Robin Fisher, Duff Pattullo of British Columbia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991): "Dawson City, Yukon" and "The Decline of Reform" (in part)

The standard life of Duff Pattullo, by the historian Robin Fisher, written from the Pattullo Papers (BC Archives) and the family’s letters. Seen 10 Oct 2026 as page images of the Internet Archive’s lending copy: pp. 36-37, 40-41, 44-51, 58-63, 66-67 and 78-81, with the search snippets for pp. 28 and 32-33; and pp. 300-329, from the chapter “The Decline of Reform” (1937-40), below. Fisher spells Pattullo’s wife’s maiden name “Riedemiester” (p. 58). Quotations below are as printed; Fisher’s own quotations are from Pattullo’s letters to his father unless he says otherwise.

Going north, 1896-97. “About the time that Duff began as editor of the Galt Reformer in an effort to make a little money,” the Klondike strike was made, in August 1896 (p. 28). Duff went north as a member of Major Walsh’s government party, but “like the gold-seekers, he had his eye out for the main chance,” and conceded “that ‘a little of the yellow has a temptation for me’” (p. 37). His letters home were to be syndicated by his father to the Globe and other papers; they appeared in the Sentinel, and “Andrew Pattullo was able to score some good political hits in editorials by using information provided by Duff” (p. 37). At Skagway he noted that “it would cost a fellow about $25 before he could get even a moderate jag on” (p. 36), and described two women: “Texas Bill, who carried goods over the pass the same as men,” and Mrs Scoville of the New York World, “a pretty little woman, cultured, quite young” (p. 36). On the White Pass he saw the horses falling into what became Dead Horse Gulch, and “Pattullo insisted he saw an ox trying to fling itself over the cliff rather than tread the terrible trail” (p. 36). Sifton “would not send his worst enemy over the White Pass,” so the party went by the Chilkoot (p. 37).

The Chilkoot. The government party “included a large cohort of Indian packers,” so Pattullo “only had to cross the Chilkoot once,” where stampeders climbed it over and over with the ton of supplies the government required. Of them he wrote: “To see the despair written on men’s faces as they carry their packs up and up the awful hill is almost enough to make one’s heart ache”; and “sentiment won’t do away up in the Klondike; every man who comes here must be willing to take life risks and be willing to stand every imaginable hardship” (p. 40). Sheltering on Lake Labarge, bearded, he met a friend who cried, “Jesus Christ, how are you? I did not expect to see you here,” and answered, “Old friend, you can expect to meet Jesus anywhere” (pp. 40-41).

The ice, 18 November 1897. The morning after camping “about six miles beyond the Big Salmon River,” his boat came round a bend onto “a fearful ice jam.” J. J. Freeman, in another boat, “leapt out of the wrong side, went through the mush ice, and drowned. The Indians guiding Pattullo’s boat quickly appreciated the situation and laid tent poles on the ice and started across on snowshoes.” Pattullo, his snowshoe strings frozen, crawled “on all fours, encouraged and urged on by Bliss. Twice his leg went through the ice… For a fifteen-minute eternity he crawled across the ice.” He wrote that he “would not go through the 15 minutes crossing that slush again for all the gold in the Yukon.” The spot was named Freeman’s Point, and the party went back to the Big Salmon for the winter (p. 41).

Spring 1898: Bennett, and Dawson. In the spring Walsh and Pattullo were back toward the border. “On 3 April there was a tragic natural disaster near the boundary. An avalanche ripped down the Chilkoot Pass close to the Scales and took the lives of more than sixty people. Walsh and Pattullo went down to do what they could to help. For the rest of the month, while he waited for Walsh to give the word to move out, Pattullo found it ‘ducedly monotonous’ in Bennett. It was 3 May before they finally struck north for Dawson City” (p. 44). At Fort Selkirk, reached on 14 May, he wrote of “what a freedom there was about the life around me, away from the conventionalism and affectation of the age,” then added that back at camp he “would not at all mind one of those ‘fine places around the corner’” (p. 44). They reached Dawson on Saturday 21 May 1898 (p. 45). He found it “a jolly place,” orderly and law-abiding under “British institutions” (p. 46); in the flood he “had a libation from a canoe in one of the numerous bars on Main Street” (p. 45). He served briefly as secretary to the Yukon Council in the summer of 1898 (p. 47).

Out and back, 1898. He left with Walsh on 2 August, meeting on the way Joe Boyle, the future “King of the Klondike,” whose family house, “The Firs,” was up Dundas Street from Burnside; he came home to Woodstock having “put on thirty pounds” (p. 48). He went back at the end of September with his brother James (“Burt”), who gave up his Toronto law practice for Dawson; the brothers “out caroused Caruso” one night (pp. 48-49). Arriving in late October, he carried the dispatches that commuted the death sentence of Frank Nantuck (p. 49).

