Life North of the 54th

Transcript

• 00:00 - Early Life
• 16:07 - Later Life

00:00 - Early Life

Opening Theme Music:
[bass guitar riff]

Garett:
Welcome back to Life North of the 54th. I'm Garett Brown.

Preston:
And I'm Preston Brown.

Garett:
Today, we'd like to introduce you to a person of history and someone quite notable for the Peace Country. But Preston and I never had the chance to meet and also didn't know a lot about until we started digging more into the Peace Country. But this is Dr. Mary Percy Jackson.

Preston:
That's right. Dr. Jackson, she was actually born in England, in the UK, in a town called Dudley, which I didn't know. But I guess it's just a little bit outside of Birmingham City.

Garett:
Yeah, she was born in 1905. That means that she grew up during the First World War when food and things were in short supply. And she noted that there wasn't enough food available for girls like her to have cooking lessons when she was in school. But she came from a family that had a history of teaching. But she decided that she didn't want to follow the tradition of her family and go into teaching. But she wanted to become a doctor.

Preston:
That's right. I learned that through her studies, she went to the University of Birmingham. And in 1927, she had a degree in surgery and medicine. And she began to work locally at the hospitals there.

Garett:
So then, as it turned out, she was looking for work. She had an interest in taking a position that came around every once in a while to move to Calcutta, India. But she said that it was a once every three years thing. And she said that she graduated in the wrong year. So she wasn't able to take that kind of position and go to India. So instead, another opportunity came.

Preston:
Yeah. So I have a note here from a letter that was in one of the journals or papers of her day, titled on the 23rd of February, 1929. And it says, "Strong, energetic medical women with postgraduate experience in midwifery wanted for country work in Western Canada under the provincial government Department of Health." For Dr. Jackson, that seemed like a very good option to pursue, even though it was not India. It was another Commonwealth country that had a lot of opportunities for her.

Garett:
So she inquired for further information from the correspondent that she found in the letter. And a reply said that, quote, "The ability to ride a saddle horse would be a great advantage." So from the letter, she knew that she was going to Western Canada. But she really had no comprehension of what life was going to be like or where she was going to be posted for sure. So she took the position. She actually thought to herself, like many people who moved to the Peace Country, that she was going to move there for work, and she was going to stay for only a year or two. That's a common experience for people in Peace Country. You're going to move for work, stay for a year or two, and then you end up staying for the rest of your life.

Preston:
Yes, that is exactly what happened with Mary Percy Jackson.

Garett:
So her trip to Alberta was the late 1920s. So it was not as convenient as an airplane. It took her a week to travel from Southampton to Quebec City on the RMS Empress of Scotland. And it was another week by train from Quebec City to Edmonton. After she was introduced to her job by the Minister of Health, the Honorable George Hoadley, and some brief job training, she traveled by train to Peace River Town.

Preston:
Yes, and for those of you who don't know, Peace River Town is 480 kilometers northwest of Edmonton City. But Dr. Jackson was not posted in Peace River. She was posted in a community that was called then Battle River, which is now in the area of Manning, Alberta, which is another almost 100 kilometers northwest of Peace River.

Garett:
Yes, she didn't have any medical colleagues closer than Peace River or Port Vermillion, but she thrived in her new position. She was unworried by the isolation of her location, and she wrote, "I've got the whole valley to myself. There's not a light to be seen. There's something overpowering about the size of Canada." Much of what we know about the life of Dr. Jackson comes from her biography, but also because for the first couple of years, she consistently wrote letters back to her family detailing what life was like and recounting some of her adventures. Though at the time, there were only eight deliveries of posts a year, once a month when the river wasn't frozen. Thankfully, Canada Post is much better than that today. These letters were later compiled into a book titled "Suitable for the Wild."

Preston:
Janice Dicken McGinnis' introduction provides a detailed discussion of Mary Percy Jackson's life and an assessment of the value of her letters in terms of the historiography of women of medicine and of the North. And so this is an excerpt from "Suitable of the Wild" from a letter dated 29 of August, 1929. "I did over 150 miles on horseback last week. Really, one needs the strength of an Amazon for this job. If ever there is much sickness about, I shall need help. There's hardly any illness about just now. I've been seeing mainly accidents and oddments. I've seen five fractures in five weeks. The one that has taken up so much time is a girl of seven who lives 10 miles north of here. She broke her arm, also dislocated her elbow. A beastly mess. Her little brother, aged 12, came to fetch me. I think that he is the bravest kid I've ever met. He had to ride over 15 miles after dark and ford two rivers and came through a wood which he had seen bear tracks to get me. He arrives here at 1 AM. We started back at 2 AM, and I didn't get there till 5:45 AM. As his horse went lame, she'd done over 40 miles that day, and the fatherly way he looked after me was delightful. But it was bitterly cold. We had our first frost that night, and he wasn't very warmly clad, and he must have been nearly done in when we got there. He insisted that he wasn't tired, though." And that closes the excerpt from the book, "Suitable for the Wild."

