Month: March 2019

The Trial

George O’Brien had been in jail in Dawson since late March on a charge of cache theft, which was enough to keep him in custody until the NWMP could gather their evidence and bring a charge of murder against him.  On June 20, 1900, he was formally charged with murder, and a later preliminary hearing resulted in him being committed to stand trial in June 1901.

Laying of the murder charge started a process that was as equally laborious as the investigation, particularly the matter of tracking down witnesses, getting them to Dawson City, and keeping them there.  Some of them, such as Kid West from Washington, had to be located and brought from some distance away.  As well, the physical evidence all had to be assembled, identified and kept secure, and the maps and photographs produced to assist the lawyers, judge and jury in understanding the context of where and how the murders were carried out.

On June 10, 1901, people lined up outside the courthouse doors in hopes of getting a seat or at least a place to stand to witness the George O’Brien murder trial.  It went on until June 21, after 63 witnesses had been called to give evidence ranging from Kid West’s jail conversations with O’Brien to identification of the stove with the peculiar damper holes to identification of the big yellow dog that was always seen with O’Brien.  In addition, over 150 exhibits had been prepared as evidence to assist the prosecution with its case.  Cst. Pennycuick and detective McGuire spent many hours on the witness stand explaining the evidence.

After all the evidence was presented and summations given by the crown and defence, the jury retired to consider it all.  They deliberated for slightly less than two hours and just after midnight on June 22, they rendered a verdict finding George O’Brien guilty of first degree murder.

The Sentence

Later the same morning of June 22, Judge Dugas passed down his sentence.  He said he believed George O’Brien to be rightfully convicted and that on August 23 he was to be put to death by hanging.

O’Brien hadn’t testified on his own behalf, but he protested his innocence in outbursts a number of times during the trial.  After his sentencing and up to the time of his hanging, he refused all overtures to make a confession and steadfastly maintained his innocence.  He even wrote a statement to that effect on the day prior to his hanging. 

In July he wrote a letter to the Dawson Daily News that demonstrated him to be relatively well educated and having a good understanding of the legal system, although naturally critical of it.  He gave his full name, gave the name of his brother Charles in England, stated that he is an Irishman, and that “my hands are clean of human blood”.

100 passes were issued to people to come into the Dawson City courtyard to witness the hanging.  At 7:34 A.M. on August 23, 1901, George O’Brien’s life ended there on the gallows.  He was buried in an area of Dawson alongside the bodies of other executed men.

Did the NWMP get the right man?

Was George O’Brien the right man to pay with his life for the murders of Frederick Clayson, Linn Relfe and Lawrence Olsen?  It didn’t take the jury long to come to that conclusion, despite the fact that all the evidence was circumstantial.  There were no known witnesses to the murders and no smoking gun in the hands of O’Brien.  His conviction based solely on circumstantial evidence can instill some doubt, but a look at his case in England in 1888 is illuminating. 

A young man and young lady walking along a lane near Birmingham, England were approached by O’Brien, who levelled a revolver at them and demanded their money. When they didn’t respond quickly enough, O’Brien fired at the man, but fortunately he put his arm in front of his face just in time.  O’Brien then ran away, leaving the man with a serious arm injury and his traumatized lady friend.

Evidence brought up at O’Brien’s trial in England shows striking similarities to the Yukon murder case.  The British prosecutor produced evidence that “[O’Brien] had on previous occasions proposed to stop a mail-train, to stop a mail-cart, shoot the drivers, and rob the mail.  He had suggested this to several young men.”  And as with the Yukon case, O’Brien had outbursts during the trial and still protested his innocence while he was being dragged out of the courtroom and off to prison.  Any doubts about George O’Brien being the murderer of Frederick Clayson, Linn Relfe and Lawrence Olsen are greatly diminished by the knowledge of his modus operandi in England.

Visiting the Murder Site

On trips over three summers along the Yukon River south of Minto, Ron Chambers and I spent time trying to determine the actual place where the murders occurred.  It eventually fell into place after a look at the files on this murder case at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa.

The photos in the files enabled confirmation of the cutbank where the bodies were taken down to the river, as shown in the photo replications below.

With the photos confirming the cutbank location, the trail measurements taken by Pennycuick and McGuire then allowed the other locations associated with the murders to be plotted with a moderate degree of accuracy.  This information took us to the murder site where we reflected on the three innocent men whose lives were callously taken there on Christmas Day almost 120 years ago.

Olsen’s Disappearance

While O’Brien was on his southward journey away from his grisly crime, the NWMP were becoming increasingly busy looking for Fred Clayson, Linn Relfe and Lawrence Olsen.  It started with Cpl. Ryan at the Hoochekoo post, where Olsen did not show up for Christmas dinner as expected.

Ryan wondered what had happened to Olsen because he viewed him as a reliable man.  The nearest telegraph station was at Five Fingers, 16 miles to the south, so Ryan did not have the benefit of that means of communication.  He considered the possible explanations, such as an accident in the bush, falling through the ice, more breaks in the telegraph line to take care of, or even that Olsen was following a tip about a new gold discovery. 

Two days after Christmas a member from the Five Fingers NWMP post came to Hoochekoo saying that they had not heard from Olsen.  Ryan and a dog driver quickly set out on the river trail northward, searching along the telegraph line as they went for any sign of Olsen.  About eight miles south of Old Minto, they left the river and took the Pork Trail because it followed along closer to the telegraph line.

