Laura Beatrice Berton (1878–1967)

Laura Thompson Berton was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and became a teacher. In 1908, she was invited to become the new kindergarten director in remote Dawson City, a mining town in the Yukon Territory. At age 29, she set out on the complicated journey to Dawson City traveling to Vancouver, then by ferry to Skagway, Alaska, and by White Pass train over the mountains to Whitehorse. Lastly, she took a steamboat down the Yukon River. Along the way, she got to know poet Robert Service, who settled into a house across the road from her.

Laura intended to stay in the high north for a year, but never left. In her autobiography, I Married the Klondike, she wrote about her experiences in a town that still clung to its former glory days of the Gold Rush, with a formal Edwardian style of society amid the trials and tribulations of life under extreme conditions.
Laura took French classes with Frank Berton, a "stampeder," whom she married in 1912. During the first year of their marriage, they lived in a tent in the mining camp of Sourdough Gully. At the outbreak of World War I, Frank joined the army as an engineer, and the couple moved to Vancouver for his posting. It would be five years before they were able to return to Dawson City.

In 1920, Laura gave birth to their first child, a son named Pierre; he was followed by their daughter Lucy. While the children were still under age six, Laura made a trip across Canada to visit her parents in Ontario. After they returned, Frank built a flat-keeled boat that the family used for many years in the summers to travel up the Yukon River, and camp out on small islands.

Laura wrote for The Saturday Night Post, The Family Herald, and The Dawson News.

During the Great Depression, Frank lost his job and the family moved permanently back to Vancouver.

Laura co-authored a children’s book with her daughter, Johnny in the Klondike, published in 1954. I Married the Klondike is now considered a classic memoir, and was adapted into a
1982 Canadian television miniseries.