Garett:
I can't imagine that kind of flipping. We had some experience riding a horse to get places when we'd visit our granddad on the ranch, but as the only mode of transportation, that's a lot. And there were really not many roads either. So when she arrived there, she was given a remote log shack in the middle of a 400-square-mile area that she was to serve. There were no roads or electricity or telegraph lines or services. She said that the property was dirty when she arrived, that there were no shelves, and the only place for a patient to lie down was her own bed, which sounds very difficult, especially considering she was seeing so many people with so many fractures and so many accidents. Considering the kinds of things that our granddad got up to when he was ranching, it's sort of really understandable why there were so many accidents that she needed to attend to when she was there. She also described that cooking in her new home was not very easy because it was a wood-burning stove, and cooking on a wood-burning stove is very difficult because of how---

Preston:
You cannot get too close to the fire.

Garett:
Yeah, and you have to constantly give attention to the flame. You don't want this fire too hot, but you don't want it too low. For cooking, it's really difficult to maintain a wood fire so consistently. So she said that for quite some time, she relied heavily on her Primus stove, which I believe is like a little Bunsen burner stove.

Preston:
Yeah.

Garett:
I think Primus was the brand name.

Preston:
There's still Primus stoves today, and I reckon it's much like a small stove you would take camping or backpacking.

Garett:
Yeah. Now you just sort of take your propane or butane tank from Coleman brand, and you just screw it onto your stove and turn it on.

Preston:
[chuckles] Yeah. One of the things I like that she wrote in one of her letters, she said, "People here succeed or fail entirely on their own abilities, and though their life is hard, there's something clean and honest about it. I know I'm doing the right job. The women out here are so awfully glad to have a doctor." And I do feel that living in the 1920s northwest of Peace River, you would definitely succeed or fail on your own terms.

Garett:
Yeah. One of the things that I've definitely learned from Peace Country is the value of hard work, that especially when you live in a place where you -- Basically, if you want something done, you have to do it yourself because you're really the only person -- You're literally the only person that can do it. So you have to put in the work. You got to put in the time. So after her few weeks of travel, she started practicing as a doctor immediately, and she would travel mostly by horseback but sometimes by dog sled. She commented, like in the excerpt, that a lot of the work was from accidents, including gunshot wounds, falls, and axe wounds. But she also said that there were many child births, and she said the child births that she attended to were, as she said, "The kind that would turn you gray."

Preston:
I don't really know what that means.

Garett:
Yeah, I feel like maybe it's an expression for, like, green or blue, like sickly or gross. I'm not sure. I'm not exactly sure. So she mentioned that most of the men in the area were expecting their wives to deliver their baby without the assistance of a doctor, especially considering a modern perspective. This sounds extremely terrifying, like--

Preston:
Very 18th, 19th-century style.

Garett:
Yeah, but with no help, like no help from a doctor but probably not very much help from anyone because there were so few people.

Preston:
Yeah, I think if I remember the information correctly, there was about around 500 people under her jurisdiction that needed medical care, over 400 square miles.

Garett:
Yeah. It's very empty, very sparse. She also said that she had a meeting before she went to Alberta, when she was in England. This was with a friend, Dr. Johnstone, and Dr. Johnstone gave her the advice, "Whatever you do, go to the dental hospital and get yourself a week's practice of pulling teeth." And later, when she was there, she said that typical caseloads would include several fractured limbs or a broken back, a birth, cases of dysentery, pneumonia, smallpox, scarlet fever, or tuberculosis, as well as other illnesses expected in a family practice and perhaps some tooth extractions, as there were no dentists in the area. So many of the cases she saw really needed the attention of a specialist, but she later said, "Some of the stuff I did, I was out of my depth, really, but I was the only one there." Just sort of also how things go, right? You're working, trying to get something done. You go out to location, and you've got stuff, but you got to get the job done, and you don't got the right stuff, so you just do it.

Preston:
[chuckles] Yeah, especially if someone's health is in dire need. If you don't do it, you know this person is in serious trouble, if not fatal. I think it'd be very difficult to be thrown into that type of senior management because you're the only person in your field, in the area.

Garett:
Yeah.

