Prisoners of the North Read Free

fault. In his various adventures he seemed to be having the time of his life. “I like this sort of thing!” he exclaimed as he dashed about Odessa trying to bargain for the lives of a group of Romanian hostages. He was never happier than when he was at the centre of things, whether running a dredging company in the Klondike or influencing royalty in Romania. He disliked supervision and one can sympathize with the British and Canadian political and military authorities who tried to rein him in.
    If Boyle had moments of introspection, he kept them to himself. Outwardly he gave no hint of any inner insecurity. Only Marie, the Romanian queen, knew his secrets and then not until the fading years of his life. He had long mastered the art of the public gesture, which made him famous in his own time. Journalists and biographers made much of him. Few of his fellow countrymen have had so much ink expended on them. Every generation of readers, it seems, has had its version of what Hollywood might call the Joe Boyle Story.
    In 1938 his eldest daughter, Flora, devoted three long articles to him in Maclean’s (“Who Was Joe Boyle?”). The magazine, in turn, published a fourth made up of letters from those who had known and venerated the legendary Canadian. Since that time three substantial biographies have been published: Kim Beattie’s breathless Brother, Here’s a Man! in 1949, William Rodney’s scholarly Joe Boyle: King of the Klondike in 1974, and Leonard W. Taylor’s revealing The Sourdough and the Queen in 1983.
    Moreover, Boyle played a role in the published memoirs and reminiscences of a dozen or more contemporaries who crossed his path, from the Klondike to the Caucasus. These ranged from Herbert Hoover, who knew him in his gold-mining days, to Ethel Greening Pantazzi, whose husband Boyle saved from execution by the revolutionary Battalion of Death in Odessa. Boyle is a leading figure in two books of memoirs by Captain George A. Hill, a British spy, who found him “a man whose equal I have never encountered before or since.” Every biography of Queen Marie of Romania, not to mention her own published memoirs, venerates Boyle, whom she called “one man in a million … a man it is a richness to know.” Yet in Canada he is largely forgotten.
    Had he been born American it is probable that he would have been claimed by Hollywood and turned into a popular icon, like Davy Crockett. But Boyle came from Woodstock, Ontario, and was a Canadian through and through. He named his mining enterprise the Canadian Klondyke Company, making it clear it was not an Alaskan venture, and when he built his enormous gold dredges he named them Canadian Number One, Canadian Number Two, Canadian Number Three, and Canadian Number Four. He made it a point to fly the Red Ensign from their masts—a sly dig at his American rivals.
    Boyle, then, was a Canadian first and foremost and a Northern Canadian with all that that connoted: a man secure within himself and outwardly unflappable, having confronted and conquered the worst that nature had in store for him. Robert Service was his favourite poet, and he often transfixed his listeners, who included members of the Romanian royal family, by quoting aloud from the Yukon bard and telling stories of early days in the North. But he rarely talked about himself. His modesty, it was said, would have shamed a shrinking violet.
    His career unfolded like a series of movies, but Joe Boyle, the Canadian puritan who neither smoked nor touched strong drink—who in fact chaired temperance rallies in rough-and-tumble Dawson City at the turn of the century—did not fit the Hollywood mould. In the early 1950s Hollywood did attempt a motion picture based on Kim Beattie’s exclamatory biography, but his family put a stop to that, as they knew he would have. It was too, well, American , loaded with invented scenes and dialogue that didn’t jibe with the Boyle character. There is no Joe Boyle story on film. Canada had