The Kluane Wagon Road – part 3

The Legal Survey of the Kluane Wagon Road

The Kluane Wagon Road (KWR) appears to have had only one route from its start at the Whitehorse-Dawson Overland Trail to Marshall Creek, about 10 miles east of present-day Haines Junction. From that point, there were branches for summer and winter use, others to access the gold creeks north of Kloo Lake, and an eventual winter route to Cultus Bay on Kluane Lake. These old roads are all loosely referred to as ‘Kluane Wagon Road’ by locals who come across them on the landscape.

One route, however, can justifiably claim this name by virtue of the legal survey of it that was carried out in two projects in 1913 and 1915 by Henry G. Dickson. He surveyed the 22.5-mile section from Silver City (then called Kluane) southeastward to Jarvis River in eight days in November 1913. Over 43 days in August and September 1915, he completed the project by surveying the 100 miles from the Overland Trail westward to the Jarvis River, joining up with the 1913 survey.

The reason for surveying the KWR is not clear, but it may have been a desire to increase the relatively sparse legal survey fabric of the region. Perhaps it was viewed that the surveyor Dickson, who was working in the area in the summer of 1913, should be prevailed upon to also survey the KWR at a time when the region was seeing increased prominence with the new big game hunting industry. In addition, the KWR was experiencing a spike in traffic in 1913 with a new gold rush to the Chisana area of Alaska just across the Yukon border.

The contract made with Dickson on July 20, 1915 for the second survey project was not viewed favorably by Commissioner George Black, as it was evidently done without consultation with him. The Dawson-based Black complained that the survey “…work is not pressing, and is not particularly important, and the Government needs money so much for vital matters …”.

These survey projects defined the main route that was being used at the time and therefore had to follow all its twists and turns. A 66-foot right-of-way was marked out by posts placed on either side of the road at each deflection (curve), with the distance and bearing measured between the pairs of posts. Because of the crooked nature of the road, the survey required a total of 1,908 posts (954 pairs) to mark the route of the KWR. An example of a section of Dickson’s survey plan is provided below:

The pairs of survey posts were numbered sequentially from the beginning of the survey projects, from 0 to 151 for the 1913 survey and from 0 to 801 for the 1915 survey. These numbers appeared on the survey plans, but not on the posts.

The vast majority of the survey posts were wooden, but iron posts were placed at important locations, such as the start and end of the road and most roadhouse locations. In addition, several of the wooden posts and all of the iron posts were placed in either a stone mound or in a mound made of dirt from four surrounding pits. These methods were used to make periodic post locations more visible and to remain as evidence long after the wooden posts had rotted away.

After the survey on the ground was completed, Dickson (or a draftsman) then had to make paper survey plans from his field information. This appears to have been a laborious process with the drafting technology that was available at that time. The 1915 plan is on 11 sheets of two-foot wide paper and appears to be hand-drawn, with the original in color. It was done at a scale of 1 inch = 500 feet (or 1:6,000), meaning that one inch on the plan represents 500 feet (6,000 inches) on the ground. To plot the 99.5 miles of the 1915 survey, about 80 linear feet of paper was required for the 11 sheets that make up the plan.

Retracing the Kluane Wagon Road

Dickson’s large survey plan sheets show the road alignment and the survey posts with the distances and bearings between them, but there is no reference to their location on the landscape. A number of crossings of named creeks and rivers are shown, but it’s not evident where along the creek or river the crossings are. The only places that indicate the location of the KWR is where it passes through Champagne and Canyon Creek, two localities that had previously surveyed properties, and where it terminates at Silver City.

To determine the location of the surveyed KWR on the land, my only option was to try to match up shapes of survey sections with similar shapes of old tracks that still showed up on available air photos. This was a very painstaking process, but it was fairly successful where the road was still visible on the air photos. This gave me the information needed to start looking for the survey posts.

I later found out that the KWR had already been mapped using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology of Dickson’s survey. Knowing about this would have saved me a lot of the laborious air photo work. My survey post location information has since shown that there is some inaccuracy in this GIS mapping of the KWR.

The first post I found was by sheer luck while out doing other work a few miles west of Haines Junction. I spotted a squared wooden post with about 4-inch sides and two feet high, with the top beginning to rot away. I was only certain it had to be a KWR post when I saw a faint ‘R’ (for ‘road’) carved sideways near the top on the side of the post facing the road.

My wife Roberta and I soon started purposely looking for posts and the first one was found, fittingly by her, a couple of miles north of Haines Junction. We  found several posts in that area and then the search expanded from there.  Other people, particularly Ron Chambers and my son Neal, began accompanying me on search trips for posts and we eventually covered almost all of the wagon road.

I have calculated that a little less than half of the surveyed KWR route remains relatively undisturbed, and therefore a corresponding amount of the survey posts (about 850 of the 1,908 originally placed) could potentially still exist. To date I have travelled all but a couple of miles of the KWR and have found over 230 posts, two of them iron and the rest wooden or the pits and mounds that marked them. This represents the locating of a little more than 1/4 of the potential remaining posts.

The wooden posts are in varying conditions, with some still standing fairly solidly, some leaning or ready to fall, and others laying on the surface. Many of the latter are in quite rotten condition, some of them barely recognizable as survey posts. Those that could not be located have presumably rotted away, were burned by forest fires, or were not found for some other reason.

The located posts are the proof of the KWR’s location and there are enough of them remaining to confirm the route. GPS co-ordinates taken of the posts will preserve this locational information after they have disappeared from the land.

The KWR is located on lands with a variety of ownership or jurisdictions. About 30% is on (and obliterated by) old and new sections of the Alaska Highway, about 15% is on First Nations’ Settlement Lands, and another 8% is on private property, municipal land, and lands for other uses such as utility easements. The remaining 47% is on vacant Crown land.

