SEARCHING FOR KLONDIKE
Bjorkman sisters carve out their paths in mining in hopes of finding their own gold rush
During the summer, when by fate of their unpredictable schedules the five Bjorkman sisters actually find themselves together at their parents’ log home on Whiskey Jack Lake, Ont., the conversation inevitably turns to rocks.
Jessica Bjorkman, the eldest sister at 38, might, for example, start talking about what she found or didn’t find, or the bear she had to run off, or the view from a B.C. mountain ridge that was so perfect she couldn’t quite believe it was real.
Karla, the youngest at 22, might take it up from there, and speak of the moonscape of Nunavut near Hudson’s Bay, and of walking that ground with her sampling hammer, trying to figure out what rocks to crack into, and which ones to ignore, while feeling as though the rocks she was treading upon were from the very beginning of time.
At this point, perhaps, Ruth, now with a four-month-old daughter, Julie, might say something about the baby, interrupting the rhythm of the rock talk for a group of sisters who, in the realm of siblings — and in the overwhelmingly maleskewed world of mining — are an extraordinary anomaly.
Jessica, Veronique and Karla Bjorkman are prospectors; Katarina and Ruth are geologists. They are modern-day pioneers — and industry role models — linked to a colourful prospecting past in which male gold hunters made newspaper headlines, took credit for lucky strikes and cheated women out of their rightful fortunes.
“As sisters, we talk more about rocks in the summer because we almost don’t see one another in the summer, because we will all be out on separate projects — although sometimes two of us will be working together,” Jessica said. “My mom calls us the boomerang family, because we always come back.”
The sisters reside either with their prospecting father, Karl, and bookkeeping mom, Nikki, or with their significant others in log homes they have built nearby on the lake northeast of Atikokan, Ont., originally founded in 1899 by a prospector.
The Bjorkmans are originally from Windsor, Ont., but Karl and Nikki uprooted the family in 1984 for a cabin in the woods. Karl worked construction, though what really interested him were rocks.
He spent a decade buried in geology textbooks before declaring himself a prospector, a calling that became the family enterprise as each child reached high school age and needed a summer job — one that paid a lot better and was more interesting than working at the local grocery store. (Bjorn, the lone brother among the Bjorkman girls, prospected for more than a decade before taking a job with the railway. He, too, lives nearby).
“My parents are adventurous people,” Jessica said. “They passed that spirit on to all of us.”
Beyond the Bjorkmans, women remain woefully underrepresented in mining, comprising just 17 per cent of the Canadian industry’s workforce in a labour market where 47 per cent of workers are women. On the bright side, the gender divide isn’t quite as gaping as it once was.
The sisters have been doing their bit to boost the percentages: giving seminars, speaking to university students, mentoring young women (and men), teaching prospecting courses in the Yukon and making it evident that other young women can do what they do, too.
It helps that their audiences appear to be listening, which hasn’t historically been the case for women who moil for gold, including perhaps the most famous of all, Kate Carmack.
Kate’s husband was George Carmack, a drifter from California. Before meeting his Tagish First Nation wife, Carmack bounced around the Yukon, eking out a living cutting logs, hauling packs over mountain passes and trying not to freeze come wintertime. Survival was never a certainty for the Californian until Kate came along.
She was raised on the land and viewed herself as the equal of any man. She sewed moccasins, mukluks and mittens, selling them to prospectors. She built shelters, fished and foraged for food, was competent and tough and, in the 1880s, or so the story goes, found a sick, half-frozen, waiting-to-croak Carmack by a river, clothed in ragged furs. She nursed him back to health and married him.
“Kate is what kept old George alive,” said Zena McLean, Kate’s great-great niece in Calgary. “My mom used to tell me how Kate would bring nuggets of gold to George. George would remark how his little wife, Kate, was going to make him a rich man someday, from all the gold she found washing dishes in the creek.”
Carmack did get rich, eventually, mostly because Kate kept him alive long enough for him to be present at Rabbit Creek, near modern-day Dawson City, Yukon, when Kate’s brother, Skookum Jim Mason, fished a dime-sized gold nugget from the waters in August 1896, triggering the Klondike gold rush. (Kate was back at camp, fishing.)
Dawson Charlie was also witness to the Klondike strike, which did not prevent Carmack, known to some as Lying George, from tweaking the details of the find so he could claim credit for it in the history books. Carmack’s version of events was later endorsed by the Vancouver chapter of the Yukon Order of Pioneers in 1922, just days before his death — and decades after he abandoned Kate for a prostitute. Kate was left penniless and, for posterity, more or less written out of one of the greatest stories ever told in Canadian mining history.
It is a wrong that American author Deb Vanasse began to right with Wealth Woman, a 2016 book about Kate Carmack’s life. The Canadian Mining Hall of Fame is now following suit — 98 years after Carmack’s death — by inducting her as part of its class of 2019.
Carmack will become the first Indigenous woman and just the third woman among the hall’s 170plus members, joining her former husband, Skookum Jim Mason, Dawson Charlie and Robert Henderson, previously inducted as the “Klondike Discoverers” in 1999. The ceremony takes place in Toronto Jan. 10.
“We are trying to right history — to correct the record,” Baird said. “They were at the scene of the crime, so to speak, because Kate Carmack brought them there.”
George and Kate got fantastically rich: a fortune, never entirely accounted for, that numbered in the millions in an age when the average U.S. worker earned about $500 a year. The Carmacks settled in Hollister, Calif., which is where George abandoned Kate without saying goodbye. Local newspapers reported on the desertion, describing Kate as a solitary figure, eventually suing her husband for her share of the fortune. Carmack, meanwhile, tried to buy her off for $500.
“The people in town basically sided with Kate,” Deb Vanasse said from Oregon. “George tried to make her out to be an evil woman, and to bury her connection to the Klondike fortune. But people commented on how Kate carried herself. What she said when she was asked was, if George didn’t want her anymore then all he had to do was tell it to her face.”
George never did. And Kate never got a nickel. Skookum Jim Mason paid her way back home, and she lived in a modest cabin thereafter, sewing clothes and, it is said, giving away most of what she earned to young people.
Kate died in 1920 during an influenza epidemic. George died two years later, having drained away a good chunk of the Klondike riches through a host of bad investments.
Back at Whiskey Jack Lake, the Bjorkman sisters are still searching for their Klondike. “Most people who prospect have the gold fever,” Jessica Bjorkman said.
Only about one-in-10,000 mining claims ever becomes an actual mine. It is the thrill of the hunt, and the belief that the next rocky outcrop might be the one to reveal itself awash in beautiful visible gold, that keeps the sisters slogging through the bush and up and down mountain steeps with reinforced knapsacks loaded full of rocks.
In recent years, they have mostly worked as prospectors for hire: contracting themselves out to junior mining companies that fly them all over Canada to check out remote access claims. They go armed with a map, sampling hammer, bear spray, compass, notebook, pen, flagging tape and, in Jessica’s case, a .357 Smith and Wesson Magnum revolver to deter bears.
Collectively, the Bjorkmans, including Karl and Bjorn, have found several visible gold showings. Among the highlights: a strike by Ruth in 2016 — the so-called Bjorkman showing — which a junior mining company had assayed at a whopping 378 ounces per tonne.
They have also found platinum group elements and copper. When not working for others, they work their own claims, optioning them to mining companies for further investigation for an undisclosed fee. They haven’t gotten rich yet, but they haven’t given up either.