Preston:
I have another excerpt from one of her letters. She wrote, "In the spring of 1930, arriving home at midnight after a house call, Dr. Percy was met by a husband asking to see his pregnant wife. After 32 kilometers of riding through swollen rivers and galloping for the last 3 kilometers, they found their wife without a pulse. Dr. Percy stabilized the mother, who was hemorrhaging, and delivered the baby and stayed 14 hours to ensure that the mother's bleeding stopped. Right after, Dr. Percy arrived home. Another man knocked on her window at 1 AM in the morning, asking her to see his wife, finding that the wife had appendicitis. Dr. Percy transferred her to Peace River. Another man soon arrived at her home, also asking to see his wife. After riding 14 kilometers to see this patient, Dr. Percy stayed with her most of the next 24 hours. She then rode about 65 kilometers to revisit her first patient, the mother and the baby, before accompanying the patient with acute appendicitis by sleigh and caterpillar to Peace River, where she had to stay to give the anesthetic. And it says in 8 days, she had ridden about 286 kilometers, survived a snowstorm, and nearly drowned during one of the river crossings. And that's an excerpt from the letter. Man, that must have been a wild week in the spring of 1930.

Garett:
Yeah, I mean, sometimes I have a busy week, but never something on that magnitude.

Garett and Preston:
[laugh]

Garett:
Yeah, so most of the letters that she wrote, she wrote within the first two years that she was in the Peace Country, consistently writing back to her family. But in the fall of 1930, Dr. Mary Percy met Frank Jackson, who had lost his wife following a postpartum hemorrhage one month after the birth of their third son. Life became more difficult for him when he developed a badly infected hand. As Dr. Percy was the nearest doctor, he traveled about 100 kilometers south in minus 40 Celsius weather to see her. By then, he was suffering from blood poisoning. Dr. Percy lanced his hand and he began to recover. They were engaged in 1931 and traveled to Peace River to buy the only wedding ring in town. During the trip, both of them developed mild cases of carbon monoxide poisoning from a hole in the car's floorboard. So I guess it's not all horse travel, but they arrived back in Notikewin, or Battle River, about three hours late for their own wedding. So Dr. Percy met Frank Jackson when he was a patient, and some of the sources that we found talked about how after their meeting, he found reasons to go and visit her. So they found that they had much in common, including a shared love of classical music. So it says they started courting, and they were married on the 10th of March, 1931.

Preston:
My favorite part about that story is traveling 110 kilometers by horseback to visit once in a while. [chuckles] To make excuses to travel that distance to see her. And then when they did decide to get married, there was only one wedding ring available and it was in Peace River. [chuckles]

Garett:
Yeah, that's quite something. After they got married, Dr. Percy Jackson moved to her husband's homestead at Keg River, which is another 100 kilometers further north than her original assignment. And she indicated that when she got married and moved, she lost the wages that she was receiving from the government as a doctor, because there wasn't a need for a doctor in Keg River, according to the province. I guess, even though Frank Jackson went all the way from Keg River down to see her, but it was probably because husbands were supposed to provide for their wives at the time. But even without her government salary, she continued to practice medicine.

16:07 - Later Life

Preston:
So after Dr. Jackson was married, her writing of letters to her family in England significantly declined. And so there's not as much information about her later life as a practitioner. But we do know that in 1935, work started to create the road that is now known as the McKenzie Highway. And that was during the Great Depression. And the government had created a work program to provide employment for the unemployment and help build new infrastructure. Conditions for the labor men were grim and their canned food supplies often frozen solid. She treated many cases of frostbite more than she had seen in the previous six years. The creation of the road altered the life in the north significantly, as now patients can be transported more easily to the larger hospitals, such as in Peace River or Grande Prairie, and became much easier to get medical supplies. However, it wasn't until after the Second World War that the road became passable in summer after the frost had melted and the ground was no longer swampy. The road created work for Mary, particularly in the early days when the road was dirt. And so by the time you can get modern transportation into the area, life in the north changed significantly for Mary and others around.

Garett:
Yeah, it wasn't quite the same as the development and settlement of other places in the west of North America because technology had already advanced. And so by the time the areas were getting settled in the north, in the Peace Country, technology was already there to just come in and just make things better or make things efficient in different ways. But the fact that some roads were only accessible by wintertime is still something that's very true in the Peace Country. In the summer roads, the roads in the summer are fine, and the winter, they're even better as they're frozen solid. But the melt in the spring is often a great pause for working conditions for the oil and gas industry. Yeah, and waiting for the ground to turn back into a frozen solid white pavement. It's also gotta wait for those to come back. So there's a biography of her life called "The Homemade Brass Plate." So it's a story of a pioneer doctor in Northern Alberta is told by Cornelia Lehn. Dr. Percy Jackson continued to practice medicine until 1975. And she and her husband, Frank, enjoyed various holidays away from the harsh north. Frank died before her on 1st of September in 1979. But following her husband's death, she started doing more lectures and talks. And she visited her family in Britain several times, often taking some of her grandchildren with her. She told many stories, both of her own life and the extensive reading she undertook. She had a very down-to-earth attitude, and she spoke plainly. She said that she had no fear of being dead and commented, "It's not being dead that one is afraid of, but a process of dying after a stroke or heart attack. When you've almost got one foot in heaven, it's a bit annoying to be brought back so you can do the whole thing again slowly. Doctors say they don't play God, but if a person has died suddenly and then is brought back to life, that is playing God." End quote from her.

