In the summer after my first year of journalism school, I decided to read Pierre Berton’s two-volume history of the building of the Canadian transcontinental railroad, The National Dream and The Last Spike. This was 1997, and I was working in the public relations department of Via Rail. My office was an expansive, mostly abandoned cubicle farm in a bland midrise behind Toronto’s Royal York Hotel. Via had been radically downsized in the previous few years, but it was still hanging onto much of the office space in Toronto that held its formerly robust workforce. I had a cubicle in a distant corner of the space, and there were only about a half dozen other employees who might possibly wander by on any given weekday. I figured that if I was caught reading books about trains in my downtime, I could shrug it off as research. 11As a joke, I went around the empty cubicles one day gathering disconnected phones and lined a half-dozen up on my desk. When friends would stop by to meet me for lunch or whatever, I’d pick them up at random and start barking orders. The building manager was deeply unamused, and I eventually had to put them back.
I’d never read any other Pierre Berton, and if I had any preconception going in, it was probably that what I was about to read would be some misty-eyed admixture of stuffy and hokey, a government marketing pamphlet disguised as scholarship. There was no good reason for my prejudice, but lots of lazy ones. Pierre Berton was certified, sanctioned, 100 percent Grade A Canadiana. Pierre Berton was Front Page Challenge, he was a motif on one of Peter Gzowski’s cozy old sweaters, he was the voice-over for Hinterland Who’s Who. He was faded Trudeaumania, a mirthless CBC sitcom, the import-substitution mediocrity of overplayed MuchMusic CanCon. He was the Honeymoon Suite of doorstopper popular histories, is what I’m saying.
And what I’m really saying is that Pierre Berton was, to my wandering punk eyes, an icon of an anxious, insecure Canadian culture that was finally, I hoped, in eclipse. The one that obsessed over the country’s lack of a cohesive identity or national monomyth, the one that exalted the ordinary and built regulatory fences around the second-rate domestic, the one that wondered endlessly what they were saying about us in London and New York. Were they talking about us at all? Should we ask again? Do we need a federal agency to intervene?
None of this had much to do with an actual writer named Pierre Berton, of course, and less still to do with the two books that made for a rip-roaring cubicle read that summer. Not long after I finished them, I finagled a first-class berth on the Canadian, Via Rail’s flagship train, the one that traces the preposterous route from Toronto to Vancouver that Berton argued, convincingly, had been the one essential act of nation-building in the first quarter century after Confederation.
My reading list for the train ride was more in keeping with my strongest literary passions in those days. It consisted, in its entirety, of the following: the final two-thirds of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. I have no regrets. Wallace split my skull wide open somewhere just west of Sioux Lookout and rearranged synapses and neural maps all the way across the great Canadian prairie. The whole trip was a slow, gentle sensory overload in two distinct tones: the staggering breadth and majesty of the Canadian landscape and the soaring, twisting, cerebral feast of Wallace’s writing. I’d gorge on a chapter or three in my berth, then hurry up to the observation deck to gawk at the forbidding muskeg wastes of the Canadian Shield. More Wallace, and then the endless horizon of the Saskatchewan plain. Still more Wallace, and then the humbling heights of the Rockies.
