Laura Beatrice Berton's autobiography of life in the Yukon entitled I Married the Klondike was published in her later years and gave her what her son Pierre describes as "a modicum of fame, which she thoroughly enjoyed.

He started his journalism career in scouting and later wrote that "the first newspaper I was ever associated with was a weekly typewritten publication issued by the Seagull Patrol of St. Mary’s Troop."

[10] Berton himself was conscripted into the Canadian Army under the National Resources Mobilization Act in 1942 and attended basic training in British Columbia, nominally as a reinforcement soldier intended for The Seaforth Highlanders of Canada.

By 1942, the Axis powers were winning the war, and Berton came to feel that the two very different visions of the world offered up by the respective sides were such that he had to take a stand by "going active", instead of remaining safely in Canada as a "Zombie".

During his time in Britain, he dated a woman named Frances who informed him on V Day that she was pregnant with his child and did not want him involved, as told by Berton in his autobiography and retold in his Biography.

[14] He volunteered for the Canadian Army Pacific Force (CAPF), granted a final "embarkation leave", and found himself no closer to combat employment by the time the Japanese surrendered in September 1945.

[29] In 1957, he became a key member of the CBC's public affairs flagship program, Close-Up, and a permanent panelist on the popular television show Front Page Challenge.

[33] Berton traced the appalling hardships faced by the thousands of people who came from around the world to seek their fortunes in the Klondike, the vast majority of whom failed to achieve their dreams of riches.

Berton also covered the rise and fall of Dawson City, a boomtown that was full of bars, brothels and gambling halls that catered to the gold prospectors, giving it a disreputable reputation both at the time and since.

The book's hero was the tough and stern Colonel Sam Steele, the Yukon commissioner of the North-West Mounted Police, a policeman with an almost legendary reputation who upheld law and order during the gold rush.

[34] Berton's background as someone who grew up in the Yukon added to the book's appeal as many reviewers praised Klondike The Last Great Gold Rush for its sense of "authenticity".

[36] To relive the boredom as he waited for an entire month to interview Nasser, Berton had the Close-Up camera crew make a documentary about life in Egypt, which he credited with broadening his perspective.

[39] Berton visited Hiroshima and its Peace Memorial, where he found himself sickened by the photographs of the survivors of the atomic bombing of that city, writing that: "for sheer horror it outdoes everything save the relics of Belsen and Buchenwald...I seemed to feel the little eyes of the Japanese boring into my back as I stared at those terrible pictures of heaped and peeling human bodies...The Germans, we are told, were stunned by motion pictures of the extermination camps.

[43] Berton called the beating of Bluestein a "semi-execution" brazenly committed in the front lobby of the popular Town Tavern nightclub of Toronto, and demanded that the police bring Papalia to justice despite the unwillingness of nearly 100 witnesses to testify.

[30] In January 1963, Berton started to work as a Maclean's columnist, where the other writers such as Robert Fulford and Peter Gzowski wanted to have him fired because the often frivolous and trivial nature of his columns were felt to be embarrassing.

[52] The show featured an interview with Sergeant Walter "Rocky" Leja of the Canadian Army, who had been badly injured when he attempted to dismantle a bomb planted by the FLQ in Montreal.

[56] In the 1960s, Berton was a leading member of the Sordsmen's Club [sic],[58] a group of Toronto intellectuals and businessmen who met for expensive lunches with women who were not their wives, and who were forbidden to attend its meetings unless their husband was not present.

[59] Other members included Jack McCllelland, John C. Parkin, Harold Town, George Fryer, Chuck Rathgreb, Arthur Hailey, and Ralph McCreath.

[59] A later controversy developed when it emerged that at end of the lunches, which typically occurred on a Friday afternoon and lasted five hours, each man stood behind a woman of his choosing with whom he expected to have sex.

[61] At the same time, he noted that with the notable exceptions of Donald Creighton and W. L. Morton, Canada had no story-teller historians who wrote popular and accessible narratives of Canadian history.

Berton defined the building of the railroad as a struggle of man against nature, seeing it as a triumph of human ingenuity and willpower, as the builders defeated the harsh landscape of northern Ontario, the seemingly endless Prairies, and the imposing Rocky Mountains.

In the 1968–1969 season, Berton interviewed from the United States the burlesque entertainer Gypsy Rose Lee, the actress Sharon Tate, the pornographer Bob Guccione, the "playmate novelist" Alice Denham, the actor Charlton Heston, and Rachel Jones (an airline stewardess who was presented at the time as one of the co-authors of the bestselling 1967 pseudo-memoir Coffee, Tea or Me?

[66] That season, Canadian guests included the singer Neil Young, Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau, the journalist Laurier LaPierre, the columnist Peter C. Newman and the feminist activist June Callwood.

Berton's television career included spots as host and writer on My Country, The Great Debate, Heritage Theatre, The Secret of My Success and The National Dream.

His biographer, Brian McKillop wrote: "No one in Canada or for that matter in North America, managed to take hold of the full range of the mainstream media with the same kind of commanding presence and authority.

It is if he somehow carried the DNA of Edward R. Murrow and Jack Paar, Vance Packard and Michael Harrington, Bernard DeVoto and Studs Terkel, with more than a little Garrison Keillor in the mix.

Each of these figures—a war correspondent who spoke truth to power; a host of the most watched and enduring television interview program of its era; a muckraking journalist in the age of the consumer; a left-wing critic of North American society; a popular and respected historian of nation and empire in North America; a collector of the kind of folklore that serves as the first draft of history; a folksy, story-telling humorist of nostalgic bent—was or is a man of exceptional accomplishment in his own area.

Berton described how the railroad builders had to quite literally blast and hack their way through the sheer granite of the Rocky mountains, which was an extremely difficult, dangerous and arduous task, given the technology of the time.

[63] In common with many other Canadians, Berton found the 1970s to be an unpleasant decade as the recession caused by the Arab oil shock of 1973–74 put an end to the "long summer" of prosperity that had begun in 1945 while the election of the separatist PQ government in Quebec in 1976 led to doubts about whatever Canada would even last as a nation.

By 1979, on the threshold of a new decade that seemed to promise only more trouble, Berton came to feel that Canada needed another national epic to give hope in dark and uncertain times.