This article is to acknowledge the contribution to Yukon history that former Yukoners Mike and Jocelyn Rourke, along with their children Matthew and Gillian, have provided in their guidebooks for travellers on Yukon rivers.  These books are excellent sources of information for anyone interested in Yukon history, particularly along the rivers.  I use them as references for my own history research.

A few years ago when looking for historical remnants along the Yukon River, my travelling partner Ron Chambers and I stopped at a house to meet the owners, Andrew and Laurie Barker.  In the course of the conversation about what Ron and I were doing, Andrew brought out Mike Rourke’s Yukon River guidebook.  I have looked at other river guidebooks over the years, but for some reason had never picked up one of the Rourkes’.

In thumbing through the book, I was impressed with what I was seeing.  There were descriptions and historical photos of people, places and activities along the river, as well as photos the Rourkes had taken of the landscape and historical remnants.  There was information from interviews they had done with a number of people who had personal knowledge of the river and its history. 

In the Yukon River guidebook I recognized some of the same history information that I had researched in archives and other sources.  The Rourkes had also made the effort on their river trips to investigate the sites they had researched, some of which were the same places I was now exploring.   Furthermore, they had done research and site visits on most of the popular boating rivers in the southern half of the Yukon, and much of it without benefit of the wealth of information now available on the internet and helpful technologies such as GPS and Google Earth.

I eventually contacted Mike and learned that he and Jocelyn had lived in the Yukon for 10 years in the 1970s and ‘80s, about half of it in Faro.  During this time, they spent many hundreds of hours in the Yukon Archives researching the history of places along the rivers. 

Over the past 40+ years Mike estimates he has travelled more than 30,000 kilometers on rivers in the Yukon as well as the Northwest Territories, northern British Columbia, and Alaska.  Jocelyn joined him on many of the trips and has logged about 18,000 of these kilometers.  Their son Matthew started going along at the age of six weeks and daughter Gillian at age three. 

Mike and Jocelyn, now living near Prince George, BC, formed a company called Rivers North Publications to produce the river guidebooks, beginning in 1983.  Their daughter Gillian also contributes to the production of them, primarily in the mapping.  The Rourkes have produced guidebooks for the following Yukon rivers: 

Nisutlin River

Teslin River (including Yukon River to Carmacks)

Big Salmon River (including Yukon River to Carmacks)

Ross River

Pelly River

Stewart River (from Fraser Falls and including Yukon River to Dawson City)

South MacMillan River (from North Canol Road and including Pelly River to Pelly Crossing)

Yukon River – Marsh Lake to Dawson City

Yukon River – Marsh Lake to Carmacks

Yukon River – Carmacks to Dawson City

Yukon River – Dawson City to Circle, Alaska

All the Yukon River books are also available in versions with maps only to make it more affordable for all members of a group to have a copy of the maps with them.  The river guidebooks are occasionally updated with new or additional information.

The guidebooks are produced on 7” x 8½” paper that is surlox-bound at the top for easy flipping of pages.  This format allows the maps to be in strip form, the river shown down the pages with downstream at the top so they are oriented in the same direction you are travelling (assuming downstream).  The maps have about 15 river kilometers on a page, so you can have the book open in front of you showing the charting of the river up to 30 kilometers ahead.  The image below shows the sort of information contained on the map pages.

For me, what makes the Rourkes’ guidebooks exceptional is the historical information contained in the large section titled ‘Site Histories’.  These tell the stories of what occurred at various places along the river and of the people that were part of the history.  In addition, the site investigations describe what might still be seen at these places.  The image below is an example of the information contained in the site history pages.

Near the back of the guidebooks is found general information about safe and respectful travel and camping practices, a list of rental and guiding companies that provide services for river trips, and a bibliography of the sources consulted for the historical information.  As a personal touch, in the Yukon River book there is a tribute to Mike’s great-grandfather Colonel William Rourke, who came to the Yukon in 1897 as a building contractor and stayed for five years.

The Rourkes’ research, writing and production of the guidebooks is a valuable contribution to the documentation of Yukon history and making it available to interested people.  This is particularly so for travellers on Yukon rivers, who might otherwise be oblivious to the activities that occurred at places they are passing by.  Much of this is now hidden from the rivers due to vegetation regrowth, but the guidebooks enable these places to be learned about and explored.  I don’t know of anything comparable to the work the Rourkes have done. 

Their guidebooks are available in Whitehorse at Up North Adventures, Mac’s Fireweed Books, Kanoe People, Wolf Adventure Tours and Yukon Wide Adventures.  In Dawson City they can be purchased at Maximilian’s Gold Rush Emporium and Dawson Trading Post.  The books are also available online at www.riversnorthonline.com.

There is a row of graves in the Masonic section of the Hillside Cemetery in Dawson City that is arranged chronologically by the date of death.  Near the middle of the row, a grave that had no marker for many years, if ever, has a new headstone for the person buried there.  This is the resting place of Henry Godkin Dickson, who died on April 3, 1941.

 ‘Harry’ Dickson, as he was called, was a pioneer land surveyor in the Yukon and the most prolific when the era and conditions he worked in are taken into account.  He committed almost 40 years of his career to the Yukon, and for much of that time he was the Territory’s only surveyor.  He worked together with his younger brother Thomas Albert Dickson for most or all of those years.

Harry did much of his work in relatively remote areas and often in adverse terrain and weather conditions, using far less sophisticated equipment than today.  For much of his career, before automobiles were in common use, he conducted his work by horseback, horses and wagons, riverboats, and foot. 

People in the land surveying profession work in the background and are not generally celebrated, but they perform a vital service in our society.  Harry Dickson’s dedication to the Yukon and his place in its history are worthy of recognition. 

The Dicksons’ Early Years, 1864-1898

Harry Dickson was born into a large family in Petawawa, Ontario on March 29, 1864.  By 1870 the family had moved to Massachusetts, where the father was working on a railroad.  In 1873 Harry’s brother Thomas was born in the United States, but the family was back in Canada by 1879 and living near Winnipeg, Manitoba.

In 1888, while living north of Winnipeg in the town of Selkirk, Harry was commissioned as a Provincial Land Surveyor for Manitoba.  The following March of 1889, he passed his examination to become a Dominion Land Surveyor (DLS), now called a Canada Lands Surveyor, and his commission number was 221.

In 1890, Harry Dickson was one of 20 surveyors authorized to conduct land surveys in Manitoba.  That year he joined with one of the others, a man named James Brownlee, in a partnership in Brandon, Manitoba.  The partnership lasted only a few years, but Dickson was to have an ongoing relationship with Brownlee into the Yukon. 

By 1893 Harry was working for the City of Brandon as city engineer, and in 1894 put his survey drafting skills to work in producing a large map of the city.  That same year, his brother Thomas passed his examination to become a Manitoba Provincial Land Surveyor.  Thomas was also noted as a civil engineer, and he may have focussed more on that when he went to the Yukon.  He was to play an integral part in Harry’s surveying work in the Yukon for the rest of his life.

In early 1898, Harry and Thomas Dickson headed for the Klondike to join the gold rush.  Similar to many Yukoners’ stories, Harry only planned to be there for two years.

The Year in Atlin, 1899-1900

No information has been found about the Dicksons’ trip west and north, but on March 17, 1899, Harry arrived in Atlin, B.C. and began working for his old partner James Brownlee, who had come to the Yukon in 1897 and then moved on to Atlin.  It is not known if Harry ended up in Atlin at Brownlee’s invitation or if it was coincidental.  Perhaps en route to Dawson Harry was diverted to Atlin, as were many other people, when it became the newest gold rush hotspot in the late summer of 1898.  If it had been Harry’s original intention to go to Dawson, he was not to make it there for many more years.

While in Atlin, Dickson surveyed the John Irving Tramway Co.’s line for the 2¼-mile railway that was being built to provide a transportation connection between Atlin Lake and Tagish Lake.  He also did some survey work on the White Pass & Yukon Route railway line.

In October 1899, while still based in Atlin, Dickson carried out the first survey of the newly-developing townsite of Whitehorse, which had just had its name changed from Closeleigh.  This survey laid out eighteen 40-acre lots and two smaller ones in preparation for later subdivision.  These lots encompassed the area between the river on the east and the tops of the clay cliffs on the west, and from what is now Hawkins Street on the south to the north end of the Marwell industrial area. 

Dickson also surveyed the White Pass & Yukon Route railway right-of-way and a 97-acre railway maintenance yard at the south end of Whitehorse.  These were within the area from Hawkins Street south to the river where the sternwheeler Klondike and Robert Service Way now are located.

The Whitehorse Years, 1900-1920

In June 1900, after he had completed his work on the Atlin-Tagish railway, Harry Dickson relocated to Whitehorse, where he established a survey business and residence on Main Street.  The activities and whereabouts of his brother Thomas after he arrived in the north are not certain, but in 1901 he was living with Harry in Whitehorse and listed as a student at age 28.  Harry’s business letterhead and newspaper advertisements in the early 1900s included Civil Engineer along with Dominion Land Surveyor, with the engineering component likely referring to Thomas.

Like people of many occupations, land surveyors had come to the Yukon with the Klondike gold rush.  In 1901 there were twelve of them in the Yukon, but Harry Dickson was the only one resident in Whitehorse.  All the rest were based in Dawson and one other was carrying out the survey of the Yukon-British Columbia boundary.  The Dawson surveyors were engaged in surveys of mining claims, roads and townsites.  This left Harry to take care of all the southern Yukon surveys, including the various types of lots, homesteads, mining claims, roads, placer creek baselines and reference traverses.  He had survey work every year except 1919 and remained the only Whitehorse-based surveyor until he relocated to Dawson in 1920. 

The Yukon’s mining activity began to decline in the early 1900s, as did the population, and the number of land surveyors naturally decreased as well.  By 1905, there were eight, four by 1910, and by 1918 Harry Dickson was the only one remaining after the departure of A.H. Hawkins, whose job as Director of Surveys for the Yukon was terminated.  From 1917 until the end of his career in 1938, Dickson was the only surveyor based in the Yukon.

Beginning in 1903 and over the next 20 years, a number of surveys called ‘reference traverses’ were conducted in the Yukon to establish ‘control’, as it’s referred to, in areas that had no existing survey coverage.  These surveys were undertaken in relatively remote areas and would have involved considerable planning and logistics.  Harry and Thomas Dickson carried out the first of these unique traverses and a number more.    

In early July 1903, gold discoveries in the Kloo Lake area northwest of Haines Junction created a stampede of prospectors into that area.  This affected Harry Dickson’s work, as on July 13 he wrote a letter to the Director of Surveys in Dawson and said that due to the “reputed placer strike west of here”, he was having a hard time getting employees for survey work. 

The next year Dickson was recruited to accompany Territorial Engineer William Thibaudeau to the Kluane region to begin planning a route for a new road to access the gold creeks.  Dickson would later survey the route that was laid out ( a link to related articles on the Kluane Wagon Road can be found at the end of this article ).  This was the beginning of an association he was to have with the Kluane area, including doing all the surveying work there, until the end of his career 34 years later. 

Harry Dickson’s surveying and drafting skills assisted him in making maps as well.  In 1904 he produced two maps, one of the Whitehorse and nearby copper belt area and the other of the new ‘Alsek, Kaskawulsh and Kluane’ gold-mining region.  These maps were apparently well received and in common use for a number of years afterwards.

In June 1904, Dickson surveyed a 43-acre mining claim in the Whitehorse copper belt that had been staked by two men in 1899.  The ‘Spring Creek’ claim, as it was named, was located about 6 km. southwest of Whitehorse city center, near the upper end of McIntyre Creek.  In 1905 Harry and his brother Thomas purchased the claim, and in 1915 did over $9,500 worth of work on it (over $82,000 in 2019 dollars), perhaps for assessment purposes and with financial backing. 

Both brothers retained ownership of their portions of the Spring Creek claim until their deaths.  When Harry died in 1941, his three-fifths ownership became part of his estate and it was deemed to have no value.  The Spring Creek claim, described as Lot 162, Quad 105D/11, still stands as a legally surveyed property.

In April 1908, at age 44, Harry Dickson’s personal life took a turn when he married a 38-year old American woman named Margaret Haughton in Whitehorse.  This didn’t last long, however, due to Margaret’s poor health.  In November of that year she went to Victoria, intending to spend several months there in hopes of getting well.  It was not to be, and she ended up passing away in early May 1909 in St. Louis, Missouri, where she had lived previously.  Harry received a telegram notifying him of her death. 

In 1910, with the Yukon’s economy and population declining, there were only four surveyors remaining in the Yukon, three in Dawson and Harry Dickson in Whitehorse.  That year, Frederick Congdon, the Yukon’s Member of Parliament, wrote to the Surveyor General in Ottawa about “… the desirability … to keep good surveyors in the country…”.  He said that “… although adverse conditions have made development slow…  I know of no better or more legitimate mode of assistance than completion of useful surveys”.  His letter resulted in the initiation of more reference traverse surveys beginning in the following year and for a few years thereafter, most of which employed the Dickson brothers.