By the time the train descended through the canyons of the Fraser Valley into the Lower Mainland of British Columbia, I felt like I’d been undone and reassembled again. I emerged onto the streets of Vancouver at the end of a two-part rite of passage, dumbfounded by the beauty of the only cloudless day I’ve ever witnessed in that city. I was convinced of two axiomatic lessons. First, that Berton had the scope of it all just right, that Canada was a wonderful but dubious hypothesis made manifest by its railroad tracks. And, second, that Canada’s literature was too small for its mythic landscape. Wallace had made the tennis courts and halfway houses of Boston as vast and exhilarating as the Canadian wilderness, and too much of the CanLit I’d read (which was mostly the stuff I’d been forced to read to that point) constrained it all down into the Victorian scale of mannered parlours and mean little kitchens, places and times that seemed not just long ago but set seemingly in another country from the largely urban and polyglot one I knew best. 22A further caveat: I freely acknowledge that I remain not very widely read in the CanLit canon, and I have no doubt there are whole thriving subgenres of which I’m ignorant and which refute my prejudices and put the lie to my biases. I’m aware that Ondaatje and Vanderhaeghe take on big historic themes, that Richler’s Solomon Gursky Was Here is exactly the sort of broad rollicking tale I’m extoling the virtues of broad rollicking tale I’m extoling the virtues of, that Atwood and Munro and Toews could kick my punk ass without breaking a sweat. I’m mainly referring to the cliched CanLit that Q’s Jian Ghomeshi once characterized as “the family drama on the prairie.” I think Twitter’s delightful @CanLitCat will have my back here, if no one else does. I remember it struck me as particularly symbolic that the CPR and its chain of signature hotels—by far the most distinctive architectural form of prewar Canada—owed their provenance to the outsized ambitions of William Van Horne, an American.
Wallace split my skull wide open somewhere just west of Sioux Lookout and rearranged synapses and neural maps all the way across the great Canadian prairie. The whole trip was a slow, gentle sensory overload in two distinct tones: the staggering breadth and majesty of the Canadian landscape and the soaring, twisting, cerebral feast of Wallace’s writing.
I’ll admit I didn’t read much more CanLit for many years after that magical day in Vancouver, and I didn’t give much more thought to Pierre Berton at all for a very long while. The stuff that raced my pulse—and still does—was the sprawling, brawling, epic-scoped writing of the American modern/postmodern tradition. The journalistic camera eyes of John Dos Passos and Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon’s lyrical puzzles, Don DeLillo’s elegant re-imaginings of shots heard round the world on New York baseball diamonds and in Dallas motorcades, Hunter S. Thompson’s gaudy fever-dream of Vegas, the debauched, obscene bicoastal fables of Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis. (What the hell, I confess—I even liked Glamorama.) These were writers who took the larger-than-life landscape of their native land and somehow made it larger still, kicking out against its temporal and historical and grammatical boundaries. You could get lost for weeks in the teeming wild of Tom Wolfe’s punctuation alone. And Wallace, above all Wallace—a shambling goliath among giants. There was a single Wallace short story, “Octet,” a self-conscious postmodern exercise in which a lone footnote explodes out of the margins and swallows its own narrative and seemingly the entire universe of fiction whole, howling for universal resonance against the limits of the form. That one Wallace short story struck me, for a time, like the last word on just about everything. What did grim tales of survival have to say against the din of this barbaric collective yawp?
*
What can I say about youth and arrogance and all that jazz? What I can say is that I find myself in Pierre Berton’s childhood home in Dawson City, Yukon, still trying to reconcile Berton’s Last Spike and Wallace’s last word. I’m still obsessed with trains, and I still gorge myself on American writing, especially the kind immersed in the expansive mythic landscapes of American history. (Caleb Carr’s The Alienist had me jumping at the shadows of 19th-century New York serial killers in the long quiet Klondike night.)
I am, however, pretty sure I owe some Canadian writers an apology, 33I’d try to list them by name, but to be honest it’d be embarrassingly random and incomplete. I’ve spent much of the last ten years bogged down in climate science and energy policy and behavioural economics, and when I’ve come up for air, I’ve defaulted to filling in gaping holes in my knowledge of the classics or devouring historical spy fiction by the yard (what can I say—Alan Furst and Philip Kerr are my comfort food). starting with Pierre Berton himself. Not just because I’m squatting in his old bedroom right now, but also because there was so much more to him than that avuncular visage on Front Page Challenge. Separate the Canadian fact from the folksy Canadiana, and there’s an effort in Berton’s writing to paint the same brash, epic landscapes that I love so much in Wallace et al. Or—if you’ll stick with me here—let’s talk about it this way: if you read Berton’s Last Spike and Klondike in the gloaming afternoons of a Yukon January, and then you feast in the evening on the novelistic genius of The Wire and Deadwood, you start to see more clearly the thread of Canadian history that Berton left for us, from which to weave grander mythic tapestries. Anyway, that’s what I’ve been doing. Let me tell you about it.