An impediment to this was a recent heavy snowfall that made travel difficult and obscured tracks and other signs.  Despite this, at a point nearer to the north end of the Pork Trail, Ryan managed to make out the faint impression of a trail beneath the new snow cover leading away from the Pork Trail.  He followed it back into the bush and came upon the tent that had been the temporary quarters of O’Brien and Graves.  

As it was near the end of the day, Ryan and his dog driver went to Fussell’s roadhouse to spend the night.  There they learned that Olsen had left the roadhouse with Clayson and Relfe on Christmas Day, headed for Hoochekoo.  Olsen’s disappearance now looked like it was not accidental nor intentional, at least not on his part.

The next morning, Ryan and the dog driver went back to the tent to investigate.  Inside was a bunk for sleeping, a stove, and a number of items including a rifle hanging from the roof of the tent.  There were also goods marked as McKay’s, obviously stolen from the cache less than a mile away.  Ryan decided it was time to involve Pennycuick, who he viewed as “a very clever policeman”, and informed him of the tent discovery.

On January 3, 1900, about the time O’Brien was at or nearing Tagish, Pennycuick wired NWMP headquarters in Dawson City requesting that all posts along the river trail be on the lookout for two suspected cache thieves using the names Miller and Ross.  Pennycuick then departed Fort Selkirk for Hoochekoo to meet with Ryan, stopping at the tent on his way where he saw that the stove had the same figure-eight holes in the stovepipe that he had previously observed at the Hell’s Gate camp.

Pennycuick returned to Fort Selkirk on January 5 and found a message saying that enquiries were being made about a Frederick Clayson, who was overdue at Skagway.  Pennycuick wired to Dawson that three men had left Fussell’s roadhouse together on Christmas Day and two of them, Olsen and Clayson, were now known to be missing.  He also noted that the men calling themselves Miller and Ross had not yet been found, and this time he mentioned that they had two dogs, one of them a big yellow dog.

O’Brien’s arrest at Tagish

It likely was not part of George O’Brien’s plan to go near the NWMP post at Tagish, but he ended up there after his horses went through some ice nearby and into the water.  He took them to the post barracks, perhaps thinking the stable there was his only option to get the horses dried off and warmed up.  While there he was found to have a police-issue winter fur robe in his possession, which  he said he had gotten as a replacement when the police in Dawson misplaced his.  He was detained while Sgt. George Graham sent a telegram to Dawson to verify this, and in doing this Graham provided details about O’Brien including the big yellow dog.

A return telegram later that day confirmed that O’Brien had been in the Dawson jail and was given a government fur robe there.  Sgt. Graham had no reason to hold him any longer and he was released, intending to leave for Skagway the next day.

Somebody in the Dawson NWMP noticed a link between the wire Graham had sent to Dawson and the earlier one that Dawson had sent with Pennycuick’s information.  Both mentioned the big yellow dog of a type distinctive enough that people took notice of it and remembered it.  This connection resulted in another telegram from Dawson a few hours later instructing Graham to arrest O’Brien on suspicion of cache theft.

That evening, Graham sent Constable Thomas Dickson into the Tagish village to arrest O’Brien.  This may be the arrest, or one of them, that Dickson is known in family lore to have issued the command “hands up or your lights out”.  Dickson would go on to marry Louise George at Tagish, raise a large family in the Kluane area, and spend the rest of his life in the Yukon.

For George O’Brien, Tagish was as far south as he would get.  He was held by the NWMP there for another month and a half before being taken back north along the Yukon River trail to Fort Selkirk to face the cache theft charges that had been made against him.

Pennycuick and Ryan Investigate

By this time, the newspapers in Dawson City were pressing the NWMP for information about the missing men.  Though the NWMP had little to say other than that they were working on it, as early as January 9 the Dawson Daily News was asserting that the men were murdered along the trail.  On January 12, the NWMP assigned more resources to the case by putting Inspector William Scarth in charge of the investigation.  He established his base at Fort Selkirk and instructed Cst. Pennycuick and Cpl. Ryan to do the ground work.

Pennycuick spent the next couple of weeks gathering information about the movements of Clayson, Relfe, Olsen, O’Brien and Graves from people who had encountered them along the river trail and at roadhouses.  By January 24, enough connections had been made to suspect the man being held by the Tagish NWMP, George O’Brien, of having some involvement in the disappearance of Clayson, Relfe, and Olsen.

Near the end of January Pennycuick and Ryan set up quarters in the same Arctic Express Company cabin that the men calling themselves Miller and Ross had occupied in mid-December, the last place they were reported to have been.  Concentrating their efforts in the vicinity of the cabin, Pennycuick and Ryan investigated slight depressions in the snow that indicated old tracks and trails underneath.   On February 19, after three weeks of following and digging out these trails, no clues were uncovered and they gave up the search in that area. 

Detective McGuire Appears

Phillip Ralph McGuire was born in Pennsylvania in 1869, the seventh of 11 children.  He left there in 1889 and by 1895 was in Minnesota, married with a daughter and working as a detective.  When and why he went to Skagway is not known, but on February 15, 1900 he introduced himself at the Tagish NWMP post as a detective working on behalf of Frederick Clayson’s brother William. 