The KWR survey no longer appears on maps or on most subsequent legal survey plans of overlapping or adjacent parcels. However, the Surveyor General Branch (the federal agency responsible for legal survey standards and records) advises that the KWR survey still exists as a legal survey and it is technically illegal to remove the survey posts.

End of the Kluane Wagon Road

The construction of the Alaska Highway in 1942 changed things drastically and rapidly for the people of the southwest Yukon. It meant the end of travel on the comparatively primitive KWR and the beginning of relatively modern highway travel. While the quicker travel time afforded by the highway was undoubtedly welcomed, perhaps some residents of the area remained nostalgic for a time about their travels and experiences on the KWR.

The KWR’s role as the primary transportation route into the Kluane region for the previous four decades came to an end. Some sections of it were covered partly or totally by the Alaska Highway, particularly the section eastward from Champagne. Other portions have been overtaken by developments such as the Haines Junction airport, the Yukon Energy transmission line, gravel pits and private land dispositions. However, much was also left intact, with some parts used for years afterwards for wood-cutting and other localized activities.

Today the intact sections of the KWR exist in a variety of conditions. Some can be driven by all-terrain vehicle or snowmobile, some can only be traversed on foot, and some are so overgrown that the road is hard to find. Most of the remaining road is seen by very few people, although some sections have occasional recreational use, some is still used for wood-cutting and trapping access, and one section is used for access to mining claims. However, most of these users are likely unaware that they are travelling on what was the KWR.

One section of the KWR that is somewhat well known branches from the Alaska Highway near km 1477, about five miles west of the Takhini River, and heads northeast toward the Little River. This section, much of which was also the initial Alaska Highway route in this area, has provided access for woodcutters, hunters and trappers, recreationists, and, more recently, landowners. A government road sign saying ‘Kluane Wagon Trail’ erected in the summer of 2015 at the junction with the Alaska Highway has likely increased awareness of the KWR in that area.

The Kluane Wagon Road is a historic feature of the Kluane region. Many of the intact portions of it are slowly disappearing into the landscape, as are the survey posts that for over 100 years have marked its existence. It is my hope that the KWR will be recognized as a valuable historic resource and be taken into account in land use activities that may affect it.

The Kluane Wagon Road – part 2

Building of the Kluane Wagon Road 

All the new developments in the Kluane region required the support of a good road, and it wasn’t only the miners who needed the access. In the summer of 1904, R.G. McConnell of the Geological Survey of Canada visited the region and observed that more than anything else, the high transportation costs were retarding development.

At the same time, the Yukon was in the early stages of decline with the Klondike goldfield returns waning. The promise of Kluane gold was the impetus needed to stimulate the economy, despite the unproven economic potential of the region. The Yukon government realized that the new mining activity called for an investment in exploring a route for a wagon road to bring down the transportation costs, to assist in the development of mining interests, and to link small communities with the supply center of Whitehorse.

This view was not held by everyone, however, and due to some opposition from Dawson City-based politicians, the funds were not approved until mid-August of 1904, and construction work did not commence until the late summer. The nature of the initial work is not clear, but some of the expenditure was engaging the land surveyor Henry Dickson to assist Territorial Engineer William Thibaudeau in locating the new road.

Construction of the Kluane Wagon Road (KWR) was started by branching off from mile 32 of the Whitehorse-Dawson Overland Trail, northwest of Whitehorse. The Overland Trail had been constructed two years previous, in 1902, going northwest from Whitehorse to the Klondike goldfields and Dawson City. The KWR headed westward, following the Takhini, Mendenhall and Dezadeash River valleys, then passed over the Bear Creek summit before eventually terminating at Silver City, near the south end of Kluane Lake.

The bulk of the roadwork was completed during the fall and winter of 1904-05 with construction of 81 miles of the road and a 5-mile winter road branch to Ruby Creek. In addition to clearing of trees and brush, construction involved corduroying of wet areas, placement of bridges and culverts, and cutting of the roadbed into hillsides where required. Evidence of sidehill cutting, which involved considerable manual labor and work by horse-drawn equipment, can still be seen at many places along the KWR.

The eventual course of the wagon road was determined by the need to accommodate horses pulling wagons and sleighs, for which the routes used for foot and horseback travel were inadequate in many places. The relatively crooked nature and greater length of the KWR compared to the present-day Alaska Highway show that the wagon road was located to avoid obstacles such as wet areas, gullies, sidehills and steep hills as much as possible, particularly the latter.

It appears that milepost markers were placed along the KWR, as some applications for land along the road have accompanying sketches that show mileposts, as does at least one land survey near the road. The markers showed the mileage from Whitehorse, so would have included 32 miles of the Whitehorse-Dawson Overland Trail. I have not come across any remaining such markers on my traverses along the road and so do not know what they may have looked like.

Related Developments

On the heels of construction of the KWR came the establishment of roadhouses to serve travellers. Nine hotel liquor licences were issued for new Kluane area establishments and newspapers carried advertisements for establishments such as the Kloo Lake Hotel and Restaurant and services such as the Bullion & Ruby Transportation Company. At least 10 roadhouses were built, and land applications were made for others that never came to fruition. Most of these establishments were relatively short-lived as the mining activity declined in the next few years, but two of them, at Champagne and Bear Creek, persisted more or less continually for the duration of the KWR’s existence.