Harry Dickson appeared to be a relatively active member of the Association of Dominion Land Surveyors, based in Ottawa.  In 1913 he was elected as the Association’s vice-president for the Yukon and Northwest Territories, a post he had not even put his name in for.  The following year he wrote a paper about the standardization of qualifications of Dominion Land Surveyors and the various Provincial Land Surveyors.

There are three records of Harry travelling out of the Yukon, all during his Whitehorse years.  Two of them, in 1911 and 1915, were to visit his parents before they passed away.  In the case of his mother, he did not make it in time to see her before she died in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, but was able to be at her funeral. 

Surveys during Whitehorse years, 1900-1920

Harry and Thomas Dickson carried out many survey projects during their time in Whitehorse, and the following examples are of their larger or notable ones.  They surveyed a large number of mining claims, most of them being on the order of 40 to 50 acres, and many located on or near the tops of mountains.  There were other more minor projects in addition to these.

1900

• Mining claims near Whitehorse Copper mine site totalling about 260 acres

1901

• Coal lands south of Fish Lake – nine claims totalling 1,440 acres
• Whitehorse townsite – subdivision of earlier surveyed large lots to create 548 town lots

1902

• Survey and production of map linking town of Whitehorse to mining claims and wagon roads in the Whitehorse Copper Belt

1903

• Whitehorse – extension of Second Avenue to north end of present Shipyards Park
• Public roads to Grafter and Copper King copper claims
• Whitehorse Reference Traverse

1904

• Addition to Whitehorse townsite – creation of 156 town lots and one 10-acre lot within the 1899 lots
• Bullion Creek baseline for placer claims
• Chambers 100-acre and 26-acre lots at Champagne

1905

• Carcross Indian Reserve #6
• Conrad townsite subdivision
• Reference Traverse from British Columbia boundary to Carcross

1906

• Two additions to Conrad townsite
• Burwash Creek baseline for placer claims

1907

• Lots, mostly in Whitehorse area

1908

• Mining claims in Montana Mountain (Carcross), Whitehorse-Fish Lake, and Alligator Lake areas
• Wheaton River Reference Traverse (West Arm Bennett Lake to Watson River)

1909

• Mining claims in Montana Mountain (Carcross), Whitehorse-Fish Lake, and Alligator Lake areas
• Wheaton River to Whitehorse Reference Traverse connection (Watson River to Golden Horn Mtn.)

1910

• Mining claims south, west and north of Whitehorse and in Montana Mountain and Alligator Lake areas
• Mining claims south of Carmacks (Dickson’s first trip north of Whitehorse)
• Carmacks Reference Traverse, part 1 (Carmacks to Kirkland Creek)

1911

• Mining claims in Whitehorse west area
• Carmacks Reference Traverse, part 2 (Kirkland Creek to Mt. Decoeli/Jarvis River)

1912

• Mining claims in Wheaton River area
• Aishihik Reference Traverse , part 1 (Nansen Creek to north end Aishihik Lake)

1913

• Kluane Wagon Road, part 1 (Kluane Lake to Jarvis River)
• Fourth of July Creek baseline for placer claims
• Mining claims in White River, Beaver Creek, Whitehorse west, Montana Mountain and Wheaton River areas
• Reference Traverse Kluane Lake to Bullion Creek baseline connection
• Ibex River Reference Traverse (Whitehorse to Takhini/Ibex River area)
• Aishihik Reference Traverse, part 2 (north end Aishihik Lake to south end)

1914

• Six Mile Indian Reserve #5
• Mining claims west of Whitehorse and in Wheaton River area
• Sixty Mile River Reference Traverse (likely Dickson’s first trip to Dawson area)
• Sixty Mile River baseline for placer claims

1915

• Kluane Wagon Road, part 2 (Overland Trail to Jarvis River)
• Traverse of Grazing Lands in Dezadeash Valley

1916

• Mining claims south and west of Whitehorse
• Whitehorse Indian Reserve #5

1917

• Mining claims in Whitehorse west and Montana Mountain area
• Homesteads in Tagish area

1918

• Lots at McRae and Whitehorse
• Whitehorse Indian Reserve #5

1919

• none

1920

• Chambers Homestead on Mendenhall River

The above list of the Dicksons’ surveys provides an indication of the scope and scale of the projects they undertook.  In addition to the physical work, significant time would have been involved in planning the survey, hiring personnel, and logistics planning for transportation, accommodation, provisions, supplies and equipment.  After the physical survey was completed, there was more time spent in drafting and submitting the survey plans and tending to administrative matters such as correspondence, payroll and bookkeeping.

In 1919 no surveys of note were done in the Yukon, or at least none that produced survey plans.  This was evidently due to a lack of survey work in the only part of the Yukon that had a resident surveyor.  That fall Harry Dickson wrote to George Mackenzie, the senior federal bureaucrat in Dawson, basically pleading for work.  He stated that “… it is an absolute necessity to have something to do, in order to live …”.  He identified two homesteads along the Kluane Wagon Road that were ready for surveying, and the following spring he was authorized to survey the Chambers homestead on the Mendenhall River.

This homestead survey would be the Dickson brothers’ last work in the southern Yukon before leaving Whitehorse in 1920.  The work situation undoubtedly prompted them to make the decision to move to Dawson, and for Harry it was the beginning of the next chapter of his career at the age of 56.

The Dawson Years, 1920-1938

A review of the major surveys conducted by Harry Dickson after he relocated to Dawson suggests that he should have moved to Mayo instead.  His first survey was an addition to the Mayo townsite and, as it turned out, much of the work he and Thomas did over the next 18 years was in the Mayo area.  A significant amount of their activity focussed on the survey of mining claims in the silver-producing area around Keno City.

Newspaper articles indicate that Thomas Dickson retained a stronger work connection to the Keno area than did Harry, who may have conducted more of the work in the Dawson area.  Unlike Harry’s previous business advertisement in the Whitehorse newspaper, the one in the Dawson newspaper contained both their names.

It appears the Dickson brothers were quite busy in the first several years after relocating to Dawson, mainly due to the level of activity in the Keno area in the 1920s.  However, after 1930 the survey work quickly tapered off, to the point that in 1932 there were no surveys done, at least none that resulted in registered plans. 

In the summer of 1931 the Yukon Government appointed 67-year old Harry as Survey Engineer at a salary of $1,200 per year as an incentive for the Territory’s only surveyor to stay.  Harry had normally been getting about $3,000 worth of government work each year, so he regarded the $1,200 as a retainer, and any survey work would be in addition.  Harry stayed in the Yukon, so the government appointment appears to have achieved the desired result.  

Being the only Yukon surveyor, Harry along with his brother occasionally made trips south from Dawson, presumably most or all by riverboat, to do survey work.  They surveyed lots in Whitehorse, Tagish and Carmacks, homesteads at Robinson and Burwash Landing, aviation fields at Carmacks, Fort Selkirk, Carcross and Whitehorse, and the Carmacks Indian Reserve #11.

Surveys during Dawson years, 1920-1938

The following are the major or notable survey projects undertaken by Harry and Thomas Dickson during their Dawson years. 

1920

• Addition to Mayo townsite
• Mining claims in Keno area and northeast of Dawson City

1921

• Mining claims in Keno area
• Mining claims in Williams Creek area (north of Carmacks)

1922

• Mining claims in Keno and Mayo areas
• Keno townsite
• Traverse of Government Road Keno to Ladue Claim
• Mining claims in Whitehorse, Alligator Lake and Wheaton River areas

1923

• Mining claims in Keno area
• Keno Hill – Mt. Rambler – Mt. Cameron Reference Traverse

1924

• Mining claims in Keno area
• Mayo – Steep Creek Reference Traverse
• Lots in Carmacks

1925

• Mining claims in Keno area
• Carmacks Indian Reserve #11
• Lots near Williams Creek (north of Carmacks)

1926

• Mining claims in Keno and upper Beaver River areas
• Huffman (Mayo area) and Leroux (Dawson area) Homesteads

1927

• Mining claims in Keno and Beaver River areas and Yukon River north of Dawson
• Mayo – Keno Road
• Detraz Homestead at Coffee Creek

1928

• Mining claims in Keno area
• Mayo – Dawson Road, part 1
• Mining claims in Montana Mountain and Wheaton River areas
• McConnell Homestead at Robinson (south of Whitehorse)
• Lots at Tagish

1929

• Mining claims in Keno area
• Lefebvre’s Ranch on Stewart River
• Mayo-Dawson Road, part 2

1930

• Mining claims in Keno area
• Mayo-Dawson Road, part 3

1931

• Mining claims in Keno and Beaver River areas

1932

• none

1933

• Lot northeast of Dawson

1934

• Indian River baseline for placer claims, part 1

1935

• Jacquot Homestead at Burwash Landing
• Whitehorse Aviation Reserve

1936

• Indian River baseline for placer claims, part 2

1937

• Mining claims in Bonanza Creek area
• Mayo Airport
• Fort Selkirk Airport
• Carmacks Airport
• Carcross aviation field

1938

• Mining claims in Keno area

Harry Dickson’s Record

Harry Dickson carried out his last land surveys in 1938 at the age of 74.  Over the 39 years of his career in the Yukon, the list of surveys that have his name attached to them is extensive, far greater than anyone else of that era. 

In addition to the impressive quantity of Dickson’s work, the quality of it appears to be well-regarded, as surveyors since that time have used and followed upon his work.  Brian Thompson, a surveyor with decades of experience in the Yukon, says that “[Dickson’s] work accurately marks the boundaries of many land interests that still exist today, and allows modern-day surveyors to build from them and establish the boundaries of new land interests”.

Thompson and Gabe Aucoin, another long-time Yukon surveyor, offered their perspectives that Harry Dickson generally did good work.  His measurements, particularly in mountainous areas where measuring distances horizontally is more challenging, were of good quality considering the equipment he had to use.  He also paid attention to leaving good physical evidence of his surveys, an important component of surveying work.  Brian Thompson added that “[Dickson’s] survey of the Whitehorse townsite group lots is near perfect”, referring to the first survey of Whitehorse in 1899.

Surveyors leave behind varying accounts of the details involved in their work, and some have left journals of their daily activities.  Field books sometimes include information about the members of the survey crew, weather conditions, vegetation, and features they encounter such as cabins, graves and trails.  Harry Dickson appears to have been a minimalist in such documentation, which is unfortunate given the breadth of his survey work and, from a Yukon history perspective, the time period it took place in. 

This lack of recording may be reflective of his character as suggested by his few interviews for newspaper articles, where he was very matter-of-fact about his work.  Here is an example:

Leaving Whitehorse, we proceeded by team to Champagne Landing, thence by packhorses, by way of the Dalton Trail via Hutchi village, to the copper locations near Aishihik Lake.  Leaving a cache at this point, we travelled in a northeasterly direction and picked up the end of the [survey] line run by us last season [from Carmacks].  Our mission was to extend this line in a southwesterly direction, crossing the Aishihik River where it leaves the lake of that name to the copper locations on the Jarvis River, south of the Kluane trail.  This was successfully completed”.

“Successfully completed” was Harry Dickson’s understated summation of a two-month expedition to travel and find, from the opposite direction, the spot in the bush where they left off surveying the previous fall, and then resume the survey for another 105 kilometers.  Most of this was through remote country that would have been little known to him and his crew and likely offered a number of challenges for them to overcome. 

Harry Dickson’s Yukon survey work is still contributing in various ways, almost 80 years after his death.  Pieces of information contained in his survey plans and field books tell of Yukon history.  These along with the survey evidence that still stands in places on the Yukon landscape assists modern-day surveyors in their work and history researchers in pursuing their interests.             

Thomas Dickson’s Contribution

This article is primarily about Harry Dickson and his contributions to the Yukon land survey fabric and Yukon history, but it must necessarily include his brother Thomas’s involvement as well.  While Harry’s surveying career is relatively well documented by the survey plans and related field books that he produced, Thomas’s work is somewhat difficult to pin down.

It is clear from survey records, newspaper articles and Thomas’s estate file that he assisted his brother in a significant way.  Thomas was a commissioned Provincial Land Surveyor in Manitoba, so obviously had the ability to conduct land surveys.  A few Yukon newspaper articles also referred to him as a Dominion Land Surveyor, which was required for surveying in the Yukon, but either this was an error or he never used his designation in the Yukon.  He appears to have done a lot of the ground work, so perhaps left the administrative matters, including signing off on survey plans, to his brother. 

The survey plans and field books included an oath that the surveyor must swear before somebody that is authorized to administer it.  When I started studying Harry Dickson’s survey plans I noticed that some were sworn before a T.A. Dickson, who I assumed to be Thomas Alexander Dickson.  He was a well-known former Northwest Mounted Police member and it seemed understandable that he could have been appointed to administer such oaths.  It was some time before I realized that Harry Dickson had a brother in the Yukon named Thomas Albert Dickson and that it was he who was taking his brother’s oaths, such as in the example below.

Thomas Dickson evidently did some work independent of his brother that employed his engineering background.  For example, in the fall of 1905 he was in charge of a crew of ten men doing river channel work at Hell’s Gate on the Yukon River.  This involved driving piles and constructing dams to direct water into the main riverboat channel.

