
  
  Charlie eventually becomes the detective that finds gold stolen from a mining facility in Alaska. You see how no expense is withheld for the interests of capital protecting its property, yet indigenous peoples resources (far more useful for fulfilling basic human needs) are trampled upon without care. The book's other main character is an outlaw who ends up in Skagway named Soapy Smith (he reminds me a lot of Rob Ford actually). Anyhow, one marshall that Charlie meets warns:
  
  “You might as well assume any marshal in Skagway is not just employed by the government, Collins explained. He’s also most likely on Soapy Smith’s payroll.”
  
  Fascinating that not much has changed since then. All that government tax revenue siphoned from the resource extraction industry — how else do the RCMP get paid? Whose payroll are they on, and whose interests do they protect? What does TransCanada care for salmon or water or forests or the resources that indigenous people rely upon? Coastal GasLink must be built and will be built. It’s a fiduciary responsibility, an ethical imperative, because that is the moral framework of capitalism.
• 
  Jeffery Moulton

  Why don't we write or hear stories about the Yukon Gold Rush anymore? I seem to recall a time that they were very popular. In high school, I was especially fond of pretty much anything by
  Jack London and loved the movie adaptation of
  White Fang. To this day, I am still fond of the John Wayne flick North to Alaska. The setting just seems so rife with story possibilities -- both fiction and nonfiction. But you really don't see much about it these days.
  
  For that matter, why doesn't the Pinkerton Detective Agency appear in more pop culture? There are tons of stories there, both good and bad. They are filled with conspiracy, murder, heists, mayhem, riots, and more. You'd think they'd be perfect fodder for more movies and novels, but I really hadn't heard much of them until just a few years ago. What's up with that?
  
  In The Floor of Heaven, author Howard Blum weaves the Yukon Gold Rush, legendary con man Jefferson "Soapy" Smith, and the story of intrepid Pinkerton cowboy detective, Charlie Siringo, together into a fascinating tale of mystery, history, and, yes, even murder. And the greatest part is that it's true!
  
  The story follows the individual exploits of three men, the aforementioned Siringo and Smith as well as George Carmack, the man who struck gold on Bonanza Creek and subsequently started the gold rush to the Yukon. For most of the book, the three stories are only tangentially related, but they come together in a fascinating way toward the end. And the history and intrigue you get along the way is more than worth it. Each of the three men come alive, both for good and for bad, and you walk away from the book feeling like you really know who they were, in spite of all their contradictions and human failings.
  
  The book is fascinating, but it does have one large problem: it takes a long time to get where you are going. Besides a brief, out-of-context prologue, Alaska doesn't really feature into the book until about a third of the way through. Likewise, the primary mystery that drives Siringo's story forward comes very late to the book. The first third is filled with "getting to know the characters" background that, while interesting, leaves the reader wondering where things are going and, "isn't this supposed to be about the Yukon Gold Rush?"
  
  Even with that, the book is very well-written and often reads more like a novel than a nonfiction story. Siringo comes off as a fascinating character and I can't wait to find out more about him (he wrote books about his adventures later in life). Likewise, Smith proved to be an interesting, complicated "not-quite-villain" bad man. And the Yukon itself comes alive through these pages.
  
  In the end, it left me wishing we had more of those stories that I mentioned in the beginning. Why don't we?
• 
  George

  HIGH ADVENTURE. A VERY ENTERTAINING READ.
  
  Set at the end of the nineteenth century, when the wild, wild west was getting tamer, and the untamed far-north was becoming wilder, ‘The Floor of Heaven: A True Tale of the Last Frontier and the Yukon Gold Rush’, by Howard Blum, tells the larger than life stories of the some of the cowpokes and conmen who straddled those two worlds.
  
  It is the story of three unforgettable men of legend and adventure: Charlie Siringo, George Carmack and Soapy Smith; any one of which could offer enough material for several novels (and probably has).
  
  Recommendation: If you like nonfiction, history, adventure, westerns, tall tales of Yukon Territory and the Klondike, true detective stories, and/or flim-flam… its all here, in spades. Highly recommended reading.
  
  “The death mask was a fake, but no doubt this detail wouldn't have troubled Soapy at all.”--Chptr 43
  
  Adobe [ePub] Digital Edition on loan from
  http://overdrive.colapublib.org
  
• 
  Jenny T

  The history of the Alaskan Gold Rush as told through the eyes of three very different individuals: Charlie Siringo, a cowboy-turned-Pinkerton-detective investigating the theft of hundreds of gold bars from an Alaskan mine; Soapy Smith, a conman/gang-leader/generally reprehensible fellow pursuing power (and gold, naturally) across the States into Alaska; and George Carmack an American Naval man gone AWOL, who marries into the native Tagish people and avidly pursues his own dreams of gold.
  
