I Married the Klondike

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University. She is the author of several books, including The
Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret
Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

In the introduction to this new edition, Pierre Berton, the author’s
son, recalls that his mother was always writing. When Berton was small,
his mother was contributing regularly to the Dawson News and working on
a novel about the British aristocracy. It was not until her husband had
died, and 22 years after her family had left the Yukon, that Laura
Berton (née Thompson) began writing I Married the Klondike. It would
become a Canadian classic and a significant work of social history.

In a book that Robert Service has described as “a record of a
woman’s courage and devotion in a hostile land,” Berton writes as
both a journalist and a storyteller: she is generous with facts, yet
never forgets to add the emotions of her characters. Her call to teach
kindergarten in the Yukon came to her when she was working as a
kindergarten teacher in Toronto. Family members were horrified by her
decision, but the pay was four times her Toronto salary and adventure
beckoned. Berton decided to follow a friend’s advice: try it for one
year. She arrived by steamboat at a rough mining town, rapidly became a
member of “the crowd who went out every night,” and chose to stay
for 29 years. Activities included snow-shoeing, skating, sleighing,
bobsledding, and fancy-dress winter carnivals. Young women, Berton adds
with her delightful sense of humour, were fully chaperoned.

The local sense of humour in Dawson is matched by the author’s wit,
and both are counterpointed by tragedy. Berton was told that the
hotel’s drinks, called “ice-worm cocktails,” really had worms
(which were considered a delicacy) at the bottom of each glass; the
“worms” turned out to be bits of spaghetti. The interior walls of
the female teachers’ boarding house, which were made of cotton
stretched over thin boards, transmitted every whisper, and soon after
arrival the teachers were kept awake by the racking sobs of a young
engineer whose wife had recently died in a log cabin on the creeks.

I Married the Klondike is anecdotal, shaped by the author’s interest
in individuals, her love of a good story, and her enthusiastic immersion
in a Yukon mining town in the early decades of the 20th century. Berton
celebrates life in the High North with wit, sensitivity, and a keen
intelligence.