TWO BOOKS ABOUT THE KLONDIKE AND SLED DOGS

TWO BOOKS ABOUT THE KLONDIKE AND SLED DOGS


I love used book sales. Last week the Quesnel Friends of the Library hosted their annual event. As a member I was involved in the organization, and I volunteered at the sale…..and I went home with almost 30 books. I picked up some gems that address local (Cariboo/North Central British Columbia) history, and some classics that address the North. Whenever one of these books addresses the topic of sled dogs, I make special note, for even though the author’s focus is not really on the sled dogs in their casual observations about the dogs, they will reveal facts that would otherwise go unknown.

Pierre Berton is a Canadian legend. This great author wrote a lot about the north and the fact that he was born and raised in the Yukon gives his work that much more credence. Pierre’s mother, Laura Beatrice Berton was also an author, and her book I Married the Kondike is somewhat of a classic first published in 1954. I have often seen this book and never really took the time to read it. I am now glad that I did.  Dorris Heffron is a Canadian author who, up until the publication of her book City Wolves in 2008, wrote fiction that was aimed at adolescents. 



Laura Berton journeyed to the Yukon in her early 20’s in about 1910, certainly before WWI. She was a second-year school teacher and the Yukon salary of almost 5 times what she was making in Toronto was too good to turn down. She arrived in Dawson City at a time when it was past its first bloom, the population was plummeting and the glitter and mystique of the Klondike Gold Rush had all but faded. Dawson City and the Yukon was settling in to the next phase of its evolution. Little did she know at the time that she would spend the rest of her life in the Yukon.

Laura often refers to the “howling huskies that were everywhere”, almost as though they were a backdrop to everything that transpired in the Yukon at that time. But she does make a few specific references to the dogs that she observed on notable occasions, particularly regarding those dogs that Jack London in The Call of the Wild refers to as the “Northerners”, the Mackenzie River Huskies or the dogs of the Loucheux or Kutchin or more properly the Gwich’in people of Telit Zheh (Fort MacPherson) and Tsiigehtchic (Arctic Red River) along the Peel and Mackenzie Rivers in the Northwest Territories. The First Nations people resident in the Dawson City/Moosehide regions are the Han or Tr’ondek Hwech’in people. The Gwich’in from the Northwest Territories are of the same linguistic group as the Tr’ondek Hwech’in but speak a different dialect and in fact are closely related to the Gwich’in people of Old Crow Yukon and Fort Yukon Alaska. Still, the Gwich’in and the Han obviously had a relationship, for there are several records of the “Peel River” people and their dogs being in Dawson City during the Klondike Gold Rush.

To quote Laura Berton from Chapter 4 of her book “…..with a great jangling of sleigh bells and a great swirl of powdered snow, the fast dog teams of the Peel River Indians whisked into town on their annual pilgrimage down the Artic Circle to Dawson. They were a dramatic and colourful group of natives. Their dogs were decorated with great pompons of brightly coloured wool and their harnesses were alive with little bells. The men wore handsome caps bright with beads and the women wore intricate beaded shawls. They were magnificent-looking people, with long black hair of great sleekness, high foreheads, good noses, strong white teeth and a straight look in the yes. They carried themselves with grace and dignity and did everything with a certain air. They wore jaunty buckskin jackets, heavy-beaded gauntlets and fur caps decorated with the tails of wild animals…..They had come into town to trade, bearing flat bales of furs in their sleighs, which they sold to the Northern Commercial Company, whose store seemed like a fairyland to them”.

In another part of her book, Laura Berton is describing the “social scene” in Dawson City and at one point she wants to make the point that Dawson truly was a cosmopolitan city. “There were Americans from every state in the union, Canadians from every province, monocled Englishmen, Australians, Latin Americans, South Africans and Orientals. One of my first escorts was an Italian who taught me to make spaghetti. For some reason Chinese were barred from the country, but there was one half-caste and there were Japanese by the score. And there was a handsome, turbaned East Indian who used to mush into town from the creeks, standing erect behind a long team of huskies. I can still see him with the frost thick on his eyebrows, contrasting with the deep brown of his face”.

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A second book that complements Laura Berton’s in that in part it also addresses the social life in gold rush Dawson City is a novel of historical fiction called City Wolves, authored by Dorris Heffron. I didn’t find this one at the used book sale, in fact it was published quite recently, in 2008. I read about this book in, of all places, the Report of the Task Force looking into the mass cull of sled dogs in Whistler B.C. in April 2010. Dr. Terry Lake, the chair of the Task Force mentions the book and the author. On further research, I subsequently learned that the author had, in fact, been appointed to the Task Force by Dr. Lake.