Thomas appears to have had health difficulties off and on, including a “serious operation” in the late fall of 1927 in Vancouver.  He again left the Yukon for medical treatment in the spring of 1939, returning to Whitehorse on April 15. He took a room at the Whitehorse Inn, where at some point during the night he passed away.  The Whitehorse Daily Star reported that he died in his sleep, but his estate file makes it clear that his death was an unpleasant one.

Thomas had made a will in 1928, bequeathing to a Miss Katherine McNab his interest in a mining claim near Whitehorse, some shares in a mining company, and his watch and jewelry.  The remainder of his estate, which did not amount to much, went to his brother Harry, who was also the executor of the will.

The Katherine McNab named in Thomas Dickson’s will was a teacher and had been in Dawson for a time.  She responded to his death by letter from Penticton, B.C., expressing her shock at the news.  She also said that Thomas “… was a very loyal friend with potential for good, but life seemed to trap him”.  She mentioned a long period of depression and that she had felt impotent to help.  She also said she was unaware of his will and that she could not possibly accept anything of value while Thomas’s brother Harry was alive.  

Thomas Dickson’s funeral was held on April 19 at the Masonic Temple in Whitehorse, followed by burial in the Masons section of the Pioneer Cemetery. He was 66 years old.

Harry Dickson’s Final Years

There is no record of Harry Dickson having done any survey-related work after 1938.  His own physical limitations and the death of his brother in 1939 perhaps made the decision for him.  Thomas’s death also may have prompted Harry to get his own affairs in order, as a few months afterwards he made a list of his property and valuables and where they were located.

Harry remained in Dawson, living in the house there that he had inherited from Thomas.  In late March 1941 he entered the St. Mary’s Hospital in Dawson for medical treatment and then returned home, but not for long.  He passed away on April 3, 1941 at the age of 77.

In his will Dickson left everything to his brother Arthur Dickson, who lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  This included his interest in the Spring Creek mining claim he had surveyed in 1904 and co-owned with Thomas since 1905.  After the estate was settled, Arthur received $561.32.  Harry Dickson never got rich doing what he did in the Yukon, but his contributions are a more appropriate measure of his life here.  

Harry Dickson’s funeral was held on April 8 in the Anglican Church in Dawson.  He had become a member of the Masons in 1893 in Brandon, Manitoba, and after the funeral his body was escorted by the Masons to the Hillside Cemetery, where it was buried in the Masonic section.

It appears that Harry Dickson’s grave never had a headstone, and until recently was marked only by a piece of blue rebar with a bronze-colored cross on top.  Fortunately, the burials over the years in the Masonic cemetery have been made in chronological order along the row, enabling his grave location to be confirmed by the headstones on either side of it. 

The Masonic Lodge #45 in Dawson was made aware of the person buried in the unmarked grave and his contributions to the Yukon, and they agreed that the situation should be rectified.  The Masons took the initiative and expense to have a headstone made for him, and in September 2023, more than 80 years after Harry Dickson’s death, members placed it at his grave .  Thanks to their efforts, Henry Godkin Dickson’s final resting place is now properly marked and acknowledges his life as ‘Yukon Land Surveyor’.

Link to related articles: Kluane Wagon Road

Updated January 27, 2020

Updated October 3, 2023

Mackintosh Trading Post was the successor name for the Bear Creek Roadhouse, which was established in 1903-04 after discovery of gold in the southwest Yukon .  The roadhouse had been built by Eli Proulx to provide accommodations for goldseekers and others who were coming into the Kluane region (see related story at The Bear Creek Roadhouse in Southwest Yukon).  It was situated 10 kilometers northwest of what is now Haines Junction along the Kluane Wagon Road, built in 1904, and later the Alaska Highway, built in 1942.

In late 1905 Joseph Beauchamp took over the roadhouse and along with his three wives (not concurrent) built more buildings and operated both a roadhouse and fur trading post.  When he and his third wife Clara sold out and left around 1930, the establishment fell into a lull for the following few years, being operated only in the winters by a caretaker. 

In 1935 George and Dorothy Mackintosh bought the Bear Creek Roadhouse buildings and breathed new life into the place.  Dorothy was new to the Yukon, but George had already spent 30 years in the Territory, about 25 of them in the Kluane area. 

George Mackintosh – the Mountie and gold miner

George Whitfield Mackintosh was born in 1877 near Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, the third eldest in a family of 14 children.  It appears that for most of his life, at least when he was an adult, he went by “Whit” as his first name by those who knew him. 

George’s first occupation was as a butcher, then in March 1900 he joined the Northwest Mounted Police in Charlottetown.  He was soon sent west and requested to be posted to the Yukon, arriving in the Territory sometime in the summer of 1900.  He was stationed at the Five Fingers post, located on the west side of the Yukon River three kilometers downstream from the Five Fingers Rapids.  He stayed there until his two years of Yukon service were completed, then took his discharge from the police force on July 30, 1902.  His conduct during his tenure in the NWMP was noted as ‘very good’.

Upon discharge Mackintosh stated that his intended place of residence was the Five Fingers area, and it appears he remained there for a time.  In 1903 he took out a commercial fishing licence and was fishing in lakes southeast of the Five Fingers post. 

By at least 1905 Mackintosh was involved in gold mining in the Kluane region after the discoveries made there in July 1903.  On November 30, 1905 he left Whitehorse with a winter’s outfit for Fourth of July Creek, where he planned to stockpile pay material during the winter.  It appears that he remained in the Kluane area for the next 20 to 25 years, as he appears on voters’ lists and censuses there during that time, and is always noted as a miner.

At some point Mackintosh married Jennie Hoochie from the village of Hutchi, north of Champagne and about 70 kilometers northeast of Bear Creek.  She died relatively young and is buried at Champagne, a stone monument by her spirit house reading “In memory of Jennie Hoochie, Wife of W.G. Mackintosh, Died Dec. 14, 1927, aged 30 yrs.; Erected by Hoochie Jackson”.  Hutchi Jackson (the spelling commonly used now) was Jennie’s brother.

In 1930 Mackintosh left the Yukon and went to California, where his mother and four of his brothers were living, and resumed his occupation as a butcher.  While there his health began to deteriorate and he wanted to return to the Yukon to regain it. 

Dorothy (McFarlane) Mackintosh – the educator

Before George left California in 1935 at age 58, he married a woman named Dorothy May McFarlane.  She was born in Wisconsin in 1885, the middle of three daughters.  She went to New York City to attend Columbia University, one of the prestigious Ivy League schools, and attained three degrees, including a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD.) in nutrition.  She then taught at a number of places, including Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas, where she was a professor in the homemaking department.

After her marriage to George Mackintosh, Dorothy left her life of high academia behind to go to the wilds of the Yukon at the age of 50.  She may have had many motivations to start a new life in the Yukon, and perhaps devotion to her new husband who wanted to recover his health was a primary one. 

George and Dorothy Mackintosh at Bear Creek ( 1935-1939)

George knew the Bear Creek Roadhouse and its location well, believing that it had many advantages, and wanted to make it his home.  He bought the place in June 1935, but soon found that the land was not titled and so he had only purchased the buildings.  In August 1935 Dorothy travelled from California to the Yukon to join George, who had gone on ahead.

On Dorothy’s first trip along the Kluane Wagon Road, she noticed that all of the old roadhouses were abandoned except the ones at Champagne and Bear Creek.  Bear Creek had been operated in the previous few winters as a fur trading post, but the buildings had not been properly taken care of and new tree growth was starting to take over the cleared land.

At some point they evidently changed the name to Mackintosh Trading Post, as that is what appeared on their letterhead and envelopes, as well as in a few newspaper articles.  Later on, whether by Dorothy Mackintosh (after her husband died) or the subsequent owners, it became known as Mackintosh Lodge.

George and Dorothy set to work re-clearing, breaking and fencing land, and even constructed an irrigation ditch to bring water from the creek to their gardens.  In the spring of 1936 George put in a homestead application for 160 acres, and they continued to work hard over the next couple of years toward meeting the homestead requirements.  This would allow them to get the land surveyed and gain title to it.  As it turned out, however, a number of factors kept the title from being granted for many years.   

Before they could make the improvements they wanted, George began to suffer from the effects of some type of cancer.  It is not known when this started, but in June 1938 a doctor from California made the long journey to Bear Creek to attend to George’s illness.  This seems unusual, but George had been his patient in California and apparently the trip was made at the request of friends of George.  While at the trading post, the doctor and a companion cut and sawed wood for Dorothy, which might indicate George was too ill to do tasks such as those.  

That November of 1938, the Mackintoshes went to California for four months, presumably for medical reasons, and had a friend stay at their trading post as caretaker.  They returned the following spring, but that August they again went back to California to get medical attention for George. It was not successful and he died on November 24, 1939 in Huntington Beach at the age of 62 and was buried at Westminster Memorial Park. 

Years after her husband’s death, Dorothy offered the following sentiments about him: “one thing that meant much to me was that any statement [George] made as to conditions or facts was infallible”.  She also said that he was held in esteem by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and that after his death (which was 37 years after he left the Northwest Mounted Police), members of the force passing through would stop and pay their respects to her as the widow of a former member.

Before his death, George told Dorothy that he believed the United States would be building an overland route to Alaska and that it would likely pass through the Bear Creek area and by their trading post.  With that possibility, he thought she might be interested in returning.  Dorothy had liked her life in the Yukon, including the hard work, so she decided to take on the challenge of going back to see what she could do on her own. 

Dorothy Mackintosh on her own (1940-1954)

The expenses necessary to address her husband’s illness, and the long travel required to do it, left Dorothy much less well off than she had been.  She and George had real estate in California she was forced to sell, and at reduced prices because of the Depression, and also had to liquidate other assets.

Dorothy wasn’t happy in California and still owned the trading post at Bear Creek, so by late March 1940 she was back in the Yukon.  She later said that “although the [Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Whitehorse] told me they could not allow me to go out there alone, I went”.  She travelled the 180 kilometers from Whitehorse to Bear Creek by dog team.

Dorothy resumed life at her trading post, running the roadhouse, gardening, and trading for furs with the First Nation residents.  She cultivated a few acres of potatoes, turnips, cabbage and other garden produce, which she marketed in Whitehorse on her once or twice yearly trips there.  She sawed her own wood, kept fires going, and hunted moose, probably with help for some of these tasks. 

Dorothy had returned to the Yukon to continue her previous life, but big changes were coming with the construction of the Alaska Highway through the area in 1942.  A couple of sources give the impression that Dorothy at first did not like the highway passing by her front door, but then realized that her trading post would not survive otherwise. 

A few months later it was determined that the highway would be rerouted near Pine Lake to avoid the turn south toward what is now Haines Junction and to take a more direct route toward the northwest.  This would have bypassed the Bear Creek area by more than five kilometers and left Dorothy well off the beaten track, to which she objected.  

Construction of the new route was carried out for several kilometers, but it was soon abandoned and reverted back through Bear Creek.  Whether Dorothy had made any official overtures to the roadbuilders to leave the road in its original location is not known, but it is most likely that the new route was abandoned because of terrain considerations.  When mileposts were installed along the Alaska Highway from Mile 0 at Dawson Creek, B.C., the Mackintosh Trading Post at Bear Creek was at Mile 1022.

Once the soldiers and civilians building the highway discovered the comforts and good food at Dorothy’s place, it became a favorite stop for them on the new road that had relatively few stops.  She also housed 15 highway workers during the construction.  Once the Alaska Highway, followed by the Haines Road in 1943, enabled local people to have easier access by vehicle, the Mackintosh Trading Post became the local store for a few years until a store was built in newly-established Haines Junction in about 1948.

1943 was a transitional year for Dorothy Mackintosh.  The new highway marked the beginning of a change in emphasis from furs and garden produce to tourists.  It also brought adventure reporters and writers who ‘discovered’ Dorothy and were enthralled by the independent single woman living alone in such a place.  A number of stories and articles about her were printed in newspapers and magazines, even though she did not like being interviewed or photographed.

When Dorothy was asked the inevitable question about being lonesome in such an isolated place, she replied as if it was something she hadn’t thought about.  She said that she had never needed a great deal of companionship and enjoyed having time to herself.

Dorothy began plans for a new house in 1943 and had two old barns taken down, presumably to use the logs as well as the location.  The house was mostly built by her and First Nations helpers in 1944 and completed in 1945.  It was 30 feet by 32 feet and had running water and a bathtub, which were luxuries for her.

Also in 1943, a couple of incidents involving the Dowell Company, a civilian contactor working on the Alaska Highway, showed Dorothy willing to take a stand for herself and the environment.  One incident had workers cutting trees for sawmilling on her land, even though it was not yet titled, but she forced them to go elsewhere.  Her primary concern was that the trees provided protection to her gardens from the well-known harsh winds that come out of the Alsek River valley. 

The other incident involved the company depositing sawdust into Marshall Creek, about 20 kilometers east of Bear Creek, and having a privy (outdoor toilet) over the creek.  Her complaint to the authorities spurred prompt action to rectify the situation.

After the Highway

Following the first years of construction and reconstruction of the Alaska Highway, Dorothy’s life at Bear Creek focussed more and more on the steadily increasing traffic past her door.  She continued to grow produce for the meals she prepared for tourists and local customers and to provide accommodations.

