THIS WAS THE NORTH

Anton Money was a twenty-two-year-old cheechako--a wilderness greenhorn--when he first came to the Yukon in 1923. Three years later he had become a character straight out of the pages of Robert Service--mushing his huskies across hundreds of miles of frozen snows, poling a handmade boat down the rapids, bringing down moose and caribou with his rifle. Money, now an old man, remembers his northern odyssey with a rosy, frosty glow. For a year he lived in pristine solitude on the shores of Lake Frances where few white men had ever ventured. He got lucky and made a gold strike and returned with a wife and baby to panhandle the yellow nuggets and live--in the log cabin he built by hand in a land where winter temperatures dropped to 80 below zero. Raspberries and currants grew wild, whitefish and trout leapt from the lake into the frying pan, wolves and grizzly bears roamed the adjacent hills and forests. The Yukon was the last frontier and Money's adventures, told simply and forthrightly, will make you wish it was still as rugged and unspoiled as an old sourdough's memories.