Suitable for the Wilds: Letters from Northern Alberta, 1929-1931: Letters from Northern Alberta, 1929-31 - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

Dr Mary Percy, twenty-five years old and from a comfortable Birmingham family, left home in 1929 to take up a medical posting in the Peace River area of northern Alberta. Her letters home, collected here, vividly describe her adventurous life on one of Canada's last frontiers. Her district covered 350-square miles of wooded, boggy land, which she travelled on horseback, in dogsled, and sometimes by automobile.

Dr Percy was faced with many issues in caring for the MTtis and Native people, as well as the increasing numbers of immigrant families. Her greatest medical challenges though were the result of poverty and isolation - and she often railed at the government for what she saw as irresponsible settlement policies and lack of attention to her community.

Despite the strenuousness of her responsibilities as doctor, dentist, public health officer, and coroner, Dr Percy enjoyed the personal and professional challenges presented by wilderness life, and her enthusiasm for this great adventure, present in her letters, is infectious. By the end of 1930 her complaint was that the area was becoming too civilized! The letters conclude in January 1931 with her marriage to farmer/fur trader Frank Jackson and her subsequent move further north to Keg River, where she lives today.

In addition to the letters, Janice Dickin McGinnis's introduction provides a detailed discussion of Mary Percy Jackson's life and an assessment of the value of these letters in terms of the historiography of women, of medicine, and of the north.

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