Viciously inhospitable, unique in the world, the remote, austere, breathtakingly beautiful area spanned by the intended route for the Alaska Highway made clear that in the subarctic north nature is a dictator, not a ‘mother’. Link to another story “The Subarctic North Lay in Wait” To this day the region is a vast expanse of …
Category Archives: History of Northern Canada
Heroine of the Klondike–Martha Black
Heroine? The subarctic north had several, but Martha Black stood out even among them. News of Gold on the Klondike reached the ears of Martha Purdy in 1898. Privileged daughter of a Chicago businessman, mother of two, Martha talked her husband, Will, into following their star to Dawson City. Martha the heroine had not married …
Angel of Cassiar
Angel of Cassiar they called her. A remote gold mining district in northern British Columbia, Cassiar attracted a party of 200 prospectors up from Nevada to try their luck. Nellie Cashman came with them, opened a boarding house, and set about prospecting just like the men. Strikes, Gold Strikes, in the Far North Unlike …
Ghosts Haunt the Caribou Hotel.
Ghosts haunt the Caribou. Fabled figures came to Yukon Territory with the rush to the Klondike gold fields. They created the famous Caribou Hotel that centered life in tiny Carcross. Apparently even death couldn’t make some of them leave its history behind. The story weaves its way through John Firth’s book, The Caribou Hotel. In …
Sister Kathy
Sister Kathy joined our Subarctic sojourn on July 24, 2013 and brought a new dimension to my developing obsession with the far north. I emailed the story of my reactions and developing obsession to my family subscribers regularly and on July 26 I emailed this. Aunt and sister Kathy and Andy joined us two days …
ALSIB (Alaska Siberia) Route
ALSIB, the Alaska Siberia Route, offered a brutal passage for pilots taking airplanes from factories in Montana to the Russian Front in Europe. But in 1943, with millions of German soldiers retreating on the Russian Front, the entire Allied war effort hinged on the Soviets. If the Soviets needed warplanes, their allies would damned well …
A Hard Good Life
A hard life can be a good life. Many of us today have lost touch with that fact. The Mennonites who came to Manitoba, Canada at the turn of the century came for better lives. They didn’t expect easy ones. Three generations on, in 1921, one austere, deeply religious, family welcomed baby Linda to the …
Cameron Cox
Cameron Cox came up by train from Fort Ord, California and detrained with the rest of the 35th Engineers into bitter cold at the Dawson Creek depot. They travelled to Fort St John and started building road northwest from there. Cameron remembered moving constantly, taking down pyramidal tents, moving a few miles, setting them up …
Glacier, the Valdez Glacier
Women Came to the Klondike Too The Valdez Glacier looked easy, and in 1897 and 1898 when promoters invited gold rushers to take “The All American Route” to the Klondike, they had yet to learn that hustlers offering helpful advice were just about the only people making money from the Klondike Gold Rush. They …
Women Came to the Klondike Too
Jack London Found a Different Kind of Klondike Gold Women as well as men heard the news of gold in the Klondike. If men endured hell to get there, women did too. With husbands or without them, miners or miner miners, women came north in droves. Some came out of desperation, hoping for money …