The Trail of ’98

Robert W. Service built his fame on Yukon verse, and here he turned the same country into his first novel. Athol Meldrum, a young Scotsman with more idealism than judgment, is swept into the 1898 rush to the Klondike and follows the punishing trail from Skagway over the coastal passes down to Dawson City. He falls hard for a woman near the start, then spends three years working the gold claims into a fortune, surviving typhoid, near-starvation while lost in the wild, and a lawless camp that steadily wears his conscience thin. Service never worked the goldfields himself; he assembled the story from the accounts of men who had, which lends the writing the texture of firsthand reportage. For readers who know his ballads, it reads as the long-form companion to that world.