Preston:
Mary Percy Jackson was very distinguished in her community and in her career. And we have a list of awards or recognitions that have come to her. In 1953, she has the Master Farm Family of Alberta, and that is an award for proficiency. And in 1963, they founded a school after her, Dr. Mary Jackson School in Keg River, where she used to live. And that is a K to 12 school currently. And in 1967, she had the Centennial Medal of Canada in recognition of valuable service to the nation. And in '75, she won the Alberta Achievement Award, along with her husband, in recognition of outstanding service in the community. And also in '75, she won Woman of the Year by the Voice of Native Women. And in 1976, she had the Honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Alberta. And in 1983, the Alberta Order of Excellence, and in '89, Officer in the Order of Canada. So very, very distinguished. And she even received a letter from on behalf of the Queen of England, which I think is quite remarkable.

Garett:
Yeah, especially since she did not live to be 100 years old, which British citizens who live to be 100 receive a letter from royalty. So she died on the 6th of May, 2000. So she died at the age of 95. So she didn't receive a letter from the Queen for living to 100. But the letter she did receive, it says, "Dear Dr. Percy Jackson, I am commanded by Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, to write and say that Her Majesty commands me to send you a brief word of appreciation for the truly great work that you are doing in and around Keg River. I am to explain that Queen Elizabeth reads the magazine of the Fellowship of the Maple Leaf and Her Majesty was deeply impressed to read of your great work, to alleviate suffering and to bring comfort to those who live in such isolated and often almost intolerably difficult surroundings. Queen Elizabeth knows full well that such work cannot be carried out without real courage and real self-sacrifice. And I am to finish this short letter by saying how much Her Majesty hopes that you may go from strength to strength in your great undertaking. Yours sincerely, Catherine Seymour." That's dated, the 28th of July, 1955. So as we mentioned, there is a biography of her life. And while we don't have the book, there were a couple of reviews that we wanted to share with you about the book.

Preston:
The first review says, "Why, or why, does everyone in Canada not know about this amazing woman? This is the memoir of Mary Percy Jackson, a British doctor who arrived in Northern Alberta in 1929. And that area of the province had not even been mapped yet. She proceeded not only to have the most incredible personal adventures, but single-handedly rescued many residents in her Northern community of Keg River, 700 kilometers North of Edmonton. From the ravages of tuberculosis, rabies, and other horrendous disease and injuries. She writes about her jaw dropping exploits in a modest matter of fact way. Dr. Jackson went on to receive many awards, including the Order of Canada. Yet I'll bet the vast majority of people have never heard of her. What a shame."

Garett:
And another review says, "A fantastic memoir of the early days in Northern Alberta. Dr. Jackson's wonderful sense of humor and love for the people she met and cared for shine brightly with every page. And her blunt commentary on medical procedures and treatments at the time, keep the work solidly grounded in history. A truly beautiful book written by a remarkable woman." So Preston and I aren't historians, but we're trying our best to share what we've learned about Dr. Mary Percy Jackson. Because when we learned about her, we were astonished and very impressed.

Preston:
Yes, having heard about her until recently, I was surprised that growing up in the Peace Country, I have never heard of this remarkable lady of local history.

Garett:
We understand that we have not done justice to the incredible life of Dr. Mary Percy Jackson.

Preston:
All the information that we have cited and the history that we have uncovered, we have nearly reviewed other people's works in order to collect this history that we have put together of Dr. Jackson.

Garett:
Links to these references can be found in the show notes or online on the website. We know this is very different from what we've done before, since most of the episodes that we do are autobiographical. And this one is biographical. But we're grateful for all of the work that people do to make and improve people's lives. And we really wanted to take some time to share with you some of the stories of the life of Dr. Jackson.

Preston:
Thank you so much for listening to our episode.

Garett:
If you have questions or comments, or if you have a story to share, then feel free to write us and email us at lifenorthofthe54th@gmail.com. Or if you know of other people that you would like us to talk about or interview, please let us know. We will be glad to hear from you. Preston, thank you for taking the time with me and for being the one to introduce me to Dr. Jackson. Really appreciate it.

Preston:
Of course. We're all on the same team.

Garett:
Yeah. Thanks, Preston. I'll see you around.

Preston:
Yes. See you next time, Garett.

Garett:
Bye.

Ending Theme Music:
[bass guitar riff with drumbeat]