Pierre Berton was a historian, journalist,
raconteur and television personality (Credit: Shutterstock)
By Thomas Rogers
If it weren’t for Pierre Berton, far fewer Canadians would know the
legend of Sam Steele, Canada’s most famous Mountie and probably the
world’s most cartoonishly Canadian person. From 1898 to 1899, Steele was
commissioner for the Yukon, as thousands of men and women from around
the world streamed into the Klondike in search of fortune. The Canadian
Mounties were determined that, unlike the American gold rushes, the
Canadian one was to be an orderly affair. Steele was the “prototype of
the Hollywood Mountie,” Berton wrote – tall, “erect as a pine tree,
limber as a cat” and so good at his job that “you could lay a sack of
nuggets on the side of the trail and return in two weeks to find it
untouched.”
The seminal Sam Steele moment, as described in Berton’s book Klondike,
took place on Lake Bennett, where Steele heard a man’s gun go off
suspiciously outside his cabin. When he searched the belongings of the
American culprit, he found a shell game and monte cards – both banned in
the Yukon. “I’m an American citizen,” the man protested. “The Secretary
of State himself shall hear about it.” Steele answered that, seeing as
the man was an American citizen, he would be lenient, “I’ll confiscate
everything you have and give you half an hour to leave town.” The man
was chased back across the US border for 22 miles with a Mountie at his
heels. (The episode was dramatised in one of the Heritage Minutes that
aired on Canadian TV in the ‘90s.)
Berton’s Klondike remains one of the most popular and entertaining works
of Canadian history ever written. Over the course of his 40-year career,
Berton published 50 books, mostly about Canadian history, including a
series of books called Canadian History for Children. He was so popular
in Canada that he once had three books on the bestseller list at the
same time. In the process, he has probably done more to shape Canadian
society’s understanding of itself than anyone else. For Canadians, whose
anxiety about their national identity can sometimes border on the
obsessive, Berton has provided an invaluable service: he told the
Canadian narrative for a mass audience, and in the process, helped
create formative national myths. It’s fitting that Berton is credited
with the most widely known and succinct definition of Canadian identity:
“A Canadian is someone who knows how to have sex in a canoe.”
Born in 1920 in Dawson City – a Yukon settlement created during the
Klondike Gold Rush – Berton focused much of his early writing on his
hometown. While studying at the University of British Columbia, he would
moonlight on weekends in Klondike mining camps. After Klondike, which
was published in 1954, he wrote books about Toronto, the Canadian
railways and, most famously, about the War of 1812. In his early
thirties, Berton became an editor at Maclean’s, Canada’s most
influential news magazine, and by the early 1960s, hosted a regular talk
show on Canadian television, where he conducted the only interview Bruce
Lee gave on TV. His public persona was relentlessly jovial, polite and
mellow – in short, stereotypically Canadian – though his appeal may have
been enhanced by the fact that he was also a dedicated stoner. (In 2002,
two years before his death, he appeared on a Canadian TV show to teach
Canadians how to roll a proper joint.)
As any Canadian history teacher will tell you, making Canadian history
exciting is no easy feat, largely because of its lack of conflict.
Berton once wrote that Canadians are less inclined to confrontation than
Americans because “it is awkward to reach efficiently for a six-gun
while wearing a parka and two pairs of mittens.” Canada is the only
country in all of the Americas to have gained independence completely
without violence, our founders having preferred a more incremental
strategy: While France and the Americans had their revolutions, Canada
had the Charlottetown Conference, a meeting with a champagne lunch that
eventually led the Queen to acquiesce to the unification of several
provinces and independent Canadian control of some aspects of government
– but not its judiciary, foreign policy or constitution. It’s not the
kind of story that sees eight-year-olds bouncing off the walls.
The modesty of Canadian history – the most decisive battle in the War of
1812 had 2% as many casualties as the Napoleonic Wars’ Battle of
Borodino two years earlier – means that Canadian historians have to
focus on relatively small stories, and Berton was particularly adept at
pinpointing its most fascinating characters. In The Promised Land, his
history of the settlement of the Canadian West, for example, he wrote
about Isaac Barr, a British huckster who convinced scores of gullible
British immigrants to establish a “British-only” utopian settlement
named Britannia on the border of Alberta and Saskatchewan by advertising
its “invigorating and enjoyable climate.” When the unprepared arrivals
became stuck on the road during a nightmarish trip to the town, they
were rescued by a minister named Lloyd. This, in turn, inspired them to
rename the settlement Lloydminster, now a major town in the prairies.
Later on in the same book, Berton describes how a Russian immigrant
named Zibarov formed a Christian sect in northern Saskatchewan, known as
the Sons of God, within the Russian Doukhobor community and encouraged
his thousands of followers to give up their cattle and shoes and embark
on a freezing march to a “warmer climate where we could live on fruit.”
When they approached the US border a Mountie threw Zibarov on a train
car headed back north, before herding the rest of his entourage onboard.
(In later decades, the group became known for staging protests that
combined nudity and arson).
Four years ago, the Canadian government tried to take advantage of
Canadians’ muddled knowledge of their own history by attempting to spin
the War of 1812, a strange and largely forgotten conflict between the UK
and the US that played out along the Canadian border, as a war of
American aggression. But in Berton’s telling, the War of 1812 is a
near-comic tragedy: a planned American attack on the Canadian side of
Niagara Falls, for instance, was called off when an American soldier
went missing with all of the boats’ oars. Berton also made it clear
that, even 200 years later, it’s difficult to pinpoint what caused the
war in the first place.
Berton said in 2002 that he “had never set out to be a patriot or a
popular historian,” but, if that’s truly the case, his books have
crafted the widely accepted popular narrative of Canadian history by
accident. In his telling, the Canadian nation was shaped primarily by
two forces: Canadians’ deference to authority and their fear of nature.
Unlike the US’ westward expansion, and to the relief of most settlers,
the colonisation of the Canadian West was conducted under the aegis of
the Canadian Mounties. The Mountie, most evocatively embodied by Sam
Steele, was so beloved because he represents a “father figure in a
nation that adores father figures.” Berton may never have wanted to
become a popular historian, but he knew how to tell the story that the
Canadian public needed, and wanted, to hear – a story that remains as
relevant as ever.
With his booming voice,
towering stature and trademark bow tie, Pierre Berton was one of
Canada's best-known personalities. The prolific author, who died at age
84 on Nov. 30, 2004, wrote bestsellers about Canadian history, from The
Mysterious North in 1956 to Prisoners of the North in 2004. He was also
a journalist, broadcaster and panellist on CBC's long-running news quiz
show Front Page Challenge.
Learn more about him and watch a video about him on the CBC at
http://www.cbc.ca/archives/topic/pierre-berton-canadian-icon-and-iconoclast
The Life and Work of Sir William Van Horne
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