John Griffith London, the illegitimate son of Professor of Astrology father and an emotionally distant mother, was born January 12, 1876, in San Francisco, California. Jack spent much of his childhood working odd jobs to help support his family. After living abroad on a seal-hunting ship and traping across much of the United States, Jack briefly attended the University of California at Berkeley. When news of the gold rush in the Yukon reached him, he packed his bags and left California with thousands of other prospectors to test his luck in the frozen north. After spending the winter and the spring of 1898 in the Yukon, London had not found an ounce of gold and was suffering from scurvy, a disease brought about by lack of good foods. Realizing he was beaten, London returned to California without gold, but with a wealth of experiences and impressions from the Klondike that would soon be portraid in the stories and novels for which he became famous. The most successful of these Klondike tales is The Call of the Wild, a novel that propelled London to the forefront of American fiction. Buck's struggles in The Call of the Wild mirror London's own difficulties in finding a compromise between his drastically contrasting belief systems.
             The gold rush created a need for a reliable, weatherproof transportation system in the Klondike, a need that could be met by only one available resource: dogs. As a result, dogs became a nesesaty with winter transportation between 1897 and 1900, and proved useful in the summer too. Dogs hauled equipment, delivered mail, and labored in the mines themselves. During the summers, the dogs were used as pack animals; during the winters they pulled sleds. By 1899 there were approximately four thousand dogs in the mining town of Dawson. Most of the animals were privately owned, but transportation companies owned some as well. During the summer months gold was brought into Dawson from the mines by dog trains consist...