WEEK 95 CORONAVIRUS: READING PLEASURES NO.2 OF 2

This is the second (and last) section of two relating to the book I greatly enjoyed   I Married the Klondike by Laura Berton.

Her descriptions of life in Dawson City in the early part of the 20th century included stories of people, places and events.  I loved everything she talked about as I was able to related to so much of it having been born and raised in central British Columbia.  My memories are the 1950s, just a few decades after hers.

She tells this story about 'Spring Break-Up' which is the time when the snow really starts to melt away and you know it's the end of winter as you move into spring. It was a time of mud, spongy roads which were half frozen and half thawed.  For my father with his haulage business it was a time of 'load restrictions' i.e. couldn't haul as much thereby reducing the wear and tear on the churned up roads. 

She describes the anticipation of spring break up.  The town was right on the Yukon River and it played a bit part in their life.  The river froze over in October and stayed that way until May as she describes here:

"The ice went out sometime during the first two weeks  of May, and the moment of its break-up was one of the great events in Dawson.  For weeks before, thousands of bets were laid on the exact day, hour and minute of its going…. 

The news that the ice was moving flashed through the town like an electric current.  The time was fixed exactly in this manner. A Union Jack on a stake was frozen into the river in front of the town early in the spring, about a hundred and fifty feet from the shore.  This was connected by a wire to point on the Canadian Bank of Commerce building, on shore, in such a way that when the ice moved a hundred feet, a switch closed an electric circuit, stopping a clock in Charles Jeanette’s jewellery store and setting a gong ringing. Almost instantly the whistle in the fire hall on Front Street would sound and then the school bells, followed by the church bells. By this time, every husky dong from Lousetown to Moosehide was howling madly and the entire town was pouring down to the river…. Once or twice the ice went on a Sunday morning, and then the entire church congregation flowed from the pews before the sermon had ended.  The famous instance occurred almost immediately after the minister had given a violent sermon on the evils of gambling, with special reference to ice pools.  The choir had hardly started the hymn  “Shall We Gather By the River” when, appropriately, the dogs and sirens indicated that the ice was moving."

While our town further south in central British Columbia and not right on a river but rather on a lake (Shuswap Lake) we none-the-less had similar local 'gambling' schemes she describes.  I recall in my Grade 4 year (aged 10 years old) trying to guess when the first snow was going to be on the rocky face of Mt Ida, the local landmark.

When she talked about Front Street the picture above is what was in my mind.  Yes, there was a Front Street in our town which directly faced the CPR railway line. This photo of Salmon Arm's Bank of Hamilton must be about 1910 or so. (My paternal grandfather was employed there. No... unlike Robert Service who was employed in the Bank of Commerce in Dawson City, he didn't write poetry!)

My maternal grandfather (Rev. V H Sansum) was the minister in Port Simpson about the same time as Laura Berton writes of life in the north.  This is a photo of his family: my mother is back left.  The lady in the photo is her step-mother as her own mother died, in the north, of pneumonia. This photos would be in the mid 1930s (my mother was born in 1919). 

This was our house in Salmon Arm, at Broadview Corner. The photo, with dripping icicles and snow melting off the roof, looks like a spring day.