Possibly in conjunction with McGuire’s investigation into Frederick Clayson’s disappearance, the Clayson family had reward posters made up and distributed.  They were made of cloth material and had a small photograph of Frederick Clayson attached to them with a paper clip. The poster indicated that the family had by now accepted that Frederick had probably been murdered, a conclusion they likely came to based on a visit to the NWMP at Tagish and as well as on the newspaper stories. 

Some sources, particularly newspaper articles, said that McGuire was with the famous Pinkerton detective agency, but he denied this, saying that he worked on his own.  He was allowed to question George O’Brien and then said that he was heading along the trail to the Minto area to assist with the murder investigation.

McGuire with his two-dog sled team arrived at the Hoochekoo NWMP post about February 23 and there met Cpl. Ryan, who agreed to accompany the detective the next day to the Minto area.  They spent several days poking around the area of the Arctic Express Company cabin, but again this yielded no results.

On March 1 things changed when they went to look at O’Brien and Graves’ tent in the bush.  In the ashes of the stove, McGuire found some remnants that indicated somebody had been burning clothes, a strange thing to do.  By this time McGuire was proving himself valuable enough to the short-staffed NWMP that they agreed to pay him to assist with the investigation.

O’Brien is Brought Back

About this same time, in late February or early March, George O’Brien was brought, handcuffed to his sleigh, by two policemen from Tagish to Fort Selkirk.   His horses and dogs were brought along as well.  He was first held at Fort Selkirk because the charge of cache theft originated from there, but in late March he was moved on to the jail in Dawson City.

A number of people along the way identified O’Brien as the man who had been hanging around the Fort Selkirk-Old Minto area in December with a partner.  This included Cst. Pennycuick, who confirmed that O’Brien was the same man who gave his name as Miller in the camp at Hell’s Gate.  Everybody also identified the big yellow dog that was with him.

The Murder Site is Found

On and off for the next few weeks, the investigators continued to focus on the trails in the area of the Arctic Express Company cabin.  The heat of the sun in the longer March days was softening and settling the deep snow, so that older trails underneath it were becoming even more discernible as depressions in the snow.  

On March 19 McGuire, working alone with his dogs, detected and followed the faint outline of an old and well-packed sled trail that led from the area of the cabin southwards and then across the river to the west side.  It went directly to where the northern end of the Pork Trail joined onto the river trail.  This was a strong indication that O’Brien and Graves had moved to that area, and it was time to concentrate the investigation there.

The next day McGuire went onto the Pork Trail and noticed the impression of a trail that branched off and appeared to head toward the river.  He followed it along the edge of a bench for almost three-quarters of a mile to where it ended at the top of a cutbank beside the river.  He then doubled back several hundred yards to a spot where he had noticed a blazed tree marking another trail that branched off. 

He followed this trail down a moderately steep bank onto a flat, bushy area that was not a lot higher in elevation than the river.  After a short distance the trail came out to the river about 500 yards north of where the other one had ended on top of the cutbank.  McGuire didn’t know it yet, but he was now standing on the murder trail.

As McGuire approached the riverbank, his husky dog  became very agitated, sniffing around a particular area of snow.  McGuire tied the dogs up and dug down in that spot, lifting and setting aside the overlying snow until he reached a packed layer further down.  Here he found a large patch of frozen blood-soaked snow that was later determined to mark the death spot of Linn Relfe.  McGuire continued to remove snow along the trail and as he got nearer the riverbank he uncovered another blood patch, this one marking the spot where Frederick Clayson had died.

On March 22, Cst. Pennycuick went with McGuire to see the blood discoveries.  They then went to the top of the cutbank, which Pennycuick reasoned would be a good place for bodies to be dragged down and put under the ice.  He was more convinced of this when he climbed down the bank and found some threads of clothing stuck on it. 

As they returned back up the trail, Pennycuick observed that the trees cut to make the trail were done with a dull axe that had an identifiable nick in it.  When they got to O’Brien and Graves’ lookout spot, they noticed the trees that had been cut to make the sightline to the river and that they had been cut with the same nicked axe.  When they went to the tent site, they determined that the logs for the tent frame had also been cut with that axe.  When it was later found, the axe that cut all those trees was identified as being among O’Brien’s effects when he was in jail in Dawson City.

Pennycuick had another revelation in store for that day.  He had brought O’Brien’s big yellow dog with him from Fort Selkirk, where O’Brien was being held.  At the lookout, he released the dog and said “go home”, to which the dog ran down the Pork Trail, turned up the trail to the tent in the bush, and laid down under a tree with a wire wrapped around it that a dog could be tied to.  There was no doubt that the dog had stayed there, if only for a matter of days, but long enough for him to remember.  This also meant that George O’Brien had stayed there as well. 

Furthermore, Pennycuick and McGuire now knew that the trails that connected the tent to the cutbank and to the murder site, and a sightline made from the lookout, had all been cut out with the same nicked axe that had built the tent O’Brien and Graves had stayed in.

The Hands-and-Knees Search

If Clayson, Relfe and Olsen had indeed been murdered, no bodies had been found to confirm it.  Therefore the only way to prove the case would be through a detailed search and gathering of physical evidence that would lead to that conclusion beyond a reasonable doubt.  On March 23, Pennycuick and McGuire began a systematic and laborious six-week search of the murder and tent sites. 

