Prelude: "... beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow ..." 3 -- Chapter 1 Of a fateful encounter between a prospector and a squawman on the banks of a salmon stream called Thron-diuck, and what that led to 34 -- Chapter 2 How Dawson was born, Circle City died, legends were lived, and fortunes won without the world being the wiser 65 -- Chapter 3 Of treasure ships laden with gold by the ton and bearing the germs of an endemic disease called "Klondicitis," which drove a continent to madness 96 -- Chapter 4 Being the tale of the Dead Horse Trail, where, every beast being expendable, men themselves became beasts 146 -- Chapter 5 A chapter of paradoxes: of money that would buy nothing; of contestants who won a race, yet lost the prize; of a golden mountain that all could see but few could find; of a starvation winter when none needed relief save those who brought it 171 -- Chapter 6 A chapter of deceptions, in which the easiest ways to wealth turn out to be the weariest and survival becomes sweeter than any fortune 201 -- Chapter 7 An unbroken line of men, stretching into the cold skies, provides the stampede with its most memorable spectacle on the slopes of the Chilkoot Pass 244 -- Chapter 8 How thirty thousand souls, in seven thousand homemade craft, were convoyed safely down five hundred miles of uncharted water to the city of gold 268 -- Chapter 9 How Dawson City, flooded first by water, then by men, was transformed into a glittering metropolis of the north, where sounds of the human carnival were never stilled (except on the Sabbath) 288 -- Chapter 10 Being a faithful account of the rise, reign, and violent death of Jefferson Randolph "Soapy" Smith, the dictator of Skagway 333 -- Chapter 11 Nourished by gold, the "San Francisco of the North" runs wild for a year, burns itself out, and enters its long decline 366 -- Coda: "... the fault is not in the wealth, but in the mind ..." 417.