Very soon after the gold discoveries in 1903, the White Pass & Yukon Route began using small sternwheelers on the Takhini River to haul freight and passengers from Whitehorse. This eliminated about 50 miles of the wagon trail, which then was still quite primitive. In 1904 the company announced that it would be placing feed and building stables at the confluence of the Mendenhall and Takhini Rivers for a freighting and stage business to the Kluane goldfields. A small community called Mendenhall Landing (also called Steamboat Landing) sprang up, consisting of a roadhouse, buildings to store freight, and cabins.

In 1904 at what was to become the community of Burwash Landing on Kluane Lake, the brothers Louis and Eugene Jacquot from France established a trading post and store. This followed the discovery of gold on nearby Burwash Creek in May of that year and a promising discovery the previous fall on Bullion Creek, near the south end of the lake. The Jacquots later were involved in the big game outfitting business as well. In 1920 they rebuilt the original log bridge at Canyon Creek, the most visible and enduring remnant of the KWR.

Use of the Kluane Wagon Road

With disappointing gold returns, the promises of the Kluane region did not materialize and by 1907 the mining activity settled down to a much lower level and would remain that way for the years to come. Miners continued to use the KWR, as did the roadhouse operators to haul supplies from Whitehorse and other people for various purposes. This included government services such as the mining recorder and post office, as well as the Northwest Mounted Police. Harry Chambers of Champagne provided mail carrier services, and later his son George did the same when automobiles were in use.

The 1910’s saw the introduction of a new industry into the southwest Yukon, the hunting of big game. The hunting parties used the KWR during the decades to follow, first using wagons and then automobiles later in the 1920’s. Some of the hunters provided accounts of their use of the KWR. Harry Auer described on his trip in 1913 how “…the transport [wagon] sank in the clay up to the axles within three hundred feet of the [Boutellier] summit …”, requiring them to unload the wagon and carry the contents on their backs to the top. G.O. Young described in his 1919 trip account how Louis Jacquot of Burwash Landing, with his six-horse team pulling a wagon loaded with 5,500 pounds of supplies, would cut a spruce tree, leave the branches on and chain it to the rear axle to act as a brake going down steep grades.

One story of the hazards of travel on the KWR is that of Frank Sketch, who had been a horse wrangler on Young’s hunting trip. Sketch was involved in freighting for the Jacquot brothers and on a trip from Whitehorse the log bridge over the Mendenhall River gave way under the load. In the chaos he was kicked in the face by one of the frantic horses and ended up losing an eye, and one horse drowned as well. Sketch was sent on a spare horse to Steamboat Landing for help, while the other two freighters returned to Whitehorse to replenish the winter’s supply of provisions that had been lost.

The first automobile to travel on the Whitehorse-Dawson Overland Trail was in December 1912, and so it is reasonable to assume they began to be used on the KWR not long after that. Frances Kipp, a nurse sent to Champagne in 1919 to assist with the influenza epidemic, described her trip from Whitehorse in an open Ford vehicle. She and her travel companions had to fill holes in the road and clear brush and fallen trees, taking them eight hours to make the 64-mile trip.

A 1920 photograph in the collection of Frank Harbottle, who operated a small transportation line between Whitehorse and Kluane Lake, includes information that the Bear Creek roadhouse, which was six miles west of Haines Junction, was the exchange point from automobiles to horses and wagons. After a vehicle bridge was built across the Jarvis River in 1923, “Kluane Lake … [could] be reached in comfort by automobile”.

Undoubtedly the longest-lasting users of the entire length of the KWR were Eugene and Louis Jacquot of Burwash Landing. They transported supplies from Whitehorse along the wagon road for the operation of their trading post, roadhouse and store from 1904 until the Alaska Highway came through in 1942. In a book by G.O. Young about his hunting trip in 1919, he mentions that “all along the route we saw signs of Louie Jacquot’s skill as a teamster.”

In a conversation with late Kluane First Nation elder Josie Sias (nee Jacquot), she recalled trips from Burwash to Whitehorse by both buckboard and automobile as a young girl. By both modes the trips took 7-10 days each way (15-20 miles per day), and three trips per year were made for supplies for the Jacquots’ facilities at Burwash. She remembered the trips as a fun time, bouncing along on a mattress in the back of the truck and camping out along the way.

Life in the Kluane region did not change as dramatically with the KWR as it did later with the Alaska Highway. Moose Jackson, a late elder of the Champagne & Aishihik First Nations, said that the wagon road didn’t mean much to First Nations people at first; it was just a bigger horse trail. The use of the KWR by First Nation people is indicated by brush camp structures that have been found in proximity to it. Moose said that eventually some First Nations people acquired automobiles for use on the KWR before the Alaska Highway came through.

Next:  Part 3 – Legal Survey, Retracing, and End of the Kluane Wagon Road

The Kluane Wagon Road – part 1

Introduction

For almost 40 years before the construction of the Alaska Highway in 1942, the Kluane Wagon Road (KWR) provided the means of access to and within the southwest Yukon. The 122-mile long road was built to provide access for mining and associated activities after gold was discovered in 1903 in the creeks of the Jarvis River and Kluane Lake areas. The establishment of roadhouses, Northwest Mounted Police posts, a government office, freighting buildings and other developments followed the building of the KWR.

Over the years various locally-known old roads in the southwest Yukon have come to be referred to as the ‘Kluane Wagon Road’. While more research is needed to tell the complete story of all these roads, one route was legally surveyed under this name. In 1913 and 1915 two legal land surveys projects were carried out by a prolific and long-time Yukon surveyor named Henry G. Dickson to define the main route that had evolved during the previous decade.

I have long known of the KWR, but had never investigated it to any extent. Then a number of years ago my wife Roberta took a Yukon History course at Yukon College and chose the KWR as a research paper topic. In the course of her research she managed to obtain paper copies of the 1915 survey plan of the road, which shows it in terms of survey posts and the distances and bearings (geographic headings) between them. However, it does not show the actual location other than at a few known points along the road that had been previously surveyed.