The first thing to know about Dawson City is that it brings all those shopworn Canadian themes of isolation and survival and peace, order and good government into such a high relief that you simply have to concede their accuracy. If they seem tired now—and they did to me, in any case—there’s a cluster of undeniable, self-evident truths at the core. In Dawson in January, as nowhere else, the weather is trying to kill you. The landscape intends to evict you. I saw a lynx up on the Dempster Highway the other day, and it really couldn’t give a good goddamn whether I lived or died. There is only one reason—and this is made abundantly clear in Berton’s Klondike—that the Dawson gold rush of 1897 didn’t turn into some sort of Donner Party catastrophe at epic scale, and that is because the cooler heads and set jaws of the North West Mounted Police got here ahead of the stampeders and saved them from themselves.
Any random smattering of detail from Klondike—and there are reams of it—will suffice. The gold-hungry hordes tried to bring horses over the high passes between the Alaskan coast and the Yukon interior, and the poor animals died in such horrific ways and such terrific volumes that Jack London dubbed the route “the Dead Horse Trail.” At the top of the pass, the NWMP demanded to see evidence of sufficient provisions for a year’s stay, because otherwise people would surely starve long before they struck it rich. The NWMP in Dawson, meanwhile, helped evacuate hundreds of stampeders down the Yukon just before the river froze solid in the fall of 1897, narrowly averting disaster. And when the river thawed in the spring of 1898, the NWMP checkpoints along the way saved countless hundreds of rickety makeshift vessels from foundering in the rapids.
The Yukon was not California or South Dakota. The Yukon was lethally unforgiving. It was ferocious. Without order, collaboration, all that dull old scaffolding of society, it would’ve been a mass graveyard.
What the Yukon emphatically was not in 1898—oh, Canada—was a libertine frontier where foul-mouthed anti-heroes could shape their lives with their bare hands at the barrel of a gun. (The NWMP frowned on public cursing, and guns were so tightly controlled that you could buy rifles “by the gross,” Berton reports, for a buck apiece – as souvenirs.) For that wild frontier story, I’ve had to turn to Deadwood in 1876—and present-day West Baltimore.
I’ll spare you the umpteenth reiteration of the argument for why The Wire is among the most successful literary achievements of our time (well, it is) 44I can’t help myself. With the warning that it contains the vaguest of spoilers, in that it reveals someone who doesn’t die over the run of the show, here’s just one absolutely jaw-dropping thing that demonstrates how off-the-chart, TV-as-high-lit good the writing on The Wire was: across 60 hours of script, five distinct narrative arcs, and countless characters mired in pitched battles with good and evil, the show somehow pulls off the cliché-defying high-wire act of maintaining a shivering, shambling, all-but-incomprehensible junkie hustler as its moral centre and accidental, backhanded protagonist. Watch the finale again: the only major(ish) character who’s achieved anything like transcendence or real transformation or even transient redemption by the end is Bubbles. in order to focus on the American frontier and its mythos. Omar Little—Robin Hood of the West Baltimore projects, and incidentally President Obama’s favourite Wire character—would fit right in amid the hustlers and drunks and junkies populating the sheriff-free gold-rush camp of Deadwood’s first season. Squint just a little through the cigar smoke of Al Swearengen’s mean, brutally violent Deadwood saloon, and you can almost see a table in back where Avon Barksdale and Proposition Joe and Marlo Stanfield, Baltimore gangsters, sit polishing their pistols and plotting how to steal the opium trade from old Wu. I bet they’re back there trading war stories with Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane. And poor old Jimmy McNulty and Bunny Colvin would’ve done better as deputies for Deadwood’s pragmatic de facto sheriff, Seth Bullock, than they did under the terminally corrupt institutional inertia of the Baltimore Police Department.[pagebreak]
Point being: Deadwood and The Wire are both tales of the American frontier. (So are The Sopranos and Breaking Bad.) They excite and entice with the elevated drama of violence, lawlessness, corruption, vice. In the denuded, lethally unforgiving social landscape of Deadwood and the Baltimore projects, the (im)morality tales and narrative arcs are writ large, stage-lit by muzzle flashes, intensified by body counts and gathering pools of blood. They are maybe uniquely compelling to a Canadian audience because we are such eager voyeurs in this world. We speak the language and recognize the settings, but the action’s completely alien, the moral compass dizzyingly skewed. If we were Germans instead, we’d have a single word for the weird mix of envy and repulsion this stuff inspires. Why isn’t our history this intense? Thank god it isn’t.
