what i'm reading

I finally finished Pierre Berton's Klondike. It took me forever to read it, as my concentration was low, and my time more limited than usual.

When I read Berton's two books about the building of the trans-Canada railroad, I learned a huge amount of Canadian history, and about the forces and themes that shaped the country. Klondike, with its narrower subject and time frame, was more of a treasure trove of bizarre, eccentric, improbable characters and seemingly impossible circumstances of their crazy quest. While I'm more interested in a broader view of history, this book was packed with mind-boggling tales too strange for fiction.

In a comment some months back, friend of wmtc West End Bound, who was also reading Klondike, noted that the book is filled with stories of extreme cruelty to animals. I find that is so often the case when I read history. The treatment of animals in earlier eras is very disturbing (as are the details of modern-day factory farms). But the Klondike story is extreme even for the 19th Century. Thousands upon thousands of horses, dogs, mules and other animals were used as if they were inanimate objects, horrifically abused, starved, forced into circumstances for which they were not suited by people who had no experience working with their species, literally worked to death, or died under circumstances that can only rightly be called torture.

Compounding the cruelty is the knowledge that these animals were being tortured and abused so that humans could exercise their sense of adventure, or satisfy their own greed, or equally nonessential reasons. The factory farm is a terrible place, but at least one can argue its necessity. There can be no decent argument for the horrors of what became known as "The Dead Horse Trail".

One reason it took me so long to finish this book was that it was so hard to stomach these details. But I appreciated Berton's treatment of it: forthright, neither overly dramatized or sugar-coated, realistic, and humane.

More history is on deck, but it's not unpacked yet.

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I forgot to mention that Berton had a very deep and personal connection to the Klondike story, probably more so than to any other book he wrote. His father was a stampeder, and Berton himself was born in the Yukon. In the notes to the updated edition, he writes: "...my whole life has been conditioned by the Klondike; it haunts my dreams and my memories..." No doubt this intense personal connection is partly what makes this his most popular book.