The information on the survey plans enables the KWR to be mapped to some degree of accuracy, but the physical remains on the land from the survey provide the real proof of the road’s location. This exists in the form of survey posts, most of them wooden, that have persisted for more than 100 years. For the past several years I have been retracing the KWR on the ground and finding survey posts that are the evidence of it.

The Imperial system of measurement, rather than metric, was in use at the time of the Kluane Wagon Road and the survey of it.  For consistency and to avoid confusion, Imperial units are used in this account of the road.

Events Leading up to the Kluane Wagon Road

The southwest corner of the Yukon had been visited very little by non-First Nations people by the time gold was discovered on tributaries of the Jarvis River in the summer of 1903. The nearest ‘outsider’ activity was about 50 miles to the east, along the First Nations trading trail that ran north-south through the Dezadeash and Nordenskiold River valleys. This important trail had been taken over in the mid-1890’s by an American entrepreneur named Jack Dalton for his commercial enterprise transporting supplies, including livestock, to the Klondike goldfields.

Hints of the mining potential in the Kluane region may have prompted Harry “Shorty” Chambers, who had worked for Jack Dalton, to build a roadhouse and trading post in 1902 at the strategic location of Champagne, at the crossroads of the trading trail and the soon-to-be KWR. Chambers and his wife Annie were well positioned to provide services to travellers when Kluane area gold was discovered in 1903. A big-game hunter who visited with Chambers in 1913 wrote that “… inspired by a belief in the development of mining in this part of the country, [he] has built a large cabin for himself with many bunks for prospective travellers… And while he waits for the country to grow he hauls provisions and general supplies of all kinds from White Horse …”.

The tributaries of the Jarvis River began to attract the attention of miners in the spring of 1903 when First Nations people reported that gold could be found in that area. This coincided with the decline of the Klondike Gold Rush, as mining claims there became harder to procure and prospectors began to look further afield. The first access used by the prospectors into the Kluane area was provided by the network of foot trails that the First Nations people had made and used for ages throughout the region.

The result was discovery of gold that summer by Dawson Charlie, a co-discoverer of the Klondike gold, on a creek that he named Fourth of July for the date of the discovery. Two days later, a discovery claim was staked on nearby Ruby Creek, and others in the area soon followed. A seemingly rich gold discovery in late September on Bullion Creek near the south end of Kluane Lake further heightened the interest in mining in the region.

Things happened fast in the summer and fall of 1903 following the gold discoveries, as local infrastructure began to develop to support the mining activity. By early August the Northwest Mounted Police (NWMP) were already building a post on Ruby Creek. By the following April, four NWMP posts were established in the area, all of a portable type until it was determined if and where a permanent road to serve the region would go. A small community grew at Silver City with a NWMP post and offices for the district mining recorder and his assistant.

Newspaper reports from the early spring of 1904 talk about hauling of machinery into the area by Skookum Jim, another co-discoverer of the Klondike gold. Freighters were able to use their two- and four-horse sleds at least as far as Marshall Creek, which is 10 miles east of Haines Junction and almost 100 wagon road miles from Whitehorse. This freighting activity would have required more than a trail and occurred prior to involvement of the Yukon government in construction of the road, so evidently some early work was carried out by prospective miners to provide access suitable for their horse-drawn freight sleighs.

Next:  Part 2 – Building and Using the Kluane Wagon Road

The Swinehart Farm – part 5

The Swinehart Farm today

So what of the Swinehart Farm site now? The three-kilometer bush road from Fort Selkirk to the farm provides a pleasant walk through an open mixed forest of white spruce and trembling aspen. It is very easy not to notice the subtle change at the farm’s eastern boundary to a more open forest of fairly large aspen trees with a lesser component of spruce. A closer look near the boundary line shows a line of large aspen trees all leaning westward at the same angle. Beside this, faint furrows discernible in the ground along the line of trees reveal this to be the eastern edge of a field. Nearby are the remnants of a gate post lying rotting on the ground.

A fairly deep hand-dug ditch along a low area just to the south of the road is easy to miss due to willow growth, and impossible to see when the leaves are out. Further along beside the road is a large hole in the ground with cribbed walls that was the basement of the farmhouse, and rotting sill logs on top of the ground show an extension or addition to the house.  I have been told that the house was cut up for firewood and taken to Fort Selkirk many years ago.

A short distance from the house site, more rotting sill logs visible only as lumps under the surface vegetation mark the outline of what was probably the barn, judging from the old photographs. Scattered around the house and barn area are old tin cans and other debris, as well as a few homemade metal and wooden objects of unknown function. Nearby is a log outhouse, the only remaining standing structure at the farm.

The entire Swinehart Farm field has grown back to forest, presently in a mature aspen successional stage. When on the ground at the farm, the surrounding hills cannot be seen above or through the forest, particularly when the trees are in leaf. However, the former cultivated field is still quite visible on air photographs more than 100 years after the farm was abandoned. Similarly, the clearing for the telegraph line that was built in 1899 still shows up from the air all these years later.

Physical evidence of the Swinehart Farm became very apparent when the area was included in coverage using the technology called LiDAR (‘Light Detection and Ranging’) in 2020.  This tool shows the earth’s surface as if there was no vegetation, enabling past human activities on the landscape to be seen.

The setting that was a home for several people more than 100 years ago has now gone back to nature and sees very few people. The daily life and activities that occurred there for 16 years can now only be imagined amid the silence and regrowth of trees. Only a few remnants persist as evidence of the farm, with the hand-dug irrigation ditch that runs for hundreds of meters remaining as the most visible testament to the industriousness of the Swinehart family and others that worked there.