A very brief precis of the book, (which in fact appears in the book itself), was written by Ken McGoogan who is himself a Pierre Berton History Prize winner and the author of several books about the North, including Fatal Passage and Race to the Polar Sea. To quote McGoogan’s comments about this book…“Historical romance, pioneering feminism, rough sex, Inuit spirit guides, wolves, dogs, more wolves, real people mingling with fictional ones, a fresh take on the Dawson City gold rush--this is entertainment. An indomitable heroine takes city wolves into the wilderness and makes them howl. I for one could not stop listening”.

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in sled dogs, the North, the Klondike Gold Rush, adventure, wolves, history, the Inuit, and a darn good story. I picked up this book with a view to looking at it through my dog musher’s eyes…..I was in for a bit of a surprise and I had to take a deep breath and sit back and think hard to try and appreciate the full depth of the author’s message.

At one level this book is a biography of a young woman who studied to become the very first female veterinarian in Canada, graduating from McGill University in the 1890’s. She had been raised on a farm in Nova Scotia and was very familiar with animal husbandry. At one point as a teenager she had some very emotional and sensitive dealings with wolves, an experience that set the future direction for her life. She obtained a manuscript that detailed the experiences of two Inuit spirit persons, a man and wife who lived many years ago and who devoted their energies to the development of the breed of dog that we now know as the Alaskan Malamute.

The author was herself the owner of an Alaskan Malamute she named Yukon Sally, and no-doubt her relationship with this dog was the spark behind the story of these Inuit spirit persons. The story mixes fictional characters with real persons. The famous Belinda Mulroney and Father William Judge and Inspector Charles Constantine of the RNWMP all figure in her recounting of experiences in gold rush Dawson City, and so does her dog Yukon Sally.

Once in the north the heroine of the story sets up a veterinary practice in Dawson City and is known as the “dog doctor” (everyone seemed to have trouble pronouncing the word veterinarian). She meets all sorts of dog mushers, with personalities that are very similar to those that we still meet every day.

Finn is a fictitious musher who has a great understanding of just what makes for a good sled dog and a good dog team. He was able to put together a great group of dogs and clearly cared about them a great deal. But Finn’s personal life choices as well as his self care get in the way of his goals to be a great musher as well as a successful gold miner…sound familiar? One real-life individual was Jethro, a black miner, a successful “Klondike King” who owned a beautiful team of malamutes that pulled a sled into which the owner had built a bar --as in booze bar. His team and sled were valued at $10,000.00. Are there Jethro’s in the sport of mushing today? Fritz, a fictitious character carried the last mail of the season over the rotting ice into Dawson City. Inspector Constantine had to get an important message out to Skagway, so Fritz turned his team around and headed out to deliver to mail, but not before the heroine convinced him to take her in his sled as a passenger. The trip was harrowing but they made it to Skagway….there is no question that my money would be on Fritz to win the Iditarod.

In fact the author had travelled throughout the Yukon with her dog as she did extensive research for this novel, she met with mushers with a desire to learning as much as possible about sled dogs and their care. There are two important themes that percolate throughout the whole book that have particular relevance for present-day dog mushers. One is the message that animals, particularly wolves and dogs, have feelings that need to be understood and respected, that they deserve to be treated humanely. The second is a recognition of the place of First Nations people and of their rights.

When the heroine was studying to be a veterinarian, surgery on animals was still being done without anaesthetic, she was appalled by the lack of sensitivity to the well-being of all animals. This was another era, animals were meant to serve and meet the needs of their human masters, the understanding that animals might have feelings and that they deserved to be treated humanely was simply not considered….until our heroine made her feelings known. Perhaps this is the reason that Dr. Lake invited the author to be a member of the Whistler Sled Dog Task Force.

There is a very upsetting history of First Nations people being uprooted, displaced and even eradicated in the face of the white man’s lust for wealth and power. This is certainly what happened to the Bear Lake (Bowron Lake) Band of the Southern Carrier Nation during the Cariboo Gold Rush of the 1850‘s. Hoards of wide-eyed gold seekers simply “pushed” the native people from their traditional homeland and lifestyle. It was inevitable that diseases to which the natives had no immunity quickly followed and the whole tribal group perished within a few short years and with them went a way of life and eons of knowledge. Something similar happened in the Klondike. The junction of the Klondike and Yukon Rivers was a fishing ground for the Han people who had lived in this area for centuries. In the vast written record of the Klondike Gold Rush, First Nations people are seldom mentioned, yet they were present long before the Gold Rush occurred and they are still there. The author makes it very clear that the person who made the original discovery of gold on Rabbit Creek in the Klondike was not only a First Nations person, but a First Nations woman. Following the Gold Rush, these people were relegated to a small site downriver from Dawson City at Moosehide. There were First Nations dog mushers long before there were non-native mushers. The two Inuit spirit persons that surface throughout this book are constant reminders of the role that First Nations people played in the unfolding development of sled dogs and of their use as animals working in support of all mankind.



Note: (interested readers might also like to read a third book, Gold Diggers -- Striking it Rich in the Klondike by Charlotte Gray which also addresses the social life of Gold Rush Dawson City).