The Story of Berton House

by Ken Spotswood
Freelance journalist
Appeared in: Klondike Sun - October 31, 1997

It's a plain-looking little house that sits at the corner of Eighth Avenue and Hanson Street in Dawson City. It's painted white with green trim, and most people wouldn't give it a second glance--except for the sign outside that reads 'Berton House'.

For 12 years it was the family home of Frank and Laura Berton, their son Pierre and daughter Lucy--and their pet dogs Grey Cloud and Spark. The Bertons bought the house in 1920 for $500. They added a room, and when they left Dawson in 1932 they sold it for the same price. Pierre was 12 years old then. Lucy was 11. No one--least of all him--had any idea that he was headed for a distinguished career and international recognition as one of Canada's most celebrated authors and broadcasters.

The original house measured nine metres by 12 metres (30 feet by 40 feet) and was built by George Craig in 1901. It had clapboard siding which made it stand out among the many log cabins and shanties of Dawson during the post-gold rush era.

Ironically, it's located on a stretch of Eighth Avenue that has become known in Dawson as 'Writer's Row'. Directly across the street from Berton House is the log cabin where Robert Service lived and wrote some of his early verse on the wallpaper. A short block away is Jack London Centre, which contains half of the log cabin occupied by the legendary author of 'Call of the Wild' and 'White Fang' during his prospecting days in the Klondike Gold Rush era. (The other half of London's cabin is part of a similar tourist attraction at London's birthplace in Oakland, CA.).

Berton House is now the official home of the Yukon's writer-in-residence program. The dwelling was acquired by the Yukon Arts Council in 1989 thanks to a generous donation of $50,000 from Berton.

In a joint project involving the Klondike Visitors Association (KVA) and the Yukon Arts Council, the two-bedroom bungalow has been completely renovated by the KVA at a cost exceeding $100,000. Additional funds have been allotted for landscaping in 1997.

Denny Kobayashi, Executive Director of the KVA, says the house remains on its original lot but was relocated to a new, insulating gravel pad to protect it from permafrost.

"While the shell of the house remains intact, it has been re-insulated and re-wired," Kobayashi said. "New plumbing has been installed throughout. It's been painted inside and out and has been completely refurnished."

For its part, the Yukon Arts Council is responsible for furnishing the house and financing the writer's retreat program for professional Canadian authors. The program was established to give them a Yukon experience--as well as the valued time and a place to write. If accepted, an author can live in the house rent free for up to six months.

The program got off to a successful start in 1996 with the three-month stay of Toronto writer Russell Smith, whose first novel 'How Insensitive' won praise and was a finalist for the Governor General's Award.

Smith--an urban hipster who later admitted he'd never been further north than Bloor Street in Toronto--lived at Berton House where he completed a draft of his second novel, another comic satire of city life called 'Noise'.

When the restoration project first began, Berton was a little skeptical about restoring the house to its original state. "I'm afraid if you were to restore this house to the way it was when the Berton family lived there in the 1920s, you wouldn't get anyone who would want to stay--it would be too uncomfortable," Berton wrote to the KVA in 1990.

"I should tell you that we had no bathroom at that time...We had no running water. The only convenience was a single holer in the basement which was reached not by a stairwell, which didn't exist, but by a ladder leading down from a trap door in the kitchen. I remember it well because the trapdoor was left open one day and I tumbled down it, without any perceptible injury," he wrote.

The sounds of the typewriter, however, are not new to the house, or the Berton family. They have, as the saying goes, 'ink in their blood'. Laura Berton is the author of "I Married the Klondike", which has become a Canadian classic--a social history that describes her first years in Dawson as a single woman and school teacher.

Her father, Phillips Thompson, was a respected journalist and author in eastern Canada who founded a political weekly, The National, worked as a reporter for the Toronto News, the Telegraph and the Mail and Empire. Thompson later became a columnist and foreign correspondent for The Globe. "I remember him in his last years working away at a roll-top desk in his study in Oakville, Ontario, as I remember my mother scribbling away on the dining room table in our home in Dawson City, and my father pecking out the result for her on an old Underwood upright," Pierre wrote in the introduction to his mother's book.

Long before it occurred to Laura to write about her personal experiences as a young teacher in the Klondike, she spent years working on a novel about an English aristocrat on an Ontario farm. "It was called 'Then Alice Came Home' and it ran to several hundred pages," Pierre recalled. "She used to read sections of it aloud to us and I can still remember the first line: 'Mrs. Barnes was making cookies.' We all thought it was wonderful and were perfectly convinced that it would become a best seller and we would all be rich. Alas, it made the rounds of all the publishers but it never saw print."

Laura later realized her dream when 'I Married the Klondike' was published in 1954, which brought her a small amount of fame. In it, she described the family home and their lifestyle:

"I settled down to keeping a house that, apart from electricity, had no modern conveniences. Our water, for instance, was delivered during the winter months by two men on a cart, four times a week...The two of them would trudge in, their clothes caked with snow and ice, their moustaches icicled, bearing two wire-handled petrol tins full of water, which they hoisted and slopped into a tank in the corner.