Oral history projects conducted at Fort Selkirk in 1984 and 1985 revealed some knowledge of the Swinehart Farm and family. The participants knew of the farm and had been at the site before, mostly after it was abandoned. In 1985 interviews, Selkirk First Nation elders Charlie Johnson and Tommy McGinty said that Swinehart raised chickens, hay and vegetables at his farm.

In her 1984 interview, Martha Cameron said that in Dawson City as a young girl she spent time with Leta (Swinehart) Stillman, who taught her how to sew and make clothes. She also knew Guy Swinehart and told of having to make him lunch one day and he asked her to cook two dozen eggs, then ate them all. In the 1930’s and ‘40’s when Martha was married and lived in Fort Selkirk, she and other ladies and their children went on picnics out to the abandoned Swinehart Farm area.

More than 30 years after Martha’s interview, her daughter Ione Christensen also recounted her memories of those picnics as a young girl in the 1930’s at the little lake beyond the Swinehart Farm.  Ione remembered going past a house with a veranda, which fits with pictures of the Swinehart farmhouse. She said nobody lived there then and no one in Fort Selkirk at that time had known the Swinehart family.

The ownership of the Swinehart Farm remains a curiosity, as the title is still in the name of the original holder, Frank Bach, who died in 1933. More than 100 years after the death of William Swinehart and abandonment of the farm, the land taxes are still being paid and the property “is under the care of Curtis Bach”. This enduring private ownership of the property resulted in its exclusion from the surrounding Selkirk First Nation Settlement Land and the road to it being surveyed out to maintain legal access.

The reason that the Bach family continues to pay the property taxes and hang on to this piece of Yukon bush is their business, but it is intriguing nevertheless. There are still members of the Bach family living in Juneau, one of whom told me he has been well aware of the property all his life and feels connected to it, even though he has never been there.

The pioneer Swinehart Farm and family played an important role for a number of years in the Fort Selkirk community as well as in early Yukon agriculture, but that seems to have become forgotten over time. Hopefully the farm and the family can regain some awareness and recognition of their place in Yukon history.

Updated October 7, 2023

The Swinehart Farm – part 4

The family reunites (1901 – 1911)

The establishment of the Swinehart Farm at Fort Selkirk may have provided the stable base to bring William Swinehart and his children back together again.  William and his wife Rhoda had been raising their children in a settled life in rural Wisconsin when Rhoda died in 1889. In 1896, the family’s lives began to change even more dramatically when William and his son Guy went off to Juneau, Alaska. The older daughters Leta and Vivian followed sometime later and attended school in Juneau, with the youngest daughter Rhoda remaining behind in Wisconsin. This meant that the family was spread out between Wisconsin, Alaska and the Yukon during the last part of the 1890’s.

Leta returned to Wisconsin from Juneau at some point before 1900, but Vivian remained in Juneau and spent her middle teenage years separated from her family at the Sisters of St. Ann boarding school. In March of 1901, three years after William and Guy Swinehart had departed Juneau, Leta and Vivian, then aged 21 and 16, joined him at his Fort Selkirk farm.

The likely scenario for the young ladies’ trip to Fort Selkirk would have been an adventure, particularly for Leta. She presumably travelled by train from Wisconsin to Seattle, then by steamship to Juneau, where she met Vivian. The two would have journeyed together by boat to Skagway, boarded a train to Whitehorse on the newly-built White Pass & Yukon Route, then travelled on a riverboat down the Yukon River to Fort Selkirk to reunite with their father William, brother Guy and uncle Ham Kline.

Leta and Vivian eventually found husbands in Fort Selkirk. Newspapers in both Dawson and Juneau reported on Leta’s marriage at the Swinehart Farm on April 3, 1904 to Sgt. Edward Stillman of the North-West Mounted Police (NWMP). In October 1905, Vivian was married to George McLachlan, the telegraph operator at Fort Selkirk.

In 1905, Edward Stillman was charged by his employer, the NWMP, for selling government hay and then attempting to cover up his deed. He was dismissed from the force, which may have caused he and Leta to move to Dawson City, where in 1908 he was working as a timekeeper for the Guggenheim mining syndicate. In 1911 Vivian and her husband George McLachlan also moved from Fort Selkirk to Dawson City when George became a telegraph operator there.

In June 1908, the Swineharts became involved in one of the Yukon’s more notorious murder cases, that of Ned Elfors. About 20 kilometers downstream of Fort Selkirk, Elfors shot one travel companion in cold blood and severely wounded the other, Emil Anderson, who managed to escape. Anderson found his way to the Selkirk cut-off road, on which he encountered William Swinehart not far from his farm. Swinehart brought Anderson to his daughter Leta Stillman’s house in Fort Selkirk, where Leta and her sister Vivian McLachlan dressed his wounds. Elfors was captured soon after, and William, Leta and Vivian all had to travel to Dawson City to testify at his trial the following month.

Also in June 1908, a somewhat lighter story appeared in the Dawson Daily News when seeds William Swinehart had ordered from Toronto did not arrive as expected.  A letter of complaint he wrote to the post office appeared in the News, containing this amusing note: “one Toronto firm was filling orders through the mail all winter. Why, my daughters have been getting goods from that firm all winter. They have had two hats each this spring from Eaton’s”. Apparently even pioneer Yukon farming women require nice hats, and these may be ones that are in photographs of the Swinehart daughters at Fort Selkirk.