Fort Selkirk, winter 1898-99. Sifton had appointed him abstracts clerk in the Gold Commissioner’s Office, but Commissioner William Ogilvie “overrode the appointment made by Sifton and… Duff was banished to Fort Selkirk for the winter, where he performed the duties of timber agent” (p. 50). He wrote straight to Sifton to complain, and “on the very day that Pattullo wrote to the minister, Sifton was visiting Woodstock at George Pattullo’s invitation” (p. 51). Ogilvie wrote that Pattullo was “very often termed Major Walsh’s pimp by some of the best people here,” and that he still represented Walsh’s mining interests (p. 51).

Lillian. In the summer of 1899 he met “the recently widowed Lillian Miles… She was born Lillian Riedemiester in 1871 in Toledo, Ohio, and was one of three daughters of Otto Riedemiester who had been a lawyer.” She had come to Dawson in 1898 with her first husband, Jerry Miles, a pharmacist with claims on the creeks (“a Mrs J.J. Miles took out a free miner’s certificate”), who “went out to the diggings when he should not have, was caught by cold weather, and froze to death.” She wintered with a sister in California and came back to settle the estate, taking $1,500 from his partner (Pattullo said she ought to have had $20,000); her mother died a year later; she owned a cabin at Fifth Street and Sixth Avenue. “Duff and Lillian had not known each other for long when they were married on the evening of Thursday, 30 November 1899,” by a minister, in the bride’s house, as the Klondike Nugget reported (p. 58). He moved in with her, “assumed power of attorney over Lillian’s finances and he began to pay off some of his debts”; they spent $150 a month eating at restaurants (p. 59). Asking Sifton for more pay, he said he was “now a married man, obliged to live the life of a gentleman and not as a ‘squaw man’”; Sifton raised his salary to $2,000 (p. 60). In February 1902 they bought three lots on Grant Street at Ninth Avenue and built the house they kept while in Dawson (p. 61).

The Gold Commissioner’s Office, 1899-1902. Vice-consul for Norway and Sweden, he was amused by the Nugget reporter who credited his “fluency in Swedish” (p. 60). When Assistant Gold Commissioner Bell was suspended in the fall of 1901, Pattullo became acting assistant gold commissioner, “without the official title or the salary” (p. 60). On the Treadgold concessions of 1901 he “took a position between the two extremes”: the “day of the pick and shovel is gone by; modern methods must be introduced”; he favoured grants of creekbed to big operators and “invoked the spirit of the builders of the Canadian Pacific Railway” (pp. 62-63). “All of the Pattullo family’s considerable political influence was marshalled in support of Duff’s claim. Both George and Andrew Pattullo wrote to Sifton” (p. 63).

Resignation, 1902. Passed over a second time, and refused a salary by the deputy minister, James Smart (“the ultimate outrage”), he resigned; a judge had certified on 6 October 1902 that he should be admitted to the bar on passing his examinations (p. 66). His colleagues gave him a testimonial and Gold Commissioner Senkler a gold watch; the “often critical Klondike Nugget” praised his efficiency (p. 66). His uncle Andrew pressed Sifton for the back pay: in the early days Duff “would have been a ‘rare bird’ indeed had he not cut loose once in a while, but when warned by both the minister and his family he had stopped his drinking binges”; his work had been criticized by no one, unique in the department “‘from the Minister down,’ added Andrew without delicacy,” and he threatened to come “running down to Ottawa to see you personally.” Sifton relented, and Duff got his back pay (p. 67).

Leaving, and what the Yukon made of him. In 1907 he went into partnership with William G. Radford, holding three-fifths of the firm; in 1908 he left for Prince Rupert (p. 78). In later life he wrote verses in the manner of Robert Service, “Over The Chilkoot” (“We was waitin’ for the Major, / We was waitin’ for the word”), and liked to say “you will never reach the heights by refusing to climb” (pp. 78-79). Fisher’s reading: “He saw the need for government intervention to stimulate the development of a frontier area but also realized that, if carried to excess, it could become a burden on the territory. The Klondike was a frontier where people expected the government to deliver services but protested vociferously when it appeared to interfere with their economic objectives” (p. 80). And of Prince Rupert: “By now he had also imbibed the boomer mentality of the northern frontier. So when he heard that a new town was to be opened up he was eager to place huge bets both on its future and on his own” (p. 81).

“The Decline of Reform,” pp. 300-329

1937-38. Honorary LL.D. from the University of British Columbia, October 1937: “The ship of a state is the largest and most difficult ship in the world to navigate. Everybody wants to be captain, the crew is sometimes mutinous, while the passengers, to whom governmental navigation is a simple process, want to go everywhere all at the same time” (p. 300). The Pattullo Bridge opened on 15 November 1937 (p. 301). “The reform impulse was starved to death by a tight-fisted federal government” (p. 302). His sixty-fifth birthday, January 1938, at a banquet in the crystal ballroom of the Hotel Vancouver, with a cake made as a replica of the legislative buildings; and a remark from the legislature, quoted in the Victoria Times: “We do not apologise, we simply give reasons for our actions.” Fisher: “This, apparently, was the philosophy that had taken him to the top. It was also the attitude that would play a large part in his downfall” (pp. 302-303). At the Liberal convention at Kelowna in August 1938 he sat by the chairman “with ‘his eye on the delegates, his mouth at the microphone and his foot near the lid’” and talked to his followers “like a Dutch Uncle” (p. 303). Harold Winch of the CCF “saw Pattullo as ‘that fat epitome of capitalism,’ and even years later remembered him as a brutal dictator” (p. 305).

