C Ihe Ladies c cu. V'VVAN - History and Classics, Department of

IntroductionXXIXCity" (MacGregor, Klondike 167, 168). At least one account of the Klondike GoldRush up the Rat River had been published in England a quarter-century beforeVyvyan's journey (Inman 450-59), but apparently it and its description of theCraigs and Destruction City were unknown to Vyvyan and Dorrien Smith.Elihu Stewart, another potential source for the women, would have suggestedthat low water levels were typical on the Rat River in late July. Vyvyan listedStewart's book under "Books Read May-Oct. 1926" after the last dated entry inher field notes (226), so she must have known that, in the last week of July 1906,the superintendent of Forestry for Canada chose to walk the Peel River Portagerather than confront the Rat so late in the summer, and this despite Stewart'shaving brought a Peterborough canoe north with him on the steamer (n5-16).So timing was crucial, and, although the women had arranged to take the firststeamer of the season from Fort Smith, an injury to Dorrien Smith's ankle keptthem two weeks in Aklavik. When at last they reached the mouth of the Rat,however, they were still more than two weeks ahead of Stewart's schedule andfound all the water they could handle flowing down the canyon.It is also difficult to say how much the missionaries Charles and EmmaWhittaker told the women in early June when the subject arose aboard the trainnorth from Edmonton. And that difficulty is compounded by the possibility thatpast experience with Agnes Deans Cameron, the first woman to publish a booklengthaccount of travels in the western Arctic (The New North [1912]), had putthem on their guard with writers travelling in the Arctic. Whittaker, who met herat Fort McPherson, considered Cameron "a vigorous romanticist, gathering datafor a vivid volume," who would produce "an intricate compound of fact andfiction, a most interesting and readable romance of travel to be sure, but hardly areliable book for reference" (Letter; qtd in Kelcey 131 -32). Although Whittakerhad previously walked the Peel River Portage several times, he chose to go up theRat River in 1900, when he had to make the trip over the Divide with his wife andtheir one-year-old daughter. Vyvyan mentions it in her field note for 2June, inher letter to her mother the next day, and in the fifth chapter of her book (25),but seems not to have pursued the matter very far. The women did learn thatWhittaker found himself chest deep in water, and that he had employed "four orfive" guides, not two, but they probably did not hear that the journey was madeonly twenty-four days after Mrs Whittaker had given birth to the couple's secondchild. In fact, except for this, their trip a quarter-century earlier anticipated thetrip that Vyvyan and Dorrien Smith would make in many respects, including