Martha Black: Gold Rush Pioneer

Brenda Reed is the curriculum and reference services librarian in the
Education Library, Queen’s University.

Martha Black lived an extraordinary life. She was born in Chicago in
1866 into a well-to-do family whose home and business were destroyed in
the Chicago fire of 1871. Her family recovered quickly from this
disaster and “prepare[d] [Martha] to be a good wife and mother, the
normal future for a young woman at that time.” Instead, Black ended up
climbing over the Chilkoot Pass in July 1898, and giving birth to a baby
boy in the winter of 1899 while alone in a log cabin in Klondike City.

Black lived through the roughest part of the Yukon gold stampede.
(Martin does a splendid job of establishing the context for Black’s
adventures, and teachers could easily connect this part of her story to
a history class on the gold rush or a discussion of the poetry of Robert
Service.) After the boom, she stayed on with her husband, George, to
become, at age 69, the member of Parliament for the Yukon, the second
woman in Canada to be elected to that position.

Accompanied by black-and-white photographs and a helpful glossary, this
simply written biography would be especially suitable for junior-high
readers and ESL students. Recommended.