To make their work easier, Pennycuick brought three men from Fort Selkirk to move the search camp from the Arctic Express Company cabin to the murder area.  This eliminated the three miles of travel twice a day that he and McGuire were doing to carry out their investigation.  The camp was set up in the bush just off the river and within throwing distance of the murder site.

They removed snow down to the old packed level along the 100+ yards of murder trail, sifting through the packed layer and marking the locations of the evidence they found with labelled sticks. They recorded the finds in their notes and made measurements along the trail so that all the evidence could be plotted on a chart. 

In addition to blood patches and spots, the following were among the many articles and other evidence they discovered at the murder site:

• 5 shells of the caliber of rifle that Ryan found in the tent;
• 2 shells of the caliber of revolver seized from O’Brien at Tagish;
• marks in trees made by bullets that had missed their mark;
• crown of a tooth found at second patch of blood, later matched up to Relfe during post-mortem; and
• a myriad of small items, many of which were traceable to the victims.

Pennycuick and McGuire also cleared snow around the area of the tent and found more items that were associated with the victims, including  two keys identified by Clayson’s brother and shown to fit the safe in the Claysons’ store in Skagway.

Pennycuick and McGuire measured the distances, using a surveyor’s tape, of all the trails involved in the murders.  Pennycuick then prepared maps and sketches of the trails and of the murder site and tent site, as well as an overall map stretching from Hoochekoo in the south to Old Minto in the north.  Cpl. Ryan later returned to the area and took photographs of the significant locations and views.

On May 4, the ground search ended after almost three months of investigations at the Arctic Express Company cabin area, the tent site, and the murder site.   It was estimated that about 200 cubic yards of snow was moved, the equivalent of 20 dump truck loads, resulting in the collection of around 400 pieces of evidence. 

The Bodies show up

After the ice went out of the Yukon River in mid-May of 1900, the NWMP and others were anticipating that bodies would soon appear.  They were proven correct on May 30, when the first one was reported on a river bar a mile and a half south of Fort Selkirk.

Cst. Pennycuick recovered the body and took it to Fort Selkirk for a quick examination and putting into a wooden box, then transported it to Dawson City for an autopsy and inquest.  There the body was identified as that of Frederick Clayson and that he had been killed by gunshot wounds.

The body was shipped from Dawson in a wooden coffin, then transferred into a sealed metallic casket at Skagway.  Clayson’s mother and sister accompanied the body from Skagway to Portland, where Frederick Clayson was buried in the Lone Fir Pioneer Cemetery on June 28, 1900.

On June 8, a body was sighted near Hell’s Gate, 11 miles south of Fort Selkirk, and recovered three days later.  It was taken to Fort Selkirk for an initial examination and identified as the body of Linn Relfe.  The body was packed in ice and shipped to Dawson to undergo an autopsy and inquest where, as with Clayson, death was found to have been caused by gunshot wounds. 

Linn Relfe’s friends in Dawson City had his body embalmed, sealed in a casket, and sent to Seattle.  There he was buried in the Lake View Cemetery.

A third body found more than 30 miles down the river from Fort Selkirk was reported to the NWMP on June 26.  It was transported to Dawson, where its physical features enabled it to be identified with confidence as the body of Lawrence Olsen. 

Olsen was buried in the Hillside Cemetery in Dawson City on June 30, 1900.  It is not known if the authorities learned any more about him or if they were able to contact any family.

Next: Part 4 (The Trial, the Sentence and Visiting the Site)

The Murder Plot

George Andrew Martin Lane O’Brien was born in 1864 in Jersey in the British Channel Islands.  He had an older sister and younger brother and by 1881 they were living in Birmingham, England, where 16-year old George was listed as a blacksmith.

In 1888, at age 24, O’Brien was charged with “feloniously shooting … with intent to murder” and was found guilty of “inflicting grievous bodily harm with intent to rob”.  He was sentenced to seven years in penal servitude at Dartmoor Prison in southwest England and released in 1894.

It is not known when O’Brien came to Canada and to the Yukon, but one piece of information places him in Dawson City by May 1898.  In that month, O’Brien suggested to a man named Chris Williams that they should work together in robbing travellers on the river trail, as people were sometimes known to carry a fair amount of gold and/or cash with them.  The plan included murdering the victims and disposing of their bodies under the ice.  This partnership did not materialize.   

O’Brien was arrested in Dawson City in September 1898 for theft and was put to hard labor on the NWMP woodpile.  He broke out in December and was recaptured later that same month and given an extra six months for his escape.  While in jail he suggested the same robbery and murder plan to a fellow prisoner named George West, a career criminal from Washington who went by the moniker of Kid West.  He also did not take O’Brien up on the offer.  O’Brien’s solicitations to Williams and Kid West make it clear that while robbery was his motive, murder was part of the plan. 

O’Brien was released from jail on September 16, 1899 and ordered to leave the Yukon as an undesirable.  At some point while in jail or after his release, he partnered up with a man named Thomas Graves.  Other than that he may have been an Englishman, little is known about Graves or even if that was his real name.   

