Georgia Powell
Georgia Powell was born in Buctoche, New Brunswick. She was a teacher in her hometown before she attended and graduated from the Waltham Training School for District Nurses in Waltham, Massachusetts. She was the superintendent of a group of Victoria Order of Nurses who travelled to the Yukon with Yukon Field Force in the spring of 1898.1)
Powell arrived in Dawson in early August with the advance guard of the Field Force. She took charge of the Good Samaritan Hospital which was two log buildings, fifty feet apart. One unfinished building had seven typhoid patients, a number that rose to eighteen by the end of the week. The other building had a finished floor and it also held eighteen typhoid patients. The patient load increased daily, and the nurses treated those who also had pneumonia, malaria, and liver congestion. Blankets, beds, and pyjamas were in short supply as were sanitation supplies. Powell took sick with typhoid after four weeks of hard work. The other VON nurses (Amy Scott, Margaret Payson, and Rachel Hanna) arrived in Dawson three days after Powell took sick. After Powell recovered, Hanna joined her in nursing at the Good Samaritan Hospital.2)
In 1899, the Board of Directors for the Victoria Order of Nurses of Canada withdrew the nurses from the Klondike. Nurse Amy Scott had been invalided back to Toronto and then returned home to England, one nurse retired from the Order and continued to nurse in a Dawson hospital, Margaret Payson took a position in the post office and remained in the Klondike.3) Georgia resigned and stayed in Dawson, reluctant to part company with Sergeant Bates of the NWMP whom she eventually married. The wedding was postponed in 1900 when Georgia went to South Africa to care for soldiers fighting in the Boer War. She was reunited there with Amy Scott as they both served with the 10th Canadian Field Hospital.4)