MONTPELIER – The stories of a Vermont farmer who spent years moiling for gold in the Canadian Yukon might have remained in the hand-typed and bound edition that was passed around by his family for decades until a grandson heard a talk about the gold rush of the 1890s.
The tale of how George G. Shaw set out to seek his fortune was family lore: the stories he told were taken down by hand over the years, then hand-typed by his granddaughter and bound as gifts for his descendants.
Now, Shaw's exploits are the subject of a new book, "To the Klondike and Back, 1894-1901," the story of the Bridport farm boy who ended up in the Yukon after hearing of the gold strike then returned after amassing a fortune that would approach a half-million dollars today.
"I never thought of having it published. It was just a family history, something to keep within the family," said Ann G. Shaw, 83, now living in Florida, the widow of George B. Shaw, the son of the prospector who hand-wrote his father's stories over the years. "Then when this came, I had no idea it would be of interest this many years later."
One of Shaw's grandsons, Gary Payne, happened to attend a talk about the gold rush at a library in Vergennes. The speaker put him in touch with a publisher who saw the value of Shaw's story.
The Yukon gold rush was a time immortalized by Jack London's book "The Call of the Wild," the story of the sled dog Buck that escapes humanity and goes wild, or the Cremation of Sam McGee, the Robert Service poem about the efforts of a man from Tennessee to escape the Arctic cold, even after death.
Middlebury College history Professor Kathryn Morse, who wrote a book about the gold rush called "The Nature of Gold," said that by the 1890s the railroads had made cross-country travel relatively easy and many easterners made the trek west, intending to return home after their years in the gold fields. At the same time, there was a deep economic depression that made it hard for young men to get a start on their own.
"This was one avenue in which they imagined they could have an adventure, escape from the constraints of their either industrial boring lives or their provincial, rural boring lives, avoid marriage and maybe gain some capital in order to perhaps come home and get some land or get a better job," said Morse.
George G. Shaw fit the profile. He was born in Long Lake, New York in 1872. His family moved to a farm in Bridport in 1890. In 1894, he headed west to Seattle and lived with an uncle while working as a lumberjack and putting away some savings that he ended up using to fund his journey to the gold fields and Canada and Alaska.
Gold was discovered in the Yukon in 1896, fueling the rush that began the next year and lasted until around the turn of the century when the easy-to-find gold had disappeared, Morse said.
During his years outside of Vermont, George G. Shaw wrote one letter home. It was dated June 23, 1898, from Dawson, Northwest Territories.
He wrote of "winter drifting on Bonanza creek" and clearing $2,000, which didn't cover much because of the high cost of "grub and everything else," including a bag of flour for $100. He hauled sleds through the wilderness because dogs were too expensive.
He wrote: "There is money in it all right and I am in here to get all I can."
He stayed three more years. Before leaving he sold his claims in the Yukon for $12,000 in $100 U.S. bills. He added to that another $3,000 he'd accumulated from his mining efforts. It would be valued at roughly $420,000 in 2014 dollars.
George G. Shaw returned to Vermont in 1901, bought a farm in Bridport and stayed there until his death in 1958, all the while telling his stories to his son, George B. Shaw, who died in 1995 after he'd written up the stories by hand.
George B. Shaw's daughter, Erin Shaw Pastuszenski, 57, of New York who typed the stories in 1980, which were bound into volumes intended for the family, said her father worked on the farm most of his life. He didn't get his GED until he was an adult and the family was living in Arizona.
"He remembered things so well," she said. "I feel a lot of pride that my dad did that."
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