Preface

IN THE SUMMER OF 1935, deep in the Yukon's Sixtymile mining district, a young Danish immigrant unpacked the family belongings and set about creating a home out of a tiny mining cabin.Only a few weeks earlier, this woman had given birth in Whitehorse.While she, her four-year-old daughter, and the new baby rested for the coming trip, her husband and two mining partners had built a sixteen-foot canoe that would take them some 300 miles down the Yukon River to the Sixtymile district.When the party set out the baby was twelve days old.This little 'bush baby,' as they called my father, was diapered with old flannels and moss from the nearby creeks and put outside in a packing crate to prevent jaundice.Over and over, I have asked my grandmother to tell me stories of her incredible journey from urban, middle-class Denmark to the poverty and hardships of northern Canadian bush life.The same woman who once played piano in the concert halls of Copenhagen relates each story with a shrug that indicates her travails were nothing special.'We did what we had to do,' she says.Growing up with all the conveniences of North American life, I found it hard to imagine the conditions under which my grandparents lived, worked, and raised their children.Even though very little had changed in the operation of a small family mining claim in the Yukon since the Klondike gold rush forty years earlier, my grandmother does not look back on her years on the Sixtymile as a period of drudgery.She cared for her growing family as well as for her husband's two mining partners under what could only be described as very rudimentary conditions.During the long dark winters she performed the laborious tasks of cooking and washing by kerosene lamp and candle light.To wash children, clothing, and dishes, she hauled and melted endless buckets of ice and snow.Where the wind blew the snow in, she chinked and re-chinked the mud and moss between the logs in the cabin walls.Her years on the Sixtymile were some of the happiest in her marriage.Together, my grandparents Bob and Elly Porsild built a future for themselves in the Yukon.Bob was also a Dane, and although a scientist by X

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