And here—to come back around to Pierre Berton and the tidy frozen streets of Dawson—is how we miss the epic aspect of our own stories, or how I did, anyway. I kept looking for the wrong tone and pacing, the wrong sorts of details. When I finish an episode of Deadwood here at Berton House, I turn off the TV and walk to the front door to lock it for the night (which I’m assured is completely unnecessary), and I pass a window that looks out on Robert Service’s cabin, a National Historic Site. It’s a fetching little frontier log cabin, enticingly spooky in the moonlight and the streetlights reflected off the snow. Just up the snowpacked block is Jack London’s Dawson home, also a tourist attraction. Both are closed for the winter. Berton House, of course, is the only one still functioning as a literary factory. As it should be—London was American and Service was English and ours is a younger country than either of those, which is why they didn’t quite get it right and why there’s still work to be done to set the record straight.
Service is the more pointed case in point. He arrived in 1907, long after the peak of the gold rush, and he wrote colourful, wildly popular verses that cavalierly transposed the American frontier onto Dawson. One of Service’s best-loved poems, “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” for example, is pure anachronism.“If there had been a Dan McGrew in Dawson,” Berton writes in Klondike, “and a Malemute Saloon, as Service’s fictional verse suggests, there never could have been a shooting because a Mountie would have been on the spot to confiscate the guns before the duel began.”
Still, the Americans were better mythmakers than we were, and so the Klondike took on a Wild West flavour in the broader pop culture, balanced only by the interloping figure of the rigid, humourless, parodically straight arrow Canadian Mountie. Sergeant Preston of the Yukon became the archetype, and Canadian history, thereby refracted, came to us as orderly and dull. The makers of Canadian TV drama, always keen to hew to the path of least resistance, offered up a latter-day version of the story in Due South, complete with a straightlaced Mountie and a Klondikey Husky named Diefenbaker.
*
Pierre Berton is no longer here to set that record straight, so I’ll try to. The real-life figure who inspired the Mountie archetype was Sam Steele, head of the NWMP detachment on the Klondike trail and later in Dawson, and though his honesty was legendary, his life was about as monochromatic and stuffy as a high-noon shootout between Wild Bill and Detective McNulty. 55A single example: During the gold rush, the Alaskan port of Skagway was run as a sort of criminal syndicate by one Soapy Smith, whose henchmen bilked stampeders out of their grubstakes up and down the trail. One of them showed up at the NWMP post at Lake Bennett—the Yukon’s headwaters—having been brought in for firing a gun. The thug protested that Steele had no right to lock up an American citizen. “Well, seeing you’re an American citizen,” Steele replied, “I’ll be very lenient. I’ll confiscate everything you have and give you half an hour to leave town.” And then Steele had a Mountie march him all the way back to the US border. If the makers of Canadian drama are looking for a setting and narrative to pound pulses, something perhaps a little less hokey than the usual CBC pandering to the regions—Heartland and Arctic Air, I’m looking in your general direction just now—then the makings of at least two long-arc Deadwood-style dramas are buried in the pages of Berton’s Klondike alone. 66This is a very much partial list of the cast of real-life characters tromping the wood sidewalks of Dawson City in the summer of 1898: Calamity Jane; Tom Horey (who helped capture Louis Riel); Sid Grauman and Alexander Pantages (of the eponymous theatres); Augustus Mack (of later Mack truck fame); Tex Rickard (later manager of Madison Square Garden); brothers Wilson (later co-owner of L.A.’s Brown Derby) and Addison Mizner (later a land developer/architect who built Boca Raton); Martin Van Buren’s niece Edith; future Boer War hero F.R. Burnham; correspondents for the Times of both London and New York; and a supporting cast answering to such names as Diamond-Tooth Gertie, Silent Sam, Sailor Bill, Swiftwater Bill, Limejuice Lil, Bill the Horse, Two-Step Louie, Hamgrease Jimmy and the Evaporated Kid (“because he was so small that he ‘looked like a bottle with hips’”).
