WOMEN IN THE FAR NORTH

Dominion, Volume 27, Issue 163, 7 April 1934, Page 18

WOMEN IN THE FAR NORTH

Daughters of the Arctic

There are now seven women among the three hundred males on the Great Bear Lake mining camps in Arctic Canada.

The first to arrive was Mrs. Joe Gerhart, who went north from the Peace River in the summer of 1932, when her husband' substituted the drill for the plough. Next was Mrs. Harry Reid, who opened the first restaurant on the fringe of the Arctic Circle. Then came Mrs. Victor Ingraham, native of Lake Athabasca, whose husband, Captain Ingraham, lost both feet, amputated as a result of privations he suffered after his schooner, the last vessel to cross Great Bear before th c present “freezeup,” exploded and sank. They have til rec children.

Tiie fourth woman is Miss Anna Swanson, not yet 20. whose name appears on official maps on a sizeable tract of country. known as "Anna Claims,-’ staked in 1931. by Henry Swanson, who felt the ground was promising enough to bear the name of the flaxen-haired daughter. The fifth to arrive is the 'Poronto-born sister of an Olympic hockey star, the bride of Bert Airth. who drove holes in the enemy's line for Queen's University Rugby team, and is now driving them into a silver-laden mountain in tiie largest group of claims at Great Bear.

The sixth is a transplanted Maritime!-, the wife of Pilot Harry Haytcr, who is running an air taxi between Cameron Bay, headquarters of the settlement, and surrounding camps. The seventh and last, to arrive is Mrs. Tom Byrnes, a Toronto nurse, and wife of the Great Bear doctor. Mrs. Gerhart, the veteran, has. during her brief residence on the “inside,”

traversed the Peace and Slave Rivers, crossed Great Bear Lake, drifted down the MacKenzie, mightiest of Canada’s waterways, fought the rapids of the Bear, and trailed the receding ice on the greatest of inland seas. For contrast. Miss Anna Swanson had a comfortable post in a warm office in Edmonton, the Alberta capital. She went North to spend her summer holidays wihh her father in 1932. Back at her desk, she disappeared in thc following winter, picked up the air mail at Fort Mae Murray, and walked into her father’s cabin, unannounced —to make her home on the “inside” for duration. "It’s no place for a woman yet: Mae Murray’s near enough to the Pole for her at present,” observed Pilot Hayter, when he went in. A month later, his bride was at Cameron Bay, helping him to build his home. Mae Murray. the busiest airport in Canada, is the intermediate base for women seeking their destiny in the Northland. Here they meet the wives of the men who fly his Majesty’s mails to tiie shores of tiie Arctic Ocean —Gilbert, F.R.G.S.. Dickins, May, Burgess, Brlntell, Hollick, Kenyon, whose names are a household word throughout Canada. From them they learn the cardinal points of housekeeping under the midnight sun, and are inducted into the sisterhood of the North. In the "cracking open” of the Arctic, these women will do their share, equally with their menfolk. As they go farther in, modern science, in tiie form of radio, helps them keep touch with what is going on in the world, from London to Auckland and Cape Town, as they help unroll the map of Canada for settlement and civilisation—pioneers, iu the last degree; true daughters of the Arctic.