O’Brien and Graves meet Constable Pennycuick

O’Brien and Graves started south from Dawson City on the river trail in late November or early December, staying at some of the roadhouses and stopping places along the way.  With them were two dogs they had stolen in Dawson, a big yellow and white St. Bernard type and a smaller black dog.

O’Brien and Graves were not physically distinctive enough that people could later remember them, and registers at the establishments were not reliable.  However, people remembered where and when they saw the big yellow dog, an unusual type for the Yukon at that time. Between December 5^th and 11^th, an operator of a stopping place between Fort Selkirk and Old Minto saw a man with a big yellow dog several times, including when the man tried to sell him some canned milk.  

An investigation into the cache thefts by NWMP Constable Alick Pennycuick, stationed at Fort Selkirk, led him to finding O’Brien and Graves on December 11^th.  They were at a camp near Hell’s Gate, a bad section of river for riverboats located 10 miles south of Fort Selkirk.  They gave their names as Miller and Ross and said they were prospectors.  This meeting caused Pennycuick to view the two men as suspects and was the beginning of a chain of events that would establish his reputation as an investigator.

The encounter with O’Brien and Graves displayed at least one example of Pennycuick’s observation skills.  During his questioning of the men, he noted an odd double set of damper holes that formed a figure-eight punched in the stove pipe, and he even made a sketch of it.  This observation was to prove very helpful a few weeks later.

On December 14^th, Pennycuick received a warrant for the arrest of the two men for things they were suspected of doing previously north along the river trail.  When he went to their camp to arrest them, they were gone.  However, more complaints of thefts came in, leading Pennycuick to believe O’Brien and Graves had not gone far.

Setting the Stage for Murder

O’Brien and Graves left their Hell’s Gate camp not long after Pennycuick’s visit, turning up late in the evening of December 12 at Fussell’s roadhouse at Old Minto.  Like other people, John and Agnes Fussell remembered the big yellow dog that accompanied the men.

From the roadhouse O’Brien and Graves moved two miles south and occupied an abandoned cabin on the east side of the river.  It was called the Arctic Express Company cabin because it had been built by a short-lived mail and express service enterprise.  The two men stayed there for several days and were engaged in stockpiling supplies they had stolen from caches.  Once again, they were identified at this location by the presence of the big yellow dog.

A few days later O’Brien and Graves moved further south, this time 2½ miles and to the opposite (west) side of the river, nearer to McKay’s cache that they were now looting.  From the river trail they went about 1,100 yards up the Pork Trail, then cut out a new trail 600 yards into the bush.  There they constructed a tent made of an 8½ foot square log frame covered with a canvas roof and moved themselves and their stolen goods into it.  It was now just a few days before Christmas.

O’Brien and Graves cut out more trails to carry out their robbery and murder plan.  From an old campsite a ways south along the Pork Trail, they cut a trail 1,250 yards eastwards that ended on the top of a cutbank by the river.  A short distance before the river, they cut another trail that branched off and went 125 yards out to the river about 500 yards north of the cutbank.  This short piece of trail was where the murders were to be carried out.  Not far away from the cutbank was an open hole in the river measuring  6 feet in width and 30 feet long.

Back at the old campsite, which was situated on an elevated bench, O’Brien and Graves made a lookout spot by cutting down 27 trees out to the river.  This allowed them a view all the way to the junction of the river trail with the Pork Trail so that they could see when somebody was coming, which trail they were taking, and possibly who it was. Perhaps for this purpose alone, O’Brien had field glasses (binoculars), an uncommon item to be packing along the trail.  The stage was set for the right victim(s) to come along.

Clayson and Relfe Leave Dawson

Frederick Hughes Clayson was born on June 1, 1872 in Port Madison, Washington, the fourth of six children.  His father, an English seaman who had jumped ship in Seattle in 1864, was a well-known newspaper man but also a bit of a scoundrel who had public battles with his estranged wife.  Despite this or perhaps because of it, their children did well for themselves, with one of them, Esther Pohl Lovejoy, becoming a renowned obstetrician, global public health advocate, and writer.

Frederick and his older brother William went north with the Klondike Gold Rush, taking with them a huge cargo of merchandise, including all the shoes they could buy in Portland.  They started a store in Skagway called F.H. Clayson & Co. Outfitters.  Frederick made periodic business trips to Dawson City in 1898 and 1899, and one report said that he bought gold while there.  He made his last trip to Dawson in early November 1899.

On December 15, while O’Brien and Graves were engaging in their shady activities almost 200 miles to the south, Frederick Clayson started south along the Yukon River trail from Dawson on a bicycle.  He was bound for Skagway to rejoin his brother William in the family business there and expected to travel fairly quickly on the hard-packed trail. 

Linn Wallace Relfe was born on May 19, 1876 in St. Louis, Missouri into a prominent family, his father being a state legislator.  Linn was the only son and had two sisters.  By 1890 the family had moved to Seattle, where Linn’s father was an attorney and became the police commissioner.

Linn was very close to his father and by the age of 16 was working with him as a clerk in an abstract and title guaranty company.  By 1894, Relfe Sr. had started his own legal firm and Linn worked for him there as a stenographer, then in 1895 was working as assistant secretary at the Chamber of Commerce.  He was said to be a well-known and popular young man in Seattle, with a wide circle of friends. 

