A Land Gone Lonesome: An Inland Voyage Along the Yukon River [Paperback]

Dan O'Neill (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 26, 2007

In his square-sterned canoe, Alaskan author Dan O’Neill set off from Dawson, Yukon Territory, onetime site of the Klondike gold rush, to trace the majestic Yukon River. His journey downriver to Circle City, Alaska, is an expedition into the history of the river and its land, and a record of the inimitable and little known inhabitants of the region. With the distinct perspective of an insider, A Land Gone Lonesome gives us an intelligent, rhapsodic-and ultimately, probably the last-portrait of the Yukon and its authentic inhabitants.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Outdoorsman O'Neill (The Last Giant of Beringia) steers his canoe through the history and topography of the Yukon River, which runs through Canada and Alaska, letting its course carry his witty travelogue. Drawing from legend, interview and observation, he evokes the river's rustic majesty and the spartan dignity of its vestigial towns, briefly fed by the frenzied Gold Rush of the 1890s. His engaging account of the river's history punctuates its backwater charm, pulling readers into a realm of frigid wilderness and frontier stakeouts. He captures the hardiness of its scattered dwellers in vignettes of outmoded customs and bawdy tourist traditions, including the tale of someone chugging an amputated-toe cocktail in the Canadian town of Dawson. Exploring the conflict between nature and society, O'Neill writes of legendary holdouts (such as crusty Dick Cook, who he acknowledges was also a subject of John McPhee) who chafe at federal mandates that threaten their hardscrabble homesteads. O'Neill's meditations on the river branch into epic themes of self-reliance, heroism and humanity. Poetic renderings of creeks, camps and log cabin settlements bestow a refined gloss on rough terrain, reviving the moribund spirit of the "ghost river connecting ghost towns." (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

O'Neill, who lives in a log cabin in Fairbanks, Alaska, chronicles his journey along the Yukon River in a canoe and his forays into the wildness into which the river takes him. His exciting trip begins in Dawson, Yukon Territory, and ends in Circle City, Alaska. O'Neill gives readers a brief history of the land and then proceeds to describe the beauty of the woods, water, birds, bears, and bluffs. O'Neill is charmed by the characters he meets along the way, including Randy Brown, who lived in a six-by-nine-foot cabin before marrying a schoolteacher, and Charlie Kidd, who walked 120 miles in snowshoes over the Woodchopper Trail once a year rather than make the trip by boat or dog teams. Then there's Dick Cook, who "looked like a marooned pirate in Birkenstocks, a castaway scavenger of random goods." O'Neill's love of the land shines through on every page. George Cohen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (June 26, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 158243364X
• ISBN-13: 978-1582433646
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #935,149 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Like Coming Into the Country Part 2, July 22, 2006

By 

Bryan Newman "alaskanoutfitting.com" (St Paul, MN) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Land Gone Lonesome: An Inland Voyage along the Yukon River (Hardcover)

It seems that ever since John McPhee's Coming into the Country came out in the seventies, all stories of living in the Alaskan wilderness are compared to it. This book in many ways revisits that book and lets you know what happened to the self sufficient trappers and homesteaders that McPhee met in the seventies. And apparently they are gone.

Much like McPhee, this book paints pictures of the upper reaches of the Yukon River and it's people with words. The author splices anecdotes and histories to the people and places he passes on the river and brings you along for the trip and the politics that have created the situation on the river today.

This book can definitely stand on it's own, but I suggest reading Coming Into the Country first, if nothing else than for the fact that you will be struck by the differences created by thirty years and some legislation. I hate to keep going back to McPhee's book to review this one, but if that book is a modern classic, than this one deserves the same billing. Great reading.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Yukon: Lonesome Except for the Ghosts, September 10, 2006

By 

bensmomma "bensmomma" (Ann Arbor, Michigan) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: A Land Gone Lonesome: An Inland Voyage along the Yukon River (Hardcover)

Dan O'Neill drops his canoe into the Yukon River near Dawson City (Canada) and paddles downriver in search of the Alaskan homesteader and the subsistence lifestyle familiar to many from John McPhee's book, "Coming Into the Country."