In early February 1947, Frank Sketch, the operator of a trading post at Kloo Lake, about 25 kilometers northwest of Mackintosh Trading post, passed away.  This was during the cold spell that saw the Yukon community of Snag set Canada’s coldest temperature at -63° Celsius, a record that still stands.  Dorothy was very concerned that Sketch’s death would mean the closing of the Kloo Lake post, which would impact the First Nations people in the nearby village.  She succeeded in pushing for an arrangement that would keep the post open longer.  Later that year, she bought the Kloo Lake post’s four buildings and their contents, which included a truck, for $3,000 (see related article at Frank Sketch’s Kloo Lake Trading Post).

Visitors in 1948 who stayed with Dorothy for a couple of nights recorded that she had a lovely garden and served trout for breakfast.  She told them that her greatest fear was in going to Whitehorse for supplies, particularly crossing the Takhini River.  The river was crossed by using a self-operated ferry and she said it was difficult for her to tie the ferry tightly enough to the bank and then to drive her truck through the slippery mud onto the ferry

In addition to stories about Dorothy’s cooking and gardening, there are ones about her interactions with bears.  One of them was related by Hugh Bradley of Pelly River Ranch, who had worked at the Dominion Experimental Farm near Bear Creek in 1952 and ‘53 and would visit the trading post occasionally.  On one occasion when there were black bears in the yard, some tourists were trying to get up close to photograph them.  Dorothy told them the bears were dangerous and to go back inside, then she proceeded to shoo the bears away with a broom.

The Mackintosh homestead property was finally surveyed in 1946 after land required for the highway, bridge, oil pipeline and telephone line had been determined.  However, it was not until September 5, 1952 that title to the land was finally granted to Dorothy Mackintosh, more than 16 years after her husband George had originally applied for the homestead.  Affidavits filed as part of this process show that in 1952, the trading post consisted of a house, two cabins, a barn and two storage buildings. 

In 1954, two years after receiving title to the property, Dorothy Mackintosh sold the trading post on Bear Creek that she had operated alone for most of the 19 years she was there.  By that time, she was well-known and respected and was, in the words of Yukon geologist Hugh Bostock, “a character of the country”.  She was then 69 years old and returned to California to live for the rest of her life. 

Back in California Dorothy undoubtedly reflected a lot on her unique life at the trading post, and gave some talks about it.  In 1965 she provided information to the Canadian Permanent Committee on Geographical Names about the proper spelling of Mackintosh (it is spelled as Macintosh or McIntosh in various sources).  The name had been nominated for a creek that flows into the Nisling River to the northeast of Aishihik Lake in honor of her husband George.  In 1966 she wrote a letter to the Whitehorse Star about the history of the Bear Creek Roadhouse and her time at the Mackintosh Trading Post.  She died in California in 1970 and was buried in the same cemetery where her husband George was laid to rest more than 30 years before.

The Post-Dorothy Era

In 1954, Dorothy Mackintosh sold the Mackintosh Trading Post to Roland (“Butch”) and Violet (“Andy”) Nygren, who operated it under the name of Mackintosh Lodge and built a new motel unit.  They sold in the late 1970s to Bryant and Gail Jeeves, who changed the name of the business to Bear Creek Lodge and built a new restaurant, bar and small gift shop, with a residence above.  The remaining old roadhouse/trading post buildings disappeared during this time, the last in 1980 when the house built by Dorothy Mackintosh in 1944 burned down.

In 1982 the portion of the original Mackintosh homestead land north of the Alaska Highway was subdivided into five lots, four of which are rural residential use and a larger one containing the site of the former Bear Creek Roadhouse/Mackintosh Trading Post/Mackintosh Lodge/Bear Creek Lodge.  In 1983 the remainder of the homestead land south of the Alaska Highway was subdivided into 24 rural residential lots.

By the early 2000s the Bear Creek Lodge, as with many other highway lodges, was becoming no longer viable and was closed as a tourist business.  The land and buildings were sold in 2009 to Ivan and Linda Thompson, who use the location for their forest harvesting business, but also rent hotel rooms on a long-term basis.  The traditions of entrepreneurship and accommodations at the Bear Creek location continue 115 years after they began.

On the Pelly Ranch Road about three kilometers from the Ranch property, there is a culvert containing a very small creek with clear, cold water.  This is the point where the creek emerges from the hills and onto the Pelly River valley bottom.  Not far from the culvert, the creek disappears into the porous soil before it can reach the Pelly River, less than a kilometer away.  

This is Benot Creek, inaccurately named by the Geological Survey of Canada geologist Hugh Bostock, who worked in the Yukon from 1931 to 1954.  He named it for Frederick Barnett, an American who came to the Yukon on the heels of the Klondike Gold Rush and staked out a homestead near the creek.  Just out of sight from the road near where it crosses the creek stand the remains of Barnett’s cabin.

Frederick Barnett was born in Lincoln, New Hampshire in 1888.  It is not known when he came to the Yukon, but in May 1915 he applied at Fort Selkirk for a 160-acre homestead fronting on the Pelly River six kilometers up the river from Pelly River Ranch.  The land inspector reported that the parcel was suitable for agriculture and contained no timber values (timber values on a parcel could sometimes result in an application not proceeding). 

In January 1916 Barnett’s homestead application was approved.  He proceeded to build a cabin in the bush almost a kilometer away from the river.  It was at the extreme northwest corner of his described homestead area, or perhaps even outside of it, presumably to be as close to the creek as possible. 

Barnett’s cabin shows some skills in building and axemanship, as noted by Dale Bradley of Pelly River Ranch.  The flat, axe-hewn inside surfaces of the logs as well as the tight corner joints are quite impressive.  It appears, however, that Barnett may have never completed the cabin because there are no obvious remnants of roof logs, either inside the building or leaning against the walls as is commonly seen in a cabin with a collapsed roof. 

Frederick Barnett signs up for War

There is a good reason why Barnett may not have finished his cabin.  His homestead was approved in January 1916 and he likely started building the cabin that spring.  However, in April he signed up for a big event – the First World War – that was to change his life and determine the fate of his homestead. 

Barnett’s attestation paper (application form) to join the Canadian Expeditionary Force was filed in Dawson and listed his address as Dawson, his occupation as a miner, and his next-of-kin as his friend Joseph Horsfall of Fort Selkirk.  Additional information showed that he was single and his parents were deceased. 

Barnett was assigned to the 231^st Overseas Battalion and was sent out with the second Yukon contingent in June.  He was officially enlisted on July 1 at Sidney, BC, where his battalion was training.  In January 1917 Barnettwas transferred to the 143^rd Overseas Battalion, which became a Railway Construction Battalion.  His unit sailed for England on February 17, 1917.

In Barnett’s homestead file, the next correspondence after approval of the homestead application was a letter in July 1920 from the Crown Timber & Land Agent in Dawson requesting information about what work had been done on the land.  The more than four year lapse in correspondence was likely because it would have been known that Barnett had signed up for military service and veterans were given some latitude for meeting their homestead obligations.

The reply from the land inspector in Fort Selkirk was that Barnett had not been seen nor heard from since leaving the Yukon in 1916.  The inspector reported that Barnett had built a cabin on the homestead property, but that no other work had been done there.

The Benot Creek name

I have known about Benot Creek for years from time spent at Pelly River Ranch.  Dick and Hugh Bradley at the Ranch said that it was named for a homesteader who built the cabin there, then went away to the First World War and never returned.  There seemed to be a question mark about the name and how to say it – the Bradleys pronounced it like ‘Ber-net’, with a near-silent ‘r’ and emphasis on the last syllable.  Their pronunciation was closer to ‘Barnett’, perhaps coincidentally, as I never heard them say that was the name of the man who built the cabin.

When I started researching the homestead, I also wondered about the name.  An internet search of Benot showed nothing relevant to Canada, and Canada’s online phone book (Canada411.ca) had only one Benot in the whole country.  It seemed highly unlikely that this could have been the homesteader’s name.  The breakthrough came with the finding of a file in the Yukon Archives for a homestead upriver of Pelly River Ranch in the name of Frederick Barnett.

With that mystery solved, the next one was how Benot Creek became an official place name that appears on maps.  The Yukon Government’s toponymist office (place names specialist) had information that the name was approved in 1968 by the Geographical Names Board of Canada, the federal agency that had jurisdiction at that time.  The approval had been based on information supplied by the geologist Hugh Bostock for a man who homesteaded in the area before the 1930s. 

The Board’s Secretariat at Natural Resources Canada in Ottawa was then contacted, as that organization has Yukon place names information that is not available in the Yukon.  They had additional information in the form of hand-written notes from Dr. Bostock in 1963, including this notation about Benot Creek: “name given me as a long-standing name after an old-timer, by people in Fort Selkirk in the 1930s”.  The name was officially approved in 1968. 

There is an approximate 30-year gap between when the Benot Creek name was provided to Bostock in the 1930s and when he passed along the information to the Geographical Names Board of Canada in 1963.  It is not known if the name was being used unofficially during all those intervening years.

The terms ‘long-standing’ and ‘old-timer’ used by Bostock, as well as Barnett’s friendship with Joseph Horsfall, indicate that Barnett had been around the Fort Selkirk area for a while.  However, Barnett was only 28 years old when he enlisted in the military and left the Yukon, so it would seem he hardly qualified as an old-timer.   Bostock may have been given erroneous information, but in any event he and/or his informants obviously did not know Barnett’s proper name.

Since the creek was already named for Barnett, it seemed that it should at least be the correct name, and I considered the idea of making a submission to the Yukon Geographical Place Names Board.  Barnett was an American and hadn’t lived in the Yukon for very long, but he appeared to have made a commitment to the country by taking out a homestead, and, more importantly, by going to war for Canada.

The personnel record

I was not able to trace Barnett after the war, so did this mean he perhaps also gave his life for this country?  A check of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission database of those who died in the First and Second World Wars did not reveal his name.

This research on Barnett was being done at about the time that World War I personnel records were becoming available online from Library and Archives Canada.  When his file was finally processed and appeared online, I hoped it would reveal some insight into what happened to him.

The first page of his personnel record revealed that Barnett had not died in the war.  The page was a scan of a manila envelope that noted his name, rank, regimental number, and company.  This was followed by a single word in big red letters: Deserter.  Information in the file stated that he deserted on February 6, 1917, just 11 days before his unit sailed overseas to join the battle in Europe.  That ended any further thought about getting the little creek renamed in his honor.  

Barnett’s personnel record also referenced a Court of Enquiry, so contact was made with Charlie LeRoss, who runs a website dedicated to the “B.C. Bantams”, as the 143^rd Battalion was known.  He had little information on Barnett, but said that the personnel record should have the date of a Court of Enquiry, which was normally held for someone who deserted.  This was not the case for Barnett, so Mr. LeRoss thought it was possible that since he deserted just days before the Battalion left for overseas, the court may not have been held until it reached there, or was not held at all because the Battalion was broken up once it reached England.     

Barnett’s trail disappears

What happened to Frederick Barnett after he deserted his comrades before they sailed toward battle has not been determined.  Perhaps he would have thought it wise to get out of Canada and disappear into the United States. 

Barnett’s homestead was officially cancelled in September 1921.  The area is now a mature mixed forest with cattle trails running across it and a small road to a fish camp on the Pelly River.  His cabin walls still stand in the bush near Benot Creek, the remaining evidence of his life there. Perhaps if he had conducted himself more honorably, his correct name on the nearby clear, fresh Yukon creek would be his legacy.  For now, the maps will contain the meaningless name of Benot Creek, but perhaps a more appropriate name will be proposed for it someday.

Updated December 20, 2019

The discovery of gold on creeks of the southwest Yukon in July 1903 prompted a wave of people into the Kluane region.  Along with the gold prospectors came others to provide support services, including freighters, police and government officials, and roadhouse operators.

This story is about the Bear Creek Roadhouse, one of the early roadhouses that started with the Kluane gold rush.  However, this one persisted in various forms through the first decades of the 1900s, the building of the Alaska Highway, and into the 21^st Century to the present.  The roadhouse and its successors over the past 115 years make this one of the longest enduring places of entrepreneurship in the Yukon.

The roadhouse was built, likely during the fall of 1903 and over the following winter, at a site on Bear Creek 10 kilometers northwest of present-day Haines Junction.  It was along a trail that was to become the Kluane Wagon Road and later the Alaska Highway.  The roadhouse was initially established by one person, but then operated more or less continuously by the second owner from 1905 until around 1930.  This early period of the roadhouse history is the subject of this story.   

The roadhouse then fell into a lull for a few years, being operated in the winters only as a fur trading post.  In 1935 it was reinvigorated under new ownership and renamed Mackintosh Trading Post by the new owners, George and Dorothy Mackintosh. 

The business continued as Mackintosh Lodge under the next owners, Butch and Andy Nygren, who took it over in 1954, and then subsequent owners in the late 1970s, Gail and Bryant Jeeves, rebranded it as Bear Creek Lodge.  In 2009 the land and buildings were purchased by Ivan and Linda Thompson and became headquarters for a new type of enterprise, a forest harvesting operation called Bear Creek Logging.  However, rental of motel rooms on a longer-term basis is also part of their business, continuing a tradition of accommodation at Bear Creek.