Linn appeared to be following a similar path as his father when Relfe Sr. died the next year at the age of 56.  However, before settling down to that sort of career Linn undertook a Klondike Gold Rush adventure.  He departed Seattle in August 1897, expecting to make it to Dawson City by September 25.

Linn was a good son, writing letters to his mother along the way.  On September 6, he wrote that after coming over the White Pass from Skagway, he was within 13 miles of Lake Bennett and far ahead of the large crowd of goldseekers.  He presumably made it to Dawson City that fall, and reports over the next two years have him working as a gold weigher, a bookkeeper, a cashier and a bartender.  In October 1898 he made a trip back to Seattle for a visit with his mother and sisters.  A little over a year later he planned another trip home to Seattle, but this time he would not make it.

Linn Relfe left Dawson on foot on December 16, the day after Clayson, travelling lightly with only a small pack.  He was also heading south for Skagway, where he would get on a boat for Seattle to visit his family.   

A couple of days after departing Dawson, Relfe caught up to Clayson, who had broken a pedal on his bicycle and was walking it along.  The two men travelled together for most of the next week and at their stop for the night in Fort Selkirk on December 21, Clayson wired his brother to expect him in Skagway on December 28.

Clayson pushing his bicycle and Relfe on foot arrived at Fussell’s roadhouse at Old Minto in the late afternoon of Christmas Eve.  They had travelled 196 miles from Dawson and settled in for a good night’s rest before resuming their trip southward on Christmas Day.

Olsen’s Christmas Invitation

Almost nothing is known about Lawrence Olsen other than he was a lineman on the Yukon telegraph line and, according to one newspaper article, was a Norwegian.  Another newspaper article said that at the time of his disappearance he was owed six months’ wages, so he may have been part of the telegraph line’s construction crew and took a lineman job after it was completed.  He was viewed by Cpl. Ryan of the NWMP at the Hoochekoo post as a steady man.

On December 22, Olsen headed north on foot from the Five Fingers telegraph station to find and repair a break in the line or whatever was interfering with the telegraph service to Fort Selkirk, the next station 56 river miles away to the north.  After about 16 miles Olsen had not encountered the problem and stopped at the Hoochekoo NWMP post to overnight with Cst. Patrick Ryan.  Ryan had invited a couple of local woodcutters for Christmas dinner and extended an invitation to Olsen, who accepted and said he would be back on Christmas day.

The next day, farther north near Old Minto, Olsen located and fixed the telegraph line issue with the assistance of a NWMP member from the Fort Selkirk post.  As it was late afternoon they went to Fussell’s roadhouse to spend the night before heading back to their home bases.  It was Christmas Eve and also at the roadhouse were the two river travellers from Dawson, Frederick Clayson and Linn Relfe.  

Christmas Murder Day

After breakfast at the Fussell roadhouse on Christmas morning, Clayson, Relfe and Olsen left together and proceeded southward.  Olsen invited Clayson and Relfe to join in the Christmas dinner at the Hoochekoo NWMP post. It was only a 16 mile trip, so it should have been a relatively easy four to five hour day of travel.

About six miles from the roadhouse, O’Brien and Graves were waiting at their lookout point when they spotted potential targets coming along the trail.  There is no information to indicate that O’Brien and Graves knew who these men were, so they likely made the decision at that moment.  They may have thought three people to be optimum because collectively they might have considerable valuables on them, and that number of people would be ‘manageable’.

O’Brien and Graves went to lie in wait and when Clayson, Relfe and Olsen drew near, they were accosted at gunpoint and forced onto the 125-yard trail that O’Brien and Graves had cut out.  With thick brush to hinder escape, it took only a minute or two for this short stretch of narrow trail, termed Death Alley by one newspaper, to become the execution place it was intended to be.   

The bodies were stripped of the clothing that may have contained valuables and then hauled up a bank, probably in the sled pulled by the two dogs, and onto the trail that led to the top of the cutbank on the edge of the river. At some point the bodies were dragged down the cutbank and dumped into the hole in the river.  Clayson’s bicycle may have also been put into the water, as it was never seen again.

The articles of clothing removed from the bodies were taken back to the tent that O’Brien and Graves were staying in and most of it was burned, some in the stove and some in an outside fire.  Left behind at the murder site were a number of items that had been removed or fallen from the bodies, as well as blood and some human body fragments that indicated what took place there.  All this was later uncovered in a painstaking investigation and would serve as evidence in the trial of George O’Brien.   

For anyone interested in more details, Malcolm’s Murder in the Yukon book gives a fairly vivid description of the murder event as deduced from the evidence later gathered at the site.

O’Brien’s Trip South

The next recorded sighting of O’Brien was on December 27, when travellers Jennie Prather and her husband bumped into him near the northern junction of the river trail and Pork Trail.  He said he was heading for Atlin, so the Prathers invited him to join them on their southward journey.  He did so, and after about a mile they all passed by within 65 feet of Clayson’s pool of blood in the bush.  O’Brien made no mention of a partner, and what became of Thomas Graves remains a mystery.

For the next couple of days, O’Brien travelled off and on with the Prathers and stayed at the same roadhouses. He didn’t seem to be in a hurry, and while he wasn’t overly social, he didn’t avoid other people.  At Schock’s roadhouse on Lake Laberge, he purchased a pair of black horses and sleigh.  His reason for doing this is not known, but it resulted in bringing him into contact with the NWMP at Tagish.