O'Neill's book is meant as both an update and a rebuke to McPhee and his fans. Most emphatically, O'Neill documents the decay and disappearance of the trappers that McPhee wrote about. Outside a few tiny villages, there is no longer a single family inhabiting the whole area O'Neill surveys on a year-round basis. He visits cabin after decaying abandoned cabin, musing on the complicity of the National Park Service in eliminating a culture that, from O'Neill's perspective, was worth preserving.

I expect there are a lot of Alaskans that share O'Neill's disappointment. And he does an excellent job communicating it - he's a first-rate journalist. Some parts of the story are downright lyrical; others are first-rate news reporting.

The narrative thread of his canoe journey from time to time gets buried behind his urge to fuss at the authorities setting policy in the area. The book gets increasingly episodic and disjointed the further downstream he gets. However, for fans of McPhee's book, and for fans of Alaska in general, a worthy addition to the literature.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Depopulation of the Upper Yukon Watershed, December 26, 2006

By 

Ralph White (New England) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Land Gone Lonesome: An Inland Voyage along the Yukon River (Hardcover)

Dan O'Neill is an adventurer, a historian, a "floater" (as Yukon River canoe campers are called), and an advocate for a people whose names may be last seen in these pages. This book is ostensibly a story about a float trip O'Neill makes from Dawson, in Canada's Yukon Territory, to Circle, in Alaska, through the Yukon Charley Rivers National Preserve, administered by the National Parks Service. Actually, it is seven trips condensed into one. O'Neill is the spiritual descendant of John McPhee, whom he quotes extensively as the base-line Yukon River interpreter. The reader may be forgiven if he believes that he will be treated to a combination of float trip travelogue and history of the places and people who make the country what it is. Little by little we learn that O'Neill wants to do more than report; he intends to make a statement and to leave an impact.

O'Neill makes (and re-makes) a compelling case that the National Parks Service is egregiously mismanaging the wilderness it is supposed to be protecting. The NPS faces the same conflict in the Yukon Charley Rivers National Preserve that it has in other national parks. How do you preserve a natural area for people to enjoy in perpetuity when each person who visits incrementally damages the area? O'Neill argues that the Yukon Charley Rivers National Preserve differs so radically from the nation's other parks that it requires fresh thinking and a more tailored conservation regime. The lament implicit in the title is that this dramatically attractive land, inhospitable as it is, once was home to scores of rugged, subsistence pioneers, and could safely be so again under a more creative land use policy.

The enduring legacy of Dan O'Neill's book will not be his administrative prescriptions, though, but his deft, economical, and often sardonic descriptions of the land and its people. We learn a great deal about the geologic history of the region, including the fact that prior to the last ice age, the river ran southward, opposite its current direction. We learn where the gold-bearing strata are located and how they were exploited during the gold rush. We trap martin and lynx, and catch king salmon to feed ourselves and chum salmon to feed our dogs, We meet characters that couldn't conceivably be made up, like Dick Cook, whom we admire for his resourcefulness and indomitable spirit, and whose body we last see face down in the river that supported him. We poke through trash middens in a sort of contemporary archaeology, and learn how to handle irascible settlers and even more irascible grizzlies.

O'Neill treats us to a world which few of us are likely ever to see. "Moose, wolf, and bear have signed the mud registry in recent weeks, and I make my own prints, climb the bank, and look for a trail..." He faithfully reports and interprets his observations and gently constructs his arguments. Regrettably, however, he is not a gifted writer, and this deficiency occasionally shows, as in his purple descriptions of scenery. "The river is molten gold...the sky is a dazzling, luminous yellow where fiery clouds flash gilded edges...then I remember that the whole spinning world is a miracle, and that sometimes reality dawns more golden than dreams." And then there is the occasional error that an editor should have caught, "Sudden death killed forty-four of the fifty-five Alaskans who died in boating accidents between 2001 and 2003..." The reader may well wonder how death can be the cause of death.

I recommend "A Land Gone Lonesome" to armchair "floaters" and all who are curious about the forced depopulation of the upper Yukon watershed. You will meet the colorful denizens of a world just recently past, and the remarkable stage they have exited. And if you become motivated to visit the Yukon for yourself, you can thank McPhee and O'Neill for their contrasting depictions of the Yukon River and its fatal attraction.