DAYS OF GOLD: A Novel of the Yukon

By: Irwin R. Blacker

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

“A rattlingly good novel about the Yukon in the era of the Gold-Rush.” Lewiston ME Sun-Journal

“Against an authentic Gold-Rush background emerges a story as colorful as the characters involved. Sometimes gentle, sometimes brutal, it creates a scene of men – and women - struck by a fever no doctor can cure." Manchester Evening News.

Simon Coit was of the kind of man of whose life legends are made. A former school teacher, Simon had spent twenty years wandering about the world, searching the far horizon and using the quest for gold as his excuse. Then one day in the Yukon country he found the gold and lost his excuse and had to face the kind of man he had become.

In Days of Gold, Irwin R. Blacker probes the soul of the seeker, the searcher, the restless wanderer, and of the two strays with whom he linked his life. One was the passionate, independent woman called Cynara Gail; and the other Tlingit Tom, the Indian youth who was Simon's partner and who believed he had to be what Simon was and to have everything Simon had — including Cynara Gail. It was the tragedy of all three that Simon Coit was a long time learning what he was and what it was he wanted.

Days of Gold is also the story of Pickit, the mining town born where the partners found their gold, which grew to be "The Paris of the North." Into Pickit drifted the greedy and worthless, the faithful and foolish, the lawyers and promoters. Among them:

Svensk Johnny, the sailor who wanted to buy a home on the street where his mother had been a maid;
Mac, the cashiered India Lancer who wanted to walk into his parents' home a hero;
Major Doughty, the Mounted Policeman who did his duty while others made and lost fortunes.

But most of all, Days of Gold is the story of the strange partnership between Simon, Tlingit Tom, and Cynara Gail, three people who loved each other — and almost destroyed that love.

In Days of Gold Irwin Blacker, who has traveled the winter along the gold creeks that race through the Klondike and the Yukon, has captured both the harshness and the beauty of that remote corner of the continent in which he sets his story.

And at the same time he has written that rare novel in which the adventurer himself is more important than the adventure, the kind of novel that Joseph Conrad or Stephen Crane might have written. Days of Gold by Blacker, a Pulitzer recommendee for the novel of Taos, is an unforgettable epic greed, obsession and and enduring love.