This book is a Thrift Store find. I picked it up at the Owen Sound Salvation Army Thrift Shop. Brenda, Olivia, and I popped in there last week. It was a good visit. We picked up a few nick knacks including a Pyrex pie plate for me to get crazy with when fresh fruit or chicken comes along.
Laura Beatrice Berton is the mother of famed Canadian journalist, writer, and historian Pierre Berton. In Pierre's introduction we learn that he hiked up the Chilkoot Pass with two of his seven children in 1971, and then the next year he published a book called Drifting Home along with a number of special features in McLean's magazine in which he drifted from down the Yukon River to Dawson City with his wife and all seven of his children to re-live the journey he had taken as a boy.
Pierre Berton was born in Whitehorse and grew up in Dawson City. His mother, while always a writer, did not at first think that the life and times of Dawson City in the early 1900s was anything worth writing about. But of course it was. The pioneers of the gold rush from 1896 - 1898 were still around, and the city had kept all of its culture and trappings while the population declined from 8000 at its peak to 800 in 1932 when the family left. Berton arrived in 1906 and the city was already in decline.
Lots of stories of the lives of courageous men and women who basically carved out a life based on a dream. Tales of survival, adventure, raising kids in the sparest of conditions, wilderness boating on wild rivers, and cultural anomalies in an isolated city that was cut off in the winter from all supply lines.
