![]() ![]() Miners came down the gangplanks hefting three tons of gold from far northwest Canada. 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. 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. At 17, he sailed across the Pacific and up to the Bering Sea on a seal-hunting ship. Jack soon became an expert sailor, and an accomplished drinker and brawler in the waterfront saloons. 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. And you can still see his cabin and his old stomping grounds in Dawson City, the former capital of the Klondike gold rush, where my plane lands with a crunch on an unpaved runway.īecause 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 it can be pieced together from letters and diary entries, a handful of nonfiction articles that he sold to magazines, the remembrances of other people, and guesswork from his fiction. The best story that Jack London never wrote, at least not in full, was a factual account of his time in the Far North. In that kind of weather, as Jack London discovered, even the strongest whiskey freezes solid, and a man’s spit turns to ice before it hits the snow. In mid-winter, when much of the story takes place, the sun doesn’t reach the horizon and temperatures plunge to 50, 60, or even 70 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. In summertime, the advantages of 20-hour daylight are offset by horrendous swarms of mosquitoes, among other challenges. Techniques including computer-generated imagery enabled the latest filmmakers to shoot the entire production without leaving California, and it’s hard to criticize them for not using authentic Yukon locations. Such is the enduring power of the story-a dog named Buck is kidnapped from California and thrust into the frozen wilds of the Far North-that this is the ninth time that the 1903 novel has been adapted for film or television. His best-known Yukon book, The Call of the Wild, has been translated into nearly 100 languages, and will be released in February as a movie starring Harrison Ford as a Klondike gold prospector. Questing for gold, what he found instead was inspiration and material for one of the most successful literary careers of all time. Library of Congress Jack London Collection / The Huntington Library, San Marino, California Though his time in the Yukon was brutal, Jack London (right, in 1896) was grateful: “It was in the Klondike that I found myself. Left, the riverfront in Dawson City, Yukon Territory, December 1897. This article is a selection from the November 2019 issue of Smithsonian magazine Buy Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12 ![]()
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