Prisoners of the North: Portraits of Five Arctic Immortals

291 Pages·2006·5.67 MB·English

by  Pierre Berton

You who this faint day the High North is luring Unto her vastness, taintlessly sweet; You
who are steel-braced, straight-lipped, enduring Dreadless in danger and dire in defeat;
Honor the High North ever and ever, Whether she crown you or whether she slay; Suffer
her fury, cherish and love her— He who would rule her must learn to obey.
—Robert W. Service

Copyright © 2004 by Pierre Berton Enterprises Ltd.
Anchor Canada edition 2005
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form
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Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Anchor Canada and colophon are trademarks.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Berton, Pierre, 1920–2004.
Prisoners of the North / Pierre Berton.
eISBN: 978-0-38567358-7
1. Canada, Northern—Biography. 2. Northwest, Canadian—Biography.
3. Canada, Northern—History. 4. Northwest, Canadian—History—1870–1905.
5. Adventure and adventurers—Canada, Northern—Biography. I. Title.
FC3957.B47 2005 971.9′009′9C C2005-901094-0
Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for the images in this book. In the event
of an inadvertent omission or error, please notify the publisher.
Published in Canada by
Anchor Canada, a division of
Random House of Canada Limited
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v3.1
Books by Pierre Berton
The Royal Family
The Mysterious North Klondike
Just Add Water and Stir Adventures of a Columnist Fast Fast Fast Relief The Big Sell
The Comfortable Pew The Cool, Crazy, Committed World of the Sixties The Smug Minority The
National Dream The Last Spike
Drifting Home
Hollywood’s Canada My Country
The Dionne Years
The Wild Frontier The Invasion of Canada Flames Across the Border Why We Act Like Canadians
The Promised Land Vimy
Starting Out
The Arctic Grail
The Great Depression Niagara: A History of the Falls My Times: Living With History 1967, The
Last Good Year Marching as to War Cats I’ve Known and Loved The Joy of Writing Prisoners
of the North
P B
ICTURE OOKS
The New City (with Henri Rossier) Remember Yesterday The Great Railway The Klondike Quest
Pierre Berton’s Picture Book of Niagara Falls Winter
The Great Lakes
Seacoasts
Pierre Berton’s Canada
A
NTHOLOGIES
Pierre and Janet Berton’s Canadian Food Guide Historic Headlines Farewell to the Twentieth
Century Worth Repeating
Welcome to the Twenty-first Century
F
ICTION
Masquerade (pseudonym Lisa Kroniuk)
B Y R
OOKS FOR OUNG EADERS
The Golden Trail
The Secret World of Og Adventures in Canadian History (22 volumes)
Maps
Drawn by CS Richardson
The Land of Gold
Eastern Europe and Russia, 1914
Stefansson’s Arctic
The Northwest Passage
The Great Bear Country
Hornby and Bullock’s Route to Hudson Bay
Service’s Return Trip to Dawson via the Edmonton Trail
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Books by Pierre Berton
Maps
Foreword
The King of the Klondike
The Blond Eskimo
The Persevering Lady
The Hermit of the Tundra
The Bard of the North
Afterword
Acknowledgements
Foreword
In the Yukon, where I spent my childhood and much of my teens, the
old-timers had a phrase for those who had been held captive by the
North. “He’s missed too many boats,” they’d say. When the sternwheeler
Casca puffed out into the grey river on her last voyage of the season
toward the world we called the outside, the dock would be crammed
with veterans waving goodbye—men and women who had given their
hearts and their souls to the North and had no intention of leaving.
Dawson City in those days was a unique community, a cosmopolitan
village where everybody knew everybody else, full of adventurous spirits
who had come from every corner of the globe to profit from the great
stampede of 1898. In my boyhood, the gold rush was history, but they
were still here, this handful of survivors from the gaudy days.
They did not talk much about adventures that would seem prodigious
to us today; it was old stuff to them. They had clawed their way up the
passes, hammered together anything that would float, defied the rivers
and the rapids, and notched the logs for their own cabins when at last
they reached their goal. They had made it! When others flagged, or
failed, or fled, they had hung on, secure in themselves, and isolated from
the outside world—prisoners of their environment but free from the
cacophony, and the glare, and the breathless bustle of the settled world.
They had had their fill of all that. I once asked George Fraser, an old-
timer who lived on Dominion Creek forty miles from Dawson, why he
hadn’t paid a visit to town in fifteen years. “Too many bright lights!” he
told me. That says it all.
The North has its own sounds, but in my day when the temperature
dropped and the roar of the river was stilled and the whine of the big
gold dredges had ceased, the world of my youth was silent. Nothing
seemed to move. Smoke rose from the chimneys in stately columns that
did not waver. It was as if the entire community had been captured in a
motion picture freeze frame. For many, I think, that was one of the
attractions.
They came from everywhere, these old-timers we called sourdoughs.
Men like Mr. Kawakami, a Dawson fixture who sold us fireworks and
incense along with Japanese parasols and kimonos from his little shop
on Third Avenue. A block away in her corner store, a distinguished,
grey-haired Frenchwoman, Mme Émilie Tremblay, displayed the latest
Paris fashions for the town’s socialites as well as for the town’s
demimonde. No stranger just off the boat would have realized that in
1894, two years before gold was discovered on Bonanza and before
Dawson existed, she and her husband had climbed the Chilkoot Pass and
made their way into the empty Yukon.
One of her customers was the Chicago-born doyen of Dawson society,
Martha Louise Black, who left her husband and climbed the Chilkoot
pregnant, bore her baby in a one-room log cabin, and went on to become
the second woman in Canada to win a seat in Parliament.
At St. Paul’s Pro-cathedral on the Dawson waterfront I would watch
the morning procession each Sunday, often led by the bishop, Isaac O.
Stringer, who had been obliged to boil and consume his sealskin boots to
ward off starvation on the Rat River trail, thus providing Charlie Chaplin
with a memorable scene for his film The Gold Rush. At the other end of
the social scale was a rough-hewn Slav, Jan Welzl, who had come to
Dawson from Prague by way of the Arctic, so he claimed, with the help
of the Inuit. He spent his time trying to develop a perpetual motion
machine in an abandoned warehouse while bemoaning the fact that he
had sold the rights to his memoirs, Thirty Years in the Golden North, for
one hundred dollars before it became a Book-of-the-Month Club best-
seller.
I went to school with the second and third generations of these captive
Northerners. One classmate, Chester Henderson, was the grandson of the
famous Robert Henderson, officially acknowledged as the co-discoverer
of the Klondike’s gold. Another was the son of Percy de Wolfe, known as
the Iron Man of the North because of the hazards he encountered with
his dog team on the mail run between Dawson and Eagle, Alaska. Helen
Van Bibber, who beat me to stand first in our class, was the mixed-blood
offspring of a marriage between a native Indian and a male descendant
of Daniel Boone.
My father was one of these Northern hostages. He could have had a
teaching job at Queen’s but he chose the Yukon, refusing to quit even