  I admit, I knew very little about prospecting and the Gold Rush prior to the reading this, but the book is well-researched, clearly-written, and I love a good adventure! Also, Alaska sounds absolutely beautiful. A good read.
• 
  Sam

  I won this book as a giveaway...What a treat for the first giveaway!
  Blum says his goal when writing The Floor of Heaven was to tell a story. I want to let everyone know he has definitely accomplished his goal with this book. Blum takes you deep into the world inhabited and trials faced by his three main characters. The intertwining stories are so enthralling, at times you forget they are true. From start to finish the book reads like a freight train...Once you get started stopping is not an easy task. I recommend "Floor" to any reader craving a well written, entertaining story that will transport him or her to a time many of us could barely imagine!
• 
  Nathan Williams

  This book is highly entertaining and will leave you wanting to learn more about the sunset era of the great American West.
  
  As others have written, I did find that it reads like a novel. If you're used to fiction, then perhaps the plot won't move as fast as you're used to. However, if you have an appreciation for history and enjoy great writing, then you will find all kinds of adventure here.
  
  It reminds me a bit of another fun historical adventure - The Devil in the White City. Imagine a mashup of that book (non-fiction) and Lonesome Dove (fiction) with a bit of Call of the Wild thrown in for measure.
  
  
  
  
• 
  Bethany

  This is an engrossing, well-paced and impressively researched story. I read it all in one sitting and now I totally want to visit Alaska. In the summer.
  
  
• 
  Nelson Minar

  A solid fun tale of Yukon adventure. The structure is slightly odd; the author follows three different men of very different temperament on different paths. But in the intersection it paints a broader story of Western and Yukon life, and it works. The author has a very deft hand with telling a gripping tale; as he notes, a highwire act since he's also trying to tell a true historical story. Which I assume he mostly succeeds in doing, even if his addition of extra color detail is a bit eyebrow raising at times. Does he really know what a character ate for dinner on some specific night? Maybe so, if he's working off a diary, and it's not the kind of story that requires footnotes. But there's a lot of details like that and sometimes it made me slightly skeptical.
  
  Anyway, good story. Now I want to read a second story of the same time and place but a more sober story of ordinary people, not the gunslingers and prospectors. Also I'd love to read a woman's perspective in that time and place. The "good time gals" in this story are just furniture, which I'm guessing is a limitation of the author's source material. I bet they have good stories too.
• 
  Jeff Mauch

  The Western US and Alaskan Territory of the late 1800's was wild and rough. It was a place for people to find their fortunes, escape their pasts and above all, find gold or find a way to make their fortune in other ways. this book tells the tales of three men from both sides of the law based on their letters and memoirs. The gold rushes in California and Alaska are incredible historical points in US and world history. It amazing that men dropped everything, traveled thousands of miles to desolate places (even to Alaska as winter rolled in) and risked their very lives, just for a chance to find some gold. The way the author told these intertwined stories was masterful, though it reads more like Fiction than anything based on historical fact. The important thing is its based on truth and is an incredibly interesting read.
• 
  Lindsey

  What a great book. This was my first exposure to the Klondike gold rush. I never knew the extent of it.
  
  This book weaves together the story of three classic western figures. The outlaw, the upstanding cowboy, and the prospector. Although their connections seem unclear at points in the book, never fear it all makes sense in due time.
  
  At points this book was very suspenseful and fun. Somewhere in Act two several of the story lines reach a peak. However, it is a false summit and the story builds again. After the first peak the story slows down and it is easy to loose interest. Hang in the ending is satisfying and has good closure.
  
  I really enjoyed the characters, the history, and the mystery of how each characters story line unfolds.
• 
  Carol

  An interesting story of the last frontier told from the perspectives of a gold miner, Pinkerton detective and grifter. Through these three men the reader learns all about the Californian, Alaskan and and Yukon territory gold rushes. The history of the Pinkerton Detective Agency is also outlined. Miners were easy hits for grifters and the reader can only hope he/she would not be a gullible as it seemed many average men were. The book is well researched and narrated and would rate higher except it took most of the book for the three characters to intersect with any significance....but then it was pretty exciting, just like in the Western picture shows.
• 
  Andy

  I read this book thinking it was going to be a large-scale history of the Yukon Gold Rush, also thinking it would be a bit more academic. While I was disappointed that such was not the case, I did find myself engaged by the story of three men whose lives all converged (somewhat) as the Yukon Gold Rush reached its zenith. Still, the book reads like a novel, but not always in a good way. A page-turner, yes, but it seems a bit too familiar in the telling of its stories and details. An entertaining read, but not the history I was expecting (much of the fault being my own for not investigating the book more closely).
• 
  Randall Russell

  Although it took a while for the story to gather momentum and get going, and although the various threads don't really come together until almost the end of the book, overall I found this book to be pretty interesting. Although I didn't love the structure for the reasons I've stated , the writing was generally fairly good, so overall I found the book to be enjoyable. I'd only recommend the book to someone who's really interested in the Yukon gold rush, or American history in general - I don't think the general reader would have much interest in this story, and the book is fairly long and detail-oriented.