TALES OF THE YUKON (266 ENGLISH)

TALES OF THE YUKON (266 ENGLISH)

          YUKON  #265, MISSIONARY STORIES WITH A CERTAIN FLAVOR OF  POLICE INTRIGUE

Aloysius Robault

Aloysius Robault, a Jesuit priest, was part of a group of four men who left Victoria, B.C. on July 11^th, 1886 to go towards the Yukon. This group was made up of the Archbishop Charles John Seghers, of another Jesuit priest, Pascal Tosi (a 58 year old Italian and a lay person who had been in the service of the Roman Catholic Church, and with the help of various miners and 50 Chilkat porters. At the source of the Yukon, their cook, Antoine Provost, disappeared mysteriously. This was the first of a series of incidents which made this expedition a failure.   Frank Fuller worried the group by his odd actions, and this sowed unease.  Regardless of the requests made by Tosi, the Archbishop stubbornly kept Fuller in the group.

On September 7^th, the four men finally arrived at the mouth of Stewart River.  At this point, Robault joined Tosi to try to convince the Archbishop to get rid of Fuller, but this was in vain. The Archbishop Seghers decided to divide the group: then he continued to go down the river with Fuller; Tosi and Robault remained at the mouth of the Stewart River. Ironically, the two Jesuit priests supposed to convert the First Nations people to the catholic faith, spent the winter teaching reading and writing to the local businessmen’s children and to instruct the miners in French.

On November 28^th, 1886, on the Yukon River, near Nulato in Alaska, Frank Fuller killed Archbishop Seghers with one shot from the bishop’s own gun.

        

The Prospectors, and the Pioneers

A Hudson Bay Company clerk in the Yukon wrote to his parents in Toronto:

There’s a little river not far from here in which our pastor, the reverend McDonald saw so much gold in one or two years that he could have picked it up with a spoon.  If I find a lot of gold, enough to make it worthwhile to dig for it, I could become a gold-seeker, but that would be only as a last resort and if I can’t do anything better…

For many years, the fur commerce was the only attraction towards the North. It is only at the end of the X1X century that people began to become interested in other forms of wealth which the Yukon offered.

Towards 1880, about twenty prospectors arrived in the Yukon through the Chilkoot Trail whose access had been known until then only by the First Nations people. The era of gold prospecting gradually replaced the fur commerce.

Ref: Empreinte p. 10-11