Suitable for the wilds

letters from Northern Alberta, 1929-1931

Edición de la obra Suitable for the wilds

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 900 square kilometres of wooded, boggy land, which she travelled on horseback, by dogsled, and sometimes by automobile. Dr. Percy faced many issues in caring for the Metis and Native people, as well as for increasing numbers of immigrant families. Her greatest medical challenges, though, were the result of poverty and isolation - and she often railed against 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, which permeates her letters, is infectious. Indeed, by the end of 1930 she complained 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 farther north, to Keg River, where she lives today. Janice Dickin McGinnis's 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.