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diamonds way up in northern tundra of the so-called Barren Lands. I was dumbstruck. I had never heard of diamonds in North America, and certainly never heard of the Barren Lands. It sounded like another planet. Being the kind of person who dreams about faraway places--and then tries to get to them--of course I had to go. I got myself an assignment from Discover magazine to cover the strike, and things developed from there over a period of about six years. I got to know the prospectors quite well, and their bizarre story. I went back to the Barrens a half-dozen times. I can say it is the most wild and beautiful place on Earth. Unexpectedly, I also ended up spending many months in libraries. It was there I discovered a centuries-long secret history of diamond hunters in the U.S. and Canada, all looking for these diamonds, this place. After that, I had to tell the whole story.

 Where are the Barren Lands and why has this territory, seemingly on the very edge of the earth, continued to attract so much attention in the past few years?
  KRAJICK:    The Barrens are on the edge of the earth. They’re at the very top and center of the North American continent in Canada’s Northwest Territories—as far as you can go without falling off into the Arctic Ocean. It’s 500,000 square miles with no roads, towns or people. It’s called the Barren Lands because it is past the northern limit where trees grow, and it is extremely harsh and dangerous. Fipke and Blusson sparked a giant staking rush, like the Klondike, with 260 companies airlifting in crews--a single diamond mine can be worth $70 billion. In 1998 Fipke/Blusson’s partners opened a huge diamond mine, the Ekati—North America’s first. Now, instantly, Canada is a world diamond power, threatening the De Beers cartel. There also turns out to be gold, uranium and other minerals there—and probably more diamonds, because exploration is still ongoing. Beyond the outdoor adventure and business aspects, this raises profound environmental questions. Up to now that remote part of the world has never faced the development taking over everything else. Now it may.

 Despite their harshness, the Barren Lands have drawn prospectors for centuries. What were those explorers looking for, at least initially, and why did rumors persist of hidden treasures to be found there?
  KRAJICK:    The original prospectors were Indians and Inuit. For millennia they traveled through the Barrens, and they found native copper—pure, unalloyed metal—just lying on the ground. This was a fabulous treasure for them, because it made good spears, fishhooks, etc. They killed each other over it. European fur traders reached the Hudson Bay coast in the 1670s, and heard rumors of this fabulous “Coppermine” far west. A lot tried finding it, but there were no maps or navigable rivers, and walking was incredibly dangerous. Many died. My favorite was a British sailor, Samuel Hearne, who was not a prospector at all--just a nice, blond-haired young fellow ordered by the Hudson Bay Co. to go find this place. He walked 3,500 miles with the Indians from 1769 to 1772. He starved, froze, shredded his feet and participated in a horrific massacre. I think of him as Canada’s Meriwether Lewis—the first outsider to really travel the interior. He never found anything, and published an absolutely heart-stopping journal before drinking himself to death. After that, the legend would never die. Everyone from Sir John Franklin to Ernest Seton, co-founder of the Boy Scouts, showed up to hunt gold, copper, whatever, to the present day. It turns out the Barrens have the world’s oldest rocks, and indications of all kinds of minerals in there. The only thing the earlier guys didn’t think of was diamonds. 

Your book tells an incredible 450-year saga of adventurers who hunted diamonds all over the continent.  Can you tell us something about these diamond hunters and the trail of clues they were following?
  KRAJICK:    The first diamond hunter was the very first European to sail into interior North America--the French explorer Jacques Cartier. He sailed up the St. Lawrence River in the 1530s and spotted sparkly things in the rocks--quartz crystals, but he thought they were diamonds. Europe went crazy until the truth came out. That’s where you get the French proverb “Voila! Un diamant du Canada!”-- the rough equivalent of the American saying, “Phony as a three-dollar bill.” But then, incredibly, a few hundred years later, people did start finding real diamonds. Everyone’s forgotten about this now, but in the early 1800s, millions of dollars’ worth of gold was panned in Georgia, Virginia and other Southern states, and in the washings, some guys found small diamonds. The first documented was by Dr. M.F. Stephenson near Brindletown, N.C., in 1843—1 carat and apparently quite nice. By the way, he’s the man credited with saying, “Thar’s gold in them thar hills!” After that, a lot of the nicest ones were found by accident, usually by kids playing. Their eyes are close to the ground, you know, and they pick up things just out of curiosity. There are now about 25 states and Canadian provinces now where loose diamonds have turned up. Hundreds of companies have followed up on random finds, but no one could find the sources—the ore, which would be minable. Americans, and later Canadians, became mad for diamonds. There have been failed diamond rushes from rural Kentucky to Syracuse, New York, and endless scams involving nonexistent diamonds. The boldest was the Great Diamond Hoax of 1872, which took in Charles Tiffany, Gen. George McClellan and Horace Greeley, and nearly wrecked the U.S. stock market.

You were there in 1998 when Fipke and Blusson’s mine opened.  Can you describe the natural environment?
  KRAJICK:     You arrive by float plane. Then you either travel by helicopter, boat, or your feet …     The Barren Lands are, literally, the most beautiful place on earth. The American West is big; the Barrens are much bigger. There are literally million of little lakes, and an endless bounty of emptiness and color, with rolling hills and plains. It was glaciated until just a few thousand years ago. So with no trees to get in the way, the rock formations are bare and primeval looking. Sometimes there are fields of boulders the size of cars, going on for miles. In winter everything is snow, ice and rock; you don’t see much life except a few wolverines and ravens, eating carrion. In the summer, caribou and wolves migrate up from the forest, enough mosquitoes to eat the planet hatch, and the grizzlies wake up—the land is alive.  I have seen caribou herds stretching literally to the horizon, with wolves following them, just like the Wild West. 

Source: www.barrenlands.com (for the rest of the interview)

QUESTION: How did you get started on a book called “Barren Lands?”

 KRAJICK:  In 1994 I read an article in The New York Times saying that a couple of small-time Canadian prospectors, Chuck Fipke and Stewart Blusson, had hit