Camp Victoria is the story of a pair of Victorian Order nurses and a feisty feminist journalist who, in 1898, find themselves separated from the Yukon Field Force with whom they were travelling through the wilds of the Yukon. Alone in the wilderness at night, the women are afraid at first - but after a little bit of truth telling, a little bit of camaraderie and a lot of medicinal whiskey, the intrepid travelers begin dreaming of creating their own utopian settlement.
Camp Victoria is loosely based on the real-life adventures of renowned Canadian investigative journalist Faith Fenton and Victorian Order nurses Rachel Hanna and Margaret Payson, who hiked the Telegraph Trail to Dawson City along with the 200-man Yukon Field Force in the summer of 1898, at the height of the Gold Rush. Wildly famous at the time, but largely forgotten now, Faith and the VON nurses’ adventure to the Klondike demonstrated to their contemporaries that, as Faith herself once wrote, “there is a way of escape for every woman – a door into the larger life, of which she alone holds the key.”
Keywords: one-act, Yukon, Klondyke, nurse, journalist, women
Suitable for School Performances: Students age 16+
Year Printed: 2016
First produced in 2014 at Lunchbox Theatre, Calgary, AB.
Running TIme: 60 minutes
Acts: 1
Female Cast: 3