Jack McQuesten

Jack McQuesten (1836-1909)

Leroy Napoleon McQuesten (* 1836, † 1909), who preferred the name form Jack McQuesten , was an explorer, trader, prospector in Alaska and in the Yukon , but also in British Columbia , Alberta and Manitoba , as well as in California . He is often referred to as the "father of the Yukon". Other names such as Yukon Jack or Captain Jack were also used.

Life

Childhood in New Hampshire, Illinois, Wisconsin

He was born in Litchfield , or Portland , Maine , in 1836 to John and Mary McQuesten. He had five brothers and a sister. In 1838 the family moved to Galena , Illinois . She moved to Platteville , Wisconsin around 1845 , at least in 1848 at the latest.

Gold prospect in California, farmer in Oregon, soldier

In 1849 or 1850 to 1852 Jack, together with his father John McQuesten and his eldest brother Varnum, looked for gold in California . The mother stayed in Wisconsin. Jack then wandered from one gold field to the next. Around 1849 his second oldest brother, Clinton, died. Jack worked on a farm in Oregon , and in 1855 he served in the US Army in the Oregon Indian Wars , the wars in which the army wanted to deport all of Oregon’s Indians from the western part of the Territory.

Gold prospecting at the Fraser, Washington Sawmill, Captain Jack, Western Canada

In 1858, McQuesten moved north in search of gold, to the Fraser ( Fraser Canyon Gold Rush ), for the last time with his family. In 1863 he left Fraser and his family, whom he only saw again in 1897. However, his father died in Orlando in 1880 . The last common residence was Quesnelle Forks in the Cariboo area ( Cariboo Gold Rush ) in British Columbia.

In 1858 Leroy took a ship from Port Gamble in Washington , where he must have worked in a sawmill, to Victoria , the only permitted gateway into the Canadian gold regions. On the crossing the ship got caught in a severe storm and Leroy managed to save the ship. He was often referred to as Sailor Jack or Captain Jack since then , and Leroy accepted his new first name. From the Fraser, Leroy-Jack moved to the Peace River and stayed there when most moved south again. He went to the Fort St. John area , then to Fort Vermilion , Alberta, where he made a living from hunting and trapping. In 1865 he moved on to Manitoba. Here he met his lifelong friend Al Mayo, who left the army shortly after the US Civil War . Jack tried his hand at voyageur and provided Fort Garry with groceries. McQuesten worked with the Hudson's Bay Company between 1865 and 1869. Until 1871 he traveled as a trapper, prospector, voyageur and trader through western Canada until he heard about the Yukon on the Hay River . He decided to go there by land and rivers.

Fort Yukon, marriage, 11 children

On August 15, 1873, McQuesten reached Fort Yukon . His partners were Arthur Harper , a Northern Irishman who emigrated as a boy in 1832, and Alfred Mayo , known as Al Mayo, a circus acrobat from Kentucky . They came to the region together, all three married Indian women. McQuest's wife Satejdenalno Nagetah (1860–1921) was called, but he preferred "Katherine". She was 14 years old, 24 years younger than her husband, and belonged to the Koyukon-Athabasques, probably from Nulato . Her father was Russian , she grew up in the Ikogmiut mission station and spoke Athabaskan , Russian and English . McQuesten did not marry her until four years later. She gave him a total of 11 children, the last of which died in 2001 at the age of 105. The other two women were called Jenny Harper (Seentahna) and Margaret Mayo (Neehunilthnoh), the latter also had a Russian father, the two women were cousins. When they met the men, who were 27, 38, and 39, all three were only 14. McQuest's interpreter, John Minook, was also the father of a Russian.

ACC trading post, first steamboat, Fortymile

Even though McQuesten had searched the Klondike region , he believed there was nothing there worth the effort. In 1873 he searched about 130 km above the Klondike on the White River . The partners maintained a thin supply network for the slowly growing number of gold prospectors. At the end of August 1874, McQuesten built a trading post at Fort Reliance on behalf of the Alaska Commercial Company , about ten kilometers below the mouth of the Klondike , which he called the "Trundeck River". With Trundeck he meant the Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in , an Indian group that lived mainly on an island opposite the later Dawson .

For some time he and his partners made a living from trading and buying furs. McQuesten ran the Yukon , the first steamboat on the Yukon River . Together with Frank Barnfield and specially committed Indians, he built a hut. McQuesten was the only one to stay for several years, twelve in all, in the post, which was about 30 feet by 20 feet . At its trading posts met Khan , especially the neighboring Tr'ondek Hwetch'in , Upper Tanana and Northern Tutchone . However, he was soon drawn to other places, like a river he called Fortymile (forty miles), then to the Sixty Mile (sixty miles). They got their names from the distance to its starting point. Fortymile remained the main supply post in the Yukon until 1896 and the first permanent Canadian settlement in the northwest. McQuesten soon had his own ship.

Klondike gold rush

As early as the summer of 1885, McQuesten recognized that the trade with gold prospectors would soon be more important than the fur trade with the Indians . In 1893 he founded Circle City . In 1896 he loaned $ 130 worth of equipment to George Carmack , whose finds sparked the Klondike Gold Rush after Skookum Jim and Tagish Charlie made the crucial find , even though Carmack could offer no money or collateral.

California

When the real gold rush started in 1896, McQuesten went to California with his family . In 1901 Chief Isaac , the chief of the Tr'ondek Haw'in , the largest Han group that had since moved from Dawson to Moosehide , visited his friend McQuesten with his brother Walter Benjamin and the medicine man Little Paul. In addition, the three traveled on the steamboat Sarah on the Yukon to St. Michael , then on to Seattle , San Francisco and Berkeley in California. They were guests of the Alaska Commercial Company , for which McQuesten had worked long, and toured the gold rush towns along the route.

McQuesten died in 1909.

A tributary of the Stewart River , the McQuesten River today bears his name, as well as its source lake, a lodge on the Klondike Highway that closed in 2003 , where it crosses the McQuesten River, roads in Whitehorse , Mayo and Faro , an airfield and the McQuesten Mineral Belt , where Gold finds, as well as a type of whiskey that is traded as "Yukon Jack".

literature

• James A. McQuiston: Captain Jack McQuesten: Father of the Yukon , Outskirts Press 2007.

Web links

• Captain Jack McQuesten

Remarks

1. ↑ This and the following from: James A. McQuiston: Captain Jack McQuesten: Father of the Yukon , Outskirts Press 2007.
2. ↑ James A. McQuiston: Captain Jack McQuesten: Father of the Yukon , Outskirts Press 2007, pp. 64ff.
3. ↑ McQuiston, p. 104. Archaeological investigations led to the result that the area was exactly 29.4 * 20.4 feet, so the house had barely 70 m² of floor space.