On January 3^rd or 4^th of the new century, O’Brien turned up at Tagish with two black horses pulling a sleigh.  Two dogs, including a big yellow one, were also with him.  O’Brien had come almost 500 miles from Dawson and was now within striking distance of the American border and Skagway.  What his plans would have been from there can only be a matter of speculation.

Next: Part 3 (The Investigation)

Introduction

Christmas Day of 1899 saw one of the most cold-hearted cases of pre-meditated murder in Yukon history.  Three good men named Frederick Clayson, Linn Relfe and Lawrence Olsen were ambushed and killed along the Yukon River winter trail near Minto simply for the valuables they might have been carrying.  Clayson, doing business in Dawson City and Relfe, who was working there, were on their way from Dawson City to their respective homes in Skagway and Seattle.  Olsen was a telegraph lineman based at the Five Fingers station.  

A fourth man known as Thomas Graves, believed to be an accomplice in the murders, may also have been killed, but no body identified as his was ever found.  The final death in this case occurred when George O’Brien was hung for murder in Dawson City in 1901.

The disappearance of Clayson, Relfe and Olsen, particularly during the months until their bodies were found, created headlines across North America.  Newspapers continually pressed the Northwest Mounted Police (NWMP) for information, and when none was forthcoming they were not hesitant to speculate on the case.  

In the end, it was an example of where “the murderer was caught before the case was solved”.  However, solving it may not have happened if not for a unique combination of factors:

• new communications technology, in this case the Yukon Telegraph line;
• a Christmas dinner invitation;
• horses and a sleigh falling through ice; and
• two dogs, a big yellow one and a husky.

I hadn’t initially intended to write a lengthy story on this murder case because a book has been written about it.  In 1982, Murray J. Malcolm published Murder in the Yukon: The Case Against George O’Brien, based on his study of the Library and Archives Canada files on this event.  This book and the files give a general sense of where this tragic event occurred, but not enough that an interested reader can fully understand the context of the story.  My main interest in it was in determining and documenting the places associated with the murder and the site itself.   

The NWMP took detailed measurements at the crime scene and of the trails involved and made very good hand-drawn maps of the murder area.  However, these maps cannot be definitively matched up with the landscape today.  Furthermore, places on the maps that could be used for locational context, Minto to the north and Hoochekoo NWMP post to the south, are no longer generally known or mapped.  Also, the Minto labelled on the NWMP map is now known as Old Minto, located two miles south and on the opposite side of the Yukon River from present-day Minto.  The Hoochekoo NWMP post site is known, but does not appear on any current maps or in general sources of information.

Fortunately, the NWMP took a number of photos of the murder site and related spots that allow their locations to be determined with more certainty.  Ron Chambers and I went to the area and matched up these photos with the views on the land to pinpoint the locations.  Ron has a personal link to this case because his grandfather Thomas Dickson was the Mountie who arrested the murderer George O’Brien at Tagish on January 7, 1900.

An additional interest to me about this murder case is that it involves a number of related Yukon history themes such as the Yukon River winter trail, roadhouses, NWMP posts and the telegraph line.  Reading about this case also gives a snapshot of life and travel in the winter on the Yukon River at the time of the Klondike Gold Rush.  An awareness of these topics allows a fuller appreciation of the murder story, so this article touches on them to provide additional context.

All reporting and mapping of this murder case used the imperial system of measurement rather than metric, so the imperial units will be used here as well.  It should be noted that all distances are in ‘river miles’ rather than ‘as the crow flies’.  Distances between locations on the Yukon River vary depending on the source, so for consistency I have used Mike Rourke’s Yukon River (Marsh Lake to Dawson City) guidebook.

In the era when rivers were the primary routes of travel, people went ‘down’ to Dawson or ‘up’ to Whitehorse based on the flow of the Yukon River.  Now in the era of highways we say the opposite, based on Dawson being north of Whitehorse.  To avoid confusion, ‘north’ and ‘south’ are used here rather than ‘upriver’ and ‘downriver’ as was used most commonly when this murder event occurred.  In the area of the murder, the Yukon River valley trends northwest-southeast, so ‘north’ and ‘south’ are used in their broader sense.

The Historical and Geographical Setting

The Yukon River Winter Trail

Riverboat travel to and from Dawson City during the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890’s and afterwards is very well known and documented.  However, this mode of transport could only take place for less than half the year.  After the riverboats made their final trips in late fall before freeze-up, people travelling to or from the Klondike during the winter months had only one option: the Yukon River winter trail (hereafter referred to as the ‘river trail’).  In the fall of 1902, a second and more expedient option became available when the Whitehorse-Dawson Overland Trail was completed and travellers could ride in relative comfort in horse-drawn stages. 

Once the river was frozen enough to be safe for walking, the river trail soon became established for travel from Dawson to Skagway and vice-versa.  There was enough traffic that it became wide and well-packed, and a variety of modes of travel were used, including walking, bicycling, dogsleds and a few horse-drawn sleighs.

It was along this trail to the ‘outside’ that Frederick Clayson, Linn Relfe, George O’Brien and Thomas Graves set out from Dawson City in late 1899.  Farther south, the telegraph lineman Lawrence Olsen was using the trail regularly to carry out his work.