The sit-down and Bloody Sunday (pp. 306-307). “Drought and recession on the prairies in 1937-8 drove more men towards the coast in search of jobs. When the temporary winter work camps in British Columbia closed down in the spring, the unemployed drifted into Vancouver looking for work or relief. The provincial government had reduced its loans to municipalities and then announced there would be no relief for those from outside the province.” Back from Ottawa with federal works money, Pattullo “advised the ‘sit downers’ to leave the buildings they had occupied, saying they would not be discriminated against if they applied for work. When a delegation of the unemployed planned to go to Victoria to present claims for assistance, Pattullo told them not to bother. Instead, he would come to Vancouver on 20 June to meet with them. In the meantime, believing that subversive influences were at work and that the situation could no longer be tolerated, he arranged with the federal government to have the men forcibly evicted from the public buildings. On Sunday, 19 June, in the early morning when few people were on the streets, the police arrived with tear gas and baton and, particularly outside the Post Office, there were ugly and violent scenes as the men were forced out. The strike leader, Steve Brodie, was beaten senseless.” At the meeting of 20 June “Pattullo reiterated the point that the two governments would spend more on works projects but absolutely refused to provide any more immediate relief. He now believed that able-bodied single men could take care of themselves during the summer, though he admitted to King that ‘the public does not view sympathetically the bald advice that they should get out and rustle.’ At one level the provincial government seemed more interested in disposing of the problem than in solving it.” He told Ottawa that “it is not our responsibility to provide for every penniless person who may come here from the rest of Canada, nor can we do so”; removing the transients would help “legitimate British Columbians”; and on the radio he warned that “a ‘general policy of sole dependence upon the Government would simply lead to moral decrepitude of the individual and the physical decrepitude of our industrial life.’ Such talk was a far cry from his vibrant advocacy of state intervention in 1933.” Fisher does not give the “too much sympathy” remark here.

After 1937 (pp. 307-310). “The words ‘work and wages’ were scarcely uttered by anyone in the Pattullo government after 1937.” John Hart’s statement of November 1937: “Because he expected income to rise to a record level, relief costs and part of the province’s debt repayment could be met out of current revenue with no increase in taxation”; in 1939 the provincial debt fell for the first time since 1933 (p. 308). On health insurance: “he had helped to wreck the health insurance scheme by following a similar tack to one he had taken as minister of lands in the 1920s” (p. 309). After “a nasty and bitter strike against the Pacific Lime Company in Blubber Bay in which workers defied the legislation,” the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act was amended in 1938; “in Pattullo’s mind, industrial conciliation and arbitration was a prelude to outlawing strikes altogether” (p. 310).

The north, and Ottawa (pp. 312-319). The oil companies’ “strike” of 1940 “was a very bad example to labour” (p. 312). King’s diary on the Alaska Highway: Pattullo wanted it built with “no thought of the cost to the people,” and “I sometimes wish I could take my public duties with the free & easy assurance some of these men do. But I cannot be lighthearted”; and, when Pattullo talked to the Americans, “like a fool” (p. 314). “In the context of the crisis over unemployment in June [1938], he pointed out to King that the construction of the road would absorb many of the single unemployed and relieve what he called ‘congestion’ in the cities” (p. 315). “We in British Columbia are getting pretty tired of eastern domination” (p. 316). Fisher’s defence of him: unlike Aberhart, Hepburn or Duplessis he did not fight King in the open, and “King, followed by those historians who cannot see beyond the Ottawa sources, tended to lump Pattullo in ‘with all the demagogues working together to overthrow the federal administration’” (p. 317).

Rowell-Sirois and the war (pp. 318-329). Before the commission in March 1938 he raised “old British Columbia issues, such as the argument that the federal government take over the Pacific Great Eastern, and even others, such as the exclusion of Orientals, that lay outside the commission’s mandate” (p. 320). “The centralisers,” he said, “almost force one to appear in the light of a provincialist” (p. 322). At the royal visit to Victoria in 1939, Lillian, “suffering from arthritis,” found standing painful, “so King took her on his arm throughout much of the day,” and afterwards Duff drove Mackenzie King out to “his house on Beach Drive,” where his daughter Doris and two grandchildren were (p. 323). At Fairbanks in September 1939 he said that “when Canada is at war, the United States is also at war”; his brother George, against American entry, wrote that “when a man leads with his chin, somebody is bound to take a crack at it” (p. 324). He would not “permit British Columbia to be hog-tied and ham-strung by Ottawa” (p. 329).

See thomas-pattullo-1873 and pattullo-bloody-sunday.