The majority of White Fang takes place in the Yukon wilderness—referred to in the novel as the Northland—during the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897. After a nugget of gold was discovered in 1896 in Klondike, Yukon (a far-northern region of Canada), about 300,000 people, including a young Jack London, quit their jobs and made the journey north in hopes of striking it rich. The 21-year-old London, by that time already an aspiring writer with a taste for adventure, had been studying at UC Berkeley for one year when he decided to drop out of school and seek his fortune in the Klondike. Although he didn’t strike it rich as he’d hoped and was eventually forced to return home after contracting scurvy, London would later recall his years spent in the harsh, arctic majesty of the Yukon wilderness as the most formative of his life. “It was in the Klondike I found myself,” he wrote. “There nobody talks. Everybody thinks. There you get your perspective. I got mine.” Indeed, his two most famous novels, White Fang and its companion novel published three years earlier, The Call of the Wild, both take place against the backdrop of the Klondike Gold Rush, demonstrating how influential this period was on him.
The Yukon wilderness looms large in White Fang, forming a harsh and overpowering backdrop to the story of White Fang’s struggle for survival against the cruelties of nature and men. The landscape’s extreme, arctic weather conditions, brittle silence, and dark, inscrutable forests continually push its inhabitants—wolf, dog, and human alike—to the brink of death, forcing them to fight for their survival. This interest in survival permeates many of Jack London’s novels, and was influenced by Charles Darwin’s idea of the “survival of the fittest”—or the idea that, through natural selection, only the strongest of a species survive. Charles Darwin was a key influence on London’s writing, so much so that London even brought a copy of Darwin's On the Origin of Species with him on his journey to the Klondike.
Additionally, London’s choice to set White Fang in the Yukon wilderness reflects the widespread interest in wilderness conservation that was peaking in the United States around the time it was published in 1906. Interest in wilderness conservation had been steadily rising since the Industrial Revolution, and when Theodore Roosevelt became president in 1901, he created the United States Forest Service (USFS) and began establishing national parks and other wilderness preserves to ensure that some nature remained untouched by industrialization.
The Yukon wilderness that the majority of the novel is set in stands in stark contrast to the mild Californian landscape (referred to in the novel as the Southland) of the book's end. Where the Yukon is characterized as “a desolation, lifeless, without movement,” “mirthless,” “savage,” and “frozen-hearted,” California is “smiling country, streaming with sunshine, lazy with quietude.” This shift in setting reflects the change in White Fang’s circumstances: while at the novel’s beginning he was a wild wolf struggling to survive, by its end he is Weedon Scott’s beloved pet, fully domesticated and living in the comfort and peace provided by his wealthy master.