Roadhouses and Stopping Places

Once the Klondike Gold Rush was in full swing, a number of establishments sprang up along the trail to accommodate winter travellers.  Some were substantial log roadhouses while others were more primitive ‘stopping places’ that usually consisted of a log frame covered by a canvas tent.  According to the NWMP, by the fall of 1898 there were about 35 roadhouses and stopping places, averaging 14 miles between them. This spacing was close enough that even in mid-winter with minimal hours of daylight for travel, people that stayed at these places rather than camp out did not have to carry sleeping gear and food.

In the Minto area where the murders occurred, some of the activity was centered on the roadhouse belonging to John and Agnes Fussell.  Located on the opposite (west) side of the river two miles south of present-day Minto, it had just opened in the late fall of 1899.  The murdered men spent Christmas Eve, the last night of their lives, at this roadhouse.

Northwest Mounted Police (NWMP) Posts

With the Klondike Gold Rush came the need to establish a police presence along the travelled routes.  By the fall of 1898 a series of NWMP posts had been built along the Yukon River to monitor people and their activities and to assist in a variety of functions. 

Posts with a connection to the murders were located at Five Fingers (about a mile and a half downstream from the rapids of the same name), Hoochekoo 16 miles north of Five Fingers, and Fort Selkirk 39 miles north of Hoochekoo.  Constable (soon to be Corporal) Patrick Ryan and Constable Alick Pennycuick, the two NWMP members most integral in the murder case, were posted at Hoochekoo and Fort Selkirk, respectively. 

These posts generally consisted of a 20’x30’ detachment/barracks building and a 16’x22’ storehouse, as well as a latrine and often a stable.  Staffing of the posts generally depended on how busy and centrally located they were.  At the time of the murders,  Five Fingers post had one Seargeant and three Constables, Hoochekoo had one Constable and a Special Constable (usually referred to as a dog driver), and Fort Selkirk had two Constables.

The Yukon Telegraph

A significant factor in the murder case was that the Yukon Telegraph project to bring telegraph communications to Dawson City had just been completed in late September 1899.  It enabled messages to be sent within the Yukon and  improved the Yukon’s connection with the outside world.  Messages to the ‘outside’ that previously took a month by mail, and often longer in the winter, were received within a week.  Two years later, that time would be reduced to 10 minutes when completion of an all-Canadian telegraph line linked the Yukon with southern Canada.  

The project started at Bennett, at the south end of Lake Bennett, the beginning of the waterway travel corridor to the Klondike region.  In the summer of 1899, Bennett was also the interim terminus of the White Pass & Yukon Route railway and an accompanying telegraph line from Skagway.  The Yukon Telegraph linked in to that line and then proceeded northwards along the Yukon’s southern lakes and down the Yukon River valley to Dawson City, primarily following the west side of the river.  The line consisted of trees and poles spaced on average 225 feet apart, with insulators attached near the top of them and the telegraph wire strung in between about 12 feet above the ground. 

Telegraph stations were established along the line, often in association with NWMP posts.  In 1899 there were 12 stations built in the Yukon, including at Five Fingers (at the same location as the NWMP post) and Fort Selkirk.  Some stations were relatively spacious, but others were one-room cabins that had to accommodate two people and the telegraph equipment.  The staff consisted of a telegraph operator and a lineman, the latter for maintaining and repairing the line to minimize service disruptions.  Because the telegraph service was so important to the NWMP in their functions, the linemen were often assisted in their duties by police members.

The telegraph line was constructed through the Minto area in latter August 1899 and completed at Dawson City on September 28.  Three months later the investigation into the disappearance of Frederick Clayson, Linn Relfe and Lawrence Olsen was beginning, and had the telegraph line not been in place at that time, there is a good chance that the murderer George O’Brien would have gotten away.

1899 Freeze-up – Scows, Caches and the Pork Trail

Freeze-up of the Yukon River had come suddenly in the late fall of 1899 and a number of scows carrying provisions to Dawson City became trapped in the ice.  The freight had been unloaded and cached on shore before the scows were crushed in the ice jams, and the goods were gradually being transported by horse-drawn sleighs to Dawson.  The NWMP tried to keep an eye on these caches during their patrols, but this wasn’t sufficient to keep them from being pilfered and the goods sold to whatever people or establishments would buy them. Complaints began coming in to the NWMP about thefts from these caches along the river.

One cache that played a role in the murders was called McKay’s because it contained goods being shipped to McKay Brothers in Dawson.  It was located on the west side of the river about five miles south of Old Minto, and the murders took place not far from it.

A challenge for getting sleighs loaded with goods over the river trail were areas of rough jumble ice, and one stretch of this was south of Old Minto.   In December 1899 a man named William Powell and his crew, who were freighting pork over the trail to Dawson with two teams of horses, cut out a three-mile trail through the bush on the west side of the river to get around the bad ice.  Although this trail was only used once for this purpose, it became known as the Pork Trail in the murder saga to distinguish it from the river trail.  McKay’s cache was located close to where the north end of the Pork Trail rejoined the river trail.

The Pork Trail ended up playing a role in the murders because it provided O’Brien and Graves with an opportunity to establish a hidden campsite, a lookout for potential victims, and a site for carrying out the murders.  They could do all this preparation work out of sight from the river trail where people were travelling.

Next: Part 2 (The Murders)