I think the previous reviewer is quite right to emphasise the "reality" of these views, produced and shot (as US film companies were remarkably reluctant to budge from New Jersey) by free-lances on location in the Yukon.
It is worth remembering that we are at a time when the "western" (the US form of the national epic) did not yet exist. Buffalo Bill Cody was of course already an international star with his Wild West Show and had appeared on film already for Edison but the Gold Rush in the Klondike, coming as it did when the US was beginning to think that the pioneer days weer good and over, made just as important a contribution to the growth of a national mythology. The majority of the earliest westerns (those made for instance by Broncho Billy Anderson at Essanay) were not concerned with cowboys and Indians, with the Indian Wars, with the Civil War but with rather simple mining communities. The dates tended to be pushed both southwards in geography and backwards in time once the film-companies started moving to California (because the California gold rush had occurred decades earlier) but the initial impetus for such themes came from this extraordinary adventure in the Klondike which was genuinely contemporary with the journalists, writer (Jack London most famously) and cinematographers recording it The western developed at a time when the "pioneer" spirit was being turned into the basis for a national ideology that would achieve its consecration with Frederick Jackson Turner's "The Frontier in American History" in 1921 and of a quasi-racial theory of eugenics. One could hardly identify a "master race" amongst the US's mongrel population but it was in the pioneer caste (s he imagined it) that Theodore Roosevelt saw the desirable elements of the population who should be encouraged to mate and "strenuously" multiply - as opposed evidently to the scummier immigrant elements represented at this time most notably by the Italians, the Irish, the Chinese and the East European Jews. The pioneer spirit and the kindred notion of "manifest destiny" was also a blueprint for an expansionist US (of which Roosevelt was equally one of the most vocal advocates.
Yet this darker side of the US national mythology was offset, especially in the early days, by a concentration on the lives of quite ordinary folk and on a very genuine spirit of adventure that could appeal to a political radical (like London) as much as to a conservative imperialist like Roosevelt. And the two are exactly contemporaneous. London was sharing the hopes and hardships of the prospectors in the Klondike at the same time as Roosevelt's "roughriders" were butchering Philipino "rebels" in the US's first overseas colony. So it is the "Klondike" western (here in germ in these early views and later associated equally of course with Chaplin's "little tramp") that was the humblest but also perhaps the most genuine and certainly the most healthy expression of the "pioneer spirit".