I recently had the opportunity to float down the Yukon River for 8 days through the Yukon Charley National Preserve. Since this was in conjunction with an college level natural science class, I ended up bringing a fair number of books along with me to share with our students. O' Neill's A Land Gone Lonesome was perfect companion history for this trip. In many ways, the book is a follow up to Coming into the Country by John McPhee. It is organized in a way that follows the history of the geographical area while floating down the actual river. Since we were taking the same course as O' Neill, it was convienent to read about bend in the river and its past as we were actually floating by it.
The book itself is very well researched and tackles a paradoxical problem of human relationship's with wilderness. We create preserves to prevent the destruction of a landscape, but the point of the preserve is it's development by humans in the past and human subsistence methods such as fishing, logging, hunting. It may seem like a clear cut argument to not allow any development at all in a national preserve but O' Neill makes a very clear case against the National Park's policies.
I found many similarities to the issues associated to the Chilkoot Pass Trail and their attempts to preserve history and block any changes to the landscape. For instance, take the case of trash as an artifact. There is a cut off date for when trash becomes historically significant. Anything after certain year need to be removed and leaving trash in the park is obviously forbidden. However, any "trash", like an old coffee can, or bent nails is an "artifact" which you are not supposed to remove from the park, or in some instance even touch.
In addition to general history, O'Neill uses interviews, legal records, policy documents, artifacts and oral history to illustrate his journey down the river. I found it very interesting and I highly recommend anyone journeying into the Yukon Charley Preserve to give it a read. ( )

Excellent book and a great sequel to Coming Into the Country by John McPhee. I've never canoed the Yukon, but I sure wanna now. The NPS doesn't look real good in this book, but as an employee I can only say that the Park Service truly brings this upon themselves. Making upper level management (Superintendents) accountable would be nice, but they seem to operate in a world all their own and one devoid of that very rare item common sense. Read the book, float the river. get into the country! I read this while on a canoe patrol along the Kobuk River in Kobuk Valley National Park. Lends some similarities. ( )