Book Review - Ways Harsh and Wild

By Pamela den Ouden

Ways Harsh and Wild, by Doris Andersen, is a story of adventure and hardship in the Yukon and Alaska of the 1898 Gold Rush days. The main character is Bill, who is only 17 years old in 1900. He travels with a team of horses from Victoria to Lake Bennett in the Yukon. The story is told in the first-person, that is, the narrator refers to himself as “I.” His friend is an English gentleman with a great love of the outdoors. These two men have many adventures during the 18 years that they spend in the north. They hunt and trap. They mine for gold, hoping to strike it rich. At times they almost drown and sometimes, they almost starve, but they are very resourceful and help each other. In the north at that time, people had to depend on one another much more than they do nowadays. Sometimes, their lives depended on getting help from someone else.

Ted marries Bill’s sister, Maude, but Maude lives in the north only for a short time. She much prefers the society of Seattle. Finally, Bill marries Alice, a woman he meets when he goes out to visit friends and family in Victoria. She is much different from Maude, and she goes with her husband to the north country.

Although this book is supposed to be a novel, it reads more like a biography. There isn’t a plot in the conventional sense. The book is just a recounting of the life in Northern Canada and Alaska at a very exciting time. Neither Bill nor Ted ever became rich through their various enterprises, but they had good times together. In fact, the author was born in Alaska, and Ted, the character in the novel, is really her father. Bill was her uncle.

An interesting addition to the book is 16 pages of black and white photos in the centre of the book. Also, the endpapers have a hand-drawn map of Alaska and the Yukon, which was really helpful in following the story of the travels of Ted and Bill as they went north and moved from the Yukon to Alaska.

I would recommend this book to readers who want to find out what it was like living in the wilderness at the beginning of the 20th century. The harsh and frozen landscape, the hunting, fishing, trapping, trading, selling, and surviving make for an exciting and lively narrative.