In early 1910, William Swinehart’s youngest daughter Rhoda, who had been left behind in Wisconsin with her grandparents, made the family complete by travelling to Fort Selkirk in a journey likely similar to that undertaken by Leta nine years previous. Rhoda appears to have made the trip alone, a 21-year old farm girl from Wisconsin travelling to the frontier of the Yukon. It is possible that she was seeing her father, brother and sisters for the first time in several years.

In the 1911 Canada Census, all of William Swinehart’s family, including his son and three daughters, one son-in-law and a future son-in-law, were shown to be present at the Fort Selkirk farm. Whether it was one big happy family is uncertain, but they were soon to start drifting apart once again.

The year after her arrival at Fort Selkirk, Rhoda married Alfred Ingrams from Montreal in July 1911. Her sisters Leta and Vivian, then living in Dawson City but in Fort Selkirk when the census was taken, were perhaps there preparing for Rhoda’s wedding. Within a week of the wedding, Alfred and Rhoda were already on their way out of the Yukon, bound for the Fraser Valley of British Columbia where they became engaged in berry farming.

In March 1912 in Dawson City, Leta gave birth to a daughter that she and Edward named Vivian Rhoda Stillman, after her two sisters. This was William Swinehart’s first grandchild and the only one he would ever be able to see.

End of the Swinehart Farm (1914) and life in the Yukon (1920’s)

In July 1914, the Swinehart Farm came to a crashing end when William Swinehart dropped dead at the age of 59 while working in his field. The cause was reported by newspapers to be heart disease, but it appears as apoplexy (a stroke) on his death registration. He was buried in the Yukon Field Force cemetery at the eastern end of Fort Selkirk. His grave is marked by a wooden headboard that is becoming difficult to read more than 100 years later, and recently his descendants had a brass plaque installed there as a more permanent marker.

It appears that the Swinehart Farm was abandoned after William’s death. His daughters Leta and Vivian had been living in Dawson City for a few years and his son Guy, who had been at the farm with his father from the start, was also living in Dawson by the following year. Whether the Swinehart Farm was occupied or farmed by anybody afterwards is not certain, but if so it was not mentioned in oral history interviews that were carried out at Fort Selkirk in 1984 and ’85.

The three siblings remained in the Yukon for a few more years before eventually leaving for California. It appears that Vivian was the first to leave after her marriage to George McLachlan ended, and by 1924 she was living in California.

Leta and Edward Stillman had another daughter, Rhoda Jane, born in 1915 in Dawson City, then in 1917 Edward died at the age of 46, leaving Leta a widow with two young daughters. In 1921, Leta married George Pohl in Dawson City in “a wedding remarkable in the history of the Yukon and probably without precedent elsewhere”, in reference to Leta’s and George’s positions in their respective lodges, the Rebekahs and the Oddfellows. The ‘historic wedding’ didn’t make for a long marriage, however, and in 1924 Leta and her daughters left for California.

Guy Swinehart remained the longest in the Yukon, but not for too long after his sisters left.  In 1915, the year after his father died, he was listed as a miner at Dawson City, and also worked that fall as a horse wrangler and big game guide in the upper White River area. In 1916, Guy began working as a telegraph operator, spending most of his telegraph career at Ogilvie (located on the Yukon River upriver from Dawson City), with occasional stints at other stations including Fort Selkirk. The Yukon River break-up of 1925 caused extensive damage and swamped the Ogilvie station, forcing Guy to spend three days on the roof of the office, where he built a fire and subsisted on soda crackers and tea. Guy left the Yukon in that fall of 1925 and by 1927 he was living in California, reunited with his sisters.

The youngest Swinehart daughter, Rhoda, who with her husband Alfred Ingrams had moved from the Yukon to BC in 1911, later moved on to Montreal. After Alfred died there in 1943, Rhoda and her daughter moved to California to join her siblings, who had lived there since the mid-1920’s. They all stayed there for the rest of their days; Guy died in 1949, Leta in 1959, Rhoda in 1964, and Vivian in 1970.

The story of William Swinehart and his children being separated and then reunited at various points during their lifetimes may be an exceptional example of family cohesion, despite circumstances pulling them apart. From Wisconsin to Juneau to Fort Selkirk to California, the Swineharts seemed to continually feel the pull of family bonds throughout their lives.

Updated October 7, 2023

Next:  Part 5 – The Swinehart Farm Today

The Swinehart Farm – Part 3

A Going Concern (1902-1914)

By 1902 the Swinehart Farm was gaining a profile, as information about its place in the Yukon agricultural picture began appearing in newspaper articles and various types of reports. While the reports were relatively objective, the newspaper accounts, in the style typical of reporting at that time, often contained embellishments, errors, and perhaps even concoctions.

A June 1902 article in Dawson City’s Daily Morning Sun reported that “it may not be generally known, but as fine a farm as can be found anywhere is the Swinehart Farm. About forty acres of ground have been under cultivation for two years”. The article also said that “every visitor to the farm is received royally and enjoys himself in every way”.

In April 1903 the Yukon Sun published a rosy article on William Swinehart and his Fort Selkirk farm, reporting that he had 30 acres under cultivation and a large tract of meadow land. He was growing oat hay, “the finest feed that is available for horses”, as well as a large quantity of vegetables for sale to roadhouses and steamboats. In the spring he marketed potatoes in Dawson City, where he could get a good price for them by being three weeks ahead of produce coming from Whitehorse on steamboats, which had to wait for Lake Laberge to become ice-free. The article concluded with: “Mr. Swinehart has his whole family with him on the farm, and says he has as comfortable a home and as profitable a business as any man could reasonably wish for”.

