Customer Reviews

A Land Gone Lonesome: An Inland Voyage along the Yukon River

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

A land gone lonesome the title was what attracted my attention in the first place. I also saw a review of the book on tv on the Alaska channel.

In A Land Gone Lonesome Dan O'Neill floats the Yukon River area visited by John McPhee over 30 years earlier. The differences over time are striking as are the differences in the authors. While McPhee was a perceptive visitor spinning a great tale, O'Neill is a long time resident, and his narration reveals a deep love of the land coupled with a keen eye towards historical perspective. He discusses in detail the effects of the National Park Service's administration, or perhaps mis-administration.If you liked McPhee, you'll love O'Neill. O'Neill has a comfortable free-flowing style appropriate for a tale about Alaska's greatest river. If you are into rural lifestyles, Alaska history, the Yukon River, or Alaska wilderness - this is a must read.

Very interesting and educational especially for me who is not familiar with the hystory and geography of Alaska.It is amazing how this people who lived there fought for theirlives in this harsh enviroment.It is sorry that the goverment is more interested in searching for oil there that to preserve this unic land and help more people who want to stay there.
What I find a little negative in this book is the missing of photos of the Alascan landscape

A gracefully written account of travels on the Yukon River. In his appreciation for the beauties of place and his understanding of man's place in nature O'Neill reminds one of Wendell Berry (the highest praise I can give). O'Neill also underscores the bureaucratic mentality of the National Park Service that has systematically eliminated the intentions of the legislation establishing the Yukon preserve.

This book is so visual. My OH my...reading this book, with my Alaska ATLAS in hand, I was transported to the Yukon - Charley region almost as if I were there!!!!!!!!!
Then I went onto Google Earth and zeroing in on places like Circle and Eagle was unreal...Thank you Dan, for a terrific, fantastic, ESCAPE from the daily grind. The only thing better...to buy a van, load up a boat, and driver to Circle, Alaska and shove off!!!!!!!!!

The Yukon River, 2300 miles long, was the last major river system in North America to be discovered, explored, and settled by non-Natives. Yet around 1900, there were tens of thousands of "outsiders" living and traveling along its course and in its basin, the vast majority attracted there by the lure of gold. Even after the ore played out, the Yukon River continued to attract settlers, trappers, fishermen, and others as a sort of last frontier. Within Alaska, that all changed around 1980 with the creation of the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve, and the attendant transfer of administrative responsibility to the National Park Service. Contrary to rather clear legislative intent, the Park Service has managed the Preserve so as to evict virtually all residents from the Preserve, such that, in the words of Dan O'Neill's book title, the Yukon is now "a land gone lonesome."

I bought A LAND GONE LONESOME in large part based on a back cover blurb likening it to John Graves's "Goodbye to a River" and John McPhee's "Coming into the Country." I was misled. The book is centered around a trip by the author down the Yukon in a 19-foot canoe with outboard motor from Dawson, Yukon Territory, to Circle City, Alaska, through the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve. The book begins promisingly enough, with some entertaining tales of sourdoughs from the gold-rush era and assorted contemporary crackpots and characters. But once O'Neill reaches Alaska, the book morphs into a kind of screed against Park Service policies in the Preserve, and never really emerges. To the extent there remains any aspect of a travelogue, it consists principally of a series of river cabins (dozens of them) in various stages of ruin and decay. There is plenty of local history, but it is provincial in the extreme, such that I was put in mind of the "Images of America" series of books, albeit without photographs. O'Neill's writing is decent, and sometimes witty, but for someone who does not already have an abiding and fervid interest in the Yukon River, A LAND GONE LONESOME is somewhat of an ordeal to traverse. It certainly is inferior to the cited works of Graves and McPhee.

Overall a book that doesnt draw you in like other writers do, McPhee who's been mentioned in other reviews, Nick Jans, others. I was intrigued and sometimes disturbed by parenthetical passages. Take this bizarre one for example:

"To a mammoth bowl of Zatarain's New Orleans Style Red Beans and Rice I add a couple of juicy moose links, nicely blackened over the fire, then cut up and mixed into the pot. For several days my dinners will center on sausage. This is partly due to the obvious ascendency of this food, but also because, without refriegeration, one eats the fresh meat first until it is gone. For dessert, boiled coffee and a couple trick-or-treat sized chocolate bars ........... As I duck into the dry, snug tent, I find that tonight I feel sorry for all the salad people. It doesn't seem fair. Me with a three-pound bolus of honest chow radiating well-being within me. They, making do with a meal of leaves. We must do something nice for the salad people, I resolve, next chance we get."

Huh? "3 pounds of beans, rice, and moose sausage"? "salad people"? I'm betting that more than 'well-being' was radiating from him before the night was over. Good luck with that colon! Yikes.