In its heyday in the 1950s and '60s, the remote community of Elsa, 300 miles north of Whitehorse in the Yukon Territory, was the epicentre of one of the world's most lucrative silver mining operations--an enterprise that far surpassed the riches produced during the iconic Klondike gold rush. For twelve of those years, Gerald Priest was the chief assayer for United Keno Hill Mines (UKHM), the major player in the region. Priest was a clever man who could as easily carry the role of refined gentleman as he could rustic mountain man. As far as ten-year-old Alicia Priest was concerned, her father Gerry's life in Elsa was perfect: a home rich with music, books and pets where he never had to boil a kettle or wash a sock; a well-paying job; a beautiful and affectionate wife; and two daughters who revered him as only little girls can. But as Alicia grows older, she realizes that perhaps her dad saw things differently, with four female dependents, an ailing wife who couldn't give him the son he wanted, a religiously fanatical mother-in-law and a tedious, dead-end job.

Escape becomes possible when Gerry stakes the Moon Claims and discovers a phenomenal silver-rich boulder--enough silver to make him and his family rich and fund their relocation south. But when Gerry tries to smelt and sell the ore, UKHM calls the RCMP. Too many things don't add up: geologists find the former assayer's boulder story improbable, the manpower required to hand-mine and transport seventy tons of rock across the Yukon terrain is beyond Herculean and most suspiciously, Gerry's ore looks a lot like the ore found in UKHM's Elsa mine.

In A Rock Fell on the Moon, Alicia Priest consults letters, news stories, archived RCMP files and court documents, and interviews with former mine employees, litigators and police investigators, to piece together the full story of her father's infamous heist. The result is a lively, heart-rending account of a mysterious crime that came extraordinarily close to succeeding; a fascinating look into the small mining communities that once thrived in the Yukon; and the personal story of the Priest family, who could only watch aghast as the life they knew crumbled around them. As she uncovers more of the story, Alicia must reconcile two different versions of her father: the fun-loving, bush-savvy adventurer who raised her, and the man accused and convicted of the Great Yukon Silver Ore Heist.

Alicia Priest (1953-2015) was a journalist with more than twenty-five years of newspaper, radio, magazine and report writing experience, with work appearing in The Globe and Mail, Canadian Medical Association Journal, The Georgia Straight, The Vancouver Sun, Vancouver Magazine and Western Living. She lived in Victoria, BC, with husband Ben Parfitt, also a writer, and their two cats and one dog. They have one daughter.

Alicia Priest's profile page

“Priest’s story gently unfolds with almost perfect measurements of tension, revelation and intimacy without sentimentality.”

Geist

“...it is an exemplary memoir, combining rich description of the Yukon during a mining boom with the details of an almost-successful heist, and offering a rare window into the life, laughter, and loss of a mid-century Canadian family.”

BC Studies

"A ripping good read...Heart-breaking, hilarious and suspenseful...This is a consummately well-written book, achieving the near-impossible feat of maintaining a journalist's objective distance while literally tracking her father's fifty-year-old footsteps and disclosing painful family secrets with restraint and dignity."
~ BC Bookworld, September 2014

"Priest's story gently unfolds with almost perfect measurements of tension, revelation and intimacy without sentimentality."
~ Geist, Winter 2015 (issue 99)