A little over a month later, the same newspaper reported that William Swinehart would be arriving in Dawson by riverboat soon with five tons of potatoes for sale. The article also mentioned that Swinehart “had the distinction of having Prof. John Macoun, the eminent Canadian botanist, declare the potatoes grown on his farm at Selkirk to be the equal of any grown in America”. Macoun, the Dominion Geological Survey naturalist, had examined agricultural products from the Yukon that were sent to an exhibition in Ontario in the fall of 1902 to demonstrate the agricultural potential of the Territory.

A July 1903 article in the San Francisco Chronicle entitled “Making a Fortune on Klondike Farm” spoke glowingly of Swinehart’s five years as “a successful farmer in the north, becoming an enthusiastic believer in the agricultural possibility of the great Yukon valley”, and having “the most extensive farm in the British Yukon or Alaska”.

In the fall of 1903, Swinehart submitted exhibits to Dawson City’s Horticultural and Industrial Exhibition in the form of “oats five feet tall and heavy with grain, and wheat six feet tall”. The Dawson Daily News reported that “the specimens are among the finest of the kind ever produced in the Yukon”.

A 1903 report by the Governor of Alaska stated that on two acres the previous year, the Swinehart Farm grew 11 tons of potatoes, nine tons of which were sold within six hours in Dawson City the following spring after the river opened to river transportation. It was noted that the farm’s location was “valuable for the ease and cheapness of reaching a hungry market”.

The Spokane Press in October 1905 carried relatively detailed information on the Swinehart Farm operation, the source of which was not stated. The article said that the Swineharts concentrate on field crops such as oats, hay and hardier field vegetables, which can be planted and cultivated with “horse tools”. Oat hay was said to be the chief crop because of the steady demand for it on the Whitehorse-Dawson stage line, which had hundreds of horses to feed. The article concluded by stating that “it is an exceptional season when the Swinehart Farm does not net its owners an income of $10,000”.

An excerpt from a 1905 book by John Scudder McLain called Alaska and the Klondike, based on a 1904 trip through the region, says that “one farmer at [Fort Selkirk] is reported to have made a clear profit of $3,000 during the past year on his crops of hay and potatoes”. There can be no doubt that this reference was to the Swinehart Farm. McLain also reported that “his success is said to be encouraging others to seek their fortunes in agriculture at this point”. There may be some truth to this because Fort Selkirk soon became a center of homesteading activity along this section of the Yukon River as well as the lower Pelly River.

In a 1907 newspaper article based on statements by Governor John Brady of Alaska about the agricultural potential of that state, Brady referred to the success of William Swinehart of Fort Selkirk as an example. He said that Swinehart had taken nine tons of potatoes to Dawson City that spring and sold them for $300 per ton. In that same year, the annual report of Alaska Agricultural Experiment Stations made a reference to Fort Selkirk, “which place has been noted for the farming of W.H. Swinehart”. It is evident that William Swinehart’s agricultural endeavors were well known not only within the Yukon, but beyond it as well.

In September 1908 an article in the Dawson Daily News explored the historic and symbiotic relationship between mining and farming; miners need farmers to feed them, and miners give farmers a market. In the article, William Swinehart provided some thoughts about the virtues of farming, outlining why he believed that being a farmer is better than being a miner: “the most independent man on top of earth today is the farmer in Yukon. … one can watch his crop maturing which will bring him more than the average miner gets with all his life-shortening excitement and struggle”.

In truth, however, Swinehart himself tells a somewhat different story. In the years that followed, he along with his son Guy, his sons-in-law, his brother-in-law Ham Kline, and Billy Thompson dabbled in mining in the nearby Selwyn River watershed. They even petitioned the government, unsuccessfully, to assist financially in putting a wagon trail into that area. In the 1914 letter Swinehart wrote to his Wisconsin home town, he stated that “I have been farming here since 1898 with varied success, and would have plenty to spare if I had kept what money I made growing stuff for the gold seekers to eat; but in Rome one does as the Romans do, speculates in gold fields of course”.

Whatever embellishments or inaccuracies may have been contained in the articles and reports on the Swinehart Farm, it is obvious that William Swinehart and those with him built a successful agricultural enterprise near Fort Selkirk that was capable of sustaining all who were involved in it.

A simple description of the Swinehart Farm operation was perhaps best provided in a letter written in 1974 by a person who had known the farm and family. The letter was sent to Dick and Hugh Bradley of Pelly River Ranch from William Watson, who had been a telegraph operator at Fort Selkirk in 1910-11. The letter included this reference to the Swinehart Farm: “… located about 2 miles out from the main settlement in a valley where they grew almost anything they needed. Had no stock, but went in strong for hay, using horses in the work”.

Updated October 7, 2023

Next:  Part 4 – The Family Reunites; End of the Swinehart Farm (1901-1914)

The Swinehart Farm – part 2

Establishing the Swinehart Farm (1898 – 1902)

The Swinehart party’s arrival at Fort Selkirk and beginning the development of the Swinehart Farm added to the swarm of activity that was occurring at Fort Selkirk in 1898 as a result of the Klondike gold rush. The small community until then consisted of not much more than an Anglican church and school, Arthur Harper’s trading post and a few cabins. In the fall of 1898 Fort Selkirk swelled with the arrival of the 200-man Yukon Field Force, along with civilian contractors, and the construction of its complex of buildings. A Northwest Mounted Police post and the Roman Catholic Church were also built in this year. The next year the Yukon Telegraph line came through Fort Selkirk and the Swinehart Farm, bringing more activity and a new communication link with the outside world.

Shortly after landing at Fort Selkirk, Swinehart began to develop his farm. The land tenure situation for the farm is very intriguing, and continues so to this day. Earlier that year, on March 2, 1898, a man from Juneau named Frank Bach had submitted an application for one square mile (640 acres) of land at an unidentified location “in the vicinity of Fort Selkirk for an experimental farm”. Bach was a prominent businessman, a judge, and for a time the mayor at Douglas Island near Juneau.

