Gold Rush: The Untold Story of the First Nations Women Who Started the Klondike Gold Rush

A powerful illustrated book that tells, for the very first time, the story of the courageous women of the Klondike Gold Rush.

Written and illustrated by Northern Irish artist Flora Delargy, the award-winning illustrator of Rescuing Titanic, this exquisitely illustrated story of quiet bravery tells, in rich detail, how Shaaw Tláa (Kate Cormack), a First Nations woman, discovered the gold that led 100,000 gold diggers to descend on the region.

Set against the powerful backdrop of the Yukon valley, with forbidding mountains and rickety railway tracks cutting through the snow, this stunning book shows young children how gold was discovered and how it possessed the popular imagination. It explores the towns that popped up overnight, the treacherous journeys people made to cross the forbidding Yukon landscape, the building of epic railways, and the resilience and injustices experienced by the First Nations people whose towns became inundated by gold-diggers and the legacy of the Gold Rush.

Flora Delargy’s style takes in minute and exhilarating non-fiction details, from the beautifully rendered train tickets and maps of the mountains, diagrams of railway bridges, a step-by-step look at how to pan for gold, to breathtaking illustrations of the Yukon mountains.

Flora Delargy is an author and illustrator from Belfast. She has a master’s degree in Children’s Book Illustration from Cambridge School of Art. In 2019, she was selected for the Illustrators Exhibition at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair. Rescuing Titanic is her debut book for children.