Pierre Berton - Prisoners of the North: Portraits of Five Arctic Immortals

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 or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisheror, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agencyis an infringement of the copyright law.

Anchor Canada and colophon are trademarks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Berton, Pierre, 19202004.
Prisoners of the North / Pierre Berton.

eISBN: 978-0-385-67358-7

1. Canada, NorthernBiography. 2. Northwest, CanadianBiography.
3. Canada, NorthernHistory. 4. Northwest, CanadianHistory18701905.
5. Adventure and adventurersCanada, NorthernBiography. I. Title.

FC3957.B47 2005 971.90099C 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

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

Hollywoods 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 Ive Known and Loved

The Joy of Writing

Prisoners of the North

P ICTURE B OOKS

The New City (with Henri Rossier) Remember Yesterday

The Great Railway

The Klondike Quest

Pierre Bertons Picture Book of Niagara Falls

Winter

The Great Lakes

Seacoasts

Pierre Bertons Canada

A NTHOLOGIES

Pierre and Janet Bertons 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 OOKS FOR Y OUNG R EADERS

The Golden Trail

The Secret World of Og

Adventures in Canadian History (22 volumes)

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. Hes missed too many boats, theyd 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 goodbyemen 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 worldprisoners 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 hadnt 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 milie Tremblay, displayed the latest Paris fashions for the towns socialites as well as for the towns 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. Pauls 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 Klondikes 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.