Eli Proulx – the founder

The earliest reference to the Bear Creek Roadhouse is associated with a man named Eli Proulx.  He was born in 1861 in Ontario and is noted as a carpenter in most sources.  It is not known when he arrived in the Yukon, but one newspaper places him here by December 1900, and in 1901 and ’02 he is listed as being engaged in general merchandise in Whitehorse.  Following the gold discoveries in the Kluane region in 1903, he evidently headed in that direction and proceeded to establish a roadhouse.

The first reference to the roadhouse is in a newspaper article from February 1904, when a hotel liquor license for there was issued to Proulx.  This licence, granted under a liquor ordinance, was intended to allow the selling of liquor on condition that the premises met a prescribed standard.  It specified that there must be five bedrooms, a separate dining room, sitting room and bar room, and provide accommodation and feed for at least six horses.  The fee for the licence was $250 plus a $50 application fee, no small amount at that time. 

It is not clear if these building requirements had to be in place before the licence was granted, but a newspaper article of March 18, 1904 reported that Proulx “… is making extensive improvements to his buildings to meet the growing demand for accommodations …”.  This makes it apparent that Proulx had buildings in place by that time, meaning he probably started construction in 1903, and perhaps was upgrading them in 1904 to meet the liquor licence requirements.  There is no record of Proulx applying for land to cover his developments.  

The same newspaper article also reported that the White Pass & Yukon Route, the Yukon’s largest corporate entity at the time, was nearing completion of a large (40 feet by 50 feet) warehouse at Bear Creek and was cutting out a road to Marshall Creek, about 25 kilometers to the east.  These activities would have been in anticipation of offering freighting, provisioning, mail and perhaps other services to the new Kluane goldfields.  The company was well-positioned to do this, as it was already engaged in providing a riverboat service from Whitehorse to Mendenhall Landing on the new Kluane Trail as well as operating freight, passenger and mail services to Dawson along the Overland Trail.    

White Pass records show that in March 1904 the company paid Proulx and a Joseph Beauchamp $335 for providing meals to its employees.  There is no apparent relationship between Proulx and White Pass, and why they both established themselves at Bear Creek at about the same time is not known.  After the spring of 1904 there is no further reference to a White Pass presence there, perhaps because it was already becoming evident that the Kluane gold rush was not going to pan out to be the next Klondike.  The White Pass warehouse appears to still be at the site in 1918, so Proulx undoubtedly took it over.

Other newspaper articles tell of Proulx’s activities at Bear Creek over the following year and a half.  When he went to Whitehorse on business in May 1904, it was reported that he was known as “… an accommodating host and reliable business man” and that his “… roadhouse is one of the most popular on the trail” (by that time there were already about a dozen roadhouses established or in the process).  Later in 1904, the Kluane Wagon Road was built through the area and passed by the front door of Proulx’s roadhouse. 

In October 1905, Proulx was in Whitehorse on a trip and was with a partner, the Joseph Beauchamp who had worked with him feeding the White Pass employees.  The following month, the Whitehorse newspaper contained a notice of dissolution of the partnership of Proulx and Beauchamp by mutual consent.  The notice further said that ownership and operation of the Bear Creek Roadhouse would be carried on by Beauchamp.

Within a few months Eli Proulx was engaged in business in Conrad, the newly developing mining community on south of Carcross on the shore of Tagish Lake’s Windy Arm.  From there he went on to become a successful fox farmer near Carcross, he and his partner Carl Fouke being called the pioneer fox farmers of the Yukon.  Proulx was still doing this in 1924.

Joseph Beauchamp and his wives – the builders

While Eli Proulx was the only name initially associated with the Bear Creek Roadhouse, Joseph Beauchamp’s name appeared relatively early on as well.  Whatever the arrangement may have been when the two men were feeding White Pass employees in the spring of 1904, by October 1905 Beauchamp was referred to as a partner of Proulx and a month later he was the sole owner of the roadhouse.

Joseph Japhet Beauchamp was born in Quebec in 1866, the oldest of three boys who lost their father when Joseph was only five years old.  By 1881, when he was 15 years old, he was already living away from home, likely working to help support his family.

Beauchamp arrived in the Yukon in June 1900 and was living in Whitehorse in 1901, his occupation listed as a laborer.  Two years later, following the gold discoveries in the Kluane region, he found himself on the Kluane Trail and soon to be owner and operator of the Bear Creek Roadhouse.  This was to become his life for the next twenty-five or so years. 

An internet search for Joseph Beauchamp in the Yukon brings up a site called Skagway Stories, which contains a story about Joe Beauchamp of Bear Creek living in the very early 1900s in Skagway before moving to the Yukon, then moving back again and eventually dying and being buried there in 1935.  However, the time period that Joe Beauchamp was known to have been at Bear Creek shows that he could not have spent the time in Skagway as claimed.  Further research indicates that the man in Skagway, known as “Burro Joe”, was a different Joseph Beauchamp. 

In 1906 Beauchamp made application for 20 acres of land on the west side of Bear Creek and north side of the Kluane Wagon Road, covering his roadhouse and a stable.   Curiously, the sketch accompanying the application did not distinguish the White Pass warehouse, even though it would have been situated on the land applied for.  In the end, the land application did not amount to anything.

Beauchamp later submitted another land application, this one in 1911 for a homestead of 160 acres covering the same area as the previous application and much more.  By 1918 he believed he had fulfilled the homestead requirements by having 7-8 acres cleared for ploughing, 2-3 acres ready for mowing, and two barns and two stables.  Correspondence from the government said that Beauchamp “has erected thereon a first-class roadhouse, stables and other buildings”.  His plan to have the homestead land surveyed so that he could gain title to it never materialized, and the end result is that Beauchamp never owned any of the land he occupied and developed at Bear Creek.

Joseph Beauchamp became part of a community of people who lived along the length of the Kluane Wagon Road.  He attended a 1908 New Year’s Day gathering at Champagne that included roadhouse operators from other locations.  At the event he was noted as playing the piano along with Annie Chambers, the proprietress of the Champagne roadhouse.

In the spring of 1910, at the age of 44 and after six years of a relatively solitary life at Bear Creek, Beauchamp made a trip back to his roots in Montreal to marry his “faithful sweetheart of boyhood days”, according to the Whitehorse newspaper.  Her name was Blanche Lepage and she accompanied her new husband back to the Yukon to begin her new life with him at Bear Creek, 180 kilometers by wagon road from civilization at Whitehorse.  

In the fall of 1912, big game hunters returning from a trip to the White River area visited with Blanche at Bear Creek and found her to be very lonely and anxious to learn about happenings in the ‘outside’ world.  Later that fall the Whitehorse newspaper reported that Joe and Blanche were visiting Whitehorse, which for her was the first time in two and a half years since leaving there as a new bride.

Blanche’s lonely life at Bear Creek came to a tragic end the following February of 1913, and for Joe Beauchamp it was a double tragedy.  On February 8, Blanche prematurely gave birth to a baby boy who died after only a few hours.  Joe waited for Blanche to recover sufficiently for travel so that he could take her to Whitehorse for medical attention and to bury their baby there.  However, her health worsened and with no nearby neighbors to help, Joe could not leave her alone to seek assistance.  Twenty days after the death of her child, Blanche passed away on February 28 at the age of 40.

Joe prepared his wife’s body, built a box to transport her and the baby in, and made the long lonely trip with them to Whitehorse by horse and sleigh.  Funeral services were held on March 9 at the Catholic Church, followed by burial in the Pioneer Cemetery, Blanche together with her baby in the same coffin. 

Two and a half years later, Beauchamp married again, this time in Whitehorse, to Elizabeth (“Lizzie”) Gray.  She was a 46-year old woman from Ontario who had been living with R.C. Miller, a well-known Crown Timber and Land Agent, and his family in Whitehorse for several years.  Joe and Lizzie’s small wedding was at the unseemly time of 7:00 in the morning on September 21, 1915, and three hours later, after an “elaborate wedding breakfast”, they were aboard their horse and wagon for the trip to Bear Creek.

Much of the Beauchamps’ operation of their Bear Creek Roadhouse was during a time of decreasing population in the Yukon, related to a decline in economic activity.  Where the population in 1901 had been over 27,000, by 1911 it was less than a third of that at about 8,500, and by 1921 it was less than half of that again at a little over 4,000 people.  The smaller population by the mid-1910s meant that use of the Kluane Wagon Road that passed by the Beauchamps’ door was occasional at best.  Mining activities in the region were at a relatively constant but low level.  New industries in the forms of big game hunting and fur farming were beginning to blossom, but they did not provide a lot of traffic that the Beauchamps could benefit from. 

In addition to running the roadhouse, Beauchamp branched out into other activities to help make his living.  He cleared land and dabbled in agriculture to the extent that the 1921 census listed him as a farmer, while Lizzie was a housekeeper (probably doing all the roadhouse work).  Though the climate and native soil at Bear Creek are fairly marginal, Beauchamp grew oats and at one point enough potatoes to sell in the Whitehorse market, including a variety he called the Bear Creek Wonder.  He wintered horses for the International Boundary Survey parties in 1915-16 and perhaps other winters, and was occasionally engaged by miners to haul freight from Whitehorse to Ruby and Fourth of July Creeks.

Beauchamp’s main additional activity, though, appears to have centered on furs.  He did some trapping himself and bought furs from the local First Nations people, which he took to Whitehorse and shipped to fur buyers in eastern Canada.  At some point, he began to build cabins a short distance to the north of his roadhouse/trading post to encourage local people to live close by.  This was the beginning of a small settlement that became a semi-permanent home base for a number of First Nation families for several decades. 

In the fall of 1919 a party of American big game hunters staying at the Bear Creek Roadhouse recorded that Beauchamp was trading with the First Nation people and that he and Mrs. Beauchamp lived in a large one-story log house.  Meals in the roadhouse were $2 and a bunk was $2 with blankets or $1 if the customer supplied their own bedding.

A few days after the hunters’ visit, in the early morning hours of October 17, 1919, the Beauchamps were struck a blow when their roadhouse caught on fire.  Joe was away in Whitehorse getting their winter provisions while Lizzie stayed at the roadhouse.  That night she had four guests, including Louis Jacquot from the Burwash Landing roadhouse and three men who were taking a packtrain of horses to Whitehorse following a big game hunting trip.  It was thought that a gasoline lamp exploded in the roadhouse dining room, and the fire then moved very quickly through the log building.  Lizzie and one of the men suffered some moderate burns in trying to rescue some of the Beauchamps’ possessions.  The roadhouse was burned to the ground with very few of its contents saved and the loss was estimated at $3,000, the equivalent of about $41,000 in 2019 dollars.

When Joe Beauchamp returned home, he and Lizzie moved into a nearby cabin belonging to a hunting outfitter.  The Whitehorse newspaper reported that “with characteristic energy … as soon as he got home he commenced to plan for the rebuilding of the roadhouse …”.  For whatever reason, he built basically a replica of his previous three-section roadhouse building.  In Whitehorse, the I.O.D.E. (Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire) collected donations of clothing and other supplies to help the Beauchamps get back on their feet.

By this time automobiles were becoming used more commonly on the Kluane Wagon Road.  Until a bridge was built over the Jarvis River in 1923 by the Jacquots of Burwash Landing, the Bear Creek Roadhouse was the change-over point from automobiles to horse and wagon.  Beauchamp likely acquired an automobile for his travels, but no information was found to confirm this.

Joe and Lizzie Beauchamp carried on their life at Bear Creek into the 1920’s, then in the summer of 1925 Lizzie went to Vancouver for treatment of an unspecified malady.  In the spring of 1926 she was again in poor health, and on April 26 she passed away at Bear Creek at the age of 56.  Joe temporarily buried her there, probably because spring break-up conditions at that time of year prevented travel on the wagon road.  He eventually was able to transport her body to Whitehorse, where she was buried in the Pioneer Cemetery.

Joe Beauchamp was by then over 60 years old, but he didn’t stay a widower for long.  In the summer of 1927 he travelled to Montreal and on June 15 married his third wife, 47-year old Clara Lafontaine.  They arrived back in the Yukon in mid-July and set off for Bear Creek.

Dorothy Mackintosh, who along with her husband George bought the Bear Creek Roadhouse in 1935, stated years later that Clara had lived there for a year, but she was not happy living in such an isolated place and urged Joe to sell and move into Whitehorse.  If this is true, it indicates that the Beauchamps may have left Bear Creek around 1928.  This is in line with the last newspaper reference to Joe Beauchamp at Bear Creek, which shows him having travelled from there to Whitehorse in late July 1928. 

According to Dorothy Mackintosh, Beauchamp sold the roadhouse to two men who intended to raise mink and engage in fur trading with the First Nations people.  Correspondence in one of Beauchamp’s land files indicates that by July 1930 he had sold his Bear Creek buildings to an L.F. Larson, who may have been one of the two men.  This deal apparently did not work out and within a year Beauchamp went back to Bear Creek, but Clara would not go with him.  Beauchamp then sold out to Frank Sketch, who owned and operated a trading post at Kloo Lake, about 25 kilometers to the northwest of Bear Creek. 