Let me sketch them out for you.
The first series focuses on Sam Steele. In the first season, he’s a headstrong young Canadian soldier helping repel the Fenian raids and put down the Red River Rebellion. (Now, Louis Riel—there’s another whole series right there.) In season two, Steele rises through the ranks of the NWMP, keeping order during the engineering trials and crazed land speculations of the building of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, meeting with Sitting Bull and fighting in the North-West Rebellion. Season three moves to the Klondike in the winter of 1897, as Steele races to avert one catastrophe after another along the stampeders’ trail. In season four, Steele keeps the peace amid the chaos and debauchery of Dawson City in the golden boom summer of 1898. In an optional fifth season, Steele commands forces in the Boer War and World War I. Because all that, at the very least, is what made up a life for this straightlaced Mountie.
But maybe we need to tell more than a Mountie story. So here’s the long arc of Klondike, a five-season novelistic HBO-style series that moves from one setting to another each year in the same way The Wire roamed season to season from drug-dealing street corners to the docks to City Hall, the schools and finally the offices of the Baltimore Sun. Season one—“Discovery”—tracks the pioneering goldhunters of the pre-rush Yukon, culminating in the Klondike strike and the pandemonium of gold-rush fever it triggers at the port of Seattle. Season two—“Rush”—follows the dreamers and schemers from Seattle and San Francisco up the coast to lawless port towns, taking in shipwrecks and paddlewheeler mutinies, even as the mad scramble in the distant Klondike sees all the best claims staked and fortunes made before there’s even a boomtown to arrive at. Season three—“Trail”—follows the myriad paths to Dawson City, taking in the dead horse catastrophe of the White Pass, the epic marching lines of weary men along the Chilkoot Trail, the foolhardy overland routes from Fort Edmonton, and the slow progress of paddlewheelers from the Yukon delta. Imagine them all racing to converge on this mythic Eldorado in the frozen wastes; tell me you’re bored. Season four —“Boomtown”—tracks the boom from the breakup of the ice on the river in the spring of 1898 through the wild summer, as Dawson City (“San Francisco of the North”) emerges from the Yukon swamp all but overnight. Season five—“Bust”—tells the tale of the boom’s end, the retreat, the inevitable hangover of gold-rush fever.
There’s some staid old straightlaced Canadian history for you right there. There’s no need to gussy up the Canadiana. The Mountie doesn’t need a dog named after a Prime Minister to add some levity. Really, the lesson Pierre Berton’s re-teaching me up here, in his childhood home, is that we’re spoiled for raw material. The stories untold and half-forgotten are scattered everywhere, like big gold nuggets across the creekbed in a stampeder’s fever dream. There’s a Klondike boom of storytelling possibility just waiting to be exploited.
Postscript: Though I was unaware of it when this essay was first written and posted, it turns out that the idea the Klondike gold rush would make for a good long-arc TV series is shared by a production team that includes Hollywood heavyweight Ridley Scott. The Discovery Channel miniseries Klondike, based on Charlotte Gray’s book Gold Diggers, started filming in southern Alberta this month.
