I love a good story about the search for gold...whether that be prospecting, buried treasure, or searching for shipwrecked booty. The dream of sparkly riches became real for some who went west seeking their fortunes. Few hit paydirt. Many perished. “Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea”, might be, perhaps the best search for gold story, with the best ending...and it was all true. But that book is about a shipwreck...with a lot of gold, a lot of gold (15 tons). But where did all that gold originate? It came out of the ground during the California Gold Rush (1849), flake by flake, nugget by nugget, on the backs of good people who went West to strike it rich...and could barely dig up enough to survive...the work consisted of long back breaking days, week after week, producing enough gold, each day, to buy perhaps enough food and clothing to return the next day to dig again. The novel “Heartbroke Bay”, based also on a true story, details the legend surrounding the mystery of a small clan of prospectors during the Klondike or Alaskan Gold Rush (1896), some fifty years later. Same requirement to do back breaking work, day in and day out, but with the added feature of an Alaskan wilderness, with all its beauty and it’s harsh climate. It also includes the fictional musing of the author, Lynn D’Urso (aka Lynn Schooler), who explores the short prospecting lives of four men and a one woman, who set out on their own, based on the rumor of a remote find, in an Alaskan Bay, (very close to Glacier National Park) and the trials and tribulations that befall such a foolhardy endeavor and a group of people tossed into austere circumstances...there are hints of tidal waves and I suspect cannibalism...but none of that materializes...
D’Urso tells a story of love, greed, survival, and hard work. He’s captured the passions of the lone women on the journey, who elopes with her husband prior to the move to Alaska, only to find she is attracted to another member of the prospecting team once they get there. Go figure. He carries the story extremely well, as it’s told through her eyes, interspersed with pages from her journal that describe what she is feeling deeply. At the end, when D’Urso reveals to us, that he based the story on actual facts, and that the women was real and came from England in exactly the same way, and the final fate of the team, also true, with an amazing twist of jurisprudence, that I will not reveal here, was a shocker. I fully expected him to tell us that the pages of her journal, were thus also real...alas, not so. But, D’Urso has terrific skill as a writer and has done a wonderful job capturing the passion and conflict in her heart which added incredible authenticity to his prose as he described the beauty of the Alaskan wild.
Beauty, adventure, passion, tragedy, and gold...it is well written and deserves for Hollywood to buy the rights and start filming soon...D’Urso deserves 4 1/2 stars for his prose, which is captivating and real as well as for his sleuthing of the story over a ten year period. But I will deduct half a star for perhaps, incorrectly, attributing the finality of the book, with the resulting requirement for jurisprudence, to the wrong cause...as well as the tsunami that never came...four stars overall...
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