Bach had gone to the Klondike at least as early as 1897 and must have come across this piece of land off the beaten path near Fort Selkirk that appealed to him.  He returned to Juneau in October 1897 with a group that included Jack Dalton who left Dawson because of warnings of a lean winter due to lack of provisions there. Mt. Bach near the Hutchi Lakes was named that year in his honor because he “helped Jack Dalton make the Dalton Trail through here to the Yukon River”. The nature of Bach’s relationship with Dalton and what assistance he provided him is not clear.

Frank Bach submitted his application for the Fort Selkirk land, likely from Juneau, at the same time that William Swinehart was preparing to leave there for the Yukon.  The two men must have had a fairly close relationship in Juneau, as Swinehart left his daughter Vivian there to live with the Bach family.

There is no record of what happened with Bach’s land application of March 1898, but it is clear that William Swinehart began developing his farm on the land that summer. He started living at the site on June 21, 1898, within a week of arriving at Fort Selkirk, so there seems little doubt that Bach told Swinehart about the parcel of land he had applied for and encouraged him to occupy it under some sort of arrangement.  Three years later, on July 18, 1901, Swinehart applied for 80 acres at this location west of Fort Selkirk “in lieu of [Bach’s application] of 2^nd March 1898”. The story behind this substitution of land applications, as well as for the three-year gap between them, is not known.

In July 1902, Swinehart paid the balance of the purchase price for the land to the government, and in August the parcel called Lot 7 Group 4 was surveyed for him. Later that year, on November 26, 1902, a Dominion Lands Grant (title to the land) was issued, but surprisingly it was not to Swinehart.  For whatever reason, perhaps the agreement with Frank Bach, the title was issued to Bach, and Swinehart never owned the land he developed, lived on and farmed for 16 years, and died on.

The valley containing the Swinehart Farm has a trail from Fort Selkirk running through it that connects back up to the Yukon River about eight kilometers downstream from the settlement. It was part of the winter trail between the coast and the Klondike region before the Whitehorse-Dawson Overland Trail was in place. This trail became upgraded to a road to the Swinehart Farm and beyond, likely in 1899 to support the Yukon Telegraph line that was being built through to Dawson City. Rather than following along the Yukon River as it normally did, the telegraph line took an easier route west through the valley and across the newly-developing Swinehart Farm.

There is no known arrangement with Swinehart for the telegraph line crossing the farm land, and he had no land tenure to bargain with, but he may have welcomed the improved access as well as the clearing provided by it. When the Overland Trail from Whitehorse to Dawson City was built in 1902, it bypassed Fort Selkirk by several kilometers, but this route through the Swinehart Farm was surveyed out as a road allowance for what was called the Selkirk cut-off. This was a road to connect the community to the Overland Trail further to the north and across the Yukon River.

The 1902 survey plan for the Swinehart Farm property shows a cabin, the road allowance, and about 15 acres fenced and under cultivation, a portion of it off of the property. This field, though now completely overgrown, still shows up plainly against the surrounding vegetation on modern air photos. Therefore it appears that this may be the extent of the land that was ever developed for farming, even though other sources quote somewhat more acreage in production. Some of these sources also reference meadow land, so it is possible that a large meadow on an adjacent lot to the west was also used by Swinehart, perhaps for harvesting of wild hay.

The choice of this site three kilometers from the river for a farming endeavor might seem curious when almost all other such enterprises in the central Yukon are located beside the rivers. On a visit to the Swinehart Farm site with Dale Bradley, owner of the nearby Pelly River Ranch, his answer to this was immediate. The location had good soil, a nearby water source for irrigation, and good access to Fort Selkirk, where riverboats and winter stages could take the farm produce to markets in Dawson City and roadhouses on the Overland Trail. Equally or more important, the farm’s elevation likely provided a buffer from late spring and early fall frosts in the river valley bottom, a condition that Fort Selkirk was known to be susceptible to.

It is not known how much all four men, William and son Guy Swinehart along with William’s brother-in-law Ham Kline and William “Billy” Thompson, were involved in the establishment of the Swinehart Farm. Not a lot was produced at the farm as it was being developed and it wouldn’t have paid much during those early years, so some men appear to have taken on occasional other work. In 1899, Ham Kline was one of the first discoverers of gold on Nansen Creek west of Carmacks. Billy Thompson worked for a time during the gold rush piloting boats through Miles Canyon and the Whitehorse Rapids.

The Swinehart Farm must have held some attraction or allegiance, however, because three years after arriving in the Yukon all four men were there when the 1901 Canada Census was taken. While William was listed as the ‘head’ of the household and Guy as his son, Kline was listed as a partner, Thompson as an employee, and another man, 40-year old Frank Chapman from Kansas, also as an employee. Also present at the farm were William Swinehart’s two oldest daughters, Leta and Vivian, an interesting sub-plot to the story that will be explored later.

The involvement of Frank Chapman and Billy Thompson in the Swinehart Farm is an interesting side note because this led to further pioneer farming in the Yukon. Frank Chapman went on to own the well-known Pelly Farm (also known as Pelly River Ranch) with his partner Peter Oleson beginning around 1910, and is thought to be the primary early developer of that farm. Billy Thompson encouraged his younger sister Lura and her husband J.C. Wilkinson to join him in the Yukon, which they did in 1917. The Wilkinsons also later owned the Pelly Farm and, along with their two sons and daughter, became well-known trappers, hunting guides and river outfitters in addition to being farmers.

Updated October 7, 2023

Next:  Part 3 – A Going Concern (1902-1914)