A government letter in one of Joseph Beauchamp’s land files states that he left the Yukon around 1931.  He evidently returned to Quebec, this time for good.  His wife Clara died in Montreal in 1937 and her death record refers to her as the spouse of Joseph Beauchamp. The following year, at the age of 71, Beauchamp entered into his fourth marriage, this one to 56-year old Dawn (or Aurore) Boivin in Montreal.  Six years later, Beauchamp died and was buried in the cemetery at Ste. Thérèse church in Blainville (northwest part of Montreal), where his birth had been recorded 79 years previously.

Dorothy Mackintosh offered a few comments about Joe Beauchamp in a history of the Bear Creek Roadhouse that she provided to the Whitehorse Star in 1966.  She came to Bear Creek in 1935, a few years after Beauchamp had departed from there and perhaps left the Yukon, so it seems doubtful that she would have met him.  However, her husband George would have known him for about 25 years and it was probably his perspective she was passing along.

Dorothy said that Beauchamp must have been a very hard-working man, noting that he built barns for horses, hay and farm machinery, and that when she arrived at Bear Creek there were seven log buildings besides the house and bunkhouse.  She understood Beauchamp to be a shrewd man, but he “had the name of being strictly honest in his dealings”.  She also said that he was “very close” in these dealings, meaning that he insisted on paying what he owed and being paid what he was owed.

History shows that Joseph Beauchamp built the Bear Creek Roadhouse and trading post into a significant establishment along the Kluane Wagon Road.  He operated it for about 25 years, many of those years with a wife alongside him.  Through this he suffered the deaths of two wives and his only child, as well as the loss of his roadhouse building to fire.  He could not have accomplished what he did without a lot of hard work, perseverance and resilience.

See related story about the next era of the Bear Creek Roadhouse site at The Mackintosh Trading Post

Updated October 5, 2023

Hell’s Gate (Ingersoll Islands)

During the riverboat era of the Klondike Gold Rush and years following, an area of islands in the Yukon River between Minto and Fort Selkirk was, according to one newspaper, “the worst part of the Yukon River in its entire course from the standpoint of navigation”.  This group of islands stretches for almost six kilometers along a widening of the river, which in this area flows in a southeast to northwest direction.  These are the Ingersoll Islands, named by American Army Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka, as were many other geographic features, on his expedition through the region in 1883.  The name was for Colonel Robert Ingersoll, an American Civil War veteran, lawyer, and political and anti-religion orator.

As soon as riverboats began operating on this section of the Yukon River,  the Ingersoll Islands area became known as an obstacle to navigation.  Very quickly it was given the name Hell Gate, or Hell’s Gate as it’s more commonly called today, with the name applied to the whole six-kilometer length of the islands.  An old Yukon River channel chart for riverboats has labels for ‘Upper End Hell Gate’ and ‘Lower End Hell Gate’ at the upstream and downstream ends of the island group. These names also appear in reports about projects undertaken to improve the main channel for navigation.  Today Hell’s Gate is generally identified, in Yukon River guidebooks at least, as only the location at the lower end of the islands.

At the upper end of Hell’s Gate, the river divides into two channels, enclosing the islands between them.  The main channel for navigation is along the left limit, which in river terminology means on the left side heading downstream, in this case toward Dawson. As the water flows along this main left channel, much of it is progressively captured by numerous small side channels between the islands and diverted over to the right channel.  By the time the downstream end of the islands is reached at lower Hell’s Gate, the amount of water that has been lost from the main channel can make it shallow enough to create difficulties for passage. 

Sometimes several riverboats could be held up at Hell’s Gate because one or more of them were stuck and blocking the way of the others.  A newspaper article in January 1901 reported that “at one time last fall five steamers were tied up at Hell Gate for three days, greatly interfering with navigation”.  One of them, the Eldorado King, was unable to be freed and spent the winter frozen in the ice.

River channel improvement work at Hell’s Gate was initiated at least as early as 1900 and went on periodically for years.  It was carried out at times by Yukon Government forces and sometimes by the riverboat operators, such as the White Pass & Yukon Route, often with government funding.  The work in the early days consisted primarily of two tactics: construction of wing dams built at an angle off of the riverbank to direct water flow into the main channel and to flush out accumulated gravel on the river bottom; and damming off the small side channels between the islands to stop the diversion of water from the main left channel over to the right channel.     

Both procedures involved installation of log pilings made from nearby timber and placement of tons of rock and gravel that was hauled on barges pushed by riverboats, sometimes from a considerable distance.  This material was used to build the wing dams and the side channel dams, and on one occasion a damaged barge was used to plug off one of the channels.  Dams totaling hundreds of meters in length were constructed to try to keep the water in the main channel.  This work was effective for a handful of years, but eventually the river cut through the finer materials that the islands are made of and around the ends of the dams, requiring them to be added onto or rebuilt. 

I have come across little information about how the channel improvement work was actually carried out.  Details about how the piles were set in place and driven, how the rock and gravel was quarried, loaded and placed to form the dams, and how the work boats and barges were used in these efforts would be interesting to know.  One helpful piece of information is a sketch at the Yukon Archives that shows work done at Hell’s Gate in 1908 to 1910.

The only apparent visible remnant today of the impressive amount of channel improvement work is a small section of the wing dam (also referred to as a jetty) protruding from the left limit of the main river channel near the lower end of Hell’s Gate.  Anchored into a nearby rock face just upstream is a metal mooring ring for tying a riverboat to. 

Old Government House

The old Yukon riverboat channel chart for the Hell’s Gate area contains a curious notation.  A location labelled ‘Old Gov’t House’ shows a building or perhaps two adjacent buildings on one of the Ingersoll Islands.  The existence in this area of an apparent government-related establishment with a seemingly elegant name was surprising and intriguing, and it initiated an archival and physical search for the building and its purpose.

The channel chart showed ‘Old Gov’t House’ to be on the southwest side of a large island.  A good locational clue was that it was noted as directly across the main channel from Mildred Island, the only island on the left side of the main channel of the river along its course through the Ingersoll Islands.

In August 2017 Ron Chambers and I went to the area to see if we could find evidence of a building on the large island opposite Mildred Island.  With some deft maneuvering in the swift, shallow water of a side channel, Ron landed the boat on the island near the location of Old Gov’t House indicated on the old channel chart.

As on many of the Yukon River islands that we have been on, the undergrowth was thick with alders, willows, rose bushes, high-bush cranberries and deadfall, making both walking and visibility difficult.  However, we shortly came into a semi-cleared area where sawn chunks of logs showed that some human activities had occurred there many years ago.  While this spot didn’t reveal much of interest, a dark shape in the adjacent thicker brush caught our attention.  It was only a short distance away, but it would have been very easy to miss.

The dark shape turned out to be an unusually large log building with the walls mostly intact, but the roof was collapsed and a section of one wall had been cut out and removed at one time, presumably for firewood.  The dimensions were measured by pacing, which was difficult to do in the overgrowth of brush, but it was approximated at 50-60 feet long by 24 feet wide, with a 20 x 20 foot addition or porch on the front side.  Large metal pins and hand-made wooden dowels that held the logs together were evident in various places.  Little could be seen of the interior because of the collapsed roof and the trees now growing up in it.  The thick brush around and within the building also made it difficult to take good photographs for documentation purposes.

Archival and other research showed that In the summer and fall of 1902 a channel improvement project at Hell’s Gate was undertaken by a crew of fourteen men under the direction of Paul Mercier, Resident Engineer for the Yukon Government’s Public Works.  The Northwest Mounted Police report for that year stated that “hardly a boat during the latter part of the season has been able to negotiate [Hell Gate] without running aground”. 

Included in Mercier’s project was the construction of a building, variously referred to in a Yukon Archives file on this project as a shack, a house, and a cabin, on the largest of the Ingersoll Islands.  The purpose of the building was not specifically stated.  The file said that all the timber for the project, including logs for the building, pilings, and bracing for the pilings was cut from this large island.

The file also describes a dispute about what timber berth the logs for the project were cut from, and therefore to whom payment was due.  Because of this dispute, the amounts of timber taken are outlined, including 1,892 lineal feet of logs used for the construction of a house.  A breakdown of the numbers and lengths of the house logs shows that eight logs of 52 feet in length were used, in addition to 62 other logs of 26 and 22 feet long.  The 52-foot logs are relatively long to be used in a building in the Yukon bush and appear to have been used for a long wall with no doors or windows.  House logs of this length also indicate that there must have been very good timber on that island.      

The location of this building leaves little doubt it is the Old Gov’t House that is noted and mapped on the old riverboat channel chart.  The Yukon Archives channel improvement file showing that a building was constructed on the same island in 1902 by a government crew indicates it must almost certainly be Old Gov’t House.  

The purpose of the building was the one question left to be determined.  Its size and location suggested it may have been a bunkhouse built for the fourteen-man crew working on the Hell’s Gate channel improvements in 1902.  This supposition was confirmed by a newspaper article in October 1902, in which the Government engineer Mercier was questioned about the expense of a building for his channel improvement project.  He responded that “when men work ten hours a day in water up to their waist, they must be warmly housed and well fed or they cannot stand the work”.

Nobody I have talked to so far with knowledge of this area of the Yukon River knew about this building.  Perhaps this is because it was only used during occasional short periods for the sole purpose of channel improvement work at Hell’s Gate a century ago and more.  This may not have given it enough profile to stay in the minds and memories of local people as time went on, especially once it was overtaken by vegetation and obscured from view. 

Old Gov’t House was presumably constructed on the largest Ingersoll Island because it was central to the crew’s work sites, had a good supply of timber and, as time has shown, was an island of relative stability. The building has stood for 117 years through the forces of ice jams, high water, and shifting channels and islands.  Diverse sources of information, combined with finding it on the land, came together to tell the story of this large log building hidden in the Yukon bush.

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)

There are many solitary graves scattered across the Yukon from the times when people were spread out more across the landscape and were buried where they died.   Some were recorded in one sort of account or another, whether in a journal notation or something more official.  The death and burial of J.J. McDonald is one of these.  

This story started with a picture at the Yukon Archives of a grave that was taken in 1942 by Robert Hays, who was working with the US Army on the construction of the Alaska Highway.  The photo was of a sturdy wooden fence and a wooden marker saying “In memory of J.J. McDonald, Died Kloo Lake Feb. 5^th, 1939”.  It looked to be located on a small grassy hill with a range of hills behind.   I was intrigued by the picture and set out to find the grave and determine who J.J. McDonald was.

The hills in the photo looked like the Kluane Hills near Kloo Lake, northwest of Haines Junction, but a drive along the Alaska Highway in that area did not produce a match of the hill profiles.  Another look in the winter at the wide open view available from the ice of Kloo Lake showed that the hills were the ones to the west of the lake.  This narrowed the search area, but not enough to give a good idea of the location. 

The second question, about the identity of J.J. McDonald, was similarly difficult at first.  Historical records in the earlier 1900s often seemed to use an initial rather than a first name, and there were many J. McDonald’s to be found.  The break came with the finding of an online Library and Archives Canada file called “Estate of J.J. MacDonald, Yukon Territory”.  Although the last name was misspelled, it was a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) report about the death of Joseph Jardine McDonald at Kloo Lake in 1939.

The file consisted of a half dozen pages of RCMP documents relating to McDonald’s death and burial.  They revealed his full name, that he was believed to have been born in New Brunswick, and that he was interested in prospecting.  It was also stated that he was well known in the Yukon, having lived here for 41 years, some of it in Mayo.  The report further said that he had no known next-of-kin, no will and no assets, and that he was now indigent (meaning poor and needy) and drawing an allowance of $20 per month from the Yukon Government.

With the information about McDonald’s full name, place of birth and approximate age, a further search of historical records showed that he was actually from Nova Scotia and was born in about 1869, making him about 70 years old at the time of his death.  He was at Lake Bennett in late May 1898 with the scores of other gold rush stampeders waiting for the ice to go out to begin the boat trip to the Klondike.  By 1901 he was a miner at Selwyn on the Yukon River, 220 kilometers upriver from Dawson City, and by at least 1910 was in the Kluane area, presumably to try his luck with the gold prospects there.

Whether McDonald stayed in the Kluane area for the next three decades until his death is not known, but the RCMP report said that at his death, he was a woodcutter and had been living for two years in a cabin belonging to Frank Sketch, owner of the trading post at Kloo Lake (see link below to related story).  He had complained to Sketch several times during the winter of ill health and was subject to fainting spells.

Sketch’s statement to the RCMP was that on February 2, 1939, Joe McDonald did not show up at the trading post at the end of his working day as normal.  Sketch went out with a flashlight to where McDonald was working, about 250 yards from the trading post, and found him lying on his back unconscious.  He packed him back to his cabin, placed him in his bed and warmed him with hot packs of salt.

The next morning Sketch sent Mae Stick from the nearby First Nations village to Ruby Creek, 18 kilometers away, to ask a woodcutter/sawmiller named Mickey Blackmore to go to Burwash Landing, a distance of about 90 kilometers, and get word to the RCMP.  These  journeys, or at least the longer one, would have been by dog team.  On February 7, almost four days later, the RCMP in Whitehorse received notification of McDonald’s situation.  The message said that Joe McDonald was found unconscious in the woods at Kloo Lake and asked the RCMP to advise if a plane would be sent to pick him up.

The Whitehorse RCMP requested instructions from their headquarters in Dawson City and received the following reply:  “plane not authorized.  Patrol by dog team as previously instructed if not already left to investigate when in the district”.  Whatever  this message was saying, the end result was that an RCMP dog team patrol did not come to Kloo Lake until February 26, three and a half weeks after McDonald’s collapse.  Whether the RCMP knew at some point that McDonald had died is not known, but the only real outcome of the trip was the statement taken from Frank Sketch.

In the meantime Joe McDonald had lain in bed and groaned for two and a half more days, but never regained consciousness and died in the early morning of February 5.  Sketch and another man who had been there during that time, Joseph Selby, buried McDonald on February 11 in a grave they dug by thawing the ground, a laborious process.  They buried him on a small knoll near the trading post that at the time had a nice view of the surrounding landscape.  Perhaps they had heard that the RCMP was not immediately coming and therefore proceeded with the burial.

The information about McDonald’s burial suggested his grave was likely not too far from Sketch’s trading post.  A trip along the trail from the Alaska Highway to the trading post site with Brad MacKinnon of Haines Junction eventually resulted in locating it.  Much of the area is now covered by a mature spruce forest and there are no obvious hills as indicated in the photo, but the grave was found through a combination of intuition, observation and luck, as is often the case.  It would have been in plain sight from the trail for a long time, but after nearly 80 years of forest growth it had become well hidden.

The dominant feature of the grave now is a large spruce tree growing up in it.  The fence and wooden marker are still quite solid, and other than the paint being worn away they look much the same as when they were placed.  The wording on the marker is very legible, as most of the black paint of the inscribed lettering still remains, although faded.  At some point the marker rotted at its base and fell over, and has since been propped up outside the fence.  The fact that the picture of the grave was taken by a US Army photographer, along with the quality of materials and workmanship of the fence and marker, has made me wonder if they might have been provided by the Army. 

McDonald’s death underscored the consequences arising from distance and slow methods of communication in that era.  The RCMP report surmised that McDonald likely died of a stroke due to his advanced age. 

Joe McDonald’s gravesite is now a relatively secluded location on Champagne and Aishihik First Nations settlement land. Perhaps it is an appropriate place for a person who may have been somewhat of a loner. It is also a testament to those who cared for him in the last days of his life, provided him with a proper burial, and erected a fine fence and marker for his final resting place.

Link to related article: Frank Sketch’s Kloo Lake Trading Post

Introduction

There are a multitude of places in the Yukon bush that show little evidence of activities that once occurred there.  One of these is the site of Frank Sketch’s trading post on the west side of Kloo Lake, about 32 kilometers northwest of Haines Junction.  He started the post and operated it for about 30 years, and it ended with his death in 1947. 

The Kloo Lake area was a busy place in the first couple of years following a gold rush there in 1903.  According to newspaper reports there were stores and roadhouses (some even called hotels), and there was known to be at least one sawmill.  However, the gold rush quickly faded and the associated developments were short-lived.  It seems that no land applications, land surveys or maps were made that would indicate their locations, but one of the sites may be where Sketch established his trading post in circa 1917. 

Why he picked this location for a trading post is a matter of speculation.  It was somewhat off the beaten track, situated five kilometers off of the Kluane Wagon Road, which was the main route at the time.  However, it was near a First Nations village and was on the trail to the gold mining areas of Ruby and Fourth of July Creeks.  These creeks still had mining activity on them, although much less so than the initial 1903 rush.  Perhaps he was simply able to take advantage of abandoned buildings, clearings and other features to use for his fur trading purposes.

Sketch also dabbled in mining over the years he was operating his trading post, with some sources listing him as a trader and others as a miner or prospector.  A combination of fur trading with the Kloo Lake area people in the winter and mining the nearby creeks in the summer may have been a natural fit for him. 

The only photo I have located of Sketch at his trading post is in the Yukon Archives collection of Gudrun Sparling, the daughter of John Olaf (“Ole”) Erickson.   Erickson had been mining in the Klondike region, but was in the Kluane area by 1911.  At some point he and Sketch established a relationship of enough substance that Sketch later named Erickson as executor of his will.  In 1925 Erickson and his wife left the Kluane area to purchase the Regina Hotel in Whitehorse, which was operated by their family for the next 70 years. 

Sketch’s Earlier Years

Frank Sketch was born in 1878 near Victoria, BC, the fourth of five children in a farming family.  When he was five years old, his parents died of illnesses within three months of each other.  Before her death, his mother had appointed George Stelly, a prominent Victoria businessman, as the guardian of her children.  Frank and his older brother Stephen went to live with Stelly and his family, while the eldest brother went to live with a neighbouring family and the two sisters were taken in by a local convent.

The first record of Frank being in the Yukon is in 1903, when he was working in Whitehorse as a bartender in the Hotel Grand at Front and Main Streets, where the Horwood’s building now stands.  He had a couple of prior connections to the Yukon that may have piqued his interest in coming north.  His brother Stephen came to Dawson with the Klondike gold rush in 1898, although he doesn’t appear to have stayed long.  Also, George Stelly Jr., who Frank had lived with in Victoria in his youth, had a hotel at Bennett on the Klondike gold rush trail. 

Sketch bartended in Whitehorse until at least 1912, most of those years at the Commercial Hotel.  In 1908 he married a woman named Elsie and together they bought a lot in Whitehorse at what is now the location of the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations office building.  His bartending career in Whitehorse was not continuous, as records show that he was in Seattle in 1910 working as a bartender in the Grand Central Hotel there.  However, by 1911 he was back in the Yukon and an employee of Charles Johnston, owner of the Regina Hotel.

The Trading Post Years

At some point in or after 1912, Sketch made his way into the Kluane area, where he ended up spending the rest of his life.  Whether he took over any buildings that were already there or built his own from scratch, there is no documentation of what might have been on the site at the time.  He eventually had four buildings consisting of a 24’ x 20’ trading post/living quarters, a 20’ x 10’ storehouse, a 12’ x 12’ storehouse, and a 12’ x 12’ garage.

An air photo from 1956, almost a decade after the post’s closure, shows there to be buildings divided between an ‘upper’ site to the north and a ‘lower’ site about 150 meters to the south.  Having two areas of buildings that far apart might support the notion that Sketch took over buildings that were already there. The largest building appears to be at the upper site, so I interpret this to be the location of his combination trading post and living quarters.  I have so far not talked to anybody that might be able to provide information about the site.

In more remote areas of the Yukon, trappers often had to wait until after spring break-up to haul their winter’s catch to a trading post and sell them in the late spring or summer.  Sketch’s post was located within a kilometer of a First Nations village, so was more accessible to those trappers and others to trade their furs during the winter and spring months.  This would have enabled Sketch to close the post in the summer and engage in mining or other activities.  In the 1921 census, conducted in June, he was recorded as a partner of Ole Dickson, a well-known Yukon miner, and living with him, presumably on one of the gold creeks.  That census also showed that Sketch was by then a single man.

Another of Sketch’s activities, at least during  the late summer and fall of 1919, was working in the big game hunting business.  He was noted by author G.O. Young in Alaskan-Yukon Trophies Won and Lost (1947) as a horse wrangler for Charlie Baxter, a well-known big game outfitter.  Young was hunting with a different outfitter in the White River region when his party had to be rescued from a dire situation by Sketch and others.  Young described them as “among the best hearted men we ever met” and Sketch in particular as “a quiet sturdy man of few words”.

Several days later, after the end of the hunt, Sketch and another man were taking Baxter’s horses to Whitehorse along the Kluane Wagon Road.  They were overnighting at the Bear Creek roadhouse, about 25 kilometers southeast of Sketch’s trading post, when the roadhouse caught on fire and was destroyed.  Sketch and a couple of other men tried to get some things out of the building and ended up getting their hair and eyebrows badly singed.  Sketch reported the news of the fire in Whitehorse when he arrived there.

The roadhouse was soon rebuilt, and it and the other buildings on the site were later purchased by Frank Sketch, likely in the early 1930s when the previous owner vacated them.  He owned them for a few years and possibly operated the roadhouse intermittently, but the information describing this situation is somewhat confusing.

The late elder Josie (Jacquot) Sias of Silver City in an interview recounted an incident involving Sketch that is still known by some people in the Kluane area and is also recorded in G.O. Young’s book.  Along with Jimmy Joe and Jack Allen, Sketch was hauling falltime freight on the Kluane Wagon Road from Whitehorse to the Jacquot brothers’ lodge and store at Burwash Landing.  On crossing the log bridge over the Mendenhall River, the weight of the four horses and loaded wagon, plus a fifth horse tied on behind, collapsed the bridge.  In the chaos of the situation, Sketch was kicked in the face by a horse.  His eye was hanging out, so the other men put it back into the socket and tied it up with a cloth.  They put Sketch on the spare horse and he headed for Steamboat Landing 14 kilometers away, where he hoped to get help.  A postcard photo in a collection kept by my father Al Allison taken of Sketch and others, probably at Burwash Landing, shows him with a large bandage over his right eye.  He afterwards left the Yukon and returned with a glass eye. 

Josie Sias also talked of travelling on the Kluane Wagon Road as a child by horse and wagon as well as by vehicle.  She named all the usual roadhouse stops they made and said they would include a side trip to Frank Sketch’s trading post to deliver freight to him.  Vehicle travel was possible west of the Jarvis River near the south end of Kloo Lake, and therefore to the trading post, beginning in 1923. Sketch also had his own vehicle, a 1928 Model A Ford 3/4-ton truck with dual wheels and stake body that was at his post and in running condition at the time of his death. 

In 1942 things changed in a big way in the Yukon with the construction of the Alaska Highway.  For Sketch, one of the changes was the presence of highway construction personnel in the area, providing him with a new and larger customer base.  Aside from whatever goods may have been available 25 kilometers away at Mackintosh Lodge (the new name of the former Bear Creek roadhouse), Sketch’s post was the primary store in the area.  The community of Haines Junction was just a construction camp then, with no store until the late 1940’s. 

Two US Army photographers took pictures in the vicinity of the trading post in 1942, and they may have been there primarily to visit the post.  My father worked on the highway after the war and talked about driving in to the trading post in 1946 and buying some pants there.  These new customers probably influenced the type and amount of goods that Sketch stocked in his post.

In August 1942 a US Army soldier named Ian McPherson from Michigan with the 18th Engineers Regiment working on the nearby section of Alaska Highway also evidently made his way to the trading post. There it appears he was given a first edition (1903) of “Call of the Wild” by Jack London and inscribed in it “Received from F. Sketch at Klu Lake Trading Post on this date. Yukon Territory, Canada.”

Sketch’s Death and End of the Trading Post

A nearby neighbor of Sketch on the west shore of Kloo Lake was Harry Eskrigge, who had been involved in mining in the Yukon since at least 1899.  He was in the Kluane area by 1912 and was still there decades later.  Eskrigge took care of the trading post when Sketch made occasional trips out of the Yukon, and he did so again for Sketch’s last trip.  

Sometime in mid- to latter January of 1947, Sketch made a trip to Vancouver, but he would not return.  He had cancer of the rectum and developed arteriosclerotic gangrene in his left leg, and how much of this he knew when he left is not known.  On January 29 he underwent a transverse colostomy, but that did not prolong his life and he died on February 5 at the age of 68.  His remains were taken to Victoria for burial in the Royal Oak Cemetery.

Eskrigge continued on as caretaker of the trading post after Sketch’s death, but he was not conducting any business.  The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) soon received a letter from Dorothy Mackintosh of Mackintosh Lodge at Bear Creek saying she had heard the trading post might close and was worried about the local people not having access to provisions.  She implored the RCMP to find a way to keep the post open and offered to cover the credit of people that might have to charge their purchases.  She also said that Harry Eskrigge could be counted upon to conduct any transactions honestly.

The RCMP report about this matter went on to say that Mrs. Mackintosh would purchase the staple foods at the trading post if Eskrigge would dispense with them on her behalf, to which he agreed.  He was later paid by Sketch’s estate for 150 days of wages, suggesting that he kept the post open until well into the summer.

The same RCMP report also noted that Sketch had a house in Whitehorse that was being occupied rent-free by the outfitter Charlie Baxter’s widow.  She was described as a close friend of Sketch and it was stated that she could remain there until further notice.

A follow-up RCMP report said that as of June 30, 1947 all of the trading post buildings and remaining contents belonging to Frank Sketch’s estate had been sold to Dorothy Mackintosh for $3,000.  This marked the end of the trading post, and the buildings were  either dismantled and hauled away or cut up for firewood in the following years. 

An inventory of the contents of the trading post buildings was taken shortly after Sketch’s death. He must have purchased goods in large quantities and been well stocked up for the future, as the variety and amount of goods, provisions and equipment that were on hand is astounding.  It is hard to imagine it all fitting in the relatively small log buildings he had.  The five pages of the inventory are shown below for interest.

Frank Sketch’s estate when settled seems fairly impressive for a trader/gold miner living in the bush at Kloo Lake.  He had almost $260,000 in 2018 dollars in savings, bonds and assets, so his four siblings did quite well by him, each of them receiving about $59,000.

Today, more than 70 years after Frank Sketch’s death, his trading post is not a well-known piece of Kluane area history.  The site is located on Champagne and Aishihik First Nations settlement land and the access road has gone back to a state that is not suitable for road vehicles.  Little can be seen at the site without a close look as the remaining evidence of the activity there slowly rots away or becomes enveloped by vegetation.  Though the physical evidence is disappearing, the knowledge of Frank Sketch and his trading post will hopefully be preserved.

Link to related article: The Grave of J.J. McDonald

On the Pelly River Ranch road about 40 kilometers in from Pelly Crossing, you drive over a culvert containing a small creek.  When you travel down the Pelly River from Pelly Crossing, after about 37 kilometers you go by the mouth of that same creek and probably would not notice it.  This is Crosby Creek, the name recommended by eminent geologist Hugh Bostock in honor of George Crosby, who came to the Yukon at the time of the Klondike Gold Rush and homesteaded near the mouth of the creek.

George Crosby was no spring chicken when he came to the Yukon.  He was born on November 27, 1856 in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, one of eleven children in a farming family.  At some point in his adult life he began moving westward, and in 1891 was working in a sawmill in the Upper Kootenay region of British Columbia.  A Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) report in 1938 said that he had resided continuously in the Yukon for 39 years, suggesting he came in 1899 when he was going on 43 years old.

Trapping on the upper MacMillan River

Crosby’s initial time in the Yukon was not associated with the creek that bears his name.  In the early 1900s he went trapping in the area of the fork of the MacMillan River, a tributary of the Pelly River.  This region, perhaps known most commonly as Russell Creek for a trading post and mining activity that were there, is  located 300 river kilometers upstream (east) of present-day Pelly Crossing.  Despite its remoteness, Russell Creek was the center of an active area at that time for trappers, big game hunters and a few placer miners.  How and why Crosby ended up there is not known, but it evidently offered him an opportunity and perhaps a lifestyle he was seeking, and he was to have a recurrent connection with this area over the course of his life in the Yukon.  

Crosby and others like him on the MacMillan River may have lived their lives there in obscurity had the activities of the area not been recorded in books such as big game hunters Frederick Selous’ Recent Hunting Trips in British North America (1907) and Charles Sheldon’s The Wilderness of the Upper Yukon (1911), as well as miner, trapper and hunter Nevill Armstrong’s Yukon Yesterdays (1936) and After Big Game in the Upper Yukon (1937). 

In 1904 all three of these authors encountered Crosby and his trapping partner John Barr in the Russell Creek area where they had been trapping the previous winter.  Selous described Crosby and Barr as “… most excellent fellows, full of intelligence, and ready to give any information or assistance in their power …”.  Armstrong’s After Big Game book contains the only photograph I have come across of George Crosby, shown at left below.

The books by Armstrong, Sheldon and Selous, as well as one by Stratford Tollemache called Reminiscences of the Yukon (1912), provide some insight into the lives of trappers in that area at that time such as Crosby.  These books show that while it may appear to have been a romantic life of wilderness living and independence, in reality it was also a life of hard work, much of it in cold weather. 

For the trappers of the upper MacMillan River, the remoteness provided additional challenges.  In May when the river became free of ice, they loaded their winter fur catch into boats and paddled, rowed or poled them down the MacMillan, Pelly and Yukon Rivers to Fort Selkirk.  There they sold their furs and purchased provisions for the next year, then had to get their loaded boats the hundreds of kilometers back upstream.  This was grueling work, day after day for a month to six weeks of poling and lining the boats (pulling by rope, often from in the water) in varying weather and river conditions.  They had to be back to the upper MacMillan by late summer to prepare their cabins, trapping trails, firewood supply, and meat for themselves and their dogs for the upcoming season. This annual round meant that they generally spent ten months of the year in their trapping area.

The Frozen Toe

During the winter of 1908-09, Crosby had a traumatic experience, as told in Nevill Armstrong’s After Big Game in the Upper Yukon.  On a very cold morning Crosby set out on his trapline with a toboggan pulled by his dog Faro and, when nine miles away from his cabin, began to realize that his right foot was freezing.  This was a potentially dire situation, so he unhitched Faro from the toboggan and headed back toward the cabin.  After getting it warmed back up, he took off his moccasins and found all the toes on his foot frozen. 

Crosby thawed out his toes in cold water, an agonizing process, but that did not end his troubles.  His big toe began to fester and deteriorate, and after a few weeks the bone was showing.  He decided that he would have to remove the toe to prevent gangrene from spreading into his foot, and pondered how to do this cleanly and not so crude as to make him faint.  The answer was a pair of strong scissors, with which he managed to cut off the toe, apparently doing a neat job of it.  He used vaseline for an antiseptic and pieces of handkerchief for bandages and the toe ended up healing very well.

Crosby had to fend for himself for a month awaiting a scheduled visit by his partner John Barr, whose trapping base was more than 70 kilometers away.  His bad foot caused him to hobble around outside in the cold to get wood for his stove and snow to thaw for drinking and cooking.  He did not even have the companionship of Faro, who  had not followed him home as he expected.  When the dog didn’t turn up after a few days, Crosby presumed the wolves had got him. 

John Barr showed up at the cabin on the scheduled day and heard Crosby’s story.  He went out to retrieve the toboggan and its contents and to see if he could find any sign of what happened to Faro.  On reaching the site Barr found the dog alive and well beside the toboggan, having remained there faithfully for a month with no food, waiting for his master to return.

In the early summer of 1909, Crosby’s foot was still on the mend and he appeared to be suffering from scurvy when Armstrong encountered him and John Barr on the MacMillan River heading downriver.  Crosby’s condition may have prompted him to live closer to civilization, as a note from Pelly Farm shows Crosby being paid in October of that year for five months work at $78/month.  The 1911 Canada census listed Crosby on the Pelly River along with six other people who were all connected to Pelly Farm.

Also in 1911, the RCMP in Dawson City received a letter from Crosby’s brother Arthur in Nova Scotia asking for any information about George, as the family had not heard from him for about 12 years.  They had heard there was a George Crosby in the wood business across the river from Fort Selkirk who had been hunting up on the MacMillan River.  At some point George must have established contact with his relatives because near the end of his life 30 years later he named a niece as his next of kin and knew where she was living in Alberta.

Homesteading on the Pelly River

After 1911 Crosby’s activities are unknown until March 1917, when in his 61^st year he applied for a homestead of 160 acres at the mouth of Garnet Creek (later to become Crosby Creek), about 21 kilometers up the Pelly River from its confluence with the Yukon River near Fort Selkirk.  It is conceivable that from his many trips past there on the river he noticed the potential of this location for an agricultural endeavor. 

An inspection report by the Crown Timber and Land Agent concluded that the land was suitable for agriculture and had no valuable timber, only 75 cords as estimated by Frank Chapman of the Pelly Farm.  By July Crosby was granted entry to the land to remove the timber and begin the required work for obtaining his homestead.

An inspection report in August 1920 showed that Crosby had resided at the homestead continuously since 1917 and had a log house and stable built and three acres under cultivation, with 15 more acres cleared.  By that time, in addition to the developments, Crosby needed to have the land legally surveyed to meet the requirements of the homestead regulations and to obtain ownership.

In January 1921 Crosby wrote a letter to the government suggesting he may cancel the homestead because of the difficulties of finding a surveyor and the expense of the survey.  The government replied that it did not want to put undue pressure on him and suggested he apply for an extension of time to have the survey done.  Crosby did so and also stated that “I am residing on the homestead … except a few months working down to Pelly Farm, have done a great lot of work here”.

Over the next couple of years there were more letters from the government about having the land surveyed, with no response from Crosby until April 1923, when again he declared that he could not afford the cost of it.  By then he had five acres seeded to sweet clover and brome grass, 30 more acres cleared and ready for seed, and three acres of potatoes and other vegetables.  He also said that he had been working at Pelly Farm that winter.  Later that summer, Nevill Armstrong recorded that Crosby was back up on the MacMillan River to trap again.

Another extension of time to have the land surveyed was granted to Crosby, but there was no further correspondence from him.  His homestead file laid dormant until June of 1932, when a government land agent reported that Crosby had returned to Fort Selkirk after being up the MacMillan River, and had abandoned his Crosby Creek land years ago.  Perhaps a man of his independence had not been able to tolerate the idea of owing something or having an obligation, and was willing to leave behind the homestead he had worked so hard to develop.  Whatever the case, Crosby’s file was subsequently closed and the homestead cancelled.

Crosby’s Mark

There is no record or indication of anybody taking over Crosby’s homestead after he left it, and it gradually went back to nature.  His field, which would have been cleared by hand, is no longer readily discernible from the air or on the ground, but it shows up on older air photos of the area. 

From the evidence still remaining on the land, the ‘great lot of work’ Crosby referred to in his letter to the government may have been an understatement, especially considering his age when he started developing the homestead.  The basement/cellar of his house with substantial wood cribbing still remains in place and holding back most of the dirt 100 years later.

Crosby’s house was sold in 1940 to Stanley Jonathan, who dismantled it, rafted the logs to Fort Selkirk, and reassembled it there.  The solidly-built log house with dovetailed corners and broad-axed walls is now under the care and maintenance of the Fort Selkirk historic site, and provides lasting evidence of Crosby’s industriousness and craftsmanship.

The most enduring testament to Crosby’s work at his homestead site is a hand-dug irrigation ditch running for close to a kilometer from a point of elevation further up Crosby Creek.  I first heard about Crosby’s place many years ago from Dick and Hugh Bradley of Pelly River Ranch, and my main memory is of them talking about the ditch. They must have been impressed by the hard work it would have taken as well as the engineering skill to maintain a consistent downhill grade along the whole distance of it.  Appearing to have been at least a foot deep when it was dug, the ditch gradually angles down along the side of a terrace to the level of Crosby’s house, probably to supply water to his potato and vegetable gardens. 

The Final Years

Crosby’s old stomping grounds on the MacMillan River evidently drew him back there after he vacated his homestead on the Pelly River.  He was noted by Nevill Armstrong to be on the MacMillan in 1923 and 1925, in the latter year being hired by Armstrong to assist with prospecting and mining on Russell Creek.  This was after Crosby had spent the previous winter trapping there when almost 70 years old. Armstrong also mentions Crosby bringing him 40 pounds of potatoes he grew in a garden on the MacMillan River.

When Crosby left the MacMillan is not known, but records show he was in Fort Selkirk in 1932.  At some point between then and 1937, he stayed there to live.

Crosby’s life changed dramatically late at night on February 3, 1938, when he was 81 years old.  His cabin in Fort Selkirk burned down after he dropped a match onto his mattress and caught it on fire.  He tried to beat it out with his hands without success, then clad only in underwear and almost overcome by smoke inhalation, he made his way to the local store for help.  The fire was impossible to extinguish and everything including Crosby’s effects were destroyed.

The RCMP report of this incident prepared by Constable G.I. Cameron, in command of the Fort Selkirk detachment, labelled Crosby as an ‘Indigent’ (meaning needy).  The report stated that the fire  had left Crosby “..completely destitute … he is almost blind and very infirm physically, the minor burns and shock he received left him in a state of almost complete collapse … it has been necessary for an attendant to be constantly with him…”.

A story related to me by Cst. Cameron’s daughter Ione Christensen, and which is also told in Joyce Yardley’s book Yukon Riverboat Days, is almost certainly about the Crosby fire incident, although I have no proof of it.  Cst. Cameron’s wife Martha went to the fire and as the roof started to collapse, a box came sliding off that contained cookies and other goodies she had given the old man for Christmas.  He hadn’t eaten any of them, so she was somewhat miffed and threw the box into the fire.  The next day the man came by tearfully lamenting the loss of his Christmas gift, saying that it was the first time in his life anyone had given him something nice, and that he would just look at the goodies because they were too pretty to eat.  Martha then had to get busy and make him a new Christmas box.

 A couple of days after the fire, Cst. Cameron sent a telegram to the RCMP headquarters in Dawson City saying that Crosby could not care for himself and wished to go to the Dawson hospital.  He was not fit for overland travel and so a few days later when a scheduled White Pass plane arrived, he was transported to Dawson.

So what became of poor old destitute, infirm, almost-blind George after he got to Dawson City?  The tough old man lived in the St. Mary’s Hospital for another four and a half years, almost to age 86.  There he racked up a bill of $6,804 for 1,701 days of care at $4.00 per day.  The only payment made on the account during that time was $425 in May 1942, perhaps from the sale of his Crosby Creek homestead house.  

A letter from the sister superior at St. Mary’s Hospital to the Public Administrator advised of the death of George Crosby early in the morning of October 4, 1942.  He had no personal belongings.  George was buried in the Hillside Cemetery in Dawson City, the location of his grave now unknown.

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)