Jack London spent nearly a year in Alaska and the Klondike, mining for gold and braving the Alaskan winter. There he was inspired to write what would become The Call of the Wild, one of his most famous novels. The Call of the Wild tells the tale of a domesticated dog stolen from his California family and sold to sledders in Alaska. As he adapts to the harsh and wild environment, he slowly sheds domestication and returns to his primal roots. The Call of the Wild was London’s first major success, ensuring he’d have a readership for his future writing and paving the way for him to become one of the first writers to amass a fortune from just his fiction.
So, on this great journey into the East, straight meat was the bill of fare, ammunition and tools principally made up the load on the sled, and the timecard was drawn upon the limitless future.
They sledded seventy miles up the Yukon, swung to the left into the Stewart River, passed the Mayo and the McQuestion, and held on until the Stewart itself became a streamlet, threading the upstanding peaks which marked the backbone of the continent.