"A great deal of the water spilled over on to the floor, where it almost instantly froze into a thin sheet, so that when we rose we were faced with a miniature skating rink in our kitchen."

The trap door in the kitchen floor led to the cellar which contained not only the afore-mentioned toilet, but the family's cloakroom, a cold storage room for fruit and vegetables, the furnace and as many cords of wood that could be crammed in.

In the early years the whole family slept in the one bedroom--Frank and Laura in a double bed, Pierre and Lucy in cribs on either side. Frank added a spacious new kitchen addition to the north end of the house about 1926, after which everyone spread out. The old kitchen became Lucy's new bedroom. Frank's old den became Pierre's bedroom, and Frank and Laura finally had some privacy.

During the summer the family's garden flourished with vegetables and a colourful display of flowers. "Our finest crop was spinach, which we gathered by the bushel and bottled for winter use," Laura wrote. In the winter, keeping home and hearth together in temperatures of 50 degrees below zero was--and still is--a full-time job in Dawson City. The Berton home was no exception:

"Each fall we pasted every window down with heavy paper so that no breath of air could enter. Our only ventilation was in the bedroom, where Frank had an ingenious arrangement above the bed consisting of a length of stove pipe stuck through the wall with a tight lid on a hinge which could be opened or closed by pulling on a rope to admit an icy blast of air. We needed no refrigeration, of course. Anything placed on the back porch froze solidly at once."

The kitchen was the most important room in the house. It's where the family meals were cooked and eaten. It's where the whole family--including Grey Cloud and Spark--took their weekly Saturday night bath. "We didn't even have a bathtub," Pierre recalled. "I bathed in an iron laundry tub once a week."

On Mondays the laundry was soaked and wrung out to dry on a complicated arrangement of ropes and pulleys suspended from the ceiling. In the fall the kitchen was the room where Frank butchered the annual caribou, as well as ducks and fish. It's where Laura bottled spinach and canned preserves for the winter. It was also Pierre's and Lucy's nursery, and it's where Laura did her writing late at night after the chores were done. In addition to working on her novel, Laura also wrote articles for the Dawson News.

"I can remember taking her copy down to the office on Third Avenue," Pierre wrote. "The first galley proofs I ever saw contained her accounts of various concerts and minstrel shows in the Arctic Brotherood Hall." Frank Berton was a man of many talents who is warmly remembered by Pierre. "My father was a man of enormous curiosity--a wildflower collector and amateur astronomer who read Anglo-Saxon and did algebra problems as a hobby.

"He was, among other things, a dentist, a civil engineer, a cabinet maker and a weaver. He was also a remarkably good teacher; you couldn't be with that man for five minutes without learning something."

For years Frank worked as the mining recorder in Dawson--until the Depression of the 1930s found its way to the Yukon. In 1932 the government informed Frank that his job was being eliminated for economic reasons. At age 60, he was given a small pension and the Bertons prepared for retirement.

The house was sold. Grey Cloud had grown old and blind and was mercifully shot in the woods one night by Frank after the children were in bed. Spark had died a few years earlier after a porcupine quill became lodged in his brain.

The Bertons stayed for the annual Discovery Day festival on Aug. 17, 1932. The next day they boarded the riverboat Casca for their journey 'Outside', which eventually took them to Victoria, B.C., after 25 years in Dawson City. For Frank and Laura it was the end of an era, but for Pierre and Lucy it was the beginning of new events which would re-shape their lives. Pierre recalled getting his start as a writer after joining the Boy Scouts in Victoria. "I published a newspaper for the Scouts, then another one at the high school--five copies, which I typed with one finger and rented out for a cent or sold for a nickel...

"Writing was a natural thing for me, yet when I was in high school I didn't think of becoming a writer; I decided I would become a chemist. I'd hold chemistry shows in my garage for a nickel, and I'd bring in about 20 kids. I changed the color of water; I blew up things; I created mounds of ash in a single motion; I made dust explosions..."

"By my second year of college, when I found I was spending all my time on the college paper, I decided to switch courses and become a journalist." Lucy Berton Woodward also became an author. She later wrote two children's books, one of which was co-written with her mother..

"I didn't really have an ambition for writing. It was more of a copycat kind of thing," she said in an interview in Dawson in 1996. "Pierre started writing when he was in the Scouts in Victoria. The first writing I did was in high school there. We started a newspaper and I wrote a mystery story. In college (at the University of B.C.) I worked on the Ubyssey newspaper and became a senior editor. I later got a job with the now-defunct News Herald in Vancouver.

"My mother and I collaborated on 'Johnny in the Klondike'. I wrote 'Kidnapped in the Yukon' which came out in 1968."

Four generations later the Berton literary tradition continues. Lucy's son Berton Woodward is World Editor of Macleans magazine. Her daughter Paisley became a lawyer, but later quit the legal profession to become a journalist and now works for CBC radio in Vancouver. Last but not least, Pierre's son Paul is a senior copy editor, columnist and sits on the editorial board of the London Free Press newspaper in Ontario.

Meanwhile, through the combined efforts of the Klondike Visitors Association and the Yukon Arts Council, Berton House will continue to be the Yukon home of Canadian authors through the writer-in-residence program.