The Invincible Martha Black

A Klondike Gold Rush odyssey featuring "The First Lady of the Yukon." Climb the treacherous Chilkoot Pass, run the Whitehorse Rapids, and experience what was once the most famous city on Earth: Dawson City.

There were many, MANY more entertaining characters in Dawson City we wish we’d had time to include in the episode. We’re very much hoping that we’ll be able to cover some of them in more detail in the future. In fact, we’ve already shot a bunch of footage for an episode about Klondike Kate Rockwell and her rival in Whitehorse, Klondike Kate Ryan, which we’ll be releasing some time in 2019. Make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss it!

There was also Belinda Mulroney, “the richest woman in the Klondike”, whose broken-down pet mule, Gerry, had a habit of poking his head into the saloons to and getting drunk on free booze until he finally got kicked out. (At least, according to some stories — including the tales Pierre Berton tells in “Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush”, although we’ve been told that he could get more than a little carried away with repeating the most exciting myths sometimes.)

There was “Swiftwater” Bill Gates, a dishwasher from Idaho whose claim on Bonanza Creek was so rich he paraded through the muddy streets in a top hat, with a diamond pin in his tie and the only starched collar in town. He fell so deeply in love with a teenage dancer that he offered her her weight in gold if only she would marry him—but still got soundly rejected. He died decades later, searching for silver in Peru.

There was Charlie Kimball, who sold his claim on Bonanza Creek for $100,000, opened a dancehall and was so excited by its success that he got drunk for three straight months, spent all his money on booze, and lost his dancehall in the process.

There’s more to the story of Martha and George, too—especially when it comes to their contributions to the First World War.

When the war broke out, the Blacks were determined to do their part. George created his own Yukon Infantry Company and convinced nearly 300 men to sign up. And when they sailed off to join the fight, Martha made sure she was with them. She spent the war in England, working harder than she’d ever worked before: volunteering for the Red Cross and the YMCA, writing reports for the newspapers back home, and visiting wounded soldiers in hospital. She was even made a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society thanks to a series of talks she gave about the flora of Yukon. (She was very much an expert on the subject; in fact, the Canadian Pacific Railway displayed the art she made of pressed flowers in hotels across the country.)

Just a few months before the end of the war, George joined the list of the wounded. At the Battle of Amiens, his legs were hit by shrapnel and cut through by a machine gun bullet.

And the Blacks were far from the only Yukoners who made sacrifices during those terrible years of the war. Dawson City and Whitehorse spent more per capita on war bonds than any other cities in Canada. And in 1918, the territory was devastated by the sinking of the SS Sophia. The steamship was owned by the Canadian Pacific Railway, ferrying passengers between Alaska and Vancouver — including soldiers destined for the front lines in Europe. There were more than 350 people on board when the ship struck a reef. It was stranded there for nearly 48 hours, in sight of the desperate rescuers who tried and failed to save the passengers before the ship finally sank beneath the waves. Every single one of them died. This, too, is a story we’d like to cover in more detail someday. You can read more about the sinking of the Sophia from the Canadian mint, who created a memorial coin this year, here.

Note: The portrait of Martha Black used in the episode for her journey to Dawson is a substitute for the fact there are no usable photos of her during her younger days. Rather than use a photo of an elderly Martha Black, we chose to find a public domain image that closely resembled her since Martha was not an elderly woman when she first came to Yukon--she grew old here in Canada, and we didn't think it would make sense to use a late photo for her 20s and 30s. We believe strongly that the animations in Canadiana episodes are a way to connect to the past, so we make decisions to strengthen that sensibility, even if it means fudging some lines (think: re-enactments).

A big thank you to Alpine Aviation, Janet and Gerd, and to our pilot Andrew who gave us the experience of a lifetime flying over Chilkoot Pass!

Episode Transcript:

This is Bonanza Creek. We're in Yukon, just outside Dawson City near the Klondike River. This is where it all started. In the summer of 1896, a man called Skookum Jim of the Tahltan First Nation stopped here with his family for a rest after shooting a moose. He came to the creek for a drink on this exact spot, and it was here that he first noticed them, flakes of gold in the water.

Word of the find spread quickly through these mountains. Within days, the whole creek had been claimed by local prospectors, and soon all the neighbouring creeks had been claimed, too. Hundreds of people poured into these valleys to pan for gold, and they found lots of it, burning through the permafrost to reach the precious metal below.

The Klondike Gold Rush had begun.

This is Canadiana.

The gold was a long, long way from the rest of the country, in the far north, cut off from the outside world by icy mountains and frozen rivers. There was no road to this place, no telegraph not even regular mail delivery. It took almost a year for the news to reach the outside world, but when a steamship pulled into Seattle carrying two tons of gold, it started an international stampede.

The timing was perfect. The world was in the grip of a terrible depression. The promise of an instant fortune was enough to send droves of desperate adventurers scrambling north. They called them Stampeders. Over the next two years, 100,000 of them set out for the Klondike, hoping it would change their lives forever, and one of them was Martha Louise Black.

She didn't need the money. She was living a very comfortable life in Chicago as a 32-year-old socialite with a rich husband and two children, but secretly, she was bored. She longed for adventure, and then one day, a stranger turned up at her door. He claimed his dead uncle had just left him a million dollars in gold dust and that he would give half of it to anyone willing to go all the way to Dawson and get it.

Black was in.

She left her husband and her children behind and headed north, but getting here wouldn't be easy. These are the Coast Mountains, and in 1898, this was the quickest way to the Klondike, through these icy peaks on foot. There's a narrow path down there called the Chilkoot Trail. It snakes its way through the mountains for more than 50 kilometers, from the coast of Alaska on into Yukon, a punishing trek that could take months to complete.

They called it the worst trail this side of hell.

Thousands of people who tried to walk this path never made it to the other side. Some turned back; others died. Only the strongest and most determined men survived. Martha Black did it all wearing a long skirt and a corset, pregnant with her third child. 

Day after day, she struggled along the trail surrounded by death.

She saw haunting sights, avalanches so recent corpses were still being uncovered, abandoned equipment left behind by those who'd frozen to death or slipped from the narrow icy ledges to their doom, the carcasses of dead horses lining the trail. Some said the mountain routes to the Klondike were so punishing that horses committed suicide, throwing themselves off ledges to bring their suffering to an end.

And then the most daunting obstacle of all, the Chilkoot Pass. This is it. It stands on the border between Alaska and Yukon, a slight dip between the mountain peaks. At the bottom is the United States, where most of the Stampeders came from. At the top, Canada and the path onward to the Klondike.

If Black wanted her gold, she'd have to climb this first.

As Black made her ascent, her heart pounded in her chest. She struggled to breathe. There were moments, she admitted later, I felt I could go no farther. And then, just a few feet from the summit, her foot slipped. She lost her balance and fell tumbling into a crevasse, where the sharp rocks broke her fall. Her hands were bleeding, her boot sliced open, her leg throbbing with pain, but she regained her footing and carried on.

Then suddenly, she was at the top. She'd made it; she was in Canada.

And there at the summit were the Mounties in their famous red coats, processing travelers through customs and making sure everyone had brought enough food to keep them alive for a year, a load so heavy, some Stampeders had to make the trek up and down the pass 40 or 50 times.

Even then, their suffering was far from over.

After the endless grueling march through the mountains, they arrived here. Today this is a ghost town, but 120 years ago, the shores of this lake were noisy with the racket of the tent city of Bennett. Thousands of Stampeders were preparing for a deadly new chapter in their journey.

This is the Yukon River. It stretches for nearly 3,000 kilometers, from the placid shores of Lake Bennett all the way to the Klondike and beyond. It's one of the mightiest rivers on the continent.

Martha Black and the rest of the Stampeders were determined to conquer it any way they could. Here at Bennett, they cut down whole forests' worth of trees, sawed them into boards, and banged them together into makeshift boats and rafts. Most of them had no clue what they were doing. Their vessels were leaky death traps.

But all through the summer, an endless flotilla of rickety crafts floated down the river toward the promise of gold. The trip would take them another two mosquito-plagued weeks, and most terrible of all, it would take them over the Whitehorse Rapids.

Today, the rapids have been tamed by a nearby dam, but in the late 1800s, this canyon was filled with seething whitewater, and it was quickly followed by the rapids that gave the city of Whitehorse its name. It was a one-two punch so dangerous, the Mounties banned women from crossing them,

but Martha Black didn't give a damn.

She and her companions braved the rapids in a small wooden boat crammed so full of people and supplies, they could barely stay afloat. At halfway through, disaster struck. An oar snapped with a great crack, leaving them helpless in the angry, churning water. The boat spun out of control, in danger of being crushed among the rocks. Somehow, miraculously, they made it out the other side, and now, finally, nothing stood between Martha Black and the Klondike.

Black arrived here in the summer of 1898. Just a couple of years earlier, this spot where the Yukon and Klondike Rivers meet had been home to an indigenous camp. The Tr'ondek Hwech'in and their ancestors had been coming here to hunt and to fish for thousands of years. Now, suddenly, it was the biggest city west of Winnipeg and one of the most famous places on Earth, the beating heart of the Klondike Gold Rush, a muddy, drunken mess of tents and log cabins.

There were gambling dens where more than $100,000 could be lost in a single hand, dance halls where prospectors spent so much gold on booze, you could make a fortune panning for the gold in the sawdust on the floor, and saloons filled to the brim with adventurers and dreamers of all kinds. It was Sam Steele, the most famous Mountie of them all, the writer Jack London, who turned the stories he found here into best-selling books like White Fang, Calamity Jane, whose exploits with Wild Bill in the Wild West are still the thing of legend today.

But most of the Stampeders never found their fortune. Of the 100,000 who set out for the Klondike, only 30,000 ever made it to Dawson City. Only 2,000 struck paydirt, and only about 200 found much of it. Most of those drank all their newfound wealth or gambled it away. Only a few dozen people ever got their gold out of the Klondike, and after just a couple of years, the easy finds dried up and the prospectors moved on.

The last great Gold Rush was over.

But while thousands of people streamed out of Dawson City, Martha Black stayed behind. She never did get the gold she'd been promised all the way back in Chicago. What she found here instead was a whole new life. It wasn't an easy one.

During her first winter here, as she got more and more pregnant, she lived in a cabin just over there on the other side of the Klondike River. It was called Lousetown. Some said it was the most lice-ridden place on Earth. The temperature sometimes dropped to minus 55 degrees Celsius.

Dawson suffered outbreaks of typhoid, malaria, and smallpox. A fire burned down half the town twice. Night after night, Black later remembered, I prayed to die. She finally gave birth alone in the cabin to a nine-pound baby boy.

And when the spring came, an avalanche nearly wiped out the cabin with her and her new son in it. But no matter how dangerous life here might be, the north found its way into her heart. Black fell in love with this vast, rugged country, with the pale green moonlit nights, with the wildflowers draping the mountainsides in colour, and with the strange characters who called this place home.

Before she knew it, Black was at the center of Dawson's social life, welcoming strangers into her cabin, grizzled mining men who came bearing gifts for her new baby and tears in their eyes as they remembered the families they'd left behind. She quickly put down roots here. Her other kids joined her and she met a new man, a lawyer from New Brunswick named George Black. He proposed after just two weeks.

Together they started their own gold mining company, and George entered politics, getting elected to city council and appointed as commissioner of the Yukon, in charge of the entire territory. They lived here at the commissioner's official residence.

George eventually got elected to Canadian Parliament and became the Speaker of the House of Commons. But there was a shadow hanging over him, his memories of the First World War. The horrors he'd seen in Europe haunted him for the rest of his life. Decades later, he suffered a nervous breakdown brought on by his PTSD.

When the next federal election rolled around, he wasn't well enough to campaign, and so that's how Martha Black found herself running for office. She was 69 years old.

Her riding was the biggest in the country with the smallest population. Reaching her voters was an epic challenge, but Martha Black was used to epic challenges. She campaigned by plane and by car and even on foot, sometimes walking for miles past herds of caribou and flocks of ptarmigan just to talk to two or three people at a time. She made no election promises except that she'd do her best, and for the voters of Yukon, that was enough.

In February 1936, Martha Black found herself here, more than 4,000 kilometers away from Dawson City on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. Just two weeks before her 70th birthday, she became the second woman ever sworn in as a member of Canadian Parliament. It was just the latest stop on an extraordinary Canadian journey.

She'd risked her life to come north, defying death over thousands of punishing kilometers to find a new home, and she found it here in Yukon, among the miners and the Mounties, the dancehall queens and the gambling barons. She opened her heart to them and to this unique place, and they responded in kind, choosing Martha Louise Black to represent them in Parliament and become a pioneer of an entirely different kind.

So I'm here in the Sourdough Saloon inside the Downtown Hotel in Dawson City, and I'm about to take part in one of Canada's strangest traditions. But before I do that, I want to thank you so much for watching.

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So here's the story. It starts in the 1920s with a pair of brothers, Louie and Otto Linken. They were rumrunners doing a frantic border crossing during a heavy blizzard, and to get his bearings, Louie stepped off the sled and straight through the ice, soaking his foot. They were worried, though, that the police were hot on their tail, so they just kept going, and by the time they got home, Louie's big toe was frozen solid.

So Louie took a shot of rum and Otto took an ax to the toe. Then they stuck it in a bottle of alcohol as a keepsake. When they eventually abandoned their cabin, they somehow forgot the toe and left it behind, which is where it stayed for years, all the way until 1973 when it was discovered by a man named Captain Dick Stevenson, and he did what anyone would do when they find an abandoned pickled toe.

He started a Sourtoe Cocktail Club.

Today, more than 100,000 people have taken the challenge: drink a shot garnished with a real mummified human toe. The Sourdough Saloon is now on their 10th toe. They've now had to up the fine for intentionally swallowing one all the way to $2,500, which is what happened to the ninth toe back in 2013. Those new toes have all been donations, mostly from people who got frostbite or medical amputations, although one was left with a simple note: don't wear open-toed sandals when you're mowing the lawn.

And that's the story of the Sourtoe Cocktail